Partnering Medicine & Nutrition

Learn how blend medicine and nutrition for the best possible outcome for your health and longevity.  Some challenges will not fully resolve without nutrition changes.  Learn what these are, and when to use nutrition in a supportive role for challenges best address by modern medicine.  You will leave this episode with clarity on where food can help and where it doesn’t.

Transcript

Welcome back to the Jolie Podcast. I am so happy to be here with you. And today we are going to talk about an important topic of nutrition and medicine where each holds the key. This is super important because so many people want to use food to be their healing, but there is an intersection between food and modern medicine that produces the ultimate outcome. And we are here to talk about this. My name is Julia and I'm the founder of Julie. Our passion is changing lives with food. So spoiler alert, I think nutrition is super, super important. However, I am a scientist at heart and more than anything, I want people to have help, to have happiness, to feel good in their bodies. And so whatever it takes is what we do. So today we're going to dive into this question because many of us wrestle with what is the role nutrition should play and when must I rely on medicine. If you are a person who is already keyed into the power of food and the power of plants, you might be resistant to modern medicine. If you are a, please just give me a pill. You might be resistant to changing food, changing what you're eating to affect your body, and you might be somewhere in between that continuum. This podcast is for you no matter where you fall, so that you can approach each and every health question, health challenge, health goal from a place of empowerment.
(02:04)
So we have two camps. Generally the food is medicine and I don't need pills. You don't need pills if you're eating right, that's the extreme. And then on the other side, the other side of the extreme, we have food doesn't matter. There's a drug for everything. And the truth is that both are wrong, that food and medicine for your optimal health, and I am always pushing for optimal health. Our partners and they both have strengths and they both have limitations. So in this episode, I want to give you clarity on three things. Firstly, the health challenges where nutrition is absolutely a non-negotiable. No matter what medicine you take, you will not better if food isn't aligned. And for those things, oftentimes pills, treatments are prescribed. But to find true difference, you have to change your diet. You have to treat yourself with food. And in these instances, the medication is more to manage the symptoms of the underlying pathology that is related to nutrition.
(03:29)
Secondly, I want to really talk about the conditions where nutrition and medicine work together. Powerfully one without the other in these cases does not give you the best result. So in some cases you need medicine and nutrition working in tandem to get the best result and the best result might be the most healing, but it also might be the easiest path to healing. So in some cases, nutrition is support for your body while it undergoes medical treatments. And finally, we're going to talk about the times where medicine must take the lead and nutrition, while important because it helps your overall function is not enough on its own. And this I think is important to address because sometimes clients will come to me with health challenges, with problems with diagnoses, and they would like food to solve it. There are times when food does not solve it where food is the supporting actor in the play of your life, but Madison must be the main character.
(04:49)
And so I want to be clear as to what that is so that by the end of our conversation you'll know where nutrition outperforms medicine and where nutrition and medicine work as a team and where medicine outperforms nutrition, where it is absolutely necessary. And my goal is that you leave this discussion, you leave this podcast and that you share this podcast, but you leave it empowered with a clear sense of how to use both medicine and nutrition for your best health. And when we talk about medicine, we are mainly talking about allopathic or western medicine. Chinese medicine operates on a different paradigm where food is very much integrated into the medicine. So we won't address that. That's the area of treatment that I'm most familiar with. Ayurvedic medicine is another very highly respected medicine. I am less familiar with that and will not speak to it, but most of you listening to this are engaged with western medicine.
(06:05)
And so when we talk about medicine, we are going to be talking about western medicine. So where is nutrition a non-negotiable? Under what circumstances must you address food or use food for your healing to get the best outcome? So let's start with that because this is my wheelhouse and this is where your food is really going to make the difference. And without changing your diet, without using Buddhist medicine, the medicine is going to mask symptoms but not take it away. So let's start with type two diabetes, type two diabetes. And also spoiler alert, I don't know, that's actually spoiler alert, but just like a rule of thumb, when an ailment has to do with digestion and metabolism, food is going to be important because food is a key aspect, a key player, a key influencer in both of those systems. So type two diabetes should not be a surprise that it is a condition that is primarily driven by food.
(07:28)
Now, yes, you can take metformin, you can inject insulin, you can use GLP ones, you can use berberine, but those are keeping your blood sugar from soaring dangerously high. But if your meals are not built to regulate your blood sugar, you still have diabetes type two or you are still pre-diabetic. I spent a lot of time reading the, I don't know if this is the name of it, but it's by Gary Tubbs, and it's basically a history of diabetes and it's talking about how initially diabetes was treated primarily with diet. It wasn't until we discovered insulin that we started treating diabetes with insulin. And there was a big debate among academics as well as practicing physicians regarding this because insulin facilitates the clearing of sugar out of the bloodstream, but it doesn't address the underlying problem which is related to diet. And it is directly related to eating too many foods, relying on too many foods that easily convert into sugar.
(08:56)
So if your meals are built on refined sugar, if they're built on processed carbs, if they're built on unprocessed carbs, but that's mainly what you eat, then you are already creating a sinking boat. You are already creating a situation where type two diabetes thrives. The key in treating type two diabetes is changing your diet. So this became abundantly clear or was abundantly clear. Oftentimes clients are resistant to this. For the client that I had that had a type two diabetes under control, insulin levels or blood sugar levels I should say were in the two hundreds, they were taking insulin and they felt like they were fine, that everything was okay because their doctor said it was okay, they were taking their insulin. But in reality, such elevated blood sugar, even fasting blood sugars of one 60 and one 70 are damaging to your body. Sugar is toxic to your nerves, to your fine capillaries, and this ends up compromising your kidneys, your toes, your fingers, and your brain.
(10:22)
This client, it took a lot of convincing, but with the help of a continuous glucose monitor, he was able to see exactly how food interacted with his body and seeing that, yes, I am taking insulin and I'm quote under control, but I see that when I eat this muffin, for instance, my blood sugar skyrockets. This is what it took for him to realize that, hey, I need to change my diet because using the same CGM or continuous glucose monitor, he was able to see that, oh, if I have a salad and then I sit down and have a piece of fish and a half of a sweet potato, my blood sugar doesn't do the same thing. It was this kind of information, this kind of feedback from the CGM that helped him to buy into the importance of food. And once he bought into that and began to practice principles of eating that kept blood sugar under control, he was completely amazed, completely amazed.
(11:32)
And the end result was after doing this, his doctor began to dial back his insulin until he became insulin free, which I call that diabetes and remission or post diabetic state. So in a situation like diabetes type two, it's important that we're talking about type two here. Nutrition is absolutely essential in healing, treating and reversing. Another example is high blood pressure medications can lower blood pressure numbers, but they don't fix the underlying causes. So if your sodium intake is sky high, if you're not eating enough potassium rich foods and if your weight is adding pressure to your arteries, pills address the problem by relaxing your blood vessels, by giving you extra potassium. But they do not treat the underlying problem that caused the high blood pressure in the beginning. So one of my clients was on two blood pressure medications and was still hovering between 1 40 90.
(12:56)
Ideal at this time is 1 20 80 and we made nutritional shifts eliminated processed food. Jo life does not use that included born leafy greens, more vegetables, more omega threes, salmon walnuts, things of that sort, chia seeds. And we cut the evening wine from two glasses to one, and within six weeks she dropped her blood pressure into the one twenties over eighties and her doctor was able to reduce the medication. That is the type of change that happens when you begin to use diet to affect conditions like high blood pressure. I will say if your blood pressure is acutely elevated, definitely use the bare minimum of medication while you bring it under control with your diet. If you are not willing to make the dietary changes, then yes, of course you have to go on medication. But if you're willing to make the dietary changes, then it will address the high blood pressure and it will address the underlying circumstances that create the high blood pressure.
(14:18)
It will address how your body deals with stress. It will address inflammatory markers, it will address hormone balance like cortisol balance. So using your food is super important because you're not only tackling that one problem, but you're tackling multiple problems that just showed up as high blood pressure but could also show up in other ways too. So let's talk about high statins. Lower LDL. Yes, but they don't repair the inflammatory environment that creates the arterial plaque. So if you're eating sugar, if you're eating lots of refined oils and not getting enough fiber, the root problem remains the root problem of too maturing in your blood of sticky fat molecules in your system. Inflammation within the artery itself continues when we work with food, however, we work the whole body, the whole system, and this is where using food to treat high cholesterol is super important.
(15:43)
And how do we do that? We add Omega-3 rich foods like fish and nuts. We add lots of soluble fiber. Why do we do that? It's because when you eat lots of soluble fiber, so you eat your salad beforehand, you might intake cilium husk, you're eating your vegetables, that fiber is sequestering bile. Bile is made from cholesterol, and when we eat a lot of fiber, it sequesters that and you poop that extra cholesterol out. When you have a low fiber diet for instance, you reabsorb that cholesterol and that adds to your overall cholesterol count. So fiber does that. Fiber also feeds your microbiome, which helps to reduce inflammation. And when you have a lot of fiber in your diet, it's taking up space of other things that would contribute to your high cholesterol, such as too many sugars for instance. Too much sugar is converted into lipids, hence triglycerides that are spilling over from your liver.
(17:02)
So your food is an important thing to look at when addressing high cholesterol. So we have some really important systemic problems. We have type two diabetes, we have high blood pressure, we have high cholesterol all related to diet, and then there's hormone balance in PCOS. For women, especially in midlife, nutrition is the most powerful lever to help rebalance insulin, cortisol and estrogen. Oftentimes when we talk about hormone imbalance, we think only about estrogen, testosterone, progesterone. However, all of our hormones act like a symphony. They influence each other. And so when we want to bring ourselves into balance, we need to balance them all. And by balancing them with food, we get to impact insulin, cortisol, and estrogen all at the same time. Medicine might address one hormone or a symptom, but food works across your whole system. Clients will often tell me, I didn't realize how bloating and hot flashes or irregular cycles were tied to what I was eating.
(18:24)
Even I didn't realize that the discomfort and the pain that I had while menstruating was tied to what they were eating. But once they rebalanced their palate and their plate, everything shifted. So for hormone imbalance, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, type two diabetes, I first and foremost want you to look at your diet and begin to make the changes. And this is where Julie thrives. We massively change people's health outcomes. The second area where nutrition and medicine are partners. Now in the second category, medicine is powerful and nutrition is powerful, and they work in synergy together. So if you use one, you only get half the result if you use both of them together. One plus one is greater than two in this situation. So one client, one of the clearest examples is cancer. And let me say clearly that nutrition does not cure cancer medicine, chemotherapy, surgery, radiation, those are the things that are lifesaving as it relates to cancer. Cancer. You need your doctors, you need your treatment, you need all of that. However, nutrition during your treatment is powerful. It helps you to keep your muscle mass strengthens your immune system. It supports your recovery, it helps your body work harder to defeat the cancer alongside the chemotherapy and the radiation and the surgery.
(20:16)
So this is like with cancer, food is not going to cure you, but food is going to help your treatments. Food is going to make you strong as you go through your treatments. Food is going to help you recover more quickly from your treatments. So for example, one of our clients was going through chemo and chemo is if you have not gone through it, it's very, very taxing on the body and it creates some unexpected consequences like things that you thought you liked food-wise you suddenly don't like it changes your taste buds, it changes your relationship with food because your perception of food taste-wise changes and the nausea begins to can become a problem as it relates to nutrition. And so when working with cancer patients, our goal is to give small high protein food that they can easily ingest. So smoothies, broth based soups and the small meals, the liquid meals, the high protein meals help to stabilize weight, which is very important when approaching cancer is to make sure you keep your weight on.
(21:36)
It helps to recover faster after treatment and it helps to support the work of the medicine. So the medicine is what saves your life and the nutrition is what gives strength. So when you are dealing with cancer, when you are undergoing treatments, yes, those treatments are primary and your food is there to be a supporting character to help you excel in your treatment. Another place where partnership is essential is in heart disease. So let's say you need a stent, you need a bypass. Let's say you've had a heart attack, let's say you need a transplant. Medicine and surgery are definitely the things that save your life in that moment. But what happens next depends on your nutrition. So after a cardiac event, if you go back to the same lifestyle, you're basically setting yourself up for another cardiac event. So you go and you have the things that western medicine excels at.
(22:45)
You have that acute treatment, you recover from your heart attack, you recover from your obstructed artery, and then you go back, this is what you should do to a diet of anti-inflammatory foods. So that way you've had this event, you've had medicine, save your life in this event, and then you are going to continue saving your life, optimizing your help by choosing foods that help you to avoid subsequent heart attacks, subsequent stents, subsequent cardiac events. And what diet is that? It's mainly an anti-inflammatory diet that's filled with vegetables and fish and nuts. That's low in sugar, that's high in fiber. It can slow or stop disease progression depending on where you are in that spectrum. And if you are interested in the anti-inflammatory diet, a small plug here, I'm going to do wellness Wednesdays in September, sign up for the Wellness Wednesdays because not only will it be relaxation and movement that is accessible to all, that's why we're doing chair yoga, but there will be q and a time and there will be time to learn about cooking, learn about eating, learn about choosing foods in the grocery store that help you to adhere to an anti-inflammatory diet when you're not having Jo or when you're cooking at home or when you're going out to dinner or when you're on vacation.
(24:25)
So that is super important. So as it relates to cardiac health, medicine is your 9 1 1 and nutrition is your insurance policy. It's what's going to keep you healthy after that 9 1 1 event. Autoimmune conditions are another example where medicine and food work hand in hand where they work together, where they work synergistically. So whether it's ms, whether it's rheumatoid arthritis, whether it's Hashimoto's medicine will slow the progress of the disease, but nutrition is there to help reduce inflammation and it's there to stab off, flare up flareups. So your medicine slows the disease down and nutrition further puts the brakes on it by reducing inflammation, by reducing flareups, and by literally making your tissues stronger so that your tissues can repair faster. Inflamed tissues are damaged tissues, your nutrition is there to help those tissues recover, rebuild, and repair themselves more quickly. In the case of autoimmune conditions, food is not the cure, but food is the stabilizer.
(26:00)
And with autoimmune conditions, many of them are progressive. And the objective both in medicine and in nutrition is to slow or halt the progression of the disease. And one of my favorite books as it relates to nutrition and autoimmune disease is the Wahls protocol. It is a wonderful story of a doctor who set about healing her autoimmune disease when medicine could do no more for her and the nutritional takeaways that she discovered along that road. So I suggest that book to all people who have autoimmune diseases. We use a lot of the science related to that to implement our autoimmune protocols for clients. So I want to really underline how when you have autoimmune disease, you will get the best outcome by combining nutrition and medicine.
(27:08)
And in one area that you may not think about where nutrition is super important is the role of nutrition and surgery. And in trauma recovery, post-surgical recovery is trauma recovery. By the way, nutrition is super important here and here. I can speak from my own experience too, after having some surgeries that my nutrition made a big difference. It made the bounce back after being under anesthesia because your body needs to clear that it made the bounce back in terms of getting into normal toileting routines. And it also made the bounce back in terms of helping my tissues to heal faster. And so with, if you have an anticipated surgery, I really encourage you to dial in your nutrition pre-surgery, get as strong as you can, lots of collagen, lots of colorful fruits and vegetables, lots of protein so that when you come out of surgery and you're in the recovery stage, your body is leaving that surgical operating room strong.
(28:28)
And then post-surgery, giving yourself those things again. So you're giving yourself lots of protein, lots of collagen, think bone broth. I love it. It makes such a huge difference. Your animal sources for this, think vitamin C, your dark leafy vegetables, zinc. And one thing that you may not think about is how hydrating your food is, how your food helps you to hydrate from the inside out and post-surgery, that is super important. So even something as common as an infection can be helped by food too. I just want to touch on that. So if you've had pneumonia or strep throat and you need antibiotics, you need to take them, no doubt about it. But your nutrition can help you. They can help you a handle the antibiotic better by feeding your gut microbiome as it is handling destruction, necessary destruction, but also food is important to help you with hydration, with vitamin C, with zinc and with protein, all of which help you to resist infection as well as weather through the medicines that are there to help you, the antibiotics, and to help you build stronger afterwards to support your immune system.
(29:48)
And now I want to touch on the final segment where medicine must lead. And this is super important. So let's talk about the times when medicine must take the lead. No matter how strong your nutrition is. The clearest example of this is type one diabetes. Without insulin, it is fatal. You are going to die. Nutrition. While it might help to balance your blood sugar, nutrition cannot replace insulin, which is not available to a type one diabetic. So here, food is important, but medicine is absolutely primary. It is what is going to significantly change things. We touched on acute infections when we talked about food being supportive of recovering and withstanding antibiotics, but I want to stress that there's no substitute for antibiotics. If you have an acute infection, strep throat, meningitis, sepsis, God forbid, no amount of bone broth, no amount of turmeric tea, no amount of ginger is going to stop those things.
(30:59)
It's going to stop the bacteria from spreading. I came in contact with this with a client who did have an infection and was trying to treat it with food and with tea and with this and that and the other. And that is not a treatment for an infection. When you have an infection, you need the antibiotics and then your food can be the supportive, it can be what makes you feel better on an emotional, I was going to say emotional and physical way, but I want you to think of it as like a hug or warmth or being in the bed. But the active ingredient or the agent that's going out to defeat the bacteria that are causing the infection is the antibiotic. So here, when there's an infection, you need to treat it. You need to treat it with medicine, go to your doctor, treat your infection, let your food support you, let your food make you feel good, let your food help you recover more quickly.
(32:01)
But that will not happen unless you treat the infection. And the other thing that I want you to really think about is where medicine must take the lead. Never feel bad about that. Medicine is here to be our helper, just as food is to be our helper. And the first medicines were inspired by the magnificence and the healing capabilities of food. We have brains, we have intelligence, we have scientists that go and they find causality. They find medicines that treat disease. And we are also thankful and owe so much better because of that. So if you have an emergency, if you have an aggressive cancer, if you are facing organ failure or have organ dysfunction problems without any reservation, take advantage of all the medical treatments that are available and are wise for you to experience. And here, let your nutrition support your being. But do not misguide yourself or compromise your wellbeing by thinking that nutrition is going to be the thing that heals you.
(33:19)
So let's put all this together. Nutrition is foundational. Without a doubt. That is what I devote my work to. That's what my passion is. That's what I spend so much time with it with. And that's what I see day after day after day. Nutrition is foundational. But medicine is important too. It's not a replacement. So let nutrition be your foundation and medicine will be the thing that helps you when you come into need and hopefully with very sound, very intentional nutrition. Your need for medicine will be less and less in chronic conditions like diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, nutrition, outperforms medicine in these illnesses that in cancer, heart disease, autoimmune disease, nutrition and medicine are strong partners. But in acute life-threatening conditions like type one, diabetes, infections, trauma, serious disease medicine, must always lead. Always, always, always. And the smartest approach is not a food only or medicine only.
(34:38)
It's both. And I hope that you leave this podcast knowing when nutrition is the driver and when medicine must step up to be the life-saving agent that it can be. And so I leave you with this reflection. Where in your health are you relying on medicine while ignoring nutrition? And where are you depending on food alone, when something can be fixed by medical care too? I really encourage you to weave the two together and to use food as your daily medicine while respecting when medical care is needed. And that's what we do at Jolee. The thing that I love about Jolie is we are agnostic, as I call it. We are not married to any one philosophy. Our only desire is help. And whatever's going to take you to help is what we are behind. So in some cases, that's food only. In some cases it's food plus medicine, and in some cases it's medicine.
(35:49)
And we are in the backseat. And so think about this. Think about where in your life or are you letting your food slide? And is there any medical thing that you're neglecting? Have you been to the doctor recently? Have you gotten yourself tested? Have you had your blood work done? Do those things. When you eat well and take care of yourself from a medical perspective, you put yourself in a place of having optimal help, of having longevity, of having healthy aging, of protecting yourself, and of creating the relationships that are there for when you need them. So thank you for listening today and I hope that this episode brought you clarity. If it did, please share it with a friend or a loved one who's navigating a health journey or who has questions about, okay, what can nutrition do, what can food do? Where do I need medicine?
(36:48)
And as always, my pleasure and I'd love to hear your stories, your questions. You can contact us at jolie@thejolielife.com. You can contact me directly at julia@thejulielife.com. Take a look at our website, the jolie life.com and join one of our programs and you will be amazed about how nutrition will change, how you feel. And honestly, it doesn't take long. It takes five, 10 days and you will just be like, wow, I did not know I could feel this good. Anyway, talk to you soon. I hope you enjoyed this podcast, the Jolie Life Podcast. And if this podcast helped you in any way, I invite you to share it with your friends and your family and whoever you come across that you think might be helped by this podcast, I would love to hear your comments. And you can contact me at julia@thejolielife.com. And please follow us on Instagram, the Jolie Life. Our website is the jo life.com. And it would be lovely if you would subscribe and if you would rate this podcast and go back and share this with someone. Let the ripple effect happen. Let the joly life be the beautiful life that keeps on giving by beauty, mark of love.