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Hello everyone, so excited that you all came and this is a topic that is near and dear to our hearts right. We all have hormones and we might have hormonal imbalance and it is wonderful to be able to share information about it so that we can all be healthier. My name is Sophie Alexander and I am the lead practitioner here at the Nutritional Wellness Centre and I call myself a ballistic practitioner or a clinical nutritionist and my goal is to help people keep healthier and happier without the use of unnecessary drugs or surgery and I want to share a bit about my background and stories and those of you who don’t work with me or don’t know me don’t know why I am motivated to be here tonight with this information but now in retrospect I can look back on my health history and really see the signs of when my health story began particularly when reflecting on hormones and hormonal balance you know I got my period at age 11 and that is on the young side and it is happening at younger ages and we can go into whole conversations about that but you know and then gosh by early teens I was having horrible menstrual cramps I was taking these pills and they were not handling it so much so I got put on birth control by age 16 and the whole idea was to help balance your hormones right and I was on that without really any 2nd thought until my mid 20s until I started to become more educated on what it can mean to be on birth control for so long interestingly along that period of time from high school into college I started developing really bad blood sugar issues terrible stomach aches once I was in college I would eat in the dining hall and have to lie down for a couple of hours as well, as I get more educated about gut floor balance well things lie that how interesting to learn that being on birth control can affect the gut floor and it is just awls fun to look back in retrospect while you are living it but I didn’t necessarily ed down the path of becoming an nutritionist till after college when I got Lyme disease and after doing a couple of rounds of antibiotics I didn’t get better and unfortunately I kind of caught the symptoms late about 6 months later that the actually timeline and I was dealing with arthritic type symptoms and then I started studying herbs and I started studying nutrient and I moved to Ithaca to study herbal medicine and I would drive don Green street wondering about this radish on the side wondering what it was about and I saw on the website that it was about whole food nutrition and quoted the Weston A Price foundation I knew I had found my people because I had been kind of already studying nourishing traditions cookbook and things like that, so I became a client of Tara’s and within 3 months of being a client.

I no longer had any of that severe bloating or the pain after eating and I had already transitioned off of birth control but then the menstrual cramps came back but after working with her I no longer had those cramps and within time the Lyme symptoms came under control too. I went back to school to study nutrition and as soon as I graduated with my master’s degree I was lie Tara will you hire me and yes Tara is the owner and founder of the Nutritional Wellness Centre and I have been here ever since so I am excited yeah, it is just that someone mentioned that this is recording in Facebook live and just about how so many people are getting their periods at younger ages and how such ongoing problem with daughters and part of why I am here why I am sharing this information and why I am excited for such a turn up of folks to be here and share with their friends families and daughters and we are here to talk about hormones and their imbalances and how to do it naturally.

So I wanted to really start because it is a confusing really big topic it is a pretty broad topic and I wanted to get into more specifics and how folks have a better understanding and over view and the hormonal system a lot of people call it the endocrine system we have this kind of confusion looking chart in your packets with this chart for the endocrine organs and so I’ll be referring to that but before we get into that I really want you to think of your hormonal system as your body’s planning committee and so you have got a group of glands and they all coordinate each other and sending messages to each other to make hormones or to not make hormones and they really plan for long term projection so it can be a part of preparing the body for pregnancy and conception and seeing you through that process but it can also be a short term thing like in your immediate flight or fight response for example, but as you observe like it is a very interconnected system so you cannot just have one aspect of healthy – all of it has to be healthy actually your wellbeing and your hormonal balance is depend on each actor or each committee member we should say being happy.

So a lot of folks I have my list to refer to and I am going o be going off a lot on this handout that you guys have in here so you can see where we are into his sheet we have hypothalamus and so hypothalamus is a gland in your brain a lot of people think of it as command central where a lot of hormones are made and stored and then that information is passed to the pituitary which is also a gland in the brain where more hormones are stored and sent out and you can see from there how it goes on right, you have the thyroid right there in the middle because so many messages go there and you can s that the thyroid is connected to everything else in the chart. So here at the office we work a lot on thyroid heap – going back to the source of hypothalamus as well.

Pituitary support as well but it is intimately connected to your adrenals and the messages that get sent back and forth from there and of course the sex hormones – a lot of people aren’t aware that you have hormones receptors in your gut and the pancreases and the liver and the thymus and your immune system is connected and I don’t want to get into too much detail and kind of overwhelm you with that information but I want you to observe the solid lines or one type of message and the dotted lines are another type fo message and take in what a complex system it is and realize that there is so many different aspects as to what can go out of balance and it is just not that your adrenals are not functioning but your hypothyroid or blood sugar handling issues- it is actually broader than that. So what we do here is a full body approach system because it is about how all the organs talk to each other and how that interplays in getting the body healthy. Any questions about that? General take away? Ok. So a big thing I end up talking to people about in terms of balancing the hormones naturally, is step no.1 what can you do to reduce stressing your life. So you think this is a nutritional office you should be talking about what you are eating right but these things tie into it and stress reduction then will change up the pathways of the body it can be stuck in and you can be stuck in a similar hormone pathways and if you take time to take a walk and change up your usual routine and incorporate your usual routine if it is yoga or meditation that can be tremendous for reset because we are not designed to function in a state of high stress hormones and in general most of us do. That system was designed for a quick response of adrenaline so that we can be running away from the tiger or some kind of quick thing that has an end but we live in world now where these stresses are ongoing and so there is no end and there is no coming down from that response and hen the body does not switch back into a different mode and so that long term can real cause a lot of trouble in terms of how it all stays balanced. The second big thing is all about toxicity exposure which I talk about a lot! Because it ties into why more and more girls are getting their period at 11 it is about these exposures that are in our environment. They are in our cleaning products, beauty products, they are all around us, some we can control and some we can’t.
These toxicities really are another fancy term is endocrine disruptors I feel like you talk about that it is also called plastics, and what that means is it interferes with the functioning of the endocrine and hormonal system, so any step you can use to use a more natural cleaner or different detergents or being aware of the work of the environmental working group who does some amazing work with rating personal care products and they have a whole database where you can go and search these different are products and see how they rate and see whether they are rated highly for safety or not and I feel like that environmental working group does great work and children’s health for childrens toxicity exposure as well as person care products. So if you have not been to their website they have a great app that you can download to your phone and you can just take pictures of the bar clothes or they have a lot of them on site. Number 3 is eating fat.

We work a lot really hard here to re-educate people about how important fat is in your diet and I am going to get into a little bit more detail about the bio chemistry slightly and I don’t want to but there has been so much miss-education about fat and about cholesterol and actually it is cholesterol that makes your sex hormones so I was just looking at someone’s blood work the other day and the markers say it has to be under 199 to not be considered as too high and you know in the world of a clinical nutritionalist you go under 160 which a lot of doctors are pushing because they have folks insistent you get into a place with the body where it is not actually make with is hormones it ends up having to choose between using that cholesterol and run certain pathways and make your sex hormones or not because it is not vital to life for us to not reproduce. Your body will not prioritize that pathway it will prioritize the other pathway which ends up making more cortisol which contributes to more inflammation and it just feeds the cycle and it feeds the ambiance that is happening. So you need your cholesterol ideal.
It should be about 220 actually. That is the perfect number to support hormonal balance I can get it to be a whole other lecture and how these numbers get set and who dictates that but so please don’t get worried if your cholesterol is over 200, and please eat butter, coconut oil and eggs because they do nourish the system, and I have had awesome clinical results if I particularly younger women if I have them add coconut oil into their diet, say they are not having regular menstrual cycles or have PCOS just add coconut oil back in and making it part of their routine can give tremendous results to making the body get back to making the morose itself. So yeah ignore what they say about coconut oil, there was just another article going on a rant here like circulating around and it just brings up all the fear and all these old arguments against saturated fat that are not founded so enough about fat except that you should eat it, and then a big thing is about eggs. Your veggies are an amazing source of your minerals right. Your fiber you actually need a lot of fiber for your body to recycle your hormones and clear them out of the gut, eating your veggies especially your green leafy veggies is a huge part of liver health and hat I end up working on most of the time to support livers is when I actually do work going on thyroids and hypothalamuses and things like that – our liver is a big place where all these hormones are found filtered and then cleaned out because the whole idea is that the hormones that are circulating the blood stream need to be broken down and moved out of the body and your liver does that your liver also plays a huge role in converting hormones so a big issue with thyroid can be not about the actual thyroid hormones being released but are they being converted properly into t3 and t4 and the liver so we need diets in here that are lacking in b vitamins and cabbage, Brussels sprouts, eggs garlic onions you know you can have sluggish liver and sluggish bile flow – a fact because so many people are not eating good quality fats. So cholesterol butter, peanut oil these are all examples of your healthier fats but most processed foods most restaurants a lot of people are still cooking with canola oil and hydrogenated vegetable oils and that is just clogging up the liver. That is another piece of why we have an epidemic of people struggling with their hormone balance and it can be tied back to these simple changes and then a big one is soy.

So avoiding unfermented soy can be a big part of supporting hormonal balance I mean it is on the news a lot right now because of al the trade wars right and what is going on with soy in this country but soy we make a lot of it, we make so much of it we don’t know what to do with it, and we hide it in all sorts of things and it is in a lot of processed foods, and it is putting soya bean oil and just everywhere it is in our scald dressings and soy is estrogenic so meaning it is supporting estrogen in the body but so many of us are in a state where we actually have plenty of estrogen and like so the soy contributes to the problem whereas unfermented so fermented soy lead to like – I am talking bout miso and I am talking about temper and so that is ate last easier to digest right because it has been predigested by the fermentation process so it does not have the same facts and for most people the main issue with soy is just that it is hidden in so many things, and it is not that they are sitting down Dan eating lots of tofu but they are getting it from these other sources that they are not aware of, and that can be impacting things. Any other questions so far? I’m talking kind of fast so I apologize if you need me to repeat anything or slow down I can – should you avoid all soy? If I am working with someone who is dealing with hot flashes or their premenopausal and post-menopausal and struggling then yes I have them pull all soy out even fermented soy. Yeah and till a better balance is happening.
Yeah but the thing that I forgot to mention back in the begging when talking about stress handling I see such a correlation when women in that range that I was just talking about pre or post-menopausal who are really struggling with hot flashes or struggling with that transition and it actually ties back to how healthy their adrenal glands were heading into that transition and so a lot of it has to do with rebuilding that organ and the whole stress handling is what I was talking about at the beginning. I thought that might be interesting to you in the conversations that we had but yeah. Alright yeah I really and truly believe that we come from an operating basis that our bodies have the innate capacity to maintain hormone balance and to correct it but it omnes down to what is needed for that individual. Body and what is throwing the balance off. When given the correct support the body can heal and so really what it comes down to is like Identifying what is the underlying cause what is throwing the bod out of balance is its digestive piece is it a liver that tie into the digestive piece or is it something that is specific with a specific hormonal gland? And getting to the bottom of it and so with that in mind I want to explain a bit more about what I mean because a lot of you are clients here and you know what I mean by that in terms of getting information about the body and specific organs and kind of like what does she mean and how can you find out what the underlying balance is and in my experience with doing this every person is unique everybody is unique and that really anything can cause anything and in the sense that I don’t know what is causing one specific body to not regulate correctly and may not be the same as what is accusing another boy to regulate correctly and there is not just one size and there is no one magic bullet but yes you have menstrual cramps and then you just need to take this – it is a simple point but I feel that it is really significant point and that is why there are not like one diet that is right for the individual so there are really people out there who go that is amazing for me and I got great results and then another would say that I tried that and that did not do anything for me.
I do believe that there are underlying principles that do dictate what is considered a healthy diet and a nourishing diet but then you know the nitty gritty of that – comes down to the body and how it has been fed through its life span and how its parents ate and how its grandparents ate and things like that – so it is a really long term perspective but what is amazing about it that even though there is a long term perspective about it there is definitely immediate things that can be done and that can create change so behind me I have my little board – and this is let me get the other one first. Thank you. So I chose to put like fatigue at the top of this because there are so many symptoms that are not regulating properly but fatigue is a big one that I hear you know the description of what we used for this class – unexplained weight loss or weight gain or unexplainable fatigue changes in nail quality or changes in skin quality they can all be indicative changes of poor hormonal balance.

Behind me this chart I can rotate it if you want. This triangle here I have fatigue and the top organ dysfunction and nutrition deficiency here. It ties into – I will explain more into this idea that anything can cause anything. well you see with the triangle everything is interconnected and what I found in every occurrence of fatigue and overall hormonal imbalance that everyone is dealing with that organ does have specific function it does have specific nutritional deficiencies and it is tying into what I was saying before that we have to identify what is going on for that specific body to be able to rebuild and repair and so the idea – I feel awkward because of the camera here and you on the other side! But the idea with the triangle is that if you throw off one corner you throw off the other 2 as well. I know some of you, have heard this talk and have kind of seen this before but I feel like this is a really important point to keep reiterating. The idea is that if you have an organ that is not functioning properly then you are going to have nutritional deficiencies and If you have them that is going to cause further organ dysfunction.
So If you have this kind of symptoms these things are already occurring and what is unfortunate because they are so interconnected it causes a vicious cycle and it cause the body to become more nutrient deficiency which causes it to function less and less often which makes you more and more symptomatic so the idea that where do we put a halt in this how do you stop it, and the best case stop it – but even better than that once it is stabilized how do you rebuild and how do you repair and what I find it comes down to identifying what organs we are shuttling and what we need and giving it to them and then the process can start to be reversed. As a fun exercise part of your packet has a little quiz. Thankfully most of you have something to write with… Hopefully! If you don’t we can have some things passed around. We don’t have extras! 3 more packets! 4? Oh ok. 4 quizzes are awesome! Thanks for hanging out there without a proper seat! Take a minute to answer the sugar quiz you count up your false and everyone answers false to 4 or more questions yeah you did. So you know it is important. If you take the score and you take away the word fatigue and you put up sugar – it is really important because sugar causes the exact same mechanism that the symptoms do so sugar causes nutritional deficiencies, sugars cause organ dysfunction we need to be willing to admit that at least some of our current situations are caused by our current dietary habits. So on the other side of that sugar quiz there are 147 reasons why I encourage you to stop eating sugar. I am here with one that stuck out to me – no. 94 sugar can exacerbate PMS.

Gosh I see that a lot in clinical practice, with women working on hormonal balance and working to attention as to how each cycle is going and is kind of a monthly observation that a person struggles with sugar and then the next period can be horrific – that is when it’ll happen with migraines or if they have more cramps or not. So yeah, really analyzing one’s diet for sugar is significant and I implore you to spend some time highlighting ones that you feel are relevant to you and reach for it when you are being tempted. Yeah even if you are not struggling with hormones balance there are so many reasons here to motivate you to really work on that. Yeah because we all want to be dealing with healthy hormonal balance we want to be ageing well and not have so many symptoms and with less struggles which is my opinion is really unnecessary, and so with that kind of depressing outlook with it I do really want to offer hope and how hope is using our help is using a system called nutritional response testing. So those of you aren’t aware of it and those of you who aren’t clients I believe this s a great way for you to understand better how it works, and really understand what is happening in your appointments, but if this system really wallows me to assess how the body is really functioning and how it can help do better. So I have got Cindy over here – our associate practitioner and she is going to help me do a quick demonstration but the first thing I need you to understand is that her body has a certain amount of energy she is giving off and she is healthy and when I ask her to put her arm and apply pressure she is able to do that. But let’s say that we throw Cindy in a lake right and she is dealing with hypothermia – the idea behind hypothermia is that the body prioritizes and it need to keep the core alive and needs to keep you warm and keep you heart beating and functioning and so it draws energy from the periphery from your fingers and toes and the same concept is in play with nutritional response testing so the idea is that I am asking Cindy to match the pressure. I touch her thyroid and it is irritated and I am putting pressure on it and there I have some kind of underlying struggle with the thyroid. It has toxicity issue and she is not happy with how the body is eating or it is under functioning and actually needs targeted nutrition to repair itself. If I am putting that pressure and the body says oh gosh I got to protect that third the arm response will change and thus the arm will go down and so in a very kind of simple explanation of it, we then offer the body different support and offer in different whole foods and the idea of it is that these are living foods in glass and just the same way that you can put your hand in a window pane and feel the heat from the sun that is really far away I can put the food on the body ad it can pick up the energy from it. And if it is helpful and reparative and resourceful energy then when I go back and when I touch the thyroid the body is going t sense that I have what I need to take care of that, so I don’t need to stress out and worry about it. The arm repose will come again but I can offer the body many things and if I offer the body something that is not the right thing and is not going to help it deal and repair then the response will stay with her arm going down and showing what I call a stress response and so that is how we customize it and build it for the individual and so while clients here are all taking supplements no one is taking the exact same thing. It is an individualized program so yeah I appreciate that. You know it is called designed chemical nutritional so that is why it sticks here and it is alit bit like the idea that we are all wearing black button down suits but everyone’s in seams are all customer to them. And the biggest thing is determining whether your nutritional response testing case and all is everybody is. If you are I really and truly believe that nothing will help you with it as much, so that is why I encourage folks who are clients here tonight there is health screening form that is part of your package we can fill that out. Cindy and I are happy to do a healthy screening and an assessment to see how this works. So I have to keep in mind that for new clients as well as old clients what we are working on is your overall health. You can come in being like oh my health right you know you can come in saying my hot flashes are driving me nuts and yep am going to be like we are going to work on that liver repairing those digestive functions and so it is hang in there it is a long term process, but it is about restoring overall health and overall optimal function ad n how things are going and it is totally safe naturally. You can be on medications and you can be taking other things but yeah we have babies as clients, and my oldest client is 95, it is an incredible range of where you can support the body depending on where you are in life, but you have to be open to be willing to try something different. So I am excited as a part of tonight I am talking about my approach and what I do and how I support hormones and I also invited Shawn here form nature’s pharmacy to talk about what he does because it is really wonderful to have another too to support the body with medication that are based or made out of herbs and he is going to go more into what it actually means and what that contributes because so many of us are in a situation where you are already on a medication to support hormone balance or I have clients who are really struggling through certain transitions even though they are changing their diet and working at it. They are at a place where there is an option for folks who want to do a little more natural focus. So let’s welcome Shawn!

Hi I am Sean from nature’s pharmacy – right around the corner and a lot of people might have heard about compounding pharmacies but might not know what it is. An intro on myself – is the compounding pharmacy is basically customized medication for people while it is in different dosage and different ways of using it compounding pharmacist can come up with a solution and what made me go towards that is on the account of the fat that I was working retail and I saw that people were not really getting the relief that they needed and it took a toll on me so I wanted to make a change in people, so I looked into compounding and I decided that is where my calling is, and as far as what different areas that I do I can do things for working with kids with autism I am working with pain management centenary use and as Sophie mentioned a lot of bio identical hormones a lot of people might have heard about all these couple of different forms of humors whether it is synthetic natural or bio identical and I will go into a little detail and I’ll explain. Something like a synthetic hormones would be derived from pregnant farm animals such as horses or cows, and so what the company will do is basically add a structure to the compound and add a structure to the chemical so that way they and get a patient on it and might not work bio dynamically and then there is natural hormone replacement therapy such as like herbs and says Sophie would have mentioned and then what my focus is bio chemicals where it basically is herb matching to what is identical in the body. A lot of people might have heard about hormone replacement therapy being kind of causing cancer and higher risk of cancer and in general with bio identical, those risks are actually subsided and it actually can be a preventive measure vs. something that you use as a synthetic like something similar to diet line. The reason is that the body can respond to the change in the structure and in turn it can wreak havoc when something like a biochemical was the right thing.

As far as how do I come up with a formula for a patient is basically I have a saliva testing that allows the patient to give us a saliva sample 4 times a day and then turns that into a better picture something like a blogger where it is just one time whether there is any fluctuation with our hormones it is just going to pick up that level so basically if someone had a high level that day then their whole rating is going to be high. So intern they are not really gone to get the benefit they need, where with a saliva casket it is 4 times a day and in the morning and before lunch dinner and before bed time, and that actually helps give a better average of what is going on so in turn a person is going to get more relief for it. Couple of different hormones that I see every day is – estrogen such as astral, estradiol, progesterone, testosterone, DHEA. I will go into a little detail of which one does what. Astral or Estradiol is an estrogen where estrogen helps with vaginal lubrication, thickens the vaginal walls, and then a negative thing, you can increase fat storage – so if someone their estrogen levels are too high, might be causing extra fat to be stored. A lot of complains I get with compounding is a lot of women experience vaginal dryness burning itching all those symptoms and one thing to combat that is how to use something like an astral cream that is going to help supplement that or in turn provide extra lubrication for the women, then coming up with a compound cream I can do different forms and I can do creams lozenges – suppositories all sorts of things, vs. something commercial at least it is one strength or I can come up with a custom string or combination of medication that would work on all the symptoms so they don’t have to take multiple medications and generally – the bases that I have are actually a lot easier a lot better for patients beset for instance one of the bases I can use promotes adherence to the vaginal lining so in turn the medication is going to stay intact longer it is going to provide extra moisture and overall patient is going to be a lot more satisfied than taking something that is just available with no it is kind of like a one size fits all – doesn’t work with me – it is customized, probations namely. Another ingredient that I used is Estradiol which is beneficial with people with hot flashes and as well as promoting cerebral blood flow and in turn it kind of helps with memory as well! Sterol vs. Estradiol – it is considered a weaker hormone and in turn that is the one that can be used and combated against different types of cancer related to hormones. The next one is progesterone – women age after 35 their progesterone levels decrease and that can be linked to migraine headaches, it can help fight fat by using it as energy facilitates thyroid function – promotes normal sleep and then helps restore normal libido I actually can help with any PMS pans or anything like that. I had a 14 year old who was in extreme pain every time she had her cycle and so we got talking and I can with a progesterone capsule with her and that is a lower strengthen what she would get available and in turn that helps all her symptoms subside – every 10 days or 14 days she took it. I can check but with it, it replaced the progesterone she was losing in her body and that helped her sleep, get less cramps and less bloating. I really think she was really experiencing it.
Progesterone is produced in the glands and it can help with one of the progesterone levels being out – it can help with causing a lot of fatigue and inflammation. So in turn people are not getting good night sleep – taking it by mouth actually induces sleep – a lot of women who can or are having trouble with good quality sleeping, and they don’t want to take any other controlled drug. Their progesterone levels might be off and in turn that is going to help them sleep and get good night stress, it actually acts as a natural diabetic. Another medication is DHEA which helps decrease the cortisol levels, promotes weight loss, and increases brain function. It is also helpful to decrease cortisol levels as well and it can be used when people are experiencing sexual dysfunction and it kind of helps to promote and increase libido, another medication would be something like testosterone which a lot of women don’t realize but everyone has testosterone in their bodies. Testosterone can be used for weight loss and increased libido.

Bone density, body mass helps with, keeps everything maintained like that. So a lot of women are experiencing, they have a lot of brain fog and I would come up with a dose like 2 mg per ml so that way they can use that and instead of having to take other supplements. We found one lady who tried one dose and it was working but she was just expiring a lot of brain fog and we took and increased the dose a bit with the doctor and her brain fog went away completely, and actually just based off of that. Combining something like estradiol and something like testosterone can be very beneficial if they both help with members. I have an aunt that I talk about hormones with and her levels they can’t figure out what is going on. I told her to have her levels checked because she is in her mid-60s and that is how she found out or figured out what was going on. So I have been working with her to come up with a game plan as far as getting her memory back and giving her more energy with the kids and all, I have included an evaluation sheet that kind of helps talk about all sorts of hormones or symptoms or what we might be experiencing and ways to combat that. If someone was experiencing some vaginal dryness and they didn’t want to use hormone cream, I can make them a cream such as hyaluronic acid, vitamin E and A to help them out. The natural lubrication and all of the – soothe any discomfort that they may have. Hyaluronic acid helps to regenerate cell tissue. Vitamin e helps to promote healing and vitamin helps to supplement endothelial cells. So they all work in conjunction with that specialized basis to promote or help with vaginal dryness. A quick question? Sure. The arrows that are pointing up and down do that mean that there is enough abundance of it or there or I need for more, is there one you are looking for in particular? I was just looking at the first one. There is high E and a low P. Does that mean that you can assume that estrogen is very high and my progesterone is very low? Or that you would need to create something too? No it would be a high estrogen and low progesterone so in turn I would create something probably more like a progesterone cream that is going to offset the estrogen dominance. Ok so would you let multiple things that are sort of opposite of each other. That is a good question. I always like to recommend lab testing that way if something is too high or too low, saliva testing is going to show you might be this or that, it is a better tool that way. Another thing a lot of women experience is sexual dysfunction due to the fact that, their body is not producing the hormones so intern anything can be painful so I have one ream actually it I similar to Viagra it is the same medication that kind of produce blood flow and in turn that is going to help with stimulation and help the lady reach a climax. Do you guys have any questions so far? The side effect if you have too much? As far as having side effects there would be kind of your body can, if your body has too much hormones it can do the opposite and kind of have a negative effect were that is why I would start low and work it up but in a negative fact is experiencing hot flashes when someone was not experiencing hot flashes just because there is too much estrogen going in the body – where generally I have not seen any side effects as far as that – just because it started slower with the saliva test coming up with a formula and playing a game plan like that – so it would subside and as far as it is kin do f tough because there is no every person is different, one person might be experiencing symptom at one strain where other people wood b fine, so that is why I started slow and working your way up works the best. Usually when I administer hormone it is in syringes so people can penetrate that way if they feel like they are experiencing hot flashes then they can decrees a little bit and then they don’t have to worry about that. Someone had a question on Facebook about the cream you just talked about. Which cream is the one you l talked about last for vaginal dryness? It is a cream with a combination of hyaluronic acid, vitamin d and vitamin a and I put the cream in something that is going to adhere to the vaginal lining so in turn it is going to stay a tad longer and provide more really from the patient vs. just like regular cream. They are going to work well but using that base is kind of like a secret base just because it is proprietary so you might want to wholesale it and I just started using it for that aspect of it. I made a mix between 50-50 with the two different bases and the relief that people got from the base is a lot higher than just the regular cream. Besides the testosterone is there any of these herbal creams that must be established from a doctor so everything that goes through a compound in pharmacy would need approval for prescription and know some places do offer progesterone on line but as far as it would be worth getting prescription for just for the compounding pharmacy especially not I only get the top quality products so if someone is using a progesterone cream from one place vs. a progesterone cream form mine I know the size of the particles every single time and that is going to cause medication to be driven into the body even more or if it is not enough, so I had one lady who was – went to one pharmacy and they used to have been using a cheaper quality product and I made her a cream using my base which was designed specifically for penetration of the body and she had to reduce the medication just because how it was being administered. Everything was the same strength and all but just the particle side of the medications that I used was different from what the other place was using. A follow up to that, although you may not be able to share names, are there physicians here that can actually prescribe biogenic hormones? Paul fits them in, another one is Dr. Collie in Turnings Bourg and another one is Dr. O’shea is another one, I work a lot more with Dr McCauley and Dr. Oshea they are usually – they text me and say hey we have this how can we combat that. Question being asked.. my thought process is kind of like blood work but kind of old school as well where it is churning, saliva testing is more new school I guess, I offer saliva testing at my shop you can come in and you can get it and basically how I have it set up is you just get the kit and then you submit all the paperwork to the company and then they end me the results which I can then share with your doctor as well. So that way we are all working in conjunction with each other but not there is that and then there is a prescription – you don’t need a prescription for saliva testing actually it helps you get these things. What I do when I see the results I call a doctor. Here is what I recommend – that way a lot of it comes from educating the doctors too. It is kind of a new school though even though all medications were kind of commanded before the mass manufacturing, so more and more doctors are calling around they see the benefit of it, sure. 2 questions – one is can one get insurance premium reimbursement? How I set up I don’t take insurance but I give you a form to reimburse insurance so within 2 months 3 months they reimburse the payment to the patients. Every other time every insurance company usually does but some don’t, it is usually 50-50 all my prices are pretty competitive from all the pharmacies that I kind of called around with and I always want to price match too because I take that into consideration. I want people to afford the medication as well, if they can’t, what good am I to have at the pharmacy. My second question is do you work with medical marijuana? I don’t do anything with medical marijuana just because at the time it was like 200,000 dollar fee from the application but I do offer what is called full spectrum hemp oil CBD oil and the one that I have in stock is actually helpful and works on adrenals, clams the down, works on that and peaceful sleep helps with anxiety depression, I can name like 80 different things for it. So I have 2 forms that I sell, and I also carry a salve too that works, better for paid but the real solution works really well for a bunch of symptoms. Does that need a prescription? Nope over the counter is fine it is considered an oral supplement – actually the US, with full spectrum it can have a slight amount of THC in it, but it is not anything that is going to be psychoactive bu enough to work in conjunction in regular with the CBD, and the one that I have in stock it is, well it has turnips and turnips actually have the medication and help to pass the blood brain barrier easier and so in turn, that is going to make the cbd oil work even better. So far – yeah I actually never thought that it could be possible, it just – I never really worked outside for the testing or anything like that, but I would have no problem doing it, are you talking like a cream or something.
Yes, a cream that I was advised here and I am a client here and my body is very sensitive with testing, something you think might work but just doesn’t. Especially for the record, we do not consult test patients. That answered that question! That is the reason I have never done it (laughs). I have another question – do you compound thyroid medication and if so how do you feel it works compared to armored thyroid. I do compound things. I have a few different forms. I have more of a synthetic one hitch is just pure legal thyroxine and a lot of thyroxine and I have one that is desiccated pure scenic thyroid which is similar to what is on recall right now, and it is but I have it, I did everything – pure powdered medication so I can do any strength if it was 72 milligrams for instance vs. what is avail be so similar starting material is like armored thyroid but like a different form of it. This is mainly about women but men also have hormone issues and the same things that apply with that? Yep same thing I am working with an older gentleman he is about 84 and I am making him a testosterone cream just to supplement it, some women or some men with even like erectile dysfunction I could make like a few combination medications that works similar to Viagra but I always recommend if they are going for Viagra to actually be tested for their testosterone, just because guys testosterone levels drop evening our 30s, just continuously drop a lot of these people, a lot of these men that have erectile dysfunction should probably take testosterone and in turn it is not going to have the same fact as without it. In the same thing as – same case as always basically it is testosterone levels vs. someone’s estrogen or progesterone levels so and with bio medicals it is a lot safer than just like what is available commercially just because it is mimicking what is in our body vs. something that is similar to it but is not exactly the same thing. I am not sure what you are testing for with the saliva test and if you need a prescription to get a saliva test. That is what I explained over here – everything is basically how I have it set up – you pick p the saliva test from my shop, you do the samples send them into the lab I get the results, no prescriptions need and then I can send the results to your doctor as well, and then – how much does the kit cost and the testing – the test for 5 different hormones – test for progesterone, estrogen, DHEA, testosterone and cortisol too for 5 panel testing it is a 130 dollars right to the CRT labs and they offer a couple of other testing too you could do a couple of samples and have that – and then the price goes up – but for that basically a 130. That’s less than blood work. Oh yeah, way less. And they actually offer they have a form for the people who submit with tie insurance too so that way it kind of gives them both options really. How much would you say on average the cream is? The cream – for a month’s supply most hormone therapies are about 3975 roughly starting out – I think I have one patient that is on it like a couple of different things, 6 different ingredients and they are like 44. It is a month’s supply yeah, and pretty much if someone wanted a cream, a lozenge and suppository it is roughly going to be around the same price. I am always willing to work with people and pricing, because I want them to be able to get through the relief and that is my passion. You said the saliva test is 5 panels, are there any other panels? There are different ones through the labs, but as a pharmacist in the New York State I can only have certain ones o I am sure If someone called – and sometimes there are stipulations that say you can’t do it in New York State but some people send it out like from Pennsylvania for instance and they cannot do nothing about it. I think If you call them they can probably explain a little bit more as far as what their procedure is and what states can accept and all, but I am pretty sure if you call them and ask for a kit they would probably help you out. About the vaginal cream, is it like nontoxic ingredients in there or how safe is it? Well, all the cream I use is for hormone replacement therapy. It has all been tested. I do have more of a natural base vs. some that – I don’t have the ingredient list with me right now. I do have one that is all plant derivatives and some women choose that and others are ok with the regular cream too. And also for your oil what is your price point. I have several, I have Charlotte’s web which is a bit more pricey, everyday plus charlotte’s webs – a 100 mils is 189 online and I am selling it for 150. Then I have the 30 ml which is just the hemp oil which is like 35, and then I have the ones with the added turpine which is more local than that one. Usually 35, but I don’t mind people trying for a 25. I have been nursing both of them hand in hand and I cannot tell the difference but I know both of them work really well so and I am actually in the process of working with some else on their own product line so that is going to be in, in a couple of month – our own creams, oils, I don’t want to go into too much detail but it is a lot different than what is out there. Figured I might as well use the tools that I have. Removing a lot of these ingredients right – yeah as far as the amount that would be in there would be just this much or something like that if someone was using the actual plant material so it is just a small amount and it won’t really actually show up – and it shouldn’t shop up as far as any testing or anything like that. I am doing a study with someone that is really close to me and he never tried any CBD oil so I just want to see to just be sure. If he tried for 30 days and nothing happened but so far it seems like it is pretty awesome. What is stability what? Generally the one that I have taken they told me to just put it in the refrigerator while the other tests are doing it, but I was talking to someone one of my patients and she was down in some place trial on vacation and they told her don’t even worry about it – straight to them and there is actually it is not being refrigerated or something like that. It is fairly stable and once you get the sample you just don’t want to do anything or like to eat or drink beforehand just because that can screw the results. So you need to put a decent amount of saliva on it in each vial so it is not like it is going to dry up or anything like that. Yeah you get one large one and smaller ones from different samples. Yeah I do free consultations as far as everything – that way I like to make sure a patient understands everything going on, and then we can come up with a solution that way – so anytime feel free to give me a call or stop in, there is free 15 minute parking in front of my store actually so I always tell people that. All Sean’s contact information is right there, you guys got his business card and you can contact him for sure questions come up. He is very available and is really great. Tell everyone that anytime the light is on the door is open so I am there from – have posted hours but I’m there long past that, and we have a lot of experience working with all kinds of clients and medications, any questions coming up as you are thinking over this information, those of you who are our clients we can help you to understand everything that he is talking about and whether it is relevant for you. We would be happy to help anytime. Thank you so much for coming! Awesome, it is great. Thank you so much.

Everyone wants to learn about what to eat. Okay bring in just one more option of seating. Just in case! Alright, welcome everyone for coming out on a Thursday evening to learn about nutrients and what the heck to eat right. So that is what we are talking about this evening. So I am Sophie Alexander and I am the lead practitioner of the wellness center and most of you know me, but I am a clinical nutritionist and I have been working here for the past 6 years and really excited and passionate about what I do and helping transform peoples lives through people’s lives through national response testing through whole foods nutrition and to give you a little bite more of my background so you know why I do this work, I would say in retrospect oth now I know my health story and my health journey started at a young age and I went through food cravings and puberty too young, I had a lot of digestive issues, starting in high school that got really severer in college and I decided to become vegetarian and then vegan for a while so as a principle so I definitely have that experience of working through different types of diets and figuring out for sure what works for me.

That didn’t – my digestive system just went crazy while I was in college, bloating so bad that I would be lying down after meals to allow the pain and like the gas to move through, and then it all came to after college where I got Lyme disease, and I didn’t really know I had gotten it in the moment, 6 months went by and I developed bad arthritic symptoms and swelling my knees and wrists, so that is what began my journey because conventional medicine didn’t really have answers for me and didn’t really have symptom recovery and then they told me that the Lyme was gone and so I started herbal medicine, and then I moved to Ithaca to study with Seven Song who does the herbal medicine here and I was driving by green street all the time and I would see that radish and I wondered what this place was all about and at the same time I was learning more about the principles I will be talking to you about today. About the western year price foundation, traditional did, and I have been studying that on my own and then when I found that was what Tara Lambert who founded the national wellness center that was that she was teaching people, I really was like- I need to go there and I need to know what this is all about and the pairing of the national response testing and the really having some to hold me accountable and apply those traditional principles, for changing of my diet I started to get better and then I knew I had to go back to school and do this.

Do this work, so that is why I am here this evening excited to share this information with you because it is the – nutritional world is challenging to be a part of. It is ever shifting and ever changing. It is incredibly controversial and shouldn’t be – it is what we put in our mouths and what we eat, but I feel like every other day there is a study saying that coconut oil is good or saying it is bad, there is just so much confusion in the general population about how we should be taking care of ourselves, and you know also feels like every other day that someone is writing a book on the perfect way to eat and what was right for them, and thus how everyone should eat and so, how you write off, you are not going to come to this talk tonight and learn the perfect way to eat because there is no perfect way for everyone hands down I truly believe that while there are some broad principles I am talking about and there are things that are similar for everyone, we are also all very much individuals and we all have our own make up of what our specific new nutritional deficiencies are or our specific body make up and how our own organs are doing, and we are all a product of how our parents ate and how the parents before them ate and so on, and thus it means that we don’t, we all have – it is a really simple concept but we all have specific needs and how we need to be taking care of our bodies and so – that is why I strongly believe that someone will write a book about this one thing that worked so well for them because it was right for them, but it does not mean that it is going to work for the next person.

So there is a lot of hot buttons names that are floating around right now – keto diet is really big right now, and more and more people are hearing about Paleo and I wanted to give some brief descriptions of what those mean so folks can kind of understand what is being talked about and I want you to have better understanding of like general within these worlds of like what people are talking about and what are hot topics and do you have a lot of really- alot of things in common and it is just about the differing principles in the, but I also want you to understand that you can follow one of those diets and you can still not eat a nutritionally dense good diet and I will get more into what I mean by that, in a little bit but so we are not jumping ahead, Keto is a kind of a reworking of Atkins and what it is, is a diet hat is really low in carbohydrates so most folks are following Keto diet eat very little grain, also eat very few or lower starch vegetables too so it is going to be a diet that is low in overall – it is called net carbohydrates and higher in fats and a lot of protein – low grains or no grains? Either no to low, but because you are getting the carbohydrate level so low in the diet a lot of people eat no grains at all. So it is interesting then that Keto is short of Cytogenesis, which is getting the body moving for burning fat for fuel vs. burning glucose for fuel, and it was first developed or really researched and studied for helping epileptic kids with seizures and it worked amazing well and is really awesome to see how you can change the body’s bio chemistry and create that change and then they started seeing other health benefits from it. I will definitely tell you as a broad principle I am very much in favor of people having less sugars and carbohydrates in their diet. Anyone here who works with me will know that, and clinically I have seen great success with particular people that are diabetic pre-diabetic and pushing themselves in to Keto and getting the carb counting so low that they are having mostly protein and fats and then they are getting some carbohydrates from vegetable but it is still low and then you have to be really careful about getting fiber and really there could be a whole talk about keto so I don’t want to drill too much but I want people to understand what I am talking about. Then Paleo diet is no grains no lagoons no refined sweeteners it is getting back to that principle of saying well how our ancestors maybe but I do feel like the, our ever search for sweets as humans is meant that like well so that the Paleo diet goes no refined sweeteners but honey is okay maple syrup is ok, these are traditional sweeteners and those still have way too much sugar and too much sweet and too much fruit and things like that, so again it comes down to the individual body but I want you to understand these broad principles so it is going got bring us to, more of an education about who was Western E Price and what was the research he did in the 30s and what were the broad principles that he developed about what is a healthy diet because I do see people as I was just saying miss apply hose Paleo concepts a bit and do lots of fruit and lots of sweets and I see people struggle with keto too where they are eating tons and tons of dairy because it is slow in carbs and not the good dairy so they are constipated and I also see it just not be right for certain women and their hormone balance at certain stages of their life too.

So Western E Price was a dentist he lived in the 30s, he did some really fascinating research where basically he and his wife traveled around the world and study traditional diets and looked at their teeth and he was really interested in cultures where the traditional cultures were on the verge of what he called on the verge of civilization so basically he was studying the intersection of how these traditional cultures met with the hands that were happening like the introductions of refined flours and the introduction of refined sweeteners and he would, so what was cool about is it was traditional diets form all over the world and so they didn’t all look exactly the same, the makeup of the diet, he discoverer some core unifying principles amongst them, and then he has some amazing documentation of how people change particularly how their teeth changed with the introduction of refined sweeteners and refined grains and it would be really quickly within a generation so he studied yeah the families particular the mothers would start eating refined grains and refined sugars and then their children would start to be born with dental changes, and he saw that the arches in their mouth got smaller there was no room for their teeth to be growing in properly, and yeah it – he wrote a kind of dry book called Neutrino and physical degeneration but the concepts and the pictures in it are just so cool because he documented every piece of it, and the further – the more generations that folks had these what he called the food civilization in their diet the more degeneration he saw, and then but then the positive of it and the message of hope that I take from it, is that as people then moved back to their traditional diets, and pull out their refined sugars and pull out the refined grains it within a couple of generations even very quickly he had documented within one family these were the kids that were born eating the white flour and here are is the next child born where the mom went back to the traditional diet and the dental arches were back there was better formation and just overlap better formation in the born structure which was just talking about really showing how the body getting the full spectrum of neutrinos is needed to form properly.

So then you know there are people who the Western E Price foundation is committed to keeping his work going, and it continues to education educate people about his work. They have a lot of wonderful resources and we listed some of them for you on those snacks, lunches substitution ideas, so they have a website called the Western E Price doc or you can learn a ton of information, you can become remember and support them and they have a lot of resources to help folks navigate different food options so you can buy their shopping guide where they literally go through a rate of foods from best good worst option and get you a sense of if you are trying to buy a cracker, what kind of cracker would be your best option basically and they put it all on a app as well and it is called find real food, and they have some other downloadable pdf called a guide for healthy life booklet that goes into more detail about these principles that I am going to kind of briefly talk about right now because they are there is a lot to say about each aspect of it, each of them could be their own talk and since we are about to start our cooking series for the fall and she will be kind of approaching one of these as a topic and the first one is on diary. First part is about lacto fermenting foods actually and she is doing a whole class about the introduction of fermented foods. So the biggest I am like right now referring to the sheet, which is in your packet, it is really highlighting the data of nourishing traditional diets, traditional diets vs. modern diets and Iay these underlying principles of how to eat well, how to nurse the body how to begin to rebuild it, cell by cell and them you have that next – yeah so big piece of – I work to educate people about just how mineral deficient our soil has become so traditional diets they didn’t have the advent of big farming and the soil is that much fertile right and thus the food was more rich in vitamins and minerals and so that is like a huge starting point of a difference between traditional diets and modern diets, so one way that we can apply that in terms of oh gosh what do we eat is buying organic fruits and vegetables and because they are more rich in vitamins and minerals and particularly buying local from a farmer who you know is working on filled in soil and the more you have a relationship with some who is locally growing your food the more you know that your food is actually grown in good soil and will have more to it nutritionally.

All the diets that dr price studied, ate way more of the whole animal than we do now, so we eat a lot of muscle meat, which has a certain amino acid profile, but it is an incomplete profile, so they ate organ mean which are higher in b vitamins, and they ate a lot more broths and ligaments and all of it were much higher in collagen and that is our building blocks for our bodies to remake ourselves, so once ay we can apply that is you can buy meat with bones in and you can save that bone and cook it again or you can start incorporating more broths and more meat broths and bone broths particularly we have a hard time here at national wellness entre keeping collagen peptides on the shelves just because it is such wonderful way in our modern world to be getting that collagen ad now anyone is wanting to keep cooking broth for 36 hours even though we are so blessed to have a place like the piggery here in Ithaca like who has organ meats and has these different cuts and makes the bone broth for us, but he collagen the collagen peptides, comes from the hides, of grass fed cows it is literally mealtime, that has been further processed into collagen which is a tasteless odorless powder and I have so many kinds love mixing it in their coffee because it comes in a creamer it is like a coconut creamer and I use this in my smoothies I hide it in my kids food, I just really mix it in wherever I go and we do se such great results from people who are adding it in regularly I mean fold are adding it in their broths and I feel they start to age in reverse its like their skin gets younger, their hair grows better and their nails are stronger and so there is a big difference and so hence you have got us to tie it back you have the Paleo diet everyone is eating a lot of protein and a lot of muscle meat and you can be on the Paleo diet and you can incorporate collagen it is not necessarily – I is just about that education that understanding, for someone to actually know to do that. Traditional diets ere big on animal fats whereas modern fats we just do lot of refined vegetable oils and talking about fats is a whole huge topic on its own, but I don’t want you to be afraid of animal fats I don’t want you to be afraid of coconut oil, I do want you to be afraid of canola and stay far away from it, and in traditional diets. It’s a huge topic I can touch on it briefly but basically the refined vegetable oils they are processed with chemicals to – for the extraction process and then the temperatures that are heated to they are poli and saturated fat so they are not stable whereas the animal fats are saturated fats and they are stable and can be heated to high temperatures and thus it crosses a lot of oxidized stress in our bodies and it causes a lot of cellular damage to be using those oils, that are – basically sitting on the shelf rancid, and it is a big re-education piece that I do with people about not vilifying or learning to unvilify fat, particularly unvilify unsaturated fat and understand that in terms of all the concern about heart health and about cholesterol that it is really those refined oils, that are the biggest culprits, and that the advent of the introduction of those oils well kind of around the time Weston E price was trying to do his research and then it really picked up in the 50s is when we saw like the gosh the sky rocketing o these kind of diseases and even though there was so much of a publication and education campaign to like pull the fat out, people have not being getting any healthier. If anything we are getting more and more unhealthy and so that is just a slight segment on it.
I should do a whole class on fats – yeah. And the western E price foundation has incredible research on it and every time there is a study vilifying coconut oil, they have a response and they have to redirect the research so I really encourage you to read their website and join them and become a member – they have an awesome journal about 4 times a year they publish alto of great articles and research. That’s fun to keep up with. A big thing to look into sea well is animals on pasture so the way animals are raised an how they are fed as they are being raised, completely changes the unity of the meat and how again it ties back to the fats but basically if they are higher in omega 6s which are more pro inflammatory and whether they are higher in Omega 3s and so even separate from the fact that about the antibiotic count an things like that in animals raised in conferment just because of how many they are trying to raise in close space and then trying to keep them alive but it really affects our health and of course it is a huge issue if you have a care about the welfare of farm animals. Right so yep – even animals that are locally raised ideally all pasture fed is a good goal to be working towards. So that is another issue and I mean it is an issue I have with, just the ongoing education it needs to happen with then people are trying to change their diet and go oh yes I need to reduce my grains or I need to reduce my sugar but if you’re eating too much meat that is poor quality meat that is really not going to, but your body is going got be yay and have a sigh of relief that it is not getting all these refined grains but long term, it is not going to help reduce the overall state of inflammation in the body and it is not go into help reduce the amount of toxic load which I see in my work very much an underlying piece of why we are so sick and why folks are struggling with their health. Yeah, let’s see if I want to then another biggie that I have mentioned a little bit earlier when I was saying a lot of people can do a keto type diet where they are really trying to increase their fats, and then they are doing lot and lots of dairy – you know I see a lot of folks with digestive issues with dairy and I also see that mostly it is due to the quality of the dairy too and so, Dr. Price’s research was about how traditional diets first how they rise the animals that gave them the dairy which would affect the quality of that but it was also about how all of that dairy was fermented in certain way and given ways to increase the digestibility and that it was not patronized and it was not heated to high temperatures which rely changed the enzyme content of that dairy and changes the digestibility so unfortunately we live in a state where it is not legal to get raw milk in the store, you can go there are places where we can help you find them or you can go o eh farm and get raw dairy and you can buy raw hard cheeses because they have been aged for 60 days, but I find that – that is a big thing that many kinds have to work on and have to reduce the amount that they consume and really work on preparing the digestive tracts and that was – is a big thing that he saw In all the different cultures that there dairy was raw and it was fermented. So that would be like your yoghurt and coming up in November I think Cindy is going to be giving a whole talk on how to ferment your dairy it is going got be awesome and know it is going to be a daunting topic, and so he also found that the cultures that did have grains they really ate grains and grains were usually a regular part of the diet and they were treated very carefully to make them more digestible so the grains also went through a fermenting process and a soaking process, so that they, the body could utilize and absorb the nutrients from it. So we have gone to sow the other extreme our grains are highly processed, they are very much like you know everyone has seen the food pyramid they are all along the bottom of the food pyramids so the education is that so much there should be a stake bal of the diet so we are having we are eating way to many of them and in forms that are hard to digest actually damaging to the digestive tract so I am not – this practice is not for Paleo per se but we have so many clients who need to rescue their grains and many who never get them back because of the damage that has happened in their digestive trt but some who do but when they do reduce some back in, it is in these fermented forms that really is the best, and some people who just have to greatly reduce the amount that they are consuming and then it is their choice whether they save it for their one slice of pizza a week or they choose to ration their grains and have it be soaked in their oat meal let people have their choice of how thy use their grains but all over the market they have people eat less. Any questions so far? It’s great that you are jumping in but I wanted dot ask if there is anyone else has something to ask – I don’t want to focus and go on so much about the theory I feel like you guys can go through and look at this handout and get more of the sense of what these foundations are and what to work in and it is just about the little steps you know, if you can add or have less grains overall if you can work in bone broth if you can work in more collagen, if you can yeah have more fermentation whether that is fermented dairy or it is fermented vegetables and what I mean by fermented vegetable is like your sauerkraut your Kimchi or your fermented pickles – any kind of vegetable that is being put in a salt water brine and is allowed to ferment and then it grown from probiotics which all aid the digestive processes and Dr Price found that through all these different tradition cultures they all had some form of a fermented vegetable or a fermented food as part of what they ate and as a way to support digestion and so we have so many dead foods and then not eating fermented foods to support that digestive process is why we do so much work about rebuilding enzymes and having people incorporate more of these foods so that their digestive systems can repair and undo the damage that has been done.

And I think that is why it can be so frustrating for folks because they are applying a lot of these principles in the sense that I know I need to be eating less sugar and I know I need oth be eating less grains and they are trying to work towards it but their digestive systems is so damaged that is feel like this i not working and that is discouraging and then they give up and so it is I find that more I educate people on how far off our food systems are and our food supply has become in general ten they realize ok it is not that I am doing the wrong thing it is just the work that is needed to repair internally oth have it all click, and I feel like why a lot of people are hunting for the next thing that works is because they really want to lose weight and they really want to feel better and not recognizing gosh how deep it goes to get to the root cause of why the body is putting on weight and onto losing weight and so you know it is a quick answer but it is a quick reason but it is a long process of an answer, and but really rewarding got watch people actually work through it and get to the bottom of it. So to make it all less theory as well, and get into a more of some direct application we did throw in some fun food ideas for you about like actually what to eat and what to take for a lunch what to snack on as fats, what to incorporate like if you are trying to have less grains but still want to pack a lunch and incorporate some of those – there are a lot of those fun things here we incorporated some bread substitutes because I feel like that I said question that people are always asking me and what are better bread options and what can I eat for a sandwich and what do you pack your daughter for lunch. My 6 year old loves those delimit meat roll ups so she does like an organic turkey from the piggery or from Wingman’s and then she gets her raw goat cheddar from green star that she loves and then she rolls them up and takes them for lunch!

Even though she loves telling me that I don’t make her enough sandwiches, all the other kids have sandwiches I need to up my game. So yeah I really hope you find these helpful and what we did is when we were referring to particular in the snack section when we were referring to specific things then we incorporate the recipe here for you to use so this is a lot of fun things to apply the collagen cookie dough bites, incorporate this collagen and it is a great way to have a high powered snack and you don’t even realize it that it contains all this different amino acids, holds all the skin in your hair and repair your digestive tract. The coconut butter energy bars are a big favorite of mine and it is a really nice open ended recipe. And then you’re getting the good fat I talk about from the coconut. It is another way to work in collagen if you like, and I love it because you can really customize it to the person. If you like the crunch of it if you want something that is more smooth but it is really hard oth find a good bar like a premade bar – with simple ingredients that don’t contain a lot of binders that don’t contain a lot of artificial sweeteners and so I mean I love encouraging people to make their own but I am excited to see that like this movement is – the moment and the search for healthier food is catching on and so more and more things are showing up like each time I go to Whitman’s I have to spend all this time in the nature section, because they are airing more things and stuff that used to only be avail be on the internet is like now on the shelves. So I was excited to see that bullet proof makes an energy bar sweetened with Stevia and protein low sugar and you can get them at Whiteman’s and they art sty and you know it is catching on.

Yeah so we have a lot of good and fun ways to get collagen, get in mealtime. The home made gummies are a staple in Gemma’s lunch too and honestly I don’t want to talk about kids lunches but she takes those almost every day. Yeah but I want to take a moment to just for those of you who rent client and even if you are it is always helpful to be reminded why you are here for your own custom nutrition program and why it is – what is targeting and what it is working towards because it ties back to that idea that I was talking to you about in the beginning that it is really not lip service when I start saying that it is about the indicial body and it is about the individual make up and really we are working on things and as Dr. Price’s work showed it is coming from the previous generation even and so we are working my makeup comes from the combination of what my parents ate and how they were raised and I worked really hard through my 2 pregnancies to fortify my 2 children and change the health of my digestive tract but they are still a product of me so they – even with me applying all the work I know and what I have done they also have nutritional dietary sensitivities and they have food restrictions but the research shows that they keep applying that information hen their children will be healthier and I do believe that that is the masses of hope and I we keep sharing this information and more and more people are applying it and we are applying to our kids as well as ourselves, that we will stop having a country that is just getting sicker and sicker and we will start to turn it around, and so I feel like most people have symptoms most people have smoothing in their health that is not optimal that they are working towards.

I know tonight I don’t have a specific topic for my triangle talk, but I just put poor health on the top and you can think about what applies for you, and whether it is your digestion or whether it I you energy and whether it is your focus whether tis i headaches, and then we look at this triangle her end so we have a trouble that has organ dysfunction down in one corner and we have nutritional deficiencies down in the other and this is really what I was talking about when I was saying we are our own unique markup of nutritional deficiencies and how that ties to Organ dysfunction and when you have anything in a triangle and when you think f the concept of a triangle you all on corner of it, was off the other 2 corners and so I will tell you that if you have any kind of symptoms where you are struggling with your health I will tell you right off the bat that you do have national deficiencies and you do have organs that are not functioning optimally and the unfortunate things is that we you have organ dysfunction that further the nutritional deficiencies and when you have nutritional deficiency that furthers the organ dysfunction and that is the same whatever the symptom is as well.

So they are all interconnected and unfortunately what ends up happening with most situations is that it is a downward spiral and things continue to get worse and rather than get better because the body is not getting what it needs to fully repair and recover and so what we have to do is we have to put a stop somewhere and in some situations it is really awful and one of the biggest things that we can do is just halt the degeneration that is happening and then the next step is can we bring it down and the positive news is that we can, but it is about identifying what is gone on with that specific individual what organ systems are struggling and what is actually deficient and beginning the process building back up – and I feel like it is very much the undying message of why one thing works for one person and then it won’t work for their neighbor because yeah because of that specific make up and that specific biochemistry so what we do is we use a technique that is called national response testing which is a way of reading the body and reading the nervous system, and identifying the specific deficiencies.
I am going to have Cindy our practitioner to come up and give you a brief demo and understanding of that so you can understand biter of how it work and what it is about – but s the idea is we have Cindy standing here and Cindy is giving off energy and she is healthy and she is working on her health’s it is an ongoing journey and so when I ask her to bring up her arm and match my pressure and I apply pressure to it she can do that, but let’s say that for example we threw her into a lake and she restarted getting really cold her body gets cold and deal with hypothermia – where the body needs to keep the core alive, so it will draw energy from the fingers toes to basically protect your heart and lungs to keep you alive. So the same concept applies with nutritional response testing if so I am asking Cindy to match the pressure and I am touching different organ systems and I get to an organ system say her thyroid is just here and it is convenient, and I am putting pressure on to and I am irritating it and I am stressing it to a degree, f hat thyroid already has something going on it, or it is not functioning optimally or it does not have the right minerals that it needs then the body is going to draw energy from the hand, and energetically protect the thyroid an her arm will go down. I am basically using her arm as my indicator for the overall health of the body and so in an initial assents and in every follow up appointment, we do these scans to test and analyze the body see what is struggling and when we identify what areas are struggling we prioritize which one and where to begin and basically ask it what does it need to start repairing itself and that bring us to the next step where we work primarily with cold food supplants and the idea behind this is that everything gives off energy we are all sharing energy whilst sitting in this room.

Put you hand to the window when it is sunny out and you can feel the energy coming off form the sun even though it is really far away.so food that are alive supplements that are made form whole food the body can pick up on the energy given off from it, and we can ask it by putting the product on the body near ideally touching and then we come back to that same reflect of asking Cindy to match that pressure and I go back to ouch the thyroid and the arm goes back to locking it just means that whatever is in the product is the correct nutrition to help take the stress away and for the organ to being the heal and repair and thus the body does not have the same stress response of being like oh gosh have to do everything I have to protect the organ because it is unhappy – but it is not. It is not about my opinion, not even the client’s opinion in the sense of you know what you read on the internet as to what you need to eat.
The body calls the shots very clearly. If I offer for something and there is no change in the arm then we know it is not going to create any change in her then it is not going to help her to heal and so that is how we begin the first steps of putting together a custom support for the body. It is kind of like the idea that if we were all in this room to get customs suits like where they all looked the same and we wore back buttoned down suits but the inseams would be unique o while everyone is inclined here to take supplements, not everyone takes the same thing and while everyone here is a work in progress and are all working to improve our diets and optimize things for ourselves no one eats the exact same thing, it changes as your needs and body changes as your – as different parts of your life change.

Our youngest client is in utero and our oldest client is 95 and whether you are pregnant or you are breastfeeding or just different stages of life – you need different nutrition, so it is called nutrient repose testing is what I was saying and what I was showing to you was designed for clinical nutrition and it is not a quick fix it is all about overall health and we have to be willing to try something new that may look a little different, we have to be willing read labels and really have neuronal re=education because of all the misinformation that is out there – it is totally safe and natural and no interaction with medications as I was saying, we can work with really young people and it is truly getting to the root cause of health concerns and I would love to share with folks who are new to us tonight I would b happy ot do what is called a health check and introduce you to response testing and see if you will benefit and that is where in the form there are, there is a health screening from in the back of the packet that will allow you or give us permission basically and does anyone have any questions for me or any recipes – the concepts that I was talking about I am happy to just open it up if anyone want to share thief r experience I just wanted to peon the last little bit up to everybody I think are we have about 10 extra minutes open forum and ask me anything you want, or just yeah – I mean I feel like a lot of times too folks want to know what we eat if you really want to know what the heck does Sophie eat or Cindy.

Q1 – I forgot to ask you this earlier but you know apple cider vinegar? I have seen the tablet form as well. Really I have never seen that! I have one with me if you want to see. Yen I do want to see! Yeah so carol is asking me about raw apple cider vinegar right, and apple cider vinegar is such an amazing product because it is the source of these live cultures. I was talking about probiotics. It helps boost acid production in the stomach and if we are talking about ways that people are enzyme deficient or are struggling with digestive health the raw apple cider vinegar can really help that and people take it when they are sick when pep are burping to much when they have stomach ache, when they are constipated and there are so many ways where we can use raw apple cider vinegar and gosh – I don’t know they dehydrate it and put it in a pill – everyone wants it to be convenient and not want the taste that vinegar – really it is a wonderful digestive aid putting a tea spoon into a bit of water and having that with your meals or before your meals can do a lot to boost stomach or acid production so whole other clasp but a whole bunch of people are not making enough stomach acid really and it is why they get indigestion in the first place but I don’t know anything about I being a tablet I would be a little questioning of it but I definitely recommend that you use it.

Q2 – can we talk about the benefits of unrefined salt? Mhmm. Can you get too much salt? Unrefined salt – I find that the body can self-regulate that so that is kind of answering your last question so let’s back up here first. So there is a lot of fear about salt because there is fear of sodium and high blood pressure and so your convention table salt in restaurant s and sold in stores is being bleached and it is being refined to make it white and thus it is pulling out the trace minerals in the past or traditionally we are saying it is not that list using unrefined salt, in the past we would never get that sodium in isolation not to mention the bleaching and the processing that it has gone through so getting salt that has court to it that has those trace minerals then gets you all these in unrefined salts it is over 80 essential trace minerals so the body needs to find different conjunctions and then working with sodium and that is why in the past salt was this precious commodity because of t being such a life force so you want to buy salt that has colour to it. We carry the real salt brand that comes from the salt lake in Utah but you can get pink Himalayan you can get dirty – it really needs to have colour. Then this is totally rebuilding told and I am actually ever encouraging people to get more alt and to help restore their mineral balance to improve energy and to improve cognitive function and to improve how well their bodies are hydrated and I find that it regulates blood pressure and doesn’t make it too high, but if it is too high it can bring it down without making it too low. It is just because it is regulating those systems, and find that people can will get a sense of having too much I often have clients do what I call salt shops which is pouring a little bit of salt into your hand and then you put it into water and then just throw it into the mouth and chance it with water and it is a great pick me up like that 3 o’clock slump and just another way to get more salt in I you are struggling and you are not used to putting it all over your food and things like that and when I was pregnant I did a salt shot and I got nauseous and I occasionally get clients who tell me they get nauseous and that means you are having too much, but it is so rare – it is really reared and most people are not getting enough. When I was doing my master’s degree in human nutrition they made us analyze our diets ad analyze literally all the micro and macro ingredients in it and I had to analyze how much sodium I was getting and I was a client of Tara’s at the time ad not eating any processed foods and I was not even meeting the FDA minimum requirement for sodium unless I was doing in ate last half a teaspoon of salt a day so I think that most people are really underutilizing it. So it is hard if you are really trying to have it like take half a teaspoon of salt and put it in the salt shaker and use it all day long – you won’t use It all up, and that is way more salt that you sprinkle in your food, so you need to be cooking with it or doing salt shots.

Q3 – right so they bleach the salt and strip it of everything and then they add the iodine back in for the idea that it is thought to prevent goiters. There is a very small amount if iodine in an unrefined salt, but my experience is that it is more about not just always about iodine but it is about all those true minerals and it is about also getting the trace amount of iodine from food in particularly if you eat some sea products and some seafood and as weed and things like that and so I don’t find that people who switch from white refined salt to iodine to unrefined salt start developing goiters or get iodine deficiencies, because it is very much about that balance and not eating one of them.

Q4 – I have a question about the deli meat. What kind of meat is deli meat? Is it ok to have it? I had deli meat while growing up as a kid, right. Yeah in that – what we are referring to is anything that can be smoked or roasted but it is not treated with the nitrates. Yeah nitrate free. I feel like Whiteman’s have a fantastic selection you can buy pre sliced or they will slice right here – the piggery the same, if you are interested in it being more local or pasteurized yeah it is really the issue with Oscar Myer it is the processing. It is a great question because you don’t want to be doing a lot of those kinds of meat that again would be contributing to all the issues I was talking about. Incredible amount of sodium yeah

Q5 – the raw cheese you talk about cheddar? Yeah the goat cheddar that Gemma loves. Yeah so what else would be good raw chase? Yeah so it is going to be any of the hard cheeses because that is the thing about cheese making. Is that any thing or cheese that has to be ages 60 days is going to be hard cheese, so your softer cheeses like feta or mozzarella or things lie that they don’t go through an ageing process, then it is not legal within the new york state for them to be raw because they will be sitting on a shelf for 60 days for them to make sure there is no bacteria growth, but you can get, there are several kinds of cheddars not just goat cheddars – at green starts and at Whiteman’s they have done us a bit of a favor where they put a red dot on a label because we send enough people there hunting for raw chase basically and the ones at green start they are in pretty big letters on the label – raw milk, but you can get a monterey jack you could get a cheddar you could get Swiss, you could get parmesan, I think most parmesans are traditionally raw anyway. Yeah so there are some yummy options, you can’t even taste the difference. It is just the label but it is frosting if you are like a feta fan. If it really is the pasteurization process you find that – if someone show stat they are struggling with pasteurized dairy and they avoid it for a period of time and do more of the raw dairy and they work on repairing their digestion then it is those local great fed cheeses that can come back in then the quality of the dairy even if it has been pasteurized if it has been a higher quality you can get it back. Even the high quality cheddar – so the Nori bread is a navy bean flour bread like she is a local woman in land sing who has market to make a totally allergy free bread and so it is sold in the freezer section in the bread section at green star and it is a big thing in my household we run out of it, and my girls get very upset I find that you need to toast it, not greet just you need to toast it and puts lot soft butter or lots of coconut oil on it to give it – that would make a great grilled cheese. Technically it is not because it is a lagoon, yeah! But I do find it is quite high carbohydrates so I very much encourage to put all the fat with it, to kind of slow down the digestion of it otherwise it is I don’t want to call it white bread but it is so starchy it will digest and turn it into those quick gloss right in your mouth with your digestive enzymes just because it does not have a lot of fire just the bean starch that is in it, so you put that on ti, and helps slow down the digestion of it for sure and I guess there’s is this piece more and more of these products out there and I mean there are still more specialty items it is fun to see that there is a bread called barely bread that is also carried at greens star –the local co-op that I like more because it is more complex than tis ingredients list so it contain cilium . it has higher fiber, it has sweet potato flour and coconut flour and almond flour and cilium and so thus it has lower carbohydrates and I work with so many folks that are pre diabetic and are working to lose weight and are just trying to make sure they are not getting hidden carbohydrates. So that is a wheat product? Cilium is a pure fiber – it is not a wheat product.

It is in the freezer section of the bread section in Green star. You could get lost in there! And again I get better feedback about the rolls than I do. Everyone has their own preference but again toasted stuff on it – how about the spurted grain – year astutely better options. Yeah you if someone is transitioning from talking a lot about bread we all love bread and if someone is transitioning from a bread and needs to have a better option like Ezekiel bread which is a sprouted green bread it can be a biter option and you know traditionally a lot of diets in the Western E Price foundation is big into sour dough so it is that fermentation, the upturning it is the breaking down of the rye traditionally and the wheat. So again a better option I just work with so many folks that either need to avoid what completely for a period of time or overall reduce these carbohydrate foods, and so then that would be one of them but I would so prefer people who eat that vs. who gets a sub. Yes sometimes it is working towards that.

Yeah so what we pulled out we pulled out our boxes and so I will put these out here and available locally or online and see if you have come across any of them or are interested, there is you know some grain food crackers there is an almond flour pasta that is really delicious this is chickpea based pats – this is what we are talking about sandwich breads, what is the brand name of this brae though – it is a bread that was supposedly good. It’s online! These are really great for picnics and grain free chip – so I will leave these out and get more options if you are trying to but these you know are all grain substitute ideas but really I love to encourage people, it is just about switching up how you think about what is on your plate and you got your spot where your grains used to be well now put more veggies there and you don’t necessarily need to but it is all about these transitions when I first started how I ate I had a bread machine and instead of making regular bread I would just make all gluten free bread and I was cooking with tapioca flour and sorghum and rice and doing all these blends and having lot so f bread and then I slowly started having was bread and then into grain free baking and now I don’t really eat bread but that is the transitions of 8 years and I am not expecting or asking anyone to do that overnight, but I can keep talking about this forever it is 7.30 thanks so much for your questions and interaction thank you for coming.

Welcome everyone. Thank you for joining me on the gorgeous afternoon to learn about digestive health and how it connects with immune health. Before I launch into it I’ll just do a little bit of the zoom guidelines. So, I am going to run through my presentation please don’t hesitate at any point if you have questions, just use the chat to communicate with me and I will do my best to keep checking that chat and answering questions, as relevant as we go through, and just stay muted the whole time to avoid disruption.

Okay I am eager to sharing this topic with you today. Excuse me, just bear with me; I have to learn how to navigate the zoom screens. As a nutritionist and especially someone who has struggled a lot through my life with digestive health, this is very important topic and a very relevant topic. I find I am addressing it daily in the clinic, and so to give a little background about me, my name is Sophie Alexander I am the owner and practitioner for the Nutritional Wellness Center and I began my own journey with my own health. Gosh, so many years ago, but I began Nutritional Response Testing on my body about 12 years ago.

But I really started to become aware with health issues when I went to college and I started having so many digestive issues. Really, severe gas and bloating and then it was once I started struggling with Lyme disease soon after graduating from undergrad, that I really was like “okay, I need to figure out what is going on with my health.” And it led me to the direction of actually finding the Nutritional Wellness Center as a client, and then being an employee, and then purchasing it a couple of years ago and it is through this bad journey that I’ve really come to understand so much about the connection between digestion and how it impacts immune health. And I really want to make this connection better known. I find in practice there are so many reasons that some people have compromised digestive systems and that and this then can impact their immune system and compromises their immune system. Through the world of Nutritional Response Testing we definitely know and discovered that anything can cause anything. So, what we need to find out is what is causing it for you. If you are struggling with particular concerns in these areas or if you know someone who is, and wants to have better solutions for them.

So many people on a regular basis, in their day-to-day life are dealing with bloating, gas, constipation. It’s an epidemic in the United States. Diarrhea, indigestion, reflux. It is incredibly common for people to be on all sorts of proton prohibits to things like anti-acids. GERD, which stands for Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease, excuse me there! Irritable Bowel Syndrome and I think too many people think that these are things that people live with, and they don’t know that there is anything that they can do about it.

So, that is one part of what I want to talk about today, for folk to understand what we can do about it. But I think also with these times, being in the midst of this pandemic, still, lots of folk are wanting to answer the question for why certain people are struggling so much with the Virus Covid-19, and why? First they thought that well, if you are older you can get more seriously ill, but now people of all ages are getting quite ill, and others not at all. Trying to understand that, I think this conversation about how connected our immune health or our digestive health plays an important role in understanding that.

So, first we will start with a simple overview, of what the digestive system is. Right, so the digestive system consists of the parts the body that work together to turn our food and our liquids into the building blocks and fuel that our bodies need to run themselves. Digestion begins actually even before you start eating. So, a lot of people don’t realize that and as you think about food, taste food, see it, the gastric juices start being released. Just as a little side note, it can very much help digestive issues just to be more mindful about when you start eating, pausing, eating slowly, taking that deliberate time to eat, and preparing to eat. Because everything starts preparing your stomach initially for the ingestion of food.

So, of course we eat through our mouths, the food goes down through our esophagus, which is a long stretchy pipe about 10 inches and moves the food down into the stomach. A lot happens in the stomach but the stomach does have three most important jobs. Number one, it stores food that is come in, and it break that food down into a liquid mixture and it slowly starts emptying that liquid mixture into the small intestine. The stomach takes a lot of time to churn mash and mix food up and then releasing it in small amounts and it really changes the pH of the food. It makes it more acidic to help kill bacteria that is in that food, and for the release of gastric juices from the stomach wall, to get it prepped for the small intestine to accept it. And that’s an area where a lot of trouble can start because either there is not enough acid in the stomach and food starts to sit too long or starts to rot, or there is not enough bile that is being released from the gall bladder and thus the stomach is responding to not being in the right environment in the small intestine that the food gets released into.

Okay, so the small intestine where a lot of nutrients absorption takes place. Small intestine is 22 feet long, it’s quite incredible. Its job is to break down food, this food mixture coming from the stomach even more. So, the majority of vitamins and mineral, proteins, carbohydrates and fats can be absorbed. Only a little bit of absorption of nutrients happens in the stomach, just to back up a little bit. It is mostly protein and protein absorption, some mineral absorption and specifically B vitamin absorption. But the majority of the nutrient absorption comes from the small intestine and it is helped out by the pancreas, from digestive enzymes released from the pancreas, bile made and stored in the gall bladder which is then released specifically to help digest fats.

The big thing about the small intestine, and I am not sure many people realize, is that it also plays a huge role in keeping out pathogens and toxicities. A lot of people talk about how the gut is actually where we have the outside on the inside, if that phrase makes sense, because you have all these outside foods that is travelling through us. But then there are cells just like our skin cells protecting our organs and internal body from the food that is travelling through our system. Through the small intestine is one layer of epithelial cells which are skin cells that line the inside of you gut, and these cells are only one cell thick so it can be very vulnerable and it easily can get damaged and have dysfunction.

So, the crucial part of this gut lining that these cells that we are talking about that can malfunction, is the tight junctions which are complex proteins between the epithelial cells. These tight junctions connect these cells together and they regulate what can pass between them, so these tight junctions are like border control agents, and they are really meant to not allow anything to pass through that shouldn’t.

But when they get damaged, unwanted items like bacteria, undigested food, they can squeeze through these gaps between the gut epithelial cells. This is where then we start to get an unwanted immune response, because of course it comes to the body’s defense. First of all, what can create this gap? Harmful microbes and parasites can impact and alter the tight junctions in the gut wall and this results in a bigger gap between the cells and this lead to a phrase you might have heard of as leaky gut.

So, parasites are very common. A lot of people don’t realize this or talk about it, but they are something that live-in most people, and it comes down to whether there are too many of them or if the body’s homeostasis balance is off. Same with all sorts of different microbes, because our intestines are full of all sorts of bacteria and we want them to be generally beneficial to us. Particularly the large intestine, which you may have heard of wanting to have good probiotics in there. But this balance can easily get off and I am going to be talking about more reasons why they can get off. These harmful microbes and parasites can add to the leakiness of the gut. Also, dietary factors, food sensitivities, chemicals in foods, they can trigger this reaction as well, and they increase the body’s release of zonulin. Zonulin is a protein that is involved in controlling these tight junctions between the epithelial cells.

So, what happens is things leak through and larger items and items that are not supposed to be coming through the junctions. And there is a whole labyrinth of the immune system right there, right beneath that for the body’s defense. If you have ever heard this phrase 70 percent to 80 percent of your immune system is found in the gut, this is what we are talking about. It is actually called Gut-Associated Lymphatic Tissue or GALT for short. This lymphatic tissue is all throughout the small intestines and so it’s job is to immediately rush to the body’s defense and to attack unwelcome and unwanted molecules that are passing through and put those microbes and toxins and undigested food out of commission.

The problem is that, you know that we are living lives that have so many food like substances and are not actually real foods that the level of toxicities, the level of chemicals in food are so much higher. Thus, the rise of so many more digestive issues and thus the rise of the leakiness in the intestines. This immune response that is not supposed to have so much work to do, has a lot of work to do, and this is really the big crux of it. In the sense that you now have a heightened immune response very regularly in the body and this leads to a lot of systematic inflammation and it can be the underlying piece of many auto-immune conditions as well. As you see listed here, many other health concerns that are associated with having this compromise in the digestive system.

So, this is more of what I was talking about. Just in general, people’s stress levels are incredibly high this past year, that is the main thing I have been hearing from clients. You can see how high the stress level is in terms of what they are trying to juggle, as well as overall concern listening to the news, and the state of the world. Yeah, many people have access to very poor foods and make poor food choices. The amount of medications in use you know and then the body dealing with the infections. And as I mentioned earlier, all these toxicities that particularly come from personal care products, from cleaning products and that are literally in the food, on the food, sprayed in the ground to grow the food, thus ends up in the water. Right, and a big piece of that is the pesticide glyphosate which they are now talking about being in everyone’s bodies in the water and in the soil.

So, that’s really my view point on why so many people are struggling with Covid-19, in such serious ways when overall people think of them as healthy. I know this is a very broad generalization, and there are people known to have core morbidities or have been very frail in certain ways. But for those situations where like “oh, my cousin who is 30 and was healthy got so sick and that was really scary”, I encourage you to think about other ways how people can be quite unwell and not necessarily having diabetes or having a heart condition. Because they could easily on a daily basis have all this digestive dysfunction that they are not just addressing and living with a very high level of inflammation and immune deregulation, that is now contributing to their immune system response, when faced with this new virus.

So, these are very broad steps that I’ll talk about in a little more detail but I do feel that is a huge part of improving digestive health and thus contributing to immune resiliency. Number one, is taking different steps to address stress levels and that can take different forms for each individual. It is not my place or training to tell you which one, just that it is such an essential part of maintaining good health. So, it could be getting out for walks or doing meditation or yoga practice. Just bear with me, I am just noticing the chat.

Oh, and I am just learning that there was a delay in some of you getting the link and I am so sorry
to hear that because I am in the midst of things now and you are just jumping on. So yeah, I see that some of you are just joining me. Well, I am going to move on. I definitely have flexibility and time today so I’m kind of almost near the end of some of my slides, but I what I can do is move forward a little bit and then go back for those of you that would like to stay on with me. I hope that sounds like a good solution.

Alright, so I have been talking about different ways to handle stress so this one, “following a healthy balance diet.” That is such a  broad statement, right? And you know that I particularly specialize in what is the correct diet for each individual, and I do not believe that there is one diet over all that everyone needs to eat. Except that I do very much see that there are these overarching principles that apply to everyone and those principles are to eat real food. You know that looks like food, meaning avoiding processed foods and avoiding refined foods, and avoiding refined sweeteners and commercial oils right, so that’s the broad guidelines

The details of that, are you somebody who needs to eat more or less protein, or someone who can tolerate grains, or who cannot tolerate grains or can tolerate certain sweeteners or not? Those are the nitty gritty details that very much needed to be figured out per the individual. But in general, you know, I mean it’s food that either you need to cook yourself, eat it raw, or prepare in a way to eat it versus. something that comes in a package. Or if it does come in a package you can recognize everything on that label, and the ingredients label is short and the ingredients label is also recognizable foods. And then you know, avoiding completely any white sugar or refined sugars and staying far away from what I called refined vegetable oils; canola oil, sun flower oil. And making sure that you have the opposite of that, the good fats in the diet. Specifically, to heal and repair those epithelial cells that I was talking about earlier who plays such a vital role, you know like our defenders along the digestive tract.

Bone broth is particularly amazing because it contains a high level of glutamine which is an amino acid that helps to repair those tight junctions and repair those cells. It is incredibly restoring thing to have in your diet and so for anyone that is showing these signs of leaky gut syndrome. Which I tell the majority of clients I see, encourage them to get bone broth into their diet regularly. Whether that is drinking it as a warm beverage, using it as a base in soups or stews. My husband makes a green smoothie in the morning and uses bone broth as a liquid in it. I am not willing to do that but I think it is awesome that he does it and he seems to enjoy it.

For clients who are unable or unwilling or really does not appeal to them to have bone broth, we do have them use collagen and so collagen can come in a powder. It is more easy to use and to hide in a smoothie or in beverages and it is tasteless odorless powder that has been derived from collagen. So, the way you can make collagen is you can harvest the joints of the animal or the hide of an animal and collagen of course gets really thick and gelatinous especially when heated and cooled. So, that is how you make gelatin. So, the collagen is processed just a little bit further than that so that it does not behave in the same way and will disappear into wherever you are trying to hide it. So, I use that in smoothies regularly I hide it in my kids oatmeal. That can be another great source of amino acid and glutamine that helps to repair the epithelial cells in the small intestine.

As I was talking about just how much the level of toxicity impacts the digestive tract and those impact the immune system – whenever possible avoiding unnecessary medications, avoiding toxicities in the sense of what are your personal care products what are you putting on your skin. Have you looked them up on the Environmental Working Group website where they can be rated? You want to be using items that rated a one or two and you will be shocked at just how many items, even things that you think are healthier options, really have a high chemical load that has not been proven safe for humans. Same with personal cleaning products, things you are using regularly and it makes such a difference to eat organic.

The environmental working group that I just mentioned publishes each year, the clean 15 and the dirty dozen and they just recently came out with their newest list and on top of the list of the dirty dozen; meaning the things grown with the most pesticides, is strawberries and we are coming into strawberry season, so excited. So, it is just one of those places here you can make you realize it is worth spending the extra money buying it organic to be reducing that pesticide exposure. Another big place to be aware of is your water, and your water source. Whether you are on city water or on well water, knowing what is in your water and filtering it, is another way that you can significantly decrease unwanted exposure to all sorts of pharmaceuticals to pesticides to fungicides. As well as in city water chlorine and fluoride exposure.

If you do have immune challenges whether you know it or not, it plays a huge role. That’s something that we do at the Nutritional Wellness Center which is help the body restore its balance, restore its homeostasis, whether its parasitical, whether it is viral, all these things live in us. And it is about getting it back into balance so they are not causing symptoms and causing distress to the digestive tract, thus leading to an overdone immune response.

But I want to explain a little bit more, I have this triangle here, as you can see I have a compromised digestive system on the top, and I have down in the other corner nutritional deficiencies and then I have organ dysfunction. So, I just want to explain that if you are dealing with any kind of digestive symptoms, the more obvious ones I am talking about, bloating gas, constipation, diarrhea, reflux, then you have nutritional deficiencies because of that lack of absorption. Because you have nutritional deficiencies and because you have organ dysfunction, because unfortunately your organs are then not getting the support that they need to run all their functions and be vital.

If you notice with a triangle if you pull on the corner of the triangle and then you throw off the other two corners. So, you know, even if you don’t have obvious digestive issues but you know some other organ is off, you have been diagnosed with something—say fatty liver or overactive bladder or some other where you know an organ is not doing its job correctly—then that is going to pull off the triangle too, and that means you have compromised digestion and that means you have nutritional deficiencies.

So, it can go, you know, you can pull one corner off and you know you are throwing off the other two corners. What can happen is through time, as you just start having a downward spiral, you have further and further organ dysfunction, further nutritional deficiencies that can further compromise the digestive tract. Until eventually you do actually get diagnosed with digestive symptoms too. You know like, “oh, why is this reflux here all of a sudden” or “it has gone far enough that there is auto immune disease that is being diagnosed” or things like that which are part of that heightened immune response which are unchecked for a long time. It needs to be stopped somewhere we need to put a stop in this triangle and stop that downward spiral, and then start to stabilize the body and rebuild. But at least first stop the damage and then begin to address the nutritional deficiencies, address the organ dysfunction, address the compromises and the digestive system, and help the body rebuild and repair!

A big thing I want to draw your attention to is that you can take that digestive dysfunction and replace it with sugar and just realize that sugar causes nutritional deficiency and sugar causes organ dysfunction. So, especially in the line of work I do, which is counseling people to change their diets, is really asking people to recognize that their currently daily habits of how they eat can be very much playing a role in their health issues. That a big part of getting well and starting rebuild and repair the body is that willingness to look for the places where the sugar is and make those changes so that that part of this triangle can stop spiraling downward.

So, this is what we do in the office on a daily basis at the Nutritional Wellness Center. As I was talking about helping the body to stabilize and then helping it to rebuild. We use a system of analysis called Nutritional Response Testing where we use to analyze the body and in order to determine what we call the underlying causes of ill health.

When these are corrected through safe and natural means the body can repair itself in order to maintain and attain more optimal health and it is truly amazing. Just the clients we see on a regular basis when we even see me clinician saying, “oh gosh there is so much further we need to go to repair and rebuild the organ systems,” but when we get to that first step of stopping that downward spiral, you know, people getting their energy back or just observing that their poops are healthier or having not so much bloating and how that builds over time.

So, we designed our programmes to address why people have digestive issues that are affecting their immunity or if it’s the reverse, if there is someone who comes in and they get sick all the time and prolonged. We address what has gone out of balance in their system. I often see a basis in digestive issues and start to repair it, so that it doesn’t happen. It allows us to be very specific and accurate in handling what each individual body needs.

So, I say the time is now right, as we are especially in the midst of this pandemic where we have so much focus on wanting to be well, and wanting to stay healthy, really working to optimize your health in these different ways. Especially in ways that you might not even know that you need further support. But particularly if you are dealing with digestive issues that is basically your body’s warning signs—sorry my screen went blank there. These are your body’s warning signs that things are not right and you may not be thinking that this is connected to your immunity or would have any impact on how your body responds to a viral exposure. But you absolutely can be proactive and your absolutely can take your health to a new level.

Alright everybody, so that is my overall presentation, and what I think I will do is I will stop recording and then if folks have questions.

Alright, we are going to get started. Again, welcome everyone, I am Sophie Alexander, I am the owner and lead practitioner of the Nutritional Wellness Center and I am excited today to be talking to you all about balancing the thyroid. It is a topic that I find to be so pertinent to many of my clients as well. As I have my own personal experiences with it, especially after giving birth and the rebalancing that takes place. Sometimes when issues start to show up post-partum and there is a lot of misinformation out there! People not really realizing how to get to the bottom of it. So eager to be going through all of this with you all.

Before I get started just a general reminder for zoom talks, it is really helpful if you mute yourself. If you are not familiar with zoom you can go to me speaking and in the corner of your screen. There are these three little dots and you can click on that and it says pin speaker or pin. That way just incase that someone else’s speaker does come up, where the computer picks up on it, it will stay fixed on me and the PowerPoint. I am happy to answer questions as we go if you can use the chat for that, or I will also pause at the end to answer questions. So, whatever ends up working best.

Alright, so balancing the thyroid. Do you feel that thyroid is overlooked when it comes to hormonal balance and misunderstood too? So, we will be talking about it. But first of all, we will go into the bigger picture and talk about what the endocrine system is. So, a lot of folks don’t realize what their endocrine system is. So, it is your hormonal system, and there are many players in it. You have it start up in the brain, you have your pineal gland and right in the center you have the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland both which make and store hormones. Then it communicates with other glands lower down. There is your thyroid, parathyroid which is on the lobes of the thyroid, you have the thymus gland, the adrenal glands, your kidneys your pancreases your ovaries, they all talk to each other.

And I might, okay here we go alright. Getting used to my computer in the PowerPoint, so bear with me too. So, I love this slide and I have used it to share with the clients, it is just really complex, the interconnected relationship of the hormonal organs, because the endocrine system is involved in most of our core metabolic function and thus it is the interconnectivity communication of all these different pieces that keep us healthy and keep our hormones balanced.

So, as you can see, we have the hypothalamus talking to the pituitary and then all these messages getting sent out, messages getting sent to the thyroid, out to the adrenals, out to the gonads. But at the same time, I mean, this will tie into things I talk about later because we are talking about digestion, liver, so you can’t talk about one without talking about the other because really these glands are systems, they are not in isolation. If someone says to you, “you have things off-ish in your thyroid,” you have things off elsewhere too and that is why the thyroid is off, and we just have to figure out what is the underlying reason of why this interconnected relationship has gone off.

So, as I mentioned earlier the thyroid is often under looked and misunderstood in terms of not only how important it is to health, but also why it is not functioning optimally. There are so many clients who come to me saying that they are dealing with, “my hair Is falling out or my skin is really dry or I am constipated, I am having a hard time losing weight,” describing a lot of symptoms that are tied to hyperthyroid. but then they say to me I have been to the doctor they ran my blood work, my TSH which stands for Thyroid Stimulating Hormone is normal or within normal limits. So, the doctor says nothing to be done. Or so many women are told, you are depressed or you know it is in your head. And we find that with the Nutritional Wellness Response Testing, absolutely things are under functioning. It’s about what we call sub-clinical hypothyroid and we go about figuring out how to rebuild it and how to support it.

So yes, a healthy thyroid is crucial for thousands of important functions in your body. So, as I mentioned earlier, metabolism and weight regulation. A lot of people who don’t know that keeping your cholesterol levels within a healthy range; thyroid plays a big role with that too, mental clarity, regulating sleep patterns heart function, your digestion, simulation, and of course hormonal balance includes maintaining healthy menstrual cycles, fertility and pregnancy. Having the thyroid be just right and supporting it well has actually been a big player for any infertility cases that I have had the joy of helping women get pregnant.

Alright, so as I was saying that the thyroid is so interconnected to these other systems. Two huge ones that I see in clinical practice are the health of the adrenals and the health of the liver. So, your adrenal glands, for those of you that don’t know, are little glands about the size of a walnut that sit on top of your kidneys. They help regulate so many functions of the body. They regulate metabolism, immune response, blood pressure, blood sugar, they are most known though for your response to stress. They send out the stress hormones, the thyroid and the adrenals works really closely together to supply essential hormones and deliver them where they need to be throughout the body.

But when your adrenal glands are not producing enough hormones or they are producing too much, especially in the sense of stress hormones. A big imbalance that I see is someone who is dealing with a lot of stress in their life and the body is then caught up in that fight or flight, go-go-go, always stress handling mode. So the body is sending out a lot of adrenaline producing a lot of cortisol, which are stress hormones and then because of that, interconnected graph that we saw as an earlier slide there is actually a feedback loop that happens in the body. When those stress hormones are really high and dominant the body helps the thyroid kind of turn down the dimmer—if you think of thyroid gland with a dimmer switch—the thyroid gets dimmer and dimmer and it’s not of course then sending out the messages that it should be. You start getting these symptoms that show as, they start fitting the perspective of hypothyroid.

And then we have the liver which is one of my favorite organs. The liver has again multiple functions and it plays a big role in metabolizing hormones. So, when the liver is not doing well—just to let a few more people into the waiting room—but if the liver is not doing well, then you can have a hormonal build up in the body. It is a big part of how estrogen dominance can take place because the body is not clearing excess estrogen out through the bile and there is a lot of congestion with the bile. And then the hormones remain in circulation in the body and then all the feedback mechanisms that the body respond to—how many hormones it has in circulation—gets thrown off. The liver plays a big role in detoxification as well. It is a storage unit, whenever we have excess glucose in our body from our diet, it gets stored in the liver’s glycogen. Then once we are not eating and we have run out of blood glucose in the blood, the liver starts breaking it down the glycogen again.

The liver also plays a big role in thyroid metabolism, it is in the liver that your T3 which is one of your thyroid hormones gets converted to T4. So, T4 is what we utilize. But if that conversion is not happening properly in the liver, then again the numbers would be off. And if your doctor is just running the TSH which is the Thyroid Stimulating Hormones, which is the messenger trying to get out, it does not actually gave us a clear picture of what is going on, what your body has to work with.

So, this is a bit of a side, in terms of talking about the liver and thyroid balance. But it is so crucial if you are wanting your doctor to give you feedback through blood work of your thyroid function, to have them run your free T3 and your free T4. So, then you know actually what you are working with. If we see plenty of T3, but barely any T4 we know that it’s actually more of a liver issue and things getting bogged down in that thyroid metabolism there.

Alright, and so with thyroid, health toxins playing a huge role. This is one of the biggest things I have seen in clinical practice and one of the way that we see really amazing changes with hormonal balance is when we start getting to the root cause of these toxicities blocking the function of the hormone organs.

One of my favorite cases is with a client who is in 6 years and she could not get pregnant, and we started working together and we found a lot of toxicities in the thyroid gland and as soon as we started moving those toxicities were out she was a little surprised, but she was pregnant in 6 weeks. And that was amazing.

So, let talk about fluoride, so fluoride in my experience plays a role in hypothyroidism and it is in many water supplies. The chemical structure of fluoride is very similar to that of iodine so can displace iodine and sneak into its receptor place on the thyroid and block thyroid hormone from getting formed. Same and true with chlorine, it has a very similar structure. So, drinking water is a big issue specially if you suspect anything with thyroid health. If you are on city water where they are adding chlorine and they are adding fluoride to the water, and thus getting filter that you know will clear those things out is crucial.

Bromide is also similar in mechanism of blocking the thyroid function. Bromide can be found in many types of bread and baked goods. They are made with brominated flour and it is used in making fumigants and dyes and flame-proof agents so it can be in your couches or in some clothing. It’s used in certain water purification compounds, and sanitizers, agents for photography. There can be some in vegetable oils, and it is used as an emulsifier in many citrus flavored soft drinks. So, it is around. I was recently listening to a lecture recently that was telling me that it is on a lot of brand new—gosh sorry my kids are yelling in the background. It is on a lot of new things like your new laptop or your new cellphone and so when you are touching them and starting to use them, you can get bromide on your body.

Alright mercury, is also a big contaminant that I pick up a lot with my work in Nutritional Response Testing and see connected a lot with hormonal imbalances, in particular thyroid dysfunction. So, mercury is high in many fish including tuna, but it is also broadly there in the environment than that. I have had clients who have not had tuna in years and they still are dealing with mercury issues. It can be in their teeth, if they are at a certain age if they have had an amalgam fillings, and yeah there are multiple ways it can accumulate environmentally unfortunately.

When I first ever got hold of the Nutritional Wellness Response Testing for the first time which was about 12 years ago now, my first test like the main issue was mercury and that is I am very fortunate that I have never had a filling and didn’t eat a lot of tuna and it was not one of those things. It accumulated somehow and the biggest thing about it is working on clearing it out.

Alright then we get into the broader topic of the environmental toxins, which can damage the thyroid. It can recruit antibodies to attack the thyroid it can be an underlying cause of autoimmune thyroid disease complications, by environmental toxins I meant. I was referring to things like plastics and industrial plastics, pesticides. There are over 80,000 chemicals in use of in the USA and very few have been studied in terms of human safety and particular in things like personal care products. There are only thirty chemicals in personal care banned for use in the USA.

So, our great resource that I have pointed people to are the Environmental Working Group and their website is EWG.org. I love the resources that they provide every year. They put out a list called the clean 15 and the dirty dozen, and the clean 15 are the fruits and vegetable that are the least sprayed so that you can buy them not organic and not have a high pesticide overload vs. the dirty dozen which are the most heavily sprayed and thus you should buy organic. It is really a great way if you are not someone who is aware of those things or not sure where to put your dollars toward organic, it can really customize that.

It also has a database called the skin deep data base where you can search your personal care products and get the rating for the toxicity level and you really want to be using personal care products that rate on 1 or 2 on their scale. And it can be shocking as you start to look through your medicine cabinet and bathroom and realize how many ways you are getting more environmental toxins and because our skin is our largest organ we do absorb everything that we put to our bodies and it start accumulating and creating dysfunction. I did forget to say at the beginning that I am happy to send these slides to you as well so you don’t have to be furiously taking notes. If you want this data I am happy to email it to you.

I am realizing that—oh, and Jo your question about cleaning the new bromide off the laptop I don’t know about that—It is my understanding from the lecture that I listened to really was just, it is there and the lecture was more from the focus of how do we move forward and how do we clean these things off of our bodies it was very much of an approach of saying that these toxins are around that and we have to deal with them and have to build up our own resiliency and there was not any data there about how to clean it off, so I will keep looking in terms- because I am interested in that as well but I don’t have an answer for that right now.

Alright, and my next piece is all about diet, right. For sure diet can improve hormone balance and can nourish and repair the thyroid gland in general I came from the perspective that there is no one right diet, that works for everyone, but there are a few themes that for sure do apply to everybody there more as that we can move away from processed food, processed sugars brands that refine oils – it makes a huge difference with health and so, as a base line we want to be eating real food, that we know where it comes from and that you recognize all the ingredients of what you are consuming. But at the same time, you know for healing there are a lot of people who have to make certain changes in terms of supporting their body’s health to repair. And so, for some it looks a bit more different from others. I do find that there is a big theme, folks who have hormone imbalances and thyroid imbalances have a history of not eating good quality fats and really need to focus on those fats and to rebuild for the body to have the building blocks to repair. So, in general you know, the thyroid loves coconut and coconut oil and avocados and extra virgin olive oil and as a nutritionist, I will often encourage people to be having on top of cooking with these oils and eating them.

Taking coconut oil as a supplement at least a tea spoon a day additionally on top of everything else to be eating, to give them those good fats to help the body to repair. Thyroid also uses a lot of B vitamins and so if someone has a history of being vegetarian work on building in sources of B’s because those are the most predominant in beef and liver and eggs. So I am a big proponent of eating very clean sources of those so that they can be pasteurized eggs and you know local or organic knowing the farmer even idelly of how that animal is raised and fed, especially for sources of liver or beef, you don’t want to be eating animals that have antibiotics and pesticides in the brain. Things like that.

Alright, there are some key things that the thyroid needs, and are often developed in to deficiencies and thus will use a supplementation but also like to educate people about where you can get them from the diet right. So, here we have iodine and a lot of people are like well we have iodine salt and I am getting enough.

But salt is a big topic in itself. I highly encourage people to not have table salt that has been infused with iodine, because that salt has been bleached and it has been stripped of all the other trace elements that are needed in the body to run multiple functions.

I recommend that people have mineralized salt like the brand ‘Real Salt’ which comes from a salt bed in Utah or pink Himalayan sea salt. Thus, the body is getting a whole broad mineral spectrum from that salt and can utilize what it needs. But those types of salts are not high particularly in iodine. So, there’s a need to know where else to get it from the diet. So, iodine is most predominantly in fish, and in seaweed, and in shrimp, it is in dairy products too. So, grass fed cultured butter can be a good source of iodine. It is in eggs as well. But if someone is iodine deficient, or you know has had many years of chemicals blocking those iodine receptors and the thyroid is desperate. Once we start moving those chemicals out, we need to be plying the bodies with extra iodine for the thyroid to recover, then we will supplement with it.

Zinc and Selenium are two minerals as well, that are often deficient and we use to nourish the thyroid. Zinc you can get from eating oysters, from red meat, chicken and beans, from nuts and from pumpkin seeds. But I do find often people don’t get enough. Even if they are consuming the diversity of those things, one way you can tell about zinc deficiency is if you have white dots on your nails. Nails can tell you a lot about mineral balance. If you have ridged nails or nails that break easily but the white dots are specific to Zinc deficiency.

Selenium, is found in brazil nuts, in sea food, and in organ meats, you can get a good dose of Selenium by eating three brazil nuts every day. As I said, same with iodine, if the body needs a higher amount to heal and repair but there is where the supplementation can be key.

Alright, a lot of question about soy when it comes to hormonal balance in general. Particularly about thyroid health. One of the biggest issue I have with soy is that it is everywhere in a lot of processed foods and usually that quality of soy had been treated with a lot of pesticides. So, I in general encouraged people to avoid soy. Just for that reason alone. But dietary soy products also contain isoflavones. They can inhibit the action of thyroid peroxidase, so that is required for thyroid synthesis. So yeah, some worry that dietary soy may boost the risk for hypothyroidism. I definitely have seen that in the sense people are over consuming it, and it is in their protein bars, for they are trying to avoid dairy for different reason so they are having soy milk, and it’s in the crackers that they eat, or yeah, any processed food that they are having and the body is overloaded. Particularly with soy oil, which is in a lot of salad dressings, even salad dressing where you look at the label and think ‘oh, that looks like a pretty good nice balsamic vinegar,’ flip it over and soil oil is the first ingredient. So, fermented soy is what is being used in more traditional sculptures so that is tempeh and miso. With bodies that are totally overloaded with soy we just pull it out completely and take a break, but the ones where people can tolerate are the fermented ones.

Alright, and so what it comes down to really is the big question of what is going on with your body. What is going on with your thyroid or with your hormonal balance? And asking that question of you as an individual. If you are dealing with any of these symptoms or having any questions of imbalance like figuring out what is going on. And is it really the thyroid gland or is it the thyroid gland in a response to other organ systems that are struggling, that balance is off and thus the thyroid is struggling and creating symptoms. So, with Nutritional Response Testing that is always the question, its treating each person as an individual and asking the question of ‘hey, what is your body’s priority?’ Why has this balance gone off and what do we do to restore it?

So, I think a lot of you that I am speaking to today, are all current clients, and these are things that maybe already addressing and hopefully took some new tools from this. Like how you can further support your healing, but if you are not currently a client, I highly encourage you to come in for initial assessment, so we can begin this process whether or not you are benefiting from the work, that Fabiola and I do. How if we are the right place to help you get to the bottom of the imbalances that you are experiencing.

Alright are there are any questions? As I went through everything there and that already came up. Because that is everything I have to share so far. But I tell you I can talk about these things for hours (laughs). But it ended up being more prompt than I thought it would be, 30 mins.  So, I am happy to chat more or handle personal questions if anybody has any.

I got to pull up the chat her is bear with me. Just wondering how thyroid affect body temperature? Yeah, that is one of thyroids functions. You mostly experience it when it is off, people can feel super cold, it is a symptom of thyroid under functioning. If you have very cold hands or feet. But then the interaction of the thyroid and the adrenals, can be a big role of why women are experiencing hot flashes when going through menopause. Yeah having that deregulation as well. I mean it all comes down to how the messages of the different hormones that regulate our body temperature get communicated.

Yeah so people who don’t have thyroid trouble how to avoid it. In general, working on toxicities, I would say, is a one of the biggest ways like cleaning up your own lifestyle. In terms of sourcing of food and sourcing of personal care products and eating a lot of cruciferous vegetables. These are a category of your kale and brussel sprouts and broccoli and cabbages, and they are all really helpful with helping the liver to clear out excess hormones. So, one of the best ways to keep a thyroid happy is to keep your liver happy.

So, good questions, I’m thinking anything else that popped into my head. I did mention earlier that I will download these slides and send them to everybody. Also yeah, the big thing about blood work. I think that is a question I get a lot right. Because it can be part of a standard like, you say – do you say to your doctor ‘oh, I am wondering about  my thyroid’ or ‘I am having trouble losing weight’ or ‘I am dealing with, dry skin or brain fog or feeling really sluggish and fatigued’, then the doctor will run your TSH but that is just a small window into what is going  on with the thyroid and we really want to run a full thyroid panel if you want to have more insight as to what is going on there.

Thyroid issues in men. I do see thyroid issues in men, I work more with women, in general which is just why I speak about that more off the cuff in terms of sharing client experiences. And I have seen thyroid problems as a result of Lyme disease, that was the question do you see thyroid issues in men and have you seen thyroid problems as a result of Lyme disease. Yeah, I am trying to pull up a specific example. I don’t have a neat case study to share. In the places where I have seen it has been interconnected with a lot of other issues coming up.

So, one particular case that comes to mind is like, it was the actually the adrenals were the priority, but the thyroid was struggling as well. The adrenals were struggling due to toxicities as well and the Lyme. Particularly the issues of chronic Lyme where the body is not as good at handling the Lyme because of underlying toxicities and not and not able to clear it out as well. Then it can depend too on how chronic the Lyme is whether it is being handled, or whether it is known to have been an issue or whether it is just starting to show up with these to her symptoms that are not as obvious.

Have I ever had anyone experience in neuropathy or nerve disorder with thyroid? I am not thinking of a case right now where that was the real obvious underlying issue, for neuropathy. Yeah no I would say I definitely see a lot of reasons for neuropathy and nerve disorders and again a big piece with underlying toxicities and underlying immune imbalances but no particular insight about thyroid tied into that per se.

Another great question; is there routine blood work? Should people ask to monitor for thyroid if they are not experiencing thyroid imbalance during the physical and things like that. Well for blood work, least for me not having great health insurance one of those crazy high deductible plan things, blood work is kind of expensive and comes out of pocket. So, I don’t personally run these things on myself but if someone has access and it gets paid for, then it is running the THS which is the thyroid stimulating hormone, the T3, T4 and also the free T3 and the free T4 and then the antibody test which gives tests for hashimotos, and that is a really great thyroid panel and it is just whether you can get it approved for the run. If there are any inkling, like if the THS is off which is often more standard to be run than running that more complex pattern, but if you can run all that regularly that is fantastic.

Awesome folks, thanks for the questions and if other ones come up, you can also email the office and I’m happy to continue the conversation. It is really such an important thing, and I often find that it is the symptoms of thyroid imbalance that start people searching and searching for other answers. It’s the brain fog, the fatigue and the inability to lose weight, and it really opens up to the really recognizing all these differ factors that affect one’s health. And how you can start taking control of your health in a very positive direction by being empowered about it. It has been a pleasure sharing with you all, and you are so welcome! thanks to all of you and yeah. Enjoy the rest of your evening!

Alright, welcome everyone, thanks for coming out tonight. To learn about what you can have in your medicine chest so you can avoid over the counter medication right learn how to support and rebuild your immune system so that it can respond better and faster – with just food which is wonderful I think. So let me backup a minute. I think all of you know me – I am Sophie, lead practitioner at the Nutritional Wellness Centre. I am here to talk to you tonight became I am really passionate about what I do and I am very excited about being able to rebuild my body with nutritional and the fact that I get to do that and help people every day and want to share with you what my family does this time of year and end up doing with a lot of clients this time we battle into what we call the cold and flu season and talk about what that comes about.

Most of you know my story but let me be brief about the part of the reason why I was drawn to this work was because of my health – luckily as a child I was healthy like in sense of colds and flus but I did have symptoms that started at a young but it just built up and it was only in college that I became aware that I had things that weren’t working right. I was really shaky between eating and bad stomach aches I had to lie down before going to orchestra because the gas and the bloating was so bad that I could not play the viola until it passed and so when I started making changes then I tried to figure things out but it really didn’t seem to make any difference and then it was after graduation college that I got lyme disease and then ideally didn’t do anything in the moment and I didn’t recognize it in the moment and then about 6 months later that I started getting arthritic symptoms and I knew something was really wrong and that was when I was doing antibiotics and I really didn’t fully resolve it that I started looking towards alternative medicine for health.

So I looked into someone who applied kinesiology in the form of muscle testing and there was a chiropractor and I started studying herbs but when I got to Ithaca is when I started working with Tara who founded the Nutritional Wellness center and that was the first time I directly felt that I was getting well. The stomach aches, the gas, the bloating all of it started to clear out quickly with more time the lime symptoms cleared up as well and so I knew I had to do this work basically and I went back to school and I studied nutrition and Tara decided to her me and that’s awesome and that is why I am here today. Everything I will be talking about I have applied to clients but I have also applied on a regular basis to myself used it with my family it has been fun having small children because I get to experiment on them and I get to see how they are responding to it too and I know that if I have an adult and I don’t want to do this is am like wow my 2 year old will do so we can figure out a way to do it too. So we are going to be talking more about this time of year where everyone starts getting really worried about the flu or getting sick but it can be really serious especially where people – we get immune systems or when we are older you can take a hard hit – so what can we do to keep our bodies built up so we completely don’t become susceptible and what do we do in that moment when we are not feeling good and knowing how to help your body recover naturally so that you are not taking something that while it might help your immune system it may be full of dyes or colors and you won’t necessarily want to be putting into your body as well. While we work I this practice from the perspective of building the body up and repairing the organs that are struggling which I will talk about later – we work with things that can be used acutely and you don’t have to come into an appointment for you to take it, you can have it in your own medicine chest and reach for if needed and I want to teach you how to use them and what to use when but at one point – it talks about it in the nutritional essential that you can read on your own time, there is so much fear around getting sick and these different flu pandemics and phenomenons that happen but there has not been really a lot of conversation about research and what has gone on nutrition during those times and there is absolutely a correlation between nutritional deficiencies and how easily you become ill.

How quickly you recover after illness if the fact that when you got ill and it can turn out to be more severe in one person than another and secondary illnesses that develop – all sign of nutritional deficiency. Something I love when I work with people – they come in for a whole myriad of health reasons, then we work together for some time and we look around and realize wow I just made it through the whole winter and I didnt get sick. Or my kids are always sick and I am not! Making that observation is a sign that the body is working better and the nutritional deficiency is being met. Thus you can kiss your child at daycare and is covered in all sorts of germs and you don’t come down with it and that is exciting and that is the direction on how to take care of our body’s long term. So that is listed in the flu virus handout you can read more about. I do want to get into the fun stuff – I think it’s fun! (Laughs) the other hand outs are general cold and flu relief handouts – like a guide you can refer to if you or someone around you is sick and you don’t recall what to do. Let’s talk about the first one on the list which is Contraplex. Feel free to jump in and ask questions. Contraplex is really my go to first thing to grab if I get that sore throat or something that is wrong and is starting to tank.
It was designed as a blend by Standard Process so it has specific extracts that are supportive of the thymus gland and helps keep your immune system going – it has calcium, an easily absorbable form of calcium which is very important when you are having immune challenges. Read it on the Contraplex hand oth – but the calcium helps the immune system greatly. With magnesium – we are highly mineral needy when we are sick especially – and then the RNAS2 is one of those magic of the Standard Process formula – I fell Standard Process could stand here and tell you why they have that in it I don’t really care because I know that it works but it is again that piece of all the different factors of building in our immunity and keeping it up. I find that this product can be used nicely for those who are – kids in school or people who work in the school system and help them from not getting sick with a lower dose and then take a high dose when you get that ‘uh oh in getting sick’ moment. Hips to ward it off and as you can see here on the cold and flu relief onset – it talks about 2 capsules every 30 to 60 minutes and you keep repeating that till you are sure you aren’t coming down with it, but if you have already come down with then a lower dose sometimes I see 4 a day 6 10 in that range, and it is one of those things if you are not sure if it’s bacterial or viral doesn’t matter it covers the whole scope. Can you repeat that bit about before you are sick and after you are sick approximately how much you take? Yeah it is listed on that Cold and Flu relief hand out but i’ll repeat it again – low dose if you are worried about getting sick or surrounded – like a daycare, take about 1 2 a day can keep overall immunity up and keep you from not getting sick but if you know you are going to be sick 2 every 30 mins or 2 every hour you can end up going through a lot within the first couple of days because you want oth stay high at that sustained amount till you are alike ok I am good. If you stop too soon that is the biggest error with the cold and flu protocols. Then you just get sick but then if you are sick and it is already happening then o point in going through that many of them actually 6 – 10 a day tens to handle that. Sophie I swear by this stuff works so well. I am glad! I have experience with it; it’s like magic I find. When it is the right product and you get the dose you get right on it. But the most important message is act fast, and really don’t hesitate if you are like it is not just that I’m tired tonight I am feeling really worn down. Is it the same for adults and children?

No its lower – they make a chewable Contraplex that tends to go well with kids because of the raspberry flavor and then again even when sick I don’t see them dose we are talking ranges but my daughter is 5 and a half and I have never had her take more than 4 in a day. But again 1 a day of the chewable works really nicely as a preventative. If the child swallows pills then the pill base done is fine don’t have to do the chewable and it is a great question and that would apply for all these food based one form standard process – all totally safe to give to kids. One of the bigger ones if you really are sick – more herbs. There are different opinions about giving them to kids but I’ll talk more about that. If you were to give a child that you thought was common down with something you still won’t give more than 4 a day? I just haven’t, and it has worked. Like with the chewable?

Yeah I mean just this morning Gemma was kind of drippy and so I didn’t want her to go to school they have that rule like if they have a fever then they can’t go and it was border line and I really wanted her to go to school, and because I have opportunity to I tested her well let’s put her on the supplement and she perks right up and I’m like alright go to school. In a similar situation where I don’t have time to test her I just give her a couple of Contraplex and it seems to – never had to do the emergency dosing the 2 every 30 minutes that war are talking about. It tends to work with adults. I find that kids are so responsive, but again it won’t do any harm. It won’t be an overdose because this is just food. Yeah I know and that brings us close to – my next one after that – may not be in the exact order in your packet but it is CamplaxBC because it is related to Contraplex. It has the contract formula. Sometimes I find hat per the specific indicial some people do better when they see and some people do better with Contraplex. But it is my next one to grab particularly if you suspect that it is something like stomach flu because it is high in Vitamin A and C as it talk about it sourcing from animal sources so easily absorbable ad has acnesea which is a plant that is studies a lot oth modulate the immune systems and get a particular response when it is more viral and I liked to travel with CamplaxBC but some people like to travel with Contraplex because it is that broad spectrum, immune support but I find that when I am flying CamplaxBC helps me stay healthier and if I am suspecting with the stomach a bug or being off or someone around me having the flu or the flu going around that is the one I go to. It is more than the amount you get from it from Contraplex. One of the best hinges to do I if you start with Contraplex and it is not working switch over to CamplaxBC is you can’t get in to get tested or if it is loved one who doesn’t do the program just switch to it. You can do similar emergency dosing with it like the Contraplex, or you can take 9 – 12 tablets throughout the day I have given CamplaxBC to ids and my daughter is about to be 2 and she will chew it down and eat it and I am not concerned if you can give it to young children it is safe as long as they are over the age of 1 when they are eating a full spectrum of foods. Same for the throat spray – I don’t think we did a print out on that. It is on your cold and flu relief handout and it is a wonderful round about it helps the throat feel better and build the immune system for colds and in stronger herbs but again I think because digesting the whole thing through my pregnancy I give my kids to do it, I am not at all worried about the safety vs. if you were ingesting large amount of medicine and tican be nice even if you are talking too much or you are a singer and things like that it can really help to moisten and relieve the throat.

Some of the bigger guns are towards the back we have the acnesea premium and these are herbs from many years, these are things that I find if you have a cold that is not clearing up that is greet to reach for – often by that stage people are calling up and saying I am not getting biter or they are here for an appointment and we see that they are not responding but Androblastic Complex has acnesea in it, also has basil in ti and the androgenic herb and it is an interesting plant and an interesting blend I have been seeing it test well for people who are recently diagnosed with Lyme as well – you know in conjunction with other things but it is one of these stronger supports of the immune system it helps with it and the sinus infections or heading in that direction – more bacterial infection and really green mucus, acnesea I find more effective if it is a virus it is not clinging on. Tucked in there is a product called Antranax from Standard process it is a liver extract and I have clients on it for so many different reason and this specific liver extra is tied to helping clean up histamine build up in the body and it is very cool and histamine build up can happen for different reason and when you have sinus congestion and allergies. Sinus congestion from being sick or tied up is how your body cleans things up. Having as much build up and thus expecting this really comfortable symptoms and Anthrax happens with that, I pair it with the AC or thing like that because the immune system then starts fighting the immune challenges off, it the food support the Contraplex from the AC and then you need up your clan up crew and you need some on to go up there and help your sinuses to drain out and everything to clean out and anthrax does a really nice job with that, but it has even more versatile options to join the sense that it but it is tied into a hysterectomy response it can help with allergies so have people separate from being sick you are responding to a bad week let’s try it. Time it for 3 every minute if you are having a sneezing attack and often it helps with poison ivy and it helps with a lot of bug bites and anything kind of skin or rash related is a great high to have in your medicine chest so you can reach for it and give it a try.

Any questions so far? I am trying not to go too fast because I have a tendency to rattle off information and I can see you trying to follow! I can repeat this for you if you need me to. I will be asking questions ok! Fair enough. Let’s build your own custom medicine chest together yeah! Finishing up talking about the cold and flu relief hand out – there are some lovely things too that you can do that are not supplements at all but are like your raw apple cider vinegar, use your salad dressing and uses your digestive aid but also helps bold he immune system and it is lovely to mix with honey or hot water if you are feeling sick, and use that to as a part of your protocol to get better, so important when you are sick to drink oat of liquids because that is where the lemon is listed on there, the ginger the raw honey to make it more palatable to soothe the throat and then the bone broth – it is a nutrient power house and we see more and more about it recently because they are trying to turn it into powders and od stuff with it. People are learning more and more about how beneficial it is and what you put all the bones from that long you not only extract all the minerals from it, you extract all the collagen and the glutamine that helps repair the lining in the intestines and it is a very soothing and repetitive beverage if you have not tried it before i encourage you to! Alright, any questions about the cold and flu handouts specifically? Handouts I skipped over talking about emu plaques because it isn’t on the hand out but I want to include it tonight because it is a nice product and it is one of the ones I reach for, I am currently taking it – just ever since my daughter Gemma has been in Monte sorry school she brings so many more things home right and she recovers quickly but it set be like kind of facing them through the family so my go to is Emu Plaques it has zinc in them, vitamin c, selenium, B6 and then my training nutritional response testing is usual something that I reach for more but it is alike a viral type of situation but I find that I works in many situations and people do really well on it and Sarah takes it and she does well on it. It can be – one I use a lot for long term rebuilding in autoimmune type situations too – interesting in terms of the nutritional deficiencies that need it for acute or long term situations as well. So many clients have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis as well and they are on it for 4 years now. Sophie what is the dosage of that – the emu Plaques? It has to be a lower dose one – I rarely see it dosed higher than 6 for acute situations and when it is like a low dose trying to keep the immunity up it is one or two a day. Yep thanks for asking for that – because I know that is not on the cold and flu related ones. So much in terms of keeping your immunity up which is also about getting enough sleep and following your dietary guidelines and we will be talking more later about that piece and how that ties into this time of year but before we talk more about that I want to draw your attention to one other supplement that I wanted to talk about tonight, let’s put those in one of those things that I see people do so well and I see people having in their medicine chest beset that is for gastric that is listed. You have hand out for Gastric and I became good friends during my first pregnancy where I had a lot of acid reflux it is a product that I use a lot to help people transition off of acid reflux medications or deal with underlying cause of that because it is designed to be soothing for the whole digestive system and you cannot open the capsules into water rather than drinking it rather than swallowing the capsule and then it starts coding things all the way from the esophagus and nay irritation of the whole lining of the digestive tract vs. burring or acid reflux issues that are higher or pains that are lower or even a lot of lower bowel gas it can help all the way along the digestive tract so for me it was huge and I have a lot of apple cider vinegar and I open up 3 capsules of gastric and I would drink that one and it was not tasty but it worked and kept me away from tummy issues and other things. Also for collegial babies so it they do not – some actually start liking it I am working with one mom right now whose baby really struggled and really chaology and mom has been changing her diet whiles nursing her and it gets better – but she opens up the capsule and puts a little bit of the powder on the finger into the baby’s mouth and she likes it and licks it off now started at a young age and now just turning 6 months – there have been nights where I have a screaming child you know in pain with some kind of gas pain and I have made her eat Gastric powder and she is gin to hate me when she is older but it worked and she would calm down and go back to lap – so it is a cool product and one of those one you can use safely and experiment with and have it her and see if it helps with these things that come up. Well then so that – those are the main things in mind and that is a test for later. Whole nutrient powerhouse there – lots of great supplements that you can get more comfortable with time. It is like saying earlier she is a believer and she has tried it and it has worked for her – it is one of those things you need to have faith. Reach for it first give it a try and I used to – growing up I grew up on Nyquil and through college that was my go to and I didn’t think I could cope without it and as soon as I started doing other things I realized oh cool I can do this instead and then it reinforces the healing knowing that when you reach for it, it is going to help you. Almighty I got a couple of things in here I don’t need to tell you guys about. A thing I find so interesting about hit is that it really starts to pick up around– a bit when kids are in school and that amazing that happens but really picks up more speed around Halloween and it keeps chugging along through thanksgiving through Christmas into valentine’s day and then into eater and then it quiets down and clear up again and I see a pattern there – I don’t know if anyone else odes – what we are eating predominantly and we have a lot of excuses and reasons to eat different foods especially with kids and how it is marketed and that is for sure and so a huge piece of why clients do well here with how their immune system changes is really because of the dietary changes and what they are regularly putting into their body and that kind of Segway’s into what else I was going to talk about which is I see that big pattern with sugar but I do see overall that so much – anything can cause anything with how people’s bodies rescind and why they are having a chronic immune challenge or why they are starting to get sick all the time. Most people consume too much sugar but it can also be a particular issue going on with their body and their immune system and I was going to explain a bit more about that – it’s on the triangle here.

Some of you have heard this before I always say, what we got here is also poor health across the top – which is imagine getting sick a lot, or a really bad repetition of chronic bronchitis – worked with so many that had chronic infections or chronic bronchitis and they cannot get through the year without turning into something like that. You see on this board we have immune challenge listed on the top, nutritional deficiency and organ dysfunction in respective corners. The main thing I was to explain is I don’t see any kind of instance of poor health without there also being nutritional deficiency or organ dysfunction and what is implant is the key piece of what I do – is identifying form the Indic dual what is their specific nutritional deficiency or what is their specific organ dysfunction because then when we identify that we can get the root cause and we start reversing it. With the triangle if you pull one corner it throws off the other corners. Same for your symptoms and the rest of your body if you are already experiencing poor health or recurring sinus infection for example, I can tell you for sure there are certain vitamins and minerals that you are deficient in. since they are fewer for your organs, and then certain organs are not functioning and working at a hundred percent.

As soon as these organs are not working at a100 percent, their ability to not digest or utilize vitamins and minerals diminishes creating a vicious cycle. The more nutrient deficient it becomes the more severe your symptoms become and more stress on your organs and it is a downward spiral. What we need to do is halt somewhere in the mechanism to stop the damage from getting further along. Stabilize it and identify what needs to be done to reverse it. We do that by noting what specific vitamins and minerals you have and handling the organs and the correct dietary change for you. I kind of skipped ahead to my message of this but if you guys won’t mind by taking a minute to fill out the sugar quiz that is in your packet. So I don’t know if any of you marked down 4 false? And any of you either just started the program or in it for a long time – it is a work in progress, and it can be a struggle with sugar. I know I struggle with sugar and the reasons I identify it is because I can take this away and I can replace it with Sugar on it! I seemed to have placed it. The point really decides is putting g up there. If you imagine sugar up there understand that sugar can cause nutritional deficiency, can cause organ dysfunction, I can remember being in college and thinking I am getting sick I am going to eat ice cream because I deserve it or I want it or whatever and in the next day being so much sicker – for may reason I know now that I don’t do well with dairy. The message is getting sent to your brain too is that the immune deficiencies or excuse me the bugs that are causing the immune challenge is sending messages to your brain saying fed me feed me make me stay alive so a big piece of doing this or keeping it up is having these tools so that you can respond well to the nutrition and you can handle your health and help boost your immunity with supplement. Is addressing your diet and working on the sugar and lessening it.

So when you have a down moment, you can skip over to the other side of your sugar quiz with a 146 reasons why sugar is bad for your health but number 1 is that sugar surpasses the immune system and it plays a huge role and I really believe strongly that it is tie very much why this time of the year we struggle. Perpetually get passed around with kids and like it is sad to see it in Gemma’s school where all these little kids are coughing and I feel we can change that. That is why we are working on it and it is why I am passionate about what it does and spread the word about it. We encourage you to share with your friend and family about this program about this work or to find someone near them because with this technique of nutritional response testing you really work on pinpointing the nutritional deficiencies and figure it out before the individual so some of you just learning about this part of the reason why we encourage you to come to the talk. Oh ayah she pushes on my arm and I don’t know tell me to take certain supplements to change my diet but what is actually happening there is the response to the body. So I am going to pull Cindy up that with the diet that we all have energy here in close quarters so we are sharing each other’s energy and the idea of hypothermia can give a bit of an explanation to the body as to what is happening with the body for nutritional response testing so with that idea that you can get really cold and the body in the effort to stay alive it draws the energy from your fingertips and toes to protect your core so that you can stay alive and it sacrifices what is not needed at the time, you can lose your fingers and toes. Same principle in play here, if I ask Cindy to put her arm out and match my pressure she can do that because she is healthy and she is strong and her body is able to match that energy. Let say that she has an issue with her thyroid and it is a butterfly shaped gland in the neck and I touch on it and I irritate it and I put pressure on it, if there is something that is not right with that organ the body is going to want to protect it and so it actually draws the energy away from the arm while she is matching the pressure check the thyroid and the arm goes down. Isn’t it cool that all these years you didn’t know how it worked! So what we do is what I call a body scan u just touch all the organ systems and the body can match my pressure then I know that the body is not going through any stress within the organ system then I know that the system is down and I know that is an area that the body needs help with an that the body is not functioning as well as it could sometimes it can correlate with blood work and other medical tests, other items it is completely simple just things that are head in a certain direction – and we are catching it before it gets there or it is something that the medical doctor will be like no there nothing wrong with you, so as you know we put the test kits on to identify if it’s there is anything causing stress to that organ so we sue whole foods supplements just o offer basically offer the body nutrients that repairs it picks up off the energy of the food in the supplement just like we pick up on energy then her arm will go back to being strong. The body knows that there is something that will take away that stress but as we see in often times you can go through multiple things and think oh no that does not help you, oh yes that one will and that is how we isolate it and really point it to the individual. Thanks Cindy – any questions on that? It’s really cool right? It is fast and it cuts to the chase and you don’t have to do a lot of guesswork. When I was going through my master degree and they were talking to me about how to do nutritional counseling with people, and they were like if you have these group of symptoms you can try suggesting they do this, and if this group this supplements, or doing hat but it was literally guess work and have them take this for a month and they are Better than that is the thing you should take, if not try something else and that is not a standard of care that I want to be able to offer people I mean with this I can be so much faster and pinpoint it to the person even if it takes that time to the month the needing to build up the system and for the people to feel better and at least have a tool and an assessment tool to know that I am in the right direction and that is one of the reasons we can’t imagine doing it any other way – but what it is called it is designed for the whole nutrition. As you know it is really specific to the individual their symptoms and their problems and there is not just a one size all approach. It is a little bit like if you are all getting suits made and the suits look the Sam in the sense we all have the same buttons and the same colors but everyone’s inseams are untie to them, that is why like clients who hear they all have a general and overall similarity for their diets how they look or they are taking all these supplements but no one is on the same program. So what we are working on is we’re working on the overall health of the person a few of us – might not be the fi but you know you are trying something new so it is a little different and it takes time but it is safer and natural and to be on medication or to not be on medication, there is interaction and it is one of those things that if there’s someone in your life that is a nutritional response testing case and nothing will help them as much.
Also I hope you all learned a bunch thought we are also doing some taste testing because standard process has come out with some vegetarian based protein powder which I like because up until now I have these things that we waste and I see people align it with a lot of dairy sensitivities and the other one that they made is rye protein based which I do a lot with people with sensitivities and while I wool totally prefer that everyone to their protein sources from eating their eggs and meat and thing like that, the protein powder is what people seems to like in terms making shakes In their busy lifestyles, so these are very simple and it is key protein, sesame seed protein and flavored one vanilla and chocolate and did sweeten them with some healthier sweetener pitons they did coconut tree sap and monk food sweetener so again in terms of a lot of the protein powders out there and there are many options overwhelming even, and where they are sourced from and the quality of them. And that is one thing that you can when you have a company you can afloat trust things like where they are sourcing things, and if they are out of the farm. So as a fun treat for coming out tonight if you are interested we have some samples of the chocolate it is in coconut milk from the can and if you guys have any questions for me on anything I talked about this evening? No? You did such a great job! So you got some tools you have your medicine and stuff, to try out when you are sick. Hopefully none of you get sick so you take such good care of yourselves. It is the protein powder just described, it is a chocolate flavored pea and sesame and pumpkin seed in full fat coconut milk. So you are welcome to try it, it is Sophie approved. Actually that is very good. I tried it and I think it is too sweet! I should not have said that before you tried it! What I like to do is you could cut it in half and if you want the same protein amount you can substitute it half with the collagen peptides which are – they are a powder that we carry that is derived from the cows and collagen is high in gelatin, feeds you hair nails, linings of the intestines and I love it too. It is tasteless and odorless and you can mix it and make it taste like whatever you want. But for folks who like free mix and ready to go and you don’t have to make it taste like something you can do half of that protein powder so the you will be getting some of the flavors and the thing that SP advertises about this one is hath they worked hard to make it like protein so even though it Is plant based it has the entire spectrum of amino acids whereas the vital proteins are not complete proteins. There are so many on the market and it is great to know what tastes good with simple ingredients. You can buy particular ones – even great companies have only probiotics since they have so many different fruit extracts, different vegetable extracts and I just tend oth find them that it really doesn’t do well with people’s bodies. So I encourage people to test their protein powders and then very often on probation tell them to take it. It is good to get more feedback too. Appreciate that. Alright in our next talk it is even more exciting in terms of the tasting options it is a preparation for the holidays. So it is going to be a treats night in a month. Thursday night or Tuesday – the 16th i shouldn’t be announcing this. Tuesday the 14th of November. Reeva of Ithaca No-grainer is actually going to be here with some of her treats. She is a client that loves to bakes and due to the dietary changes of what she had to do here she developed a whole line of grain free desserts that are amazing. So she makes muffins and cookies and all sorts of great stuff. Cindy is a great baker as well so we plan on contributing so that there is a lot of samples here ok. Alright thank you

Welcome everyone to our zoom talk about a holistic approach to a good night’s sleep. I’m Sophie Alexander. I’m the Lead Practitioner and owner of the Nutritional Wellness Center in Ithaca. I am excited to share this with you today about this because it is such an important topic. So many people are struggling with their sleep, and it is so important for our health, as I will get into in a moment. But before I launch into that, for those of you who don’t know me, I just wanted to introduce myself.

So, I have been a practicing Clinical Nutritionist for about 8 years now and I have been working to take care of my own body through nutritional changes for at least the past 12 years, 15 years. a little bit of background; I definitely now in retrospect can track back to when I was quite young and certain health conditions began such as allergies and digestive issues with hormonal imbalances. But it was not until I got to college and the digestive issues became quite severe. So, bad that I was having to lie down after eating, and then when I graduated I got Lyme disease, then things really started to snow ball.

I recognized that I was having health issues and it was after the whole Lyme disease became chronic and I was dealing with arthritic issues that I started seeking alternative answers because just the conventional treatments were not getting me anywhere. That eventually led to my path of becoming a client at the Nutritional Wellness Center 12 years ago and then going back to school for a Master’s Degree in Nutrition and becoming a practitioner, then two years ago buying the practice. So, I’m very passionate about what I do and I’m excited to share what I learn with you. Sleep issues, as a mother of three now are near and dear to my heart.

I didn’t use to struggle so much but I see this with a lot of clients and I see a lot of patterns. So, we will be getting more into that. Through clinical practice I have seen that there are so many reasons that people have sleep issues and what we need to find out is what is happening and why it is happening for that individual. And really, anything can cause anything and you will see those themes as you go into it. It is not just one certain reason why the body is not properly going into a sleep cycle at night. But yes, we have insomnia, sleep apnea, restless legs, feeling tired after getting enough sleep, waking up in the middle of the night not being able to fall back asleep, trouble falling asleep in the first place. There are just so many reasons, many ways that these sleep issues trouble us and impact our health and yeah they are really important to get to the bottom of, because then the body is actually able to truly heal and repair.

And as I mentioned earlier it really is detrimental to the body when you are not sleeping well. Sleep times for our bodies is to cleanse. It is the time for the body to repair, it is time for the body to integrate everything that has happened during the day. When you don’t sleep well, it is a major stress on the body. It can lead to weight gain, premature ageing to hair loss, hormone imbalances, fertility issues, lowered immune function, the list really does go on. As I know from, you know, having outside factors impact my sleep, small children up at all hours and things like that, it really starts. The longer it goes on the more your body starts to fall apart and this is it is really important to get to the bottom of it. You have a lot of factors like you go with all the time. Or you know, I have had clients struggling because they have an elderly sick dog and things like that, understood those are specific circumstances hopefully not very long term, but the more long-term it is—the more you need to figure out a remedy.

Alright, so this is the Chinese clock and this is a pattern I see a lot when I am talking and working with clients who have sleep disruptions. So, these are the body’s detox organs and I find that specially folks who are struggling to fall back asleep and waking up during certain hours of the night and struggling to fall back asleep, that this Chinese clock really co-relates with areas that I pick up on with the nutritional response testing body scan. So, I often find that underlying causes for sleep issues are imbalances particularly having to do with certain organ systems working to repair themselves or working to run their cycles at night, and so very common one is the liver. Right, I have many clients who come and say that they wake up anytime between 1 am and 3 am or I am up at 2.30 on the dot every night, and so often. That is liver time – so liver at night – uses the night time to run its inherent detoxification cycles and pathways and it can wake you up. The liver is also a big organ that when you are not eating regularly because you are not eating while you are sleeping it helps keep your body in a steady stream—oh dear, I think I am still on zoom and recording. I got a weird message from zoom—ok I was just saying, oh yes your liver does a huge part of maintaining blood sugar balance whilst you are sleeping. So also that 1 am to 3 am time people who have troubling falling asleep or falling back asleep can be due to the fact that the body has run out of glucose that you had from your dinner and you are switching over to the liver, breaking down its glycogen stores and back into glucose to maintain your blood sugar balance, and it does not go so well and then it pops you awake and sometimes having a snack at that time – can help you fall back asleep. Another little tip is actually having protein. Either a good amount of protein with your dinner or having protein based snack before you go to bed can help you with your low sugar imbalances.

It can help stop those from happening at night. Alright yep so you can see gall bladder time, liver time, lung time, large intestine, stomach, triple burner time. I must admit I am not as familiar with this, this is a really specific term to Chinese medicine. Has to do with some certain meridians of the body – the biggest themes I see are liver lung and large intestine which I find are all interconnected. Yep, makes a big difference when we start working on those systems. So, toxicities—connecting back to that liver pattern a lot, I find toxicities are a lot of what I see that are the underlying reason why folks are struggling to stay asleep at night, so mold toxicity can be a big one. Molds toxins in molds can be released called micro toxins when you have water damage in the building when you work in a water damaged building or you have a water damaged building that you are sleeping in, can again be stressing liver, stressing lungs, contributing to you waking up in the night and not able to settle back to sleep. Also, there’s a whole variety of other toxicities that we are exposed to, so many different chemicals just in our day to day life. There are over 80,000 chemicals in use in the US and very few are regulated, and one of the biggest ones are glyphosate and pesticide round-up. It’s used in so much wheat corn and soy, just used in during the process of growing or getting food ready for harvest. Even when you are eating all organic you are still getting pesticide exposure, just not as much. Because pesticides are air borne and they are in the water and so our bodies can easily get overwhelmed and I see that happen and it accumulates over the course of someone’s life and then suddenly they are having trouble staying asleep or falling asleep. And as we dig into it, it’s because of these toxicities. So, do as much as you can do to lower your toxicity exposure through eating organic, through using clean personal care products, through looking into your drinking water. And if you are on city water or on well-water, using filters can make a tremendous difference.

So, parasites are much more common than people think. Even there is statement from the CDC that about 70 percent, of US citizens deal with parasites. Many of us don’t know about it, right, they are not just—either you go on a trip to a foreign country and you come back with a bug. They can easily come from water and from food and could be passed amongst pets or family members to other family members. And they ear more active at night, working on your immune system while you’re sleeping, parasites are nocturnal and thus they are more active whilst you are asleep. And I don’t know if any of you have dealt with sleeplessness around the full moon but parasites are more active during the full moon and so that can often be why that happens. This is usually a big thing behind children and sleep disruptions in children and bed wetting in children who have already been potty trained. It can be the bugs, and yeah it can be quite amazing and you need to get the bugs under control and start sleeping again. I had that happen with one of my children and she was just up at 1, every night, on the dot and it was exhausting but we got the bugs under control and then she started sleeping through.

So, hormonal imbalances can be a big part of sleep problems, because they are not due to just. It’s not just what is happening at night, but it is how your body is moving through all the circadian rhythms throughout the day that manifest these problems at night. So, folks are like “oh, I’ m going to take some melatonin and that helps knock me out”. But your body’s own production of melatonin depends on proper hormone function during your waking hours, and the endocrine system which is your hormonal system is quite complicated and so hormonal imbalances lead to poor sleep and then poor sleep can lead to further hormonal imbalances and it can be vicious cycle.

A lot of this can stem from stress hormones, right, so stress hormones keep your body more in a fight or flight mode, that’s your sympathetic nervous system, your get-up-and-go mode. And then that makes when you have an excess of that in your body and your body is struggling to flush that out and you are kind of in chronic stress. Your body is then is not doing as good a job of getting into rest and repair, which is called the parasympathetic mode. I see this a lot with folks who are exhausted and they are just go go go all day long. And you would think with the type of day they are having and how much they are juggling and in general how exhausted they are getting through their day, that they would just lie down at night and pass right out. But the body is struggling to shift in to that rest and repair and they are so on and wired and they have a very hard time falling asleep.

So clinically I see this a lot stemming from your adrenal glands and the adrenal glands are the little glands that sit on top of the kidneys and make all those stress hormones. They have very interconnected feedback with the brain, with the thyroid and so it starts to create to their hormonal imbalances. The adrenals are really what help women through the menopause transition because as the body stops making as many sex hormones it is the adrenals that take over that sex hormone production and so this can be a big underlying reason for why a woman starts to deal with sleep issues as they become peri menopausal and menopausal.

It can be reason behind the night sweats and things like that disrupt sleeping. To further create a mess of it you know the toxicities are often endocrine meaning hormonal disruptors as well. So, you can have another reason why the hormonal balance is struggling because the toxicities are creating barriers with those hormones being able to heal and repair themselves. All those glands, those glands being able to heal and repair themselves. So again, it can become this downward slope of the body just not being able to get that rest and repair. You feel worse and worse, you feel crankier and crankier, and have a hard time functioning. And yeah, don’t sleep as well.

So, things you can do to optimize your sleep. So here are a few foods that are just inherently improve sleep. Healthy fats. What I mean by healthy fats is virgin olive oil, butter, ghee, coconut oil, avocado, avocado oil, those are a lot of my favorites. High antioxidant foods, so blue berries or green tea, another high oxidant food, red wine is often put in this group. But I would not recommend red wine actually, it impacts the liver so much and it really tends to disrupt sleep, I find alcohol in general does. So, don’t put red wine in that antioxidant group. As I mentioned earlier the high-quality protein especially at dinner, protein-based snack before going to bed. You know that can be a bit more meat. I have had clients how have had success particularly with turkey because it is high in a certain amino acid called Tryptophan which can cause sleepiness. Having a huge turkey feast for thanks giving and feel sleepy after can be due to that. But again, a lot of these tools are tools. Especially the healthy fats are tools that help to balance blood sugar and more balanced your blood sugar is through the day, the better energy you have, the more alert you feel, and better balanced your blood sugar is at night while you are sleeping. Thus you can enjoy a really deep restful sleep.

So, things to avoid right. Foods to avoid if you are struggling with sleep issues, again tie back to blood sugar imbalance. So, refined sugars, refined carbohydrates so that can be particularly any breads or pastas or crackers or things that break into sugars quickly in the body. Grains in general because they are over consumed and over processed and generally significantly contaminated with pesticides, and then for all those reasons, they impact, they increase toxicity levels and they impact blood sugar negatively. Then the vegetable oils…I was just telling about how helpful healthy fats are, vegetable oils are really unhelpful, vegetable oils are canola oil, corn oils, soy oils, sun flower oils. They are a lot of the oils that are used tremendously commercially. They are used in most processed foods, they are used in most restaurants, and they are not stable when heated and so they are very inflammatory to the body and they basically bog down our liver and bile ducts because our body does not know how to brake them down properly, especially due to the rancidity. So, they contribute significantly to the congestion of the liver, that I find is a significant underlying reason why people are not sleeping well.

So, some of my favorite supplements to improve sleep naturally can be Magnesiums. You get magnesium’s mostly from your green leafy vegetables, it is like very high in spinach, in swiss chard, can be high in pumpkin seeds, there are several foods that are high in magnesium. Those are some of the best sources, but magnesium gets depleted—gosh very easily—because it is used in so many different pathways in the body, and it very much gets depleted when the body’s in a stressed state to I really like magnesium lactate or magnesium lysate, these are forms that don’t tend to impact the bowel so much. Some people may have experience with magnesium and they take it and all of a sudden they have diarrhea, so it is impacting the bowels but the whole body needs to absorb it. I particularly like using a form that is literally made out of buck wheat and swiss chard juice because that is wonderful and those are whole food versions of magnesium that comes straight from those foods. Clients can take it in the evening and it just helps to relax the body helps fall asleep and stay asleep.

Big fan of fish oils too, it’s a natural sleep aid for falling asleep particularly. There are certain formulations of fish oils that are accommodative to the brain and relaxing to the nervous system and it comes back into that broader theme of how a lot of people are eating more inflammatory diets. Too much sugar and too many grains, and not enough vegetables, not enough good fats and especially not enough fats coming from fish which is higher in Omega 6 fatty acids and to help to relax the nervous system.  So, supplementing with fish oils before bed is also really successful in helping people to settle down to sleep.

Ashwagandha is one of my favorite let’s call it adaptogenic herbs. It’s a category of herbs that help the body and individuals adapt to stress, and become more resilient in the face of stress. Ashwagandha has been used in Ayurvedic which is a form of medicine that is used in India, that has been used for so many years, and very safe. For some folks it is relaxing enough so they do feel sleepy with it, other folk no not at all, but they feel more resiliency more adaptability to handle the day to day life stresses. That then allows them the body to move and speaking more into that parasympathetic rest and repair mode in the night time, the day stresses are not so overwhelming and the body is not so taken over by that.

Another one that I didn’t include here but some clients love is Valerian root, that is another herb, I mostly used as a tool to help people fall asleep while we are working on the root issues of why they are struggling to sleep. It’s another herb that just calm quiet the nervous system, and fall asleep.

What else can you do? I would say in general that sleep has a lot to do with one’s lifestyle and how well your sleep hygiene is as Dr. Mark Hymen likes to say. He is someone who speaks a lot about sleep and the importance of sleep and how the importance of sleep hygiene. He is a big fan of respecting the circadian rhythms of the body and how sleep fits in to that. What I mean by the circadian rhythm is that the body has an inherent rhythm of the day and a lot of that follows the sun and the daily rhythm. So, getting up when the sun is up, and going to bed when the sun is going to bed, and only eating when the body is awake, and the sun is up. Again, this is tying back more to food and food lifestyle. For some folks not eating after dinner or late at night, can really make them sleep so much better. He talks about, you know, really respecting that your body needs to wind down that you need to have a little quiet time and not just go and go and go until you expect yourself to lie down then fall asleep, so starting to whine down a few hours before it is bed time.

Having no screens is a big one because the blue light really does impact our pineal gland where we make our own melatonin. So you can get blue light glasses to block from the screens but really taking a break from screens specially, once you get into the darker hours of the night especially winter, helps get that body ready to rest and repair. Sleeping in the dark and so using black out curtains if you need to, and not having a clock that you can see, yeah not really a big part of not having your phone in the room. This isn’t listed on here by electromagnetic exposure can be a really, a major reason why folks are having sleep issues. If you have Wi-Fi in your house, turning the Wi-Fi off at night. When I learned that I noticed a change in how my children slept with the Wi-Fi turned off. And not having our phone in the room or even, some folks sleep with the phone right by their head and you know it is your alarm clock and things like that, but at the very least putting it on what is called airplane mode so that it is not connecting to cell phone towers and emitting that radiation.

What I mean by sleeping in a nontoxic room. In some ways I mean this, I mean awareness of the electromagnetic fields. But I wrote that mostly in thinking about, you spend 8 hours a day, hopefully, in your bed. So, the awareness of gassing the mattresses is a big deal. What kind of cleaning products you use on your sheet and even the kind of sheets that you have can all make a difference. I mean if you have an older mattress, the mattress will have off-gassed already. But if you have a new mattress there is a lot of flame returning off-gassing and other chemical off-gassing and so investing extra money in a natural foam or a natural latex can be huge. Having organic sheets and fragrance-free laundry soaps and not using dryer sheets can have high fragrance component that can really disrupt the hormonal system.

But yeah, I want to also explain a little bit further and explain how it can be so individualized. Why one is struggling when one is asleep. So, if you take a look at this triangle here, you have poor sleep at the top, we have a nutritional deficiency in one corner and in the other corner we have we have organ dysfunction, and if you observe where the triangle. All these areas are interconnected and if you pull one corner of the triangle, it is going to throw off the other two corners.

I will tell you right now that if you are dealing with any kind of sleep issues, you have nutritional deficiencies and you have organ dysfunctions, and unfortunately then the more you struggle with your sleep the more that creates nutritional deficiencies and then more of that creates organ dysfunction and vice-versa and then the organ dysfunction creates nutritional deficiencies which then worsens your sleep, or perpetuates the poor sleep pattern happening. As I was speaking earlier this can become a vicious downward cycle and then it gets worse and worse and starts manifesting in other symptoms. You know, having young children and having to be up night after night, then you get up to come to work. I would start to feel a little crazy right, and I would start to see I’m having more hormonal issues. Or I’m having more digestive issues, and my body was being so worn down and I started to get sicker and sicker.

Thankfully, my current baby is my best sleeper and you work through it, and I am so grateful to have ways to support myself so that I can—so I’m getting disrupted by a child right now which is making me lose my train of thought. Yeah, I have ways to support my body and support these imbalances so that the sleep comes back. The outside factor that was happening can create as much damage as it could have. What we need to find for each individual is a way to create a stop in that downward cycle and so that at least the imbalances can be stabilized and as we identify and correct what is going on. The body can then start to rebuild and then it can reach an upward cycle of repair. But a huge part of it is, you have to be willing as an individual to look at yourself, patterns and lifestyle choices and particularly your food choices.

You must be willing to address them, because if you take away poor sleep and you put sugar at the top of this triangle, sugar causes nutritional deficiencies and causes organ dysfunction. So, people willing to look at their own diet and realize how they are feeding the imbalance, is a first start in starting to repair and starting to heal and get better.

As I was saying you know, at the Nutritional Wellness Center we use this technique called Nutritional Response Testing and it is a non-invasive system that analyzes the body, in order to determine the underlying cases of ill health. So, we correct the body using natural means, so we can identify very specifically what is that toxicity exposure or what is that hormonal system that is not functioning properly and in need of repair. And we can give specific advice about what nutritional needs that are needed or to be changed, and what support is needed to help heal and repair the body. We design programs that are very individualized and correct the imbalances that we see. And then this picture we have a silly scene of me testing my oldest and then my middle child watching on. So, we work with folks that are as little as in utero or a new born, all the way up to our oldest client who is 97. So, we meet people who are at all different stages of health. So, there are two practitioners at the office myself and Fabiola, and if you have not worked with us yet, I highly encourage you to call and schedule an assessment to see how we can help you to get to the bottom of sleep issues and help you to take control of your health again.

Thank you. Does anyone have any questions for me? Nope, well wonderful. I will hang out here for a few minutes you are welcome to use the chat and I am going to stop recording for folks who are watching this later.

Welcome everyone, I am Sophie Alexander, owner and lead practitioner of the Nutritional Wellness Center, and thank you for joining me for my talk all about toxicities – called Are toxicities ruining your health’. This is a really exciting topic for me because I focus my practice on using a technique called nutritional response testing for those of you who don’t know me and don’t know that and I find my work that I am really interested in discovering what the underlying cause of people’s health concerns. Why are they suffering with the symptoms that they are suffering with? What is behind that – why has the body gone south, and I find the toxicities are the number 1 reason. Why that- why symptoms are happening.

I am excited to share more information about that, and also tie it into how I can help. So for folks who don’t know me I will keep this brief for those who do. I have been doing the work of nutritional response testing on my body personally for about 12 years now, and I have been the owner of national wellness entre for 2 years but he practice was founded 166 years ago by my mentor Tara Lambert, and we have been doing this work for a long time and we definitely see some patterns, over the years. I was someone who found my way to the nutritional wellness center as a client all those years ago because I was suffering with bad menstrual cramp, gas bloating, digestive pain, a lot of blood sugar balancing issues and chronic Lyme symptoms in the form of arthritic clamp symptoms, knee pain and hand pain. I know my mind was brown when I had my first nutritional response testing appointment and was told my body was out of balance due to mercury and I was, you know, wracked my brain figuring out where I was coming from. Fortunately I was consumed by someone who didn’t have any cavities. It was really a new thing for me to understand how pervasive these toxicities are, and how they can impact one’s body. And so by starting to address mercury and working for some other imbalances, I very quickly started to feel better with this – especially with digestive issues and the blood sugar balancing issues. So much so I was inspired to go back to school for nutrients and then inspired to work at the nutritional wellness center once I graduated, and so long story short, that is why I am excited to share this information today. So to start us off, so when the body is storing toxicities, as I was alluding to you a moment ago – it can cause so many diverse different, symptoms in the body – so see it connected to core circulation swelling and water retention, specially behind beaches and migraines and underlying causes of anxiety depression a lot of mental health issues, allergies, skin issues – yeast overgrowth that never clears up no matter what you do. Arthritic pain, fatigue, so much behind chronic digestive issues such as constipation obesity, yes cellulite especially difficulty losing weight, weight loss resistance – you can see the list goes on there, sinus issues, gout other digestive disorder, chronic cold, repertory disorders, sleep, that is a big one – and then bloating and gas as I mentioned the weight loss resistance, and so clients are often surprised that you know I will talk about how important it is with diet and dietary choices, a lot of times the first thing that we start working on, and addressing is getting the body’s detoxification pathways working correctly, and so first of all – back up a little bit and just talk about some definitions, so the word toxins get used very loosely and so I have always like to explain that technically toxins are poisons that are released by plants and parasites and bacteria and molds and these things live in us and they can really see toxins, and so when we use that word, we use it generally and broadly, it refers to these pathogens rather than slightly different word called toxicants which I will explain in a moment but it is part of the garbage clean up that needs oth happen in the body is one of the clean ups, of the toxins released by the things living within us. And then the other are the toxicants which we need to address because they are things that are getting exposed to – so toxicants are synthetic human made, toxic elements and chemicals such as pesticides and herbicides and so on. Unfortunately they are very pervasive and I will explain a bit more about where they come from. These toxins, it gets confusing. I will use toxins broadly but know that it can refer to many things and a lot of this talk is going to be about toxicants. So they are released by our human activities, unfortunately they can be mutagens, allergens, neurotoxins. There are many endocrine disruptors and exposure to or health can have long term health impacts. Most recent statistic I saw says that in the united states we regularly use over 80,000 chemicals just in also in industrial practices and one of the heart breaking things about it is that in the united states only 30 of those have been banned in personal care products and I will talk a little bit more about personal care products and there are very little regulation or study of the long term impacts of the regular usage.

And so we are finding that these chemicals are really changing our body and particularly the gut microbiome, so really health problems tart to occur when these chemicals are being used and growing process is in our food so they are affecting the soil microbes and thus human microbes because they block or disrupt the normal chemical processes in our digestion and in our brain function so many of you have head of Mon Sent to a very well-known company and they were really on the frontier their product roundup that there is no problem with spraying these chemicals all over our foods, and especially in crops ad in the crops to the animals eat that we eat, but now it is at a point where over 90 percent of corn and nosy beans are grown by glyphosate which is roundup and has become the standard for anything you see that is GMO. So it is from the get go on corn and soybeans, but also used as a desiccant like a drying agent on other grains as well, like oats and wheat and barley and you know potatoes – so many farmers use it to kill back weeds or round the food that they are growing as well, like blanket spreading it and it travels very easily so it is one of these things where folks are buying organic and thy are buying non GMO and they are working to really avoid but it travels in the air and it Is found in the water – found in rainwater, lakes and rivers and so it is one of these things that it has become so used now it is pervasive in our environment and it is very hard to avoid it and it has a half-life now you might have that term wrong – it has a shelf life found in the soil 21 years later and standard for organic is that no pesticides have been used for 3 years! Sadly even certified organic farms have not been 21 years of pesticide free before they start growing in the vegetables. A little bit more about glyco fate also known as round up. People spray it on their ground to kill their dandelions, and they spray it in soccer fields to make it so that the kids just have plain grass to run on right, and then I’m just talking about how much is used in farming – it is a strong metal curator originally designed to clean metal scaling out of boiler systems.

This was patented in 1961, for descaling mineral deposits out of pipes but current usage in the United States is estimated at 2 billion pounds sorry this is globally that is used – it is and I am quickly learning that it is becoming a huge part of this current health crisis we are seeing around the world. Glycolate store is in our bodies so most of these pesticides that we get exposed to in general and glycolate in particular just because it is so pervasive they are fat soluble so they end up stored in our fatty tissues so they get stored in our brains and in our nerve s and in our nerve sheet, glands, in any fat cells that we might be carrying and then it particularly disrupts connective tissue as well – so I find it accumulated in client’s joints I find that folks who are suddenly getting rotator cuff injuries or they fall and they tear, I have several clients recently that have fallen badly and torn muscles in their shoulder yes maybe they are in their 60s but not at an age where you would be like why is that happening and we have relied through testing through nutritional response testing is that actually here is toxicities of glyphosate accumulation in those joints weakening of the ligaments of the tissues there making it easier for it to be damaged. Glyphosate is really interesting in that it has a molecule in it that mimics glycine which is one of our amino acids that our body uses to build proteins. So some of my colleagues are hypothesizing and find when it accumulates such an – in knees and ligaments because the glyphosate is sapping itself here and substituting itself for the glycine and starts becoming a part of our body structure and that is making it more difficult to remove. But yeah as you can see with this image of course it accumulates so much in the digestive tract and that is why we see it as a piece of digestive issue about pain and cetin joints but the brain being a big one too – I have a client that I have been working with for many years, suffering with a lot of anxiety and depression and is of course we have had successes over the years, but is not fully handled she wants to still feel better and recently they started digging deeper and tracking the glyphosate and as we started to watch and put it back and watch that deluding in her brain her mood has improved a lot and has stabilized. So separate from glyphosate which dominates so much as a toxic exposure I did want to talk about some other ways that we are bombarded by these 80,000 chemicals that are in regular usage that are not well regulated so that can be nonstick cookware air fresheners cleaning products, cleaning solutions and anti-bacterial soaps, flame retardants, folks don’t realize that they are buying new furniture or new clothes, the chemical exposure that comes from using those fragrances, particularly scented products if you use anything that has the work scented on the label vs. an essential oil that you are getting a chemical exposure plastic food containers and then particularly if folks microwave in plastic – it releases those plastics into the food, plastic drink bottles, cosmetics fabric softeners shower curtains, canned foods – the lining in them so it can be white overwhelming but I find that any little bit of people starving to switch over to safer products it makes a tremendous difference and so that is using ceramic or stainless tell, or cookware and starting to learn about safer brands for cosmetics for shampoo and a bit of body wash as face wash and just working your way through that list – using more glass and every time you swap it out it is going go reduce the current bombardment that you are getting.

It doesn’t handle what I already have in your body and other things that you can’t control. I will talk about that in a moment but it makes a huge difference in terms of allowing your body to shift into clean p mode and to shift into handling what is stored internally vs. just dealing with what it is costly getting exposed to. So let’s talk a little bit about how our body handles these things, so our bodies are inherently always detoxing. There are a lot of fads about detox diets and needing to detox just remember you are always detoxing. Sometimes you just need to do a little more, and you need to support the body more with these pathways because they do get overwhelmed. The liver is the most important organ of detoxification, it has something called phase 1 and phase 2 during the detoxification cycles and it is really important that those run smoothly in the body so phase 1 can think of it like the garbage collector it is working to accumulate all together. Phase 2 those really nasty things get converted actually become more toxic turning them into phase 2 tuning them into soluble to move out of the body and that is why it is so important that those cycles both run correctly and then we need to eliminate properly so that the bowels is the number one way to remove things out the kidneys are another. If the system is backed up enough and is not clearing toxicants properly then it can start showing up in the skin, it can show up in these ways that we know is overflowing into the liver. If the liver is backed up people get really itchy and have a change in the body odor they start getting rashes or skin bones or acne or things like that. So just one other piece so that is why it is so vital that people are clearing things out of the body regularly right. So important that people are drinking enough water to flush the kidneys and more important that people are pooping regularly so many folks think it’s ok to skip days but you want to be having 1 to 3 bowel movements a day. But as I was saying our body needs help losing these toxic elements, our systems are designed for a certain amount of load but not the amount of load that our systems are experiencing and I would say in my day – 8 years of clinical practice going on 10, this is becoming a bigger and bigger issue. I am seeing bodies more overloaded, harder to clear up and in younger ages, you really work hard to lessen the exposure I have a 9 year old daughter who has had national response testing done on her since in utero you know and really I have tried to eat as organic as possible and we live a pretty off the grid, like homestead lifestyle, and she test for it and it has gotten into her, and in some ways somehow so we help our bodies out and I have found that these certain binders that i am going to talk about are the most effective way to date – in clinical practice that I have found to remove toxicities so binders help clear the toxicities from our body. You may have heard of them like you may have heard of activated charcoal bed night clay, die tenacious earth or corellas is another – these are other things I have used a lot of and seen some success with. It is really true that not all binders are created equal, and so I have been moving into what are using what are called carbon based binders, that are made from holmic camphoric acid so these acids they maximize these binder’s energy and they strengthen those grinding capabilities and the combination I just found is that it just digs deeper and it handles more than anything I have worked with.

So holmic and camphoric acids are the results – create from the results of soil based microbes breaking down plant material so they are recycling it and turning it into a nutrient supply of organic matter and these acids are derived from that and the holmic acids are what are broken down and are extracted further into what is known as phobic acid extracts. They are really unique because they provide every strong binding capability and they are selectively binding which is very cool in the pat I used to have appliance not eat or drink, of course drink not eat anything 2 hours away from the charcoal product I was having them take, whereas these binders I can have them take it with food they don’t bind with the minerals or the nutrients from food, but they do bind any toxicities that might be in the food because they are easier to take in that way and they are very selective in how they work, they add – nutrients and antioxidants t the body vs. depleting the body, they have very low PH in there and they are very active and they don’t leave things behind thy don’t get overloaded and like they are not a sponge that once it gets to a certain amount it starts to get started any further. So yes, it is an ultimate user-friendly binder. I do find that it enters the far corners of the body and clears out things – even things I had suspicion, it restored in places but were not showing up until we started to clean the house in a different way. As I was mentioning it gives the body nutrients at lax and keeps the minerals in the body in balance, and that has been a big issue in the past where it had to supply so many extra minerals because the binders would be stripping minerals as well. Yeah it can donate electrons to support the cells during the detox process. What I think is really neat is that it can travel from cell to cell and provide different needs depending on what each cell needs to, so it can be very customized and there are not any other natural based products that can do this type of work but can also successfully cross the blood brain barrier and pull things out of the brain. But a couple of resources I like to always share when talking about toxicities especially because it can be so depressing on how do you start to reduce your bodies toxic load, and so the environmental working group is a wonderful resource for healthy living and they have a database called the skin deep database where you can go and look up your personal care products as – and you can see how they rate in terms of safety and you want to be using products that you can rate at a 1 or a 2 and you will be shocked that even item you get from a health food store that you look them up and they are not rated low they are reaching 5 or 6 and that means they can have a nice label that makes you think it is all natural and it is all good for you, but it is so hard to understand and read the labels that you trust the company but there is no regulation so they can be using whatever they like in there. This is personally why I use a lot of beauty counter which is a company that makes really high quality safer skin care products and their products all rate mostly as one swift environmental working group and so yeah start looking up your toothpaste, your shampoo your body wash your face wash, and start swapping them out. Another resource I know I was pretty depressed about this early and how it is everywhere and of course it makes a difference to eat organic and our demand is for consumers to eat more organic, an ongoing increase of standard and increase the supply of it and so the environmental working group puts out a list every year called the Clean 15 vs the Dirty Dozen and so the clean 15 are things that you know you can safely buy not organic because pesticides are not used or they are much lower usage, just in the natural way of how they grow things, but the dirty dozen are the things that are the most heavily sprayed which is really important especially if you are on a budget with buying organic and you can only buy certain items to use the ones to buy those lovely fruits.

So yes strawberries are at the top of the list. But I want to explain a little bit further and explain a little bit more about the nutritional response testing and how this ties in. so if you see on this slide we have a triangle and at the top of the triangle we have toxicities right and in one corner we have nutritional deficiencies and in the other corner we have organ dysfunction, so you know if any of the symptoms that i have talked about or I have listed in the begging – dealing with headaches and dealing with digestive issues or dealing with body pain in any way I can tell you right now your body is dealing with toxicities and even without testing you – and if you have toxicities in your body I know you have national defines an when we have nutritional deficiency I know you have organ dysfunction and then it can go the other way too – if you have organ dysfunction then the body creates further national deficiencies because it is trying so desperately to heal and repair these organs and then the toxicities – will create further symptoms so if you subtitle the work toxicities and write headache or write knee pain those are nutritional deficiency that exacerbate those symptoms even more so what can happen unfortunately with health it can become a severe downward spiral where you know someone who is dealing with this toxic exposure it is starting to create more symptoms it is striping the body of further nutrients it is causing more organ dysfunction and then that causes further symptoms and further national deficiency and then people just start to have a downward spiral with their health and it becomes harder and harder to figure out what is causing what and especially if you are just compartmentalizing it and you are thinking well just look at the head – why I am having headaches and only look at your knee and think why the knee pain and folks either don’t get left with answer or they start doing drugs or surgeries for particular areas of the body and it still doesn’t end up getting to the root of why the body is struggling so much to being with so what we have to do is we have to put a stop to this cycle and start addressing what is getting in the way like basically start addressing the toxicities so the body can begin to repair and a big part of this is diet too like slideshows that I can swap put the symptoms and the toxicities at the top of the triangle and then I can Putin the word sugar and tell you that sugar causes nutritional deficiency and sugar in itself can cause organ dysfunction so I find that it really takes this multiple approach where clients are working on a customized basis getting the sugar out of their diet and things that quickly break down into sugar, such as most processed grains – all processed grains I should say and they start again reversing that cycle of the body breaking down and having more nutritional deficiencies and having further organ dysfunction and so the customized addressing what toxicities are breaking the body down so much and getting the sugar sources out is really what gets to the bottom of getting to true help and looking at the body as a whole instead of what these isolated components are so that we can get to the underlying cause if why people are ill and so in a summary this is what is called national response testing and it is a noninvasive system of analyzing the body and in order to determine the se underlying cause of ill health and the picture there you can see there is something sitting on the women who is getting tested in the abdomen and those re our test kits that have these pesticides in them, along with these toxicities – it is where or that is how the mercury got picked up on me all those years ago but it is really safe and a natural way to, so less expensive than actually doing very fancy functional test on toxicities, and it is super easy and I test my kids with it, our practitioner Fabiola test her dogs with it, so there are amazing ways to learn from even nonverbal animals and little kids and it is just very specific and very accurate and addressing what each individual body needs – and so those of you who are already my clients lets chat just about if you are not taking these selective binders let’s talk about how we can add those in and really work to take things to the next level and if you have not worked with us yet, I really encourage you to give us a call, schedule an assent and see how we can help – Fabiola and I would be so happy to meet you and see how these things I have been talking about today could help you. Alright and with that I am going to stop recording and if folks have any questions for me please feel free to use the chat– I am happy to hang out for a little bit – we have a little bit of extra time and I can explain anything more.

S: Welcome everyone. Hi, I am Sophie Alexander from the nutritional wellness center in Ithaca. I am so excited to be joined here today by Jeff Smith from standard process and we will be talking all about how to safety and helpfully do a detox specifically using standard process detox programs and it think this is such a key thing to be doing right now because not only is it finally becoming spring and this is such a traditionally great time to cleanse the liver from leaving everything from winter beginning to moving into spring but it is also a key way that you can really take control of your health and improve your health during this time of the pandemic. So welcome Jeff, thank you for joining us, I am going to pass it over to you to share this information with us.

J: Sounds great wonderful, well thank you to every body for listening in and hi it is a very cool topic – purification and detoxification and it is one that I am used to over the years, at least a dozen times or so. I could give you just a quick background on my story and why I am here in front of you with Standard Process. I initially did my first purification when I was in chiropractic school probably about 6 months into it, I had a professor Dr. Mary-belle Ye who is I believe a resident to f Ithaca actually and teaches bio chem and she real introduced me to whole foods and Standard Process and I did my first cleanse and throughout chiropractic school I did it 2 or 3 times, I really lost a really good amount of weight up to 20 pounds but for me it was really just getting back on track as far as eating healthy especially during those times when you are taking 28 29 credit hours because that stress can be toxic so since then I graduated in 09 from New York Chiropractic college and then began to practice – was in honey wood falls for about 10 years and then transitioned into working directly with standard process and really educating doctors and clinical nutritionists like Sophie here.

All throughout in western and central new york so I really enjoyed this – and so yeah there is my little background and as Sophie mentioned this is a wonderful time to do a purification and detoxification we kind of use those words almost interchangeably and I hope to discuss that a little bit more later here, but then we will go back and get started a lot of slides to go through, I will probably kind of fast forward through a few of them, but we are going to start out talking about why someone would want to do a detoxification and as you can see these are typically some of the main reasons why there is a weight loss issue – you have poor digestion, or you are just tired all the item. Are you stressed? It will certainly you know for a lot of people right now – it is a stressful time, even though a lot of us may be in our homes and comfortable with the amount of food we have and enjoying time with family. So there is no shortage of veggies and fruits and things like that – maybe junk foods but other than that there are lot of veggies and things like that so let’s go ahead and get started and you know the reason why we want to remove these toxins from our body and for a lot of people it maybe a specific pre weight and I want to address that right off the bat and this is an indirect way to monitor and you know hopefully lower your weight but it is not that the number one goal from a practitioner standpoint you know for you to lose weight, we really want to clean the body and we kind of go where it needs to naturally. That is why we want to clines right there – just the amount of junk around us all the time and you know I can imagine most people listening to this that come to the nutritional wellness center are not consuming a lot of these junk foods I hope, Sophie will find out! Watch yourselves but there is going to be toxins that we cannot avoid. We have to go outside we have to you know be inside sometimes, and you know you could just pick up just the natural toxins that are in the office from the chairs in your office, and how clean is your air – do you have a purification system through winter now –have the windows all been closed up so then there is dust and dandruff in the air – we need to be able to process those according to the situation. It kind of continues on that, there are toxins in the air, water that we drink, tap water not really properly filtered out not appropriately you are consuming caffeine and coffee and hinges like that. I always like to point out the household cleaning products that people use. I hope you aren’t using toxic ones. If you are on any medications they can certainly cause some toxicity and just those preservatives that they put in foods can certainly be toxic to delivery and the digestive system.

So I like to mention that in this discussion, the environmental working group is EWG.org. I believe this is a website. Down there at the bottom I encourage people to go on it and you can spend just hours on it actually they have a lot of very cool articles on the latest health and every year they put out a wonderful database on sunscreen. Make sure if you are in the sun for a long period of time, you may want a sunscreen but you want to make sure it is a good quality one without toxins. There may be some other really cool things. You can actually type in your zip code and get the water quality referred to and so certainly toxins can affect people differently. Certainly that fatigue and just tiredness all the time, and not being able to sleep, food cravings, excessive carbs and all those. Mental clarity is a gigantic one I always notice.

Fruits when I do purification and certainly low libido is a big issue that people talk about which is just not helping. So there are a few different ways that these toxins can enter the body. You can certainly breathe them in and they can get into the lungs, they can certainly get into the digestive tract things that we are eating and then another big one is skin penetration. So put in toxic lotions and toxic sunscreen and I mentioned hairspray things like that, make an even – I know you guys work closely with that, and so make sure you are getting clean products because that is so penetrative through the skin and worst with skin is that it bypasses the liver which is dangerous. So these are some of the organs that are used to remove some of the toxins in the body certainly the liver is really one of the most important, and kidneys are filtering the liquids through the body and you are excreting that through urine and then the smile and already intestine should have a nice boundary that before it gets into the blood system if it is not functioning well then we start to see different autoimmune conditions going on. So we just want to create a good environment and give all the nutrients to the kidney and to the intestines so you can process and remove these toxins. If you have a breakdown in any one of those you can have issues. This is just another depiction I like to point out – things that we haven’t mentioned before. The lymph is a very cool network throughout the body very similar to the vascular veins and arteries the lymph is you can, it is complicated and it removes all that dead debris and things that eat up our system we want to get them out. So do pretty much the other ones. Let’s go into liver detoxification and I promise not to get too bio chemically oriented here. Not a huge strength of mine anyway but liver detoxification has a couple of different phases, but phase 1 is the p 450 enzymes and the most important thing I want people to understand is that you need to go through all these phases, and if you only go through one phase, it is actually more toxic than what enters into phase 1. So you need to have the nutrients to go through phase 2 to put that toxin into either a water suitable mixture that you can excrete it through the kidneys or if you can put that into basically the feces. That way it can be removed as a stool. And that phase would be eliminated. Let’s get it out of the body. So usually an analogy of how the liver works – like an oil filter in the car. It certainly does so many other things; it converts thyroid hormones, like T4 and T3. I also would like to mention that 70 percent of the conversion goes on there, so if your subclinical hypothyroid or have that diagnosis then one of the good things is to first clean up the liver before we give any medications to support the thyroid, clean up the liver and then you start to see a lot of other things that work. One of the main functions of the liver is processing the body’s sorted sugar and glycogen.

That glycogen there is only so much that is stored in the liver. There is a certain amount that can be stored in the muscle tissue – you want to use up that sugar. Once it goes through the liver and muscle tissue, it gets stored into the blood as Triglyceride. Let’s talk a little bit more about that later. It also creates bile, which is then stored in the gallbladder and as we eat fruits, you know our senses recognize it. Ok we are eating good quality fats I hope and you know the gallbladder will in essence kind of squeeze that bile into the digestive tract into the stomach and it helps to emulsify and break down those fats so we can use those beset all the fats are able to break down vitamins like A D and K – have to be broken down by that bile that emulsify bile, so we can make our own little hormones – that is where cholesterol stems from – all the valuable vitamins. So the liver also removes any excess hormones such as estrogen and others as well – and if someone is out of healthy body fat ranges they are estrogen dominant and so the liver can be key to remove those excess estrogens. So here are some other things that can lead to diets with toxic loads like MSG and all sorts of things that have other names as well, high fructose corn syrup, trans fat, sugar, sugar is a big one we will hit on that pretty hard. So here is a cool depiction that I would love you to see. In 1988 the red states were more that 35 percent of that state is overweight then we move to 1992, 1996 and then in 1999 we see the trend and all states in 2000. We can see that in all states more than 35 percent of the population is overweight and it really has not improved in the 20 years since. Just another quick one here. We tend to see obesity and diabetes really linked. As obesity goes up so does diabetes. So in the US, some other wonderful things we do here we allow 3000 chemical to be added into our foods, and I don’t have the exact figure but I know Europe has about a tenth of that – they have to actually log in what is safe to be put in food, that won’t cause issues for people, but US has over 3000 and that is amazing. The average consumption of sugar is about 75 pounds, and I think that is a bit low and I think that shows. In 1820 it was about 4 pounds and this graph goes to 2000 and we are at a hundred pounds there. So it is a lot of sugar and we will see how sugar just really feeds cancers it you know causes sludgy blood obviously diabtestes.it really depresses the immune system. So this is absolutely huge right now with our current situation in this use, and if you are consuming a high amount of sugar then your immune system just won’t work and this is a study that showed 75 grams of sugar and that is about what I like to see my patients consume on a daily basis or average, but if you look at a soda or a mountain dew or something like that, I think in one can or one bottle say 16 ounce, I think there is well over 75 grams in one bottle, so if you consume that for 2 hours after, so if someone is consuming that throughout the day over and over again, your immune system just does work period. So right now, you can tell that if your immune system is working properly you won’t have any issues with differ pathogens that are coming in contact with your body. The mechanism there is the vitamin C absorption which is super important in immune function as we know.

So this was a pretty cool slide that the former representative in my position had put together, but I only have 2 sodas per day doc. So he kind of did some numbers and he did that to show that you are consuming as extra 84000 calories per year, and which would be about 26 extra pounds, so the amount of calories that you would have to burn on a regular basis just to stay even is huge so eliminate the sugars and what it comes down to and it only be negative but I promise that the people with diabetes you know we have kids more than adults have pre-diabetes and they really aren’t diagnosed with it. They don’t go to the doctor and what not and diabetes is just wreaking havoc on our cardiovascular health. Obesity and on and on and on. Then we talked a little bit about this earlier the excess Triglycerides that is getting stored, excess sugar if your liver is full the muscles can’t store anymore so it gets stored in the blood as Triglyceride so things like sclerosis and things of that nature are mostly from sugar really and you know just a quick story nobody likes personal stories prior to becoming a chiropractor I worked in pathology for along item and did hundreds of autopsies. Look at the coronary arteries of the heart and see if someone had an MI or a mild cardio eruption and you know would you see these blobs of fat and really you have to think of it this way somebody’s cholesterol is really really high is because there is so much inflammation in the body and that Triglyceride ss really there and it needs to repair but it just becomes way out of control where it gets to the point where it clogs the arteries.

So soft drinks will beat them up a bit here – outside of the sugar the phosphoric acid leaches calcium from the bones so that analogy is you drink a soda and the next time you urinate you can watch your bones go down the toilet just want to avoid those. We do want to consume good fats – during this cleanse. Good fats make you feel full and satiated so any kind of good natural fat is ok. Good organic butter, out of Wisconsin and there are several good choices. Some cold deep water fish oils, olive oils and really anything that is natural, you want to stay away from the bad fats – the hydrogenated oils the canola, antigen that has been processed you want to avoid. So here are some labels. Let’s blast through this but these are really some everyday products this one right here is a salad reseeding so someone makes a wonderful salad with a ton of great veggies and then they put soybean and canola oil all over it with sodium EDTA which is a preservative and MSG and artificial colors on and on so it just kind of ruins it, so consuming good salad dressing whether it is just live oil, or some type of vinegar and primal dressings one of my favorites here recently it is called Chosen Foods its really good and nice, they us avocado ils as well. So some of the common question I get is how do I know if I need to purify – so there are enough questionnaires out there, some of them do the toxicities questionnaire – it is wonderful one of those questionnaires that you can do pre and prior to the cleanse and you can do it within a months’ time, men are less frequently that – I have patients who do it 3 to 4 months and it gives the man overall idea on how the body is working. So what can happen in these 21 days – certainly the elimination of most toxins, healthier weight and life, more energy and better sleep better clarity and all that stuff can be achieved and so once the study is done on the center process of the 21 day purification… this is a retrospective study so they went back and looked at 28 different chiropractic patients that did this – really there is a calorie restriction but it is good quality food and the supplements – they look at weight, they looked at serum lipid panels of cholesterol. So this is the same patient right here who had a huge drop in cholesterol before it was 344 to 182 and look at that Triglyceride drop from 787 to 108, so big numbers there. Then we will kind of go through the study results. So post cleanse – 28 people had a drop of 72 with their cholesterol and a drop of 9 with their Triglyceride. Drop in HDL is not huge by any means, but HDL is technically good cholesterol.

So here is the quick picture of the standard process and the farm that we used to take a while ago and I as in practice and I was with the horse here but now we are well over a 1000 acres of organic farm, in Wisconsin and the interest here is the millions of pounds and vegetates that we have produced in 2020, we need to update the PowerPoint. We have listed different veggies that we grew on the farm – just a very very cool place. So the 21 are purification is what we are going over first and there are a few different products involved – there had to be a cleanse which is really what we are doing in the beginning with some really good hydroids and then you are doing a protein powder – there are a few different choices there, the SP complete or the SP complete Dairy free, and now we have a chocolate and vanilla which is very nice and then there is choice of fiber between he gastro fiber which is a capsule and the whole foods which is the other choice which is a powder and basically put that in your shake. Then after the SP clean is done we break into the SP Green Food for the last 2 weeks so we will kind of break these down – the SP cleanse is really the nuts and bolts. This is what is going to provide all the nutrients to the liver to process those toxins and is certainly going to help with the kidneys there are berries in there which is a natural diet and so gives great digestive support and helps with elimination. Here are some ingredients that I mentioned: the Juniper berries, red clovers, some apple pectin, a nice fiber burdock, and barley grass which has a ton of vitamins and minerals. Spanish black radish which is a wonderful supplement for increasing drainage and detoxification, Oregon grape fruit and fenugreek which is one of my favorites as well. So the protein powder – there are several different choices, the SP complete care has a base of whey, the SP complete dairy free is a rice protein and we could have some other ones that we will talk a little bit about later that are vegetarian proteins. The only difference between some of those is that they don’t have all the greens and you can even get these in charcoal and vanilla too and they have greens and veggies. We then have the barley grass, it has the rice in it, buckwheat which is gluten free I like to mention that – it has flax it has alfalfa in there high has calcium and magnesium, grape seeds and red wine extracts which can certainly say that you are getting some red wine during the cleanse, and then we mentioned buckwheat and choline and inositol, part of the b complex. Here is the SP green food. This has 5 organically grown whole foods and it really continues to support the liver through phase 1 and 2 detoxification after the 1st week when you start it. Has a ton of fiber and nutrients for those toxins. It has Brussels sprouts, kale and buckwheat and barley grass and some more alfalfa and how many people are just eating these constantly every single day and good therapeutic movement for the body. You have to understand that these are really concentrated foods that standard process uses and taking them in the dose that requires you to eat a lot of them, on your plate! So the whole food fiber has the ability to help digestion and what would work best in your situation.

My general guidelines is someone who does not want additional capsules and powders can do the whole food fibers than one of the other things is that if someone is prone to constipation then I typically use the whole foods fiber. It has sodium in it and sometimes sodium can un-bottle people up a little bit. Its fine I usually like the taste of Gastro Fiber if you are someone who doesn’t like to do a lot of capsules and pills and you can open this up and put the powder right in your shake, been known to do that with the SP cleanse and the gastro fiber, now it is a little time consuming you know, your 3 shakes for the day and you are putting 21 of Sp cleanse in there and the gastro fiber – a little time consuming but it certain helps to have that option. A quick little note – usually the whole kits – gastro fiber has a 150 capsules so the whole kit comes with 2 bottles, that’s about 9 a day and if you drop it to about 7 a day one bottle will get you through the whole cleanse, just a little quick rick that doesn’t really change the therapeutic value of the whole cleanse. Will help people economically. There are certainly some other products during the cleanse that others may need – if someone is super active and wants to continue to work out, it depends on what you eat during that time, but typically that days one fruit are vegetarian it does have to be that way and b any means, if you are it is really active an you might want to have it with some additional protein in there, and I highly encourage people to have some good fats with it, a shake, free oil and a cod liver oil and even the calamari oil which is a liquid and you can add a table spoon in there in the shake and it really gives a nice citrusy flavor and if someone has major sugar paneling issues then Gymnema is an herb and that literally translates to the sugar destroyer and that is wonderful for rebuilding cells, and if you have a sweet tooth, gymnema can help you. So here is kind of an eating pattern the first days from 1 to 10, you get unlimited raw and organic fruits and veggies, particularly if they are green and leafy you want to eat twice as many vegetables as fruit. It is extremely important to make sure that carbohydrate level is low. Now I never remove it if you look at the booklet technically the brown rice has been removed and they have replaced it with chimera, I love the lentils in there – they are a great choice, but I think brown rice is a good choice too – especially if they are organic, and then quinoa is a wonderful choice. Lots of water – a lot of it! I think just a general guideline, it can take your weight and cut that number in half and that is how many pounds of water that you should have per day and you can certainly include tea or the water that you do put in the shakes, you can include that too because certainly it can help – 200 pounds, or a 100 ounces of water is a lot of water – especial if you are not used to it, after awhile you centrally get used to it, and not feel like you have to do that. We talked about good quality oil, you can certainly get like a good flax oil and anything that can give good quality natural oil – exercise is a good question, as to how much I tend to say during that first day – 1 2 3 4 you will hit some detox reactions. Don’t push yourself and run a marathon or go to cross fit – these high intensity workouts. Give your body a rest, and drink your water and get your nutrients in and as you start feeling good then I think you can go out and exercise as you like.

For most people it is like taking a good walk and if you are doing that 4 -5 times a day for 30, 45 minutes, I know the cardiovascular benefits always kick in if you maintain a high heart rate – a heart rate higher than your normal – at least for 20 to 25 minutes. At least that is where you see the burn in 20 to 25 minutes. Days 11 through to 21 you continue that same eating plan which you can add back some lean protein so some fish some things like venison turkey and chicken and things like that are all good choices and if this is something that you’re interested in doing – for the first 10 days, having some chicken or some soups – be honest it is not a bad thing to do you can certain do that. I don’t want anyone to not do the cleanse because the can’t eat meat – I have done it both ways done it completely to the book and vegetarian and gotten to day 11 and think you know what I actually a couple of times that happened I just forgot about it even and I am like and I think I should eat meat and I was ok with it and then other times I have done the grapefruit and either way I think the one important note on that is animal protein takes the body a lot oth break down so, giving your body a little bit of a break is not a bad idea. Just cutting that out for a little bit so what oth avoid – all the man made garbage I hope you aren’t eating margarine anymore and other bad oils, no caffeine and no alcohol, those are 2 that- it would be interesting to see the numbers currently in the US I think you know alcohol consumption has gone up 30 percent- they are essential, people are stuck at home they don’t have to drive anywhere hey where is my glass of wine and what not. If you are consuming a lot of caffeine and alcohol start to drop that down you know don t quit cold turkey and then think you are going to be ok, your detox reactions will lesson If you can kind of wane off some of these things. Certainly the tobacco, other stimulants like soft drinks and that is you know the dairy and other things like that we can certainly have the argument as to whether they are healthier or not some people are allergic to them, so start to revive those because really what we are trying to do here is have a non-allergenic guide. So if you have had allergies in the past you can get nice and clean and then we can start to add things back one at a time so we can recognize it. If that is not a problem for you. So no processed or refined foods, eliminate the canned veggies, the dried fruits, I don’t know if you eat luncheon meats and things like that. So with the supplements, during day 1 to 7 I really do 2 shakes at a minimum because that gives you a good amount of protein and the 3 shakes and kind of an idea usually when you wake up and have a nice shake in the morning and then, you know have a ton of veggies and things like that I would snack on throughout the day – have good salad for a lunch and then have my 2nd shake around 2 3 in the afternoon and that works for me in my schedule. Then dinner and another shake at night. Sometimes if I am too full or I have a late dinner I do not have a shake but then 2 or 3 shakes.

The first 7 days you have to do that 3 time a day this one bottle you will be done with that then throughout the whole cleanse you are doing the fiber so gastro fiber it would be 9 a day and one tablespoon a day, then after you are done, so the 2nd week you are adding Sp green food at 5 capsules 2 a day so you are doing 10 of those a day and you are still continuing with the fiber and the shakes. So her is kind of a quick general shake recipe. You will notice that half a bane is always kind of great to flavor now the purification in the last couple of years, since we have the chocolate the bananas have really changed for me. I find that I just don’t need my blender nearly as much. I get my shaker bottle, I put one ice cube and then I put my SP I mix them up I have chocolate and vanilla and shake it up and then down the hatch but there are a lot of recipe for shakes and I know this is kind of a classic one, but you will notice that there is a lot of fruit in there and you have to really balance that with a lot of greens and a lot of veggies on the other end or if you have a vitamix or a really nice ginger or something like that you can certainly throw some kale or spinach like that in your shake as well. SO side effects certainly a potential I have experienced all of these maybe not so much skin issues but every time it is a little different and the first few times I did it was around 2006 2007, I got this cold runny nose and I thought what the heck is going on, and I have never eaten this healthy ever and I have got about of a cold you know I finally realized, that is just a detox reaction and I have had times where recently not this past time I did it, but the time before that first night I just went to the couch in racing all over the place so didn’t get much sleep that night, woke up, thought I felt tired when I went to sleep but I was fine and I didn’t have any issues from there on, so with the headaches if you are have on caffeine that can be an issue but all these are potential and remember the skin is the largest organ of detoxification you can be happy that you are purging the toxins through the skin one key thing about eh skin, let them go don’t depress it and then everything kind of normalizes after a short period of time, constipation diarrhea certainly can happen a bit, I do like to know that if you are having excessive constipation you can certainly give the nutritional wellness center a quick call because you know if you re detoxifying we have to get that out, and if you re no having bowel movements 2 or 3 times a day that can be a problem kind of backing up a little bit. Make sure your water is alright and a beet a day that is secure for everything just has one beet a day. So weight loss during detoxification, it is a wonderful natural side effect we talked about that earlier and this is kind of on average 8 to 15 pounds, and certainly I have experienced about 20 pounds of eight loss I have heard of all the stories of people losing more and then I have heard of people not losing much of everything and that is certainly possible where I have cases in practice and then I have them do a cleanse a gain in 6 months and then they lose and one of the key factors here is how are your clothes fitting number one and you are finding that your weight is the same but you find that your belt buckle size down. Looking at body fat measurements is much better that weighing yourself you can get a nice Tanta scale for 50 60 bucks and that will locate your body fat, body water because if a lot of time your weight stays the same your body fat has gone down 2 3 percent that just means you have more muscle now s there is something on weight loss, have it be a natural side effect. So let’s kind of blat through this a little bit because you will know that we should not eat junk, so let’s go through this a little bit and I will touch base a little bit on balance so how well our body is detoxing depends on how susceptible we are to disease and if we take away these toxins quicker than the body can rid them of trouble and toxic overload is a silent killer and that is if the toxins usually do not affect ones seems they affect everything. From the liver to digestion, the endocrine system tends to become the end stages of not having a good detox. So I am going to very quickly hop over the SP Detox balance is a newer product from Standard Process that really eliminated the need to do all of the capsules and when our research department was looking at the unification programme which has been around for well over 20 years, and has really gotten a lot of greet results, they wanted oth add even more nutrients oth the formula, thy added some amino acids, they added some creatine, they added clove artichoke, they added more Spanish black radish and just created a powder that you can do – you can vary the process, by starting low and ram up as the detoxification goes, nice option for some people so we will kind of go into this and really hit toxins really hard now I don’t know this is 80,000 chemicals registered to be produced in the US and that is a lot you know using 800 million pounds of herbicides so we have kind of gone through these before.

There is your detoxification classification phase 1 to 3, so the SP Detox Balance this is a plant based, this is great for vegetarians you are doing 1 to 3 shakes a day and you don’t have to do any other additional supplements that we chatted about so there are certain things that you want to make sure your nutrients levels are up to a certain amount before you start this, we talked about coffee and alcohol and there are, the did expand on the 21 day to a 28 day and the majority of people are going to have to go through that 28 day period the 10 die program that we offer are really of those people who want a little pick me up. I tend to find that after summer you know picnics and being outside and parties and things like that, back to Labour day just need a quick 10 day just to get me back on the healthy side and clean everything up. The reason they extended it to 28 day is because they found that detoxification just does not stop the same day – 22 when you are having 21 days. If you go back to that normal plan that you are doing prior you can have these toxins that are kind of free flowing in the body you have to eliminate them yet and they reabsorb they tend to reabsorb in the fatty tissue one of those things being the grain so extending that out oth 28 days gives you the ability to go through that detox process a little further and then kind of come down a little bit back that last few weeks, it is one of the reasons why we did that. So here is the 10 day. You can see it, and I am going to walk you through doing this. You can see Sophie and I had a chance to talk a bit before we started to day and 3shakes is a lot and you will find that they are pretty whole form doing the shakes and might need a little extra digestive support or they might not be able to get through 2 3 shakes a day and that is ok, because there are a lot of raw veggies in here and can cause a little over load to the digestive system if you are not used to eating so healthy. So here is the SP Detox Balance – they are more recently in the late fall and now we have the SP Detox Balance on the flavor and when this originally came out it has a chai flavor so it has a little bit of nutmeg in it, with some cinnamon in there as well, to get that chai flavor. The reason they did that is because of the ingredients. There is a lot of Spanish black radish in there and it is potent, I don’t know if you guys have been on Spanish black radish, I mean you open that and smell it, it’s like that is pungent and stop! Some people can find around it but then the vanilla and chocolate just was not enough so that chai is great, and really chai can be kind of a strong or a little low worry and I find that a lot of people do now is just add one scoop of chocolate and it just gives it a pretty good taste oth he shake. They upped the protein percentage to 17 grams and we have that as well, and those as well so here is kind of some of the ingredients that is a great source of magnesium, we have K1 it is made of proportion, it has got flax, it is made of potatoes oats, pumpkin seed protein buckwheat carrot, Spanish black radish and apple pectin, so some of those similar ones that you saw in the 21 day. And here is kind of a sample meal plan and you will have access to it as you go through it and really the kits these days come with a shaker bottle, the 28 day comes with that, and cool! So that is really the whole story of purification and detoxification of a patient we are recording now, quite live so I won’t take any questions at this point, if you have them I am sure you can touch base with Sophie I know that just thinking of the normal questions that come along, certainly medications are one them, the high blood pressure medication or diabetic medication. As a chiropractor I was never allowed to touch anyone’s medication not allowed to prescribe, the precision with those – I currently do encourage you to monitor them. If your blood usage or pressure, the need for those medication may go down here which is certainly a good thing, but you want to monitor everything then contact you doctor which would be wonderful. I think that is really kind of a lot of the questions that I get I hope that everyone enjoyed it and it is wonderful to go through this right now, and I certainly find it helpful to go through some of the stresses that we are dealing with and we are kind of geared in at home and you can spend a little bit more time cooking some great meals and as you can see on ships screen it is a wonderful time to cleanse and get into that beach body shape for summer –

S: I know I heard this horrible phrase going around during quarantine 19 the 19 pounds! These people are stuck at home and stress eating or overeating and so this is a really wonderful way to shift that around.

J: Absolutely

S: Bu ayah thank you so much Jeff for sharing this with us, it is really exciting I use more of the 21 day program in practice I have just more personal experience with it, and have done that one myself many times. I am having more and more clients do the SP Detox shake too and a lot of positive feedback about the flavor and doing that and just being a different way of doing it, and so I am really encouraging you if you are interested in this to please contact the office, because we can talk you through what the best option for you is and as Jeff was saying there are multiple fiber option and what might be the best option for that and just point you to the resources because there are like when we order for you, each kit does come with a booklet and there is a whole online fb group and a lot of great recourse on processed websites too so folks who have done it usually have very positive feedback about all the new recipes that they gt exposed to as well.

J: And you can actually – I can mention very quickly where you go to Standardprocess.com you can complete the surveys and one other thing I wanted to mention as well – yeah
S: Great, thank you! So yes you just need a refresher on any of this information or if you just want to talk through what might be right for you and talk about the possibilities you need to do this, please call us or email and we can order your kit and again thank you so much Jeff for joining. Really appreciate having the power point and just going into more detail about all this implant information.

J: Pleasure, and have fun with it!

S: Yeah and thank you and the only other thing I wanted to mention is unfortunately we had some technical difficulties so we weren’t able to do this connected Facebook live we are sending this out after the fact but so we are not taking any live questions now but yet another reason. Yeah we can always do it again and try and get all the tech lines up! Alright be well everyone thank you

J: Ok take care.