The Truman Charities Podcast
Truman Charities is the only podcast that donates $250 to each of our guests' charity of choice.
Jamie Truman, connects with individuals who are making a significant impact in their communities. From New York Times bestselling authors to innovative farmers, we share the untold stories of those who are shaping the world around us. We feature trailblazers, influencers, and innovators who are driving positive change, such as the lawyer who fought Dupont for two decades to protect our water and the vital work of an organization dedicated to supporting women who have been trafficked within the United States.
Jamie Truman is the co-founder of Truman Charities, an entirely volunteer-run organization. Since its inception in 2010, Truman Charities has successfully raised over $2 million for a variety of charitable causes.
In addition to her work with Truman Charities, Jamie is also the author of the bestselling book "Vanishing Fathers: The Ripple Effect on Tomorrow's Generation." This book has generated over $80,000 for charities supporting at-risk youth, as 100% of the book's proceeds are donated to these vital organizations.
The Truman Charities Podcast
The Hidden Truth About the Childhood Chronic Illness Epidemic | Why More Kids Are Sick And What You Can Do | Documenting Hope Ep. 146
Diet, medications, environmental toxins... what’s really harming our kids?
Beth Lambert of Documenting Hope joins host Jamie Truman to unpack the rise of chronic conditions in children and what conventional medicine misses when it comes to the health of our kids. She explains what she calls “the total load of modern living,” a cultural shift where kids are increasingly exposed to more processed food, technology, and chemicals putting stress on their developing bodies.
Beth also shares how the organization is helping parents address the root causes of conditions like everything from developmental delays to autoimmune disorders. Tune in to hear real-life stories of children whose conditions were reversed, and learn where you can find free tools and support to start healing your own family!
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Email: info@trumancharities.com
This episode was post produced by Podcast Boutique https://podcastboutique.com/
What if the chronic health issues affecting so many kids today things like ADHD, autoimmune diseases, allergies and gut problems weren't just manageable but actually reversible? In today's episode I'm speaking with Beth Lambert of Documenting Hope, who's challenging everything we think about children's health and offering real hope backed by science and lived experience. Welcome to the Truman Charities Podcast. I'm your host, jamie Truman. I'm so glad you're here because this episode is really one of the most eye-opening conversations I've had. Beth shares how her journey started in the world of conventional medicine and pharma and how becoming a mom and facing her own child's health struggles completely changed the way she saw health and healing. We talk about what's driving the epidemic of chronic conditions in kids today, what families can do differently and the inspiring success stories of recovery that our team has documented. If you're a parent, educator, health professional or even just curious about the link between our modern lifestyle and our kids' well-being, this episode is for you. But before we talk to Beth, please take a moment to rate and review our podcast. We are 100% volunteer-based organization, so the reviews really make a huge impact in the growth of our show. So please scroll down, hit the five stars and write a short review on why you enjoy this podcast. All right, let's welcome Beth to Truman Charities. All right, beth, thank you so much for coming on and talking with me today. Happy to be with you, jamie.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I was really interested about learning more about your organization when I found out, you know through Hillary. So I just interviewed Hillary. You have to listen to the episode, it's great. It was episode 133. It just aired and so we spoke a little bit about your organization, because that is the organization she chose for her donation to go to and she's the founder, as you know, of School of Lunch.
Speaker 1:So it was really great, through meeting Hillary to now meeting you, and I want to talk a lot about documenting hope. So when I first got on your website and the first thing I saw was a root cause approach to healing our kids and I thought this is amazing. And then it really clicked me. I was like, oh, this is exactly why Hillary loves your organization too. But then I saw on it. So I want to dive a little bit into the video that you had on there. So this is the video that you spoke about when you went to an integrative doctor with your children and it kind of changed your mindset and kind of opened your eyes and got you really thinking about creating this organization itself.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I came from the world of conventional medicine in terms of what I did for work. I worked for pharmaceutical, medical device kind of companies. I did healthcare consulting. In that world we use an approach that is very mechanistic, very symptom suppressive. It sort of like breaks the body down into parts and then when you have a symptom they try and just address that one symptom, usually with a pharmaceutical. There's limited tools, right, it's managing symptoms. That's what our healthcare system is about.
Speaker 2:When my kids were little and they had symptoms, I did not feel satisfied with somebody just giving me a pharmaceutical to manage the symptoms. I wanted to know why do my children have symptoms? What is the root cause of this? And it took talking to an integrative physician and eventually a naturopath and other kinds of practitioners who are oriented towards understanding root causes. It took meeting them and understanding their training and their frame of how they frame healthcare to really see that we have a whole nother pathway to health, which is by looking at the root causes, by trying to understand the origins of disease, that you can restore full health.
Speaker 2:You don't have to just be sick and manage things with symptom suppressive medications. So that was a kind of real revolution in my brain to think differently about health. And now that's kind of what I teach to people and try and get people to understand is that if your body is expressing symptoms, that means there is something out of balance and you can find the root causes and address the root causes and fully reverse your health conditions. And this is what Documenting Hope does is try to help parents understand what the root causes might be for their child's chronic health or developmental condition.
Speaker 1:Right, and so this was personal to you. Was this for you personally, or was it through your children that were having symptoms of something and then you had to go through and look what the root cause was?
Speaker 2:It was through my children. My oldest child had a bunch of symptoms that were like GI symptoms and skin symptoms and sensory symptoms, and then, in looking for answers, that's where I found integrative medicine, that's where I found a holistic kind of approach. But also, I will say this is often what happens in families is usually there's one kid, maybe more than one, who has these symptoms, but that child serves as the canary in the coal mine and they let everybody else in the family know that, yep, you got to start changing the way you're living too, otherwise you're going to develop symptoms, even if they haven't already. So I feel like our kids are kind of these really wonderful canaries telling us yeah, you guys got to pay attention to what you're doing here, otherwise we're all going to end up sick.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So how was that, when you finally started to kind of peel the onion back and learn more about integrative medicine and more of a holistic approach, were you still? Were you still working with pharmaceutical company as well?
Speaker 2:At that time I was actually in graduate school, so I had stopped working in healthcare and I was in graduate school and also staying home with my oldest two children, who were young at the time, and I decided because I was in graduate school that I was so blown away by this whole revolution I was describing in my mind and how I changed my conception of what health is, and I also started seeing that most of my peers had children with some kind of chronic health condition and I felt like this sense of urgency, like something is not right with our children, and so I actually ended up taking my graduate program and completely shifting it and moving right into an analysis of why we have so many sick kids today why are we having an epidemic of chronic health conditions in our kids and what can we do to reverse that trend.
Speaker 2:So that became sort of a pivot for me, where I opened up into a new career which just became all about finding solutions for parents, because the solutions are actually out there. The answers to why their children are sick or why their children might be developmentally delayed. They're all out there. It's just that it's not the place that we go to first. We tend to go to conventional medicine and we get again that symptom suppressive approach, just because that's what's covered by insurance, that is what our healthcare system offers you. But if you go outside that system, that's when you get the answers that work, that's when you get a path back to good health.
Speaker 1:So tell me a little bit about so. You said you changed your focus and so you started really looking into what the root cause is and a lot of the reasons why there is so many chronic diseases and all kinds of things when it comes to children and adults. What are a few of those that you think?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So if you look at the epidemic of chronic health conditions in kids there's so many different conditions, right. There's ADHD and autism and autoimmune diseases and allergies, and every kid has chronic constipation it seems like there's just an unlimited number of afflictions that are affecting this current generation of children. And if you look at it from the sort of siloed perspective like what causes ADHD, as if it's different from what causes allergies, you're never going to get answers because it doesn't explain why all of these kids are getting diagnosed across any number of diagnostic categories, suddenly, out of nowhere. This wasn't like this 75 years ago. A hundred years ago we didn't have, you know, one in two children with a diagnosis. Even in the 1960s you only had 2% of kids with a diagnosed chronic health condition. So we've gone from 2% in 1960 to now more than half of American children with a diagnosed chronic health condition. So you have to start thinking of this as like something cultural. There's a big picture here, right, that is making all of our kids sick. It's just that it's manifesting differently in each child. Maybe they have a different set of symptoms or different diagnosis. So when you take that 10,000-foot view, the big picture perspective, you can go back and look and say, all right, we have completely changed the way that we eat, we've completely changed the way that we live, we've changed the way that we spend our time. We are just filled with toxins from an environment that has become polluted over the last few decades. So what you start seeing is this picture of a shift in how modern Americans are living and how that shift has created a place where our bodies can no longer tolerate that kind of lifestyle.
Speaker 2:So if you ask what is causing the chronic health condition epidemic in our children, it is all of the things that are part of modern living that weren't the way that we lived just a few decades ago. So that includes what we're eating, the ultra-processed foods, the foods that are nutrient-poor because they've been grown on depleted soils. It is the limited diets, the chicken nuggets and the white foods that children eat, instead of that rich variety of chemicals that we confront every single day in our personal care products, in our medicines, in our air, our water, our soil. I mean, how many people have you heard upset on Instagram or on TikTok? There's all these videos out there about like chocolate being filled with heavy metals or protein powders being filled with contaminants. I mean, all these things that we think are okay to have are actually just filled through the manufacturing process and, because of the industrial agriculture, they're just filled with toxins. So it's almost inescapable to have toxic exposure in the modern world. And, of course, for our children, who have these little itty-bitty bodies, the toxins are more meaningful because those toxins bioaccumulate and they have a greater impact on their health and their growth and their development.
Speaker 2:And then you could go on and on how we're living our life digitally indoors in a synthetic environment, instead of think about how kids grew up 75 years ago. They spent most of their day running around outside, playing, being kids, rolling in the dirt and doing things that were developmentally appropriate for human children, and we just don't do that anymore. We're an iPad generation now, or you know these digital natives and they spend so much time staring at a blue screen, and that's going to have an impact on their health and their development, especially if you know anything about human development and that it's important. For the brain to develop, you have to move, you have to move through an environment, you have to touch things and feel things and run around, and that's how your brain is wired appropriately.
Speaker 2:So that's where you get into some of the developmental things too is that we're just not going along a normal human trajectory, the way that we have for millennia. So it's all kind of part of what I call the total load of modern living that is creating this generation of sick kids and kids who are developmentally behind. So it is never one thing, but it is many things that are working in synergy and concert to create children who just don't have robust immune systems, they don't have the ability to detoxify because the environment is just overwhelming their bodies. And when you have this total load of environmental stressors at the critical developmental windows, you know, from prenatally all the way through to the first three years of life, you're going to have an impact on their brain development. You're going to see ADHD type symptoms, autism type symptoms. It's just the natural result of bodies living in a world that is not supportive of health.
Speaker 1:So I was on your website and I went on your success stories and I must have been reading for like an hour.
Speaker 2:I started going down.
Speaker 1:There were so many and it was so interesting to me to see what the parents chose to do and the effect that it had, and I want to know from you just some of the success stories that you guys have had that you think have been really impactful.
Speaker 2:There's so many. I mean. I've been collecting success stories since like 2009. And there are, as you mentioned, hundreds of stories on our websites and our YouTube channel of kids who've overcome all kinds of chronic health conditions. So conditions, so things like life-threatening food allergies or ADHD symptoms and autism.
Speaker 2:We actually even published a paper in a peer-reviewed journal last summer about a set of twin girls who were diagnosed with severe or level three autism and then, through a very comprehensive diet and lifestyle intervention program, the parents were able to fully reverse these children's autism diagnosis. And so what that program involved was changing their diet. They had a very delicious, beautiful, nutrient-dense diet that they just made a part of their everyday life. They worked with occupational therapists who helped them overcome some developmental milestone issues. They worked with autism coaches who really helped them understand what autism actually is and what are the root causes of it and how can you modify your environment and lifestyle to help the body get back on track developmentally. Again, a set of twins who reversed their autism diagnosis. We put it in the medical literature because we felt like it really needed scientific documentation, not just the anecdotal documentation. As you mentioned, on our website we have tons of anecdotes, so now we are really working on getting this into the medical literature and get it documented, which means that we have evidence of what the child was like before the intervention and we have evidence of what the child was like after the intervention and we have another paper we're putting in another autism case, because we feel like a lot of times the experience for most parents, especially around autism, that the experience is that parents go to their pediatrician and they might say something like oh, I've heard about kids reversing autism. I've heard that you know a certain diet can help them get better autism. I've heard that you know a certain diet can help them get better, and almost inevitably the pediatrician because it wasn't part of their training in medical school, will say that there's no evidence behind that. That is not true what you've heard about these kids getting reversing their autism diagnosis. But the truth is this is happening all the time. It's just happening in the realm of anecdote and people aren't documenting very, very well. This is part of why we created Documenting Hope, because we wanted to document that these things happen and how they happen, so that we can then educate people about the path that they can take to help their children overcome their health issues or their developmental issues.
Speaker 2:So another one of my favorite stories is actually a good friend of mine, who's a neighbor, who has three children. All three children had an ADHD diagnosis and were being medicated just to stay focused in school, just to stay on task in school. It just so happened that they'd been on ADHD meds for years and then suddenly, out of the blue, one of their children was diagnosed with type one diabetes, and type one diabetes, as you know, is an autoimmune disease. And they decided that they were going to change their whole family's diet to support this child. So they decided to get rid of all sugars out of the house, all simple carbohydrates, and they just went to a ketogenic diet. And what happened?
Speaker 2:As a byproduct of that family switching over to a ketogenic diet, all three children came off their ADHD meds. They no longer needed any medication. They no longer had their ADHD diagnosis. They did not qualify for that ADHD diagnosis anymore because the diet had so profoundly changed their biochemistry and their metabolism and what was going on for their brain every day, because they just shifted to a diet without those highs and lows from blood sugar that happens when you have a high sugar diet. So I have tons of stories like that. Sometimes it's as simple as diet changes. Sometimes it's really profound interventions that families do, but they're almost always about changing your life and changing your diet and just changing the way that you're living.
Speaker 1:So what if you are a mom and you have a child that, say, has been diagnosed with ADHD, and you're not really sure where to go? So you come to Documenting Hope. And how can you help these parents navigate this?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the resources that we have on Documenting Hope are meant for people to just come in and they're all free resources free webinars, free articles, free books. We have practitioner directories. You can come in and find whatever you need, navigate on your own. But we know that sometimes the whole process is very overwhelming for parents. So we created a private membership community. It's called Healing Together and it is just that. It's a place where we are coming together as a community and working on learning how to do this work with other parents. So, as part of Healing Together, if you're a member, you can join live calls.
Speaker 2:We have live Zoom calls twice a month. One is a live call with an integrative physician. Sometimes we have two integrative physicians who host that call and they're just there to answer your questions. Like, if you wanted to come in and be like I'm really interested in getting some functional lab tests done, I want to see my child's nutrient status, should I do a stool test and things like that that you might want some physician guidance on, we host a live call for that. And then we also have another live call with health coaches.
Speaker 2:So some of those complicated questions like what's for breakfast, you know like I have to change my child's diet, but I also have to feed them breakfast every day and I'm used to giving them cereal every day, and what do I do now?
Speaker 2:That's the point of those health coach calls is because these are this is a group of people that are trained to help support families as they go through diet and lifestyle changes, and we talk about different types of interventions. You could do different therapies. There's so many amazing, beautiful, root cause oriented therapies that help children regulate their emotions or help them regulate their nervous system, help them integrate primitive reflexes all these kinds of things that are important for children's development and we talk about those kinds of things, and then we offer an online forum where people can come in and ask questions and get answered by their health coaches. So it's really meant to be a soft place for parents to land if they're feeling overwhelmed and they're not sure where to turn. We have Healing Together as a resource where it's a little bit more guided, a little bit more supportive.
Speaker 1:No, I do love that, because I think that a lot of parents and I know some parents that are going through it right now and it just is overwhelming they're not sure exactly where to go and who they're supposed to speak to, and what doctor is the best doctor to see, and what exactly is a ketogenic diet and what sugar does. They just don't know. And so this is a great place and especially that option as well so you can guide them through this whole process. So how do you see documenting hope in the future? What would you like to accomplish?
Speaker 2:Well, we have some big plans. I would say we have bigger plans than we have funding for. But what we are working on right now? We have a couple of research studies. As I mentioned before, we're continuing to publish case reports. So that's again making a compelling case through scientific evidence that these conditions are reversible, largely environmentally derived and reversible. But we also have a couple other studies where we're collecting data so that we can better understand what the modern living root causes are.
Speaker 2:So we all know, for instance, that antibiotics are a common feature in the average American child's life. Well, how big of a problem are they? How tightly are they correlated with allergies, with asthma, with autism? You know, kids, is it one round that makes a difference? Is it six rounds? We're actually doing a study called CHIRP where we're collecting information like that. It's the most comprehensive environmental health survey that asks parents to basically tell us everything that they can recall about their child preconception, prenatally and through to their current age, about what they've been exposed to, about what their symptoms are, about family health history. Because what we are looking for in the data is a better picture of not only the total load of environmental stressors we know that already correlates with worse health outcomes. But what are the specific things that are making an impact? For instance, how big of a deal is EMF electromagnetic radiation? How big of a deal is that for kids' health, like, is it okay that the iPad's on their lap or is that a major stressor? How big of a deal are antibiotics? How big of a deal is sugar in their diet, and how much sugar is okay and not? You know how much sugar is not okay? And those are the kinds of things, because we are collecting so much data in this study we've been running it since 2018, that we are going to be able to say more about modern living and how it actually impacts children's health.
Speaker 2:And then the other study we're running is a study called the FLIGHT study, and this is an intervention study where we're taking a small group of children and we're actually giving them the parents an educational program and health coaching support, a very sort of structured program that they can follow so that we can walk them through. Here's how you make a diet change. How do you test your home for mold to make sure you don't have mold as a factor in your child's condition? What are the toxins in your home and how do you address toxic exposure, things like that? So that is a study that we'll be actually enrolling.
Speaker 2:We did a pilot version. We enrolled two children in that and we are now going to open up to 12 more children, all who have autism. So the families who have a child between the ages of three and seven will be able to enroll in that study later this year and then our plan is to scale that to enroll hundreds of families. We're just doing a pilot to test it in a small group of families to see whether this coaching program moves the needle, whether this educational program is going to make the difference.
Speaker 2:Again, we're taking these years of anecdotes that we've been collecting and what these families have done, and we're taking all that knowledge and all that information and we're pouring it into a structured program to teach parents how to do this health and healing work for their own families, and we're going to document that. So that means, you know, take measurements at the beginning, take measurements at the end to see, you know, did this move the needle? And if it does move the needle, how can we then get this out to all the families who have a child with autism? Because every family who has a child with autism ought to have the ability to learn the things that are going to keep that child healthy and help them get back onto a typical developmental trajectory.
Speaker 1:Listening to you, I want to know the answers. Now You're talking about the antibiotics and sugar. I'm like, no, tell me now. I have two little kids. I want to know. But I did want to know. Does it matter? Do you have a higher success rate if the intervention is when the child is young, say from birth to three years old, or does?
Speaker 2:it matter? Yeah, no doubt it matters. So the earlier you start, the earlier you intervene, the better. And I often say to parents people will be like, oh, but my child's a picky eater. I can't do that right now and I will say there is no easier day than today to start changing your diet or making changes. Because the younger they are, the easier it is. The more plastic their brains are, the habits aren't as well established, the neurodevelopment hasn't finished. I mean, you're talking about a child between zero and six. There's so much going on in terms of neurodevelopment. So if you start when they're younger than six, there's just incredible opportunity to unwind any developmental stalls or any developmental impairments that have happened.
Speaker 2:Having said all that, yes, it's better to start earlier, but we have cases of people who have fully reversed their diagnoses, even developmental things like autism, starting in the teens and later. We have this one case of a boy who started gene-genus diet with autism. He was 15 when he started working with a functional medicine doctor, started doing the labs, doing custom supplements and nutrition, changing the diet to a nutrient-dense diet that really supported gut health. That child lost his diagnosis by 17. And then we have a friend of our organization who is an adult woman, who is an adult with autism, who became diagnosed with Crohn's disease in her late 20s and it was the diagnosis of her Crohn's disease that got her thinking about the relationship between the gut and the brain and how her gut might be related to her autism symptoms. So she started working with like a naturopath and doing all kinds of integrative and nutrition oriented and lifestyle oriented changes to heal her Crohn's disease, which is also reversible. And when she healed her gut from the Crohn's disease, most of her autism symptoms went away. So what exactly is Crohn's disease? Most of her autism symptoms went away.
Speaker 2:Now, what exactly is Crohn's disease? So Crohn's disease is an auto. It's an inflammatory, autoimmune disease that affects the gastrointestinal tract. It can be severely debilitating because the intestines become so inflamed that you can almost barely absorb any nutrients. So many times a severe form of Crohn's it can end you up in the hospital and you might need a feeding tube because your gastrointestinal tract is so diseased.
Speaker 2:So Crohn's is typically managed with biologics, like the drugs that suppress your immune system, like Humira type drugs, but all that's doing is suppressing your immune system and making your immune system not able to fight infections, not able to get rid of cancers that might be circulating in your body. So why would you want to suppress your immune system when your immune system has a very important job to do? Instead of suppressing the immune system, what we need to do is regulate the immune system. So that means getting your microbiome, that ecology of microorganisms in your gut. Get that back into balance, because that's part of why people develop Crohn's disease is because the microbiome gets so dysbiotic or out of balance. So this woman I was mentioning before, her microbiome was so dysbiotic and out of balance that she developed the symptoms of Crohn's.
Speaker 2:Crohn's can result in just chronic diarrhea, abdominal pain. It's a horrible condition to have to live with. Some people even have bowel resections and end up getting ostomy bags, which are basically plastic bags to take your waste out of your body that are attached on the outside of your body. So that is a very severe disease. But when you start understanding it from that root cause perspective, you start realizing that by making changes to what you're eating every single day and making changes to your stress level for instance, stress can is such a major part of Crohn's disease as well making changes to the toxins in your environment, you can change that ecology in your gut and you can heal it.
Speaker 2:And once you heal it, the benefits you're going to feel go way beyond your gut, because the gut and the brain are intricately connected. So you might have also symptoms of depression. You might have symptoms, so you might have also symptoms of depression. You might have symptoms of anxiety. You might have sensory symptoms, like related to an autism diagnosis. Those are all connected to that brain and gut pathway. So this woman I was telling you about, she's an adult, but she's in her. She's my age now. You would never know she had autism, you have no idea, because she did so much of that healing work that started in her gut.
Speaker 1:Wow, so do you think that a lot of these disorders do they stem from?
Speaker 2:gut health? Oh yes, absolutely. I mean I wrote a book in 2010. It's called the Compromised Generation and about two thirds of that book is about gut bacteria. It's that important. The theme of the book is, you know, looking at the changes to our environment in the last couple of decades and why we have so many sick kids. And, as I said before, it's really about modern living. It's all the things that we're doing in the modern world that are making our kids sick. But the changes that have impacted our gastrointestinal tracts are profound and I think one of the biggest smoking guns in this whole chronic illness epidemic for kids and adults is widespread use of antibiotics and other things that kill good gut bacteria. So antibiotics are one category, but birth control pills are another category.
Speaker 2:80% of American women have been on birth control pills or another kind of hormone steroid medication at some point in their life, and those destroy your gut bacteria, completely changes the pH in your gut and if you change just like changing a pH in a pond if you change a pH, the types of organisms that can live there are going to change. So we've done that for like an entire two generations of women. If you go back to the 1960s. Then there's the classes of medications like asthma medications. Asthma medications totally destroy your gut, changed the pH there. And then there's pesticides like glyphosate, which are ubiquitous in American food supply. It's a herbicide that's sprayed on a lot of grain crops, so like wheats and oats and barley, also sprayed on GMO crops like soybeans and corn and canola, and so it is a chemical that's ubiquitous in the American diet and it also destroys your gut bacteria.
Speaker 2:And the reason why that matters is because the gut bacteria are critical for health. They regulate your immune system. They literally signal to your immune cells to turn on and turn off. They help you detoxify.
Speaker 2:So if you have taken around antibiotics wiped out your gut bacteria and then you're exposed to something like mercury or lead, you're more likely to retain that heavy metal in your body if your gut bacteria have been wiped out, whereas if your gut bacteria are intact and it's rich diverse microbiota in there, they help you. They literally help you grab those metals and excrete them through your stool. They help you extract nutrients from your food. So if you cleaned out all the microbes from your gut and you were eating a healthy food, it wouldn't matter, because those microbes break down the food. They digest the food for you and extract B vitamins, for instance, that you otherwise wouldn't be able to get from food. So they are profoundly important to our health. And I would say in the modern world we have just kind of carpet bombed the human gastrointestinal tract and the human microbiome and the things that you see like asthma and allergies and autism and ADHD and autoimmune diseases. That is one of the natural outgrowths of destroying the human microbiome.
Speaker 1:What can someone do if they took an antibiotic to help with their gut microbiome that has been damaged?
Speaker 2:There's a nutritionist she's an academic nutritionist named Liz Lipsky and she has been widely quoted as saying one round of antibiotics and you will never get your microbiome back again. It irrevocably changed your microbiome. Now, having said that, have you changed it? Yes, does that mean you can't restore health and balance back to that microbiome? No, I believe foundationally, fundamentally, you can always restore health. So the microbiome can be rebuilt. But the question is, can it be rebuilt to what it was? Maybe, maybe not. I think that's to be determined and a lot of microbiome researchers are really trying to figure that out right now.
Speaker 2:But there are so many ways, like after you've taken your round of antibiotics. There are so many things that you can do to restore balance to the gut. So that might be, for instance, not eating sugars or refined carbohydrates, because those grow the wrong kind of microbe in there. It might be spending time outdoors and exposing yourself to soil microorganisms, like in the soil. It might be eating fermented foods and a lot of high fibrous foods, because that's the kind of food that the good bacteria thrive on, and eating a diversity of foods. If you have the same, like four foods that you eat every single day, you're going to grow the same four microbes that eat that food. But the healthy gut is a diverse gut. It's got many hundreds of types of microbes in there and so it's important for us to have as much diversity to our diet as possible to grow many different types of organisms.
Speaker 2:I always told my kids when they were little I was like you're not just feeding yourself, you're feeding your little pets in your gut. Like you have to think about it, like you're feeding them too and they need a certain type of food. And it's like feeding fish food to a dog, like if you're giving them the wrong type, it doesn't work. So I feel like that is something we don't really practice in the modern world that we need to start thinking about. How do we feed our gut so that we maintain good gut health?
Speaker 2:So to go back to your original answer, can we repair the damage from antibiotics? Absolutely, I think what we need to be careful of as a society is that trigger response that we have in the ER or in the urgent care or at the pediatrician's office to always lead with an antibiotic. And in a lot of countries they don't do that. Like in Germany for an ear infection, their first line of treatment is homeopathy, which doesn't destroy the gut.
Speaker 2:In America you have even an inkling of an ear infection or sore throat. It doesn't matter if it's viral or bacteria Viral. An antibiotic's not going to do anything. You're still going to get prescribed an antibiotic, even if it's viral. Why? Because doctor has five minutes to see you and the parents or the patient wants an answer and here's the script. That's the only thing they have time to. So I feel I feel for a lot of these doctors who have to get like 60 patients in on a day, like it's not. That's not realistic, but that is how our system has been set up and that is what needs to change, because we need to be able to have the time with a practitioner and a parent practitioner and patient sitting down and being like all right, let's talk about the root causes here, and you can't do that in five minutes.
Speaker 1:And when you mentioned all different types of bacteria, I remember when I was talking to Hillary and she was talking about seasonal eating, which is what you were talking about yeah, so you should eat with the seasons, yeah, yeah, that was something that I didn't really know about and I learned about and I thought that made a lot of sense. But you don't even think about it, because now all the foods get shipped into the grocery store so there is no like seasonal fruit. It looks, you know, it's just all, but I do, I do love that and that makes so much sense. So how can people help Documenting Hope?
Speaker 2:Well, we are an organization that is small but mighty and I think our biggest need right now is to get some funding behind our research. So our research, like I was saying, we're doing these small sample size pilot studies because that's all we have capacity for in terms of our funding. We're not, like, funded by an NIH grant, the government, and we don't have a whole great writing department, so we are literally funded by $5 a year donations, $100 a year donations. I mean, that's how we've gotten off the ground and in order for us to reach more people with more solutions, to be able to test these solutions and make sure they work, we just basically need more funding. And the other thing that's really important to us is that we get the word out.
Speaker 2:Most people don't even know that there's an alternative path to what they get at their pediatrician's office, and we feel like time is of the essence with our children, right? Like I was saying before, the earlier you start the better. So if you know all these parents that are out there struggling with their child, maybe they just got an autism diagnosis or maybe they got a rare autoimmune diagnosis. That is not a life sentence, but they're told that it is. So it's important that we get the word out that healing is possible, recovery from these conditions is possible, and we want people to have access to our resources on our website and to join our membership community, because that's how they have the best shot at getting their kids on the road to recovery.
Speaker 1:Right and I think so many times with a lot of adults I know for myself. I had really severe rosacea and I went to several dermatologists. They were like this is just something you have to live with and it was painful and I couldn't leave the house for like a week and it was really bad. I told my husband I said there's no way something's causing this. They were like nothing, we're not really sure.
Speaker 1:But it took me to randomly be listening to a podcast where someone was talking about there was a functional doctor on and he was like no, you have to look at your gut, you have to look at the root cause. And then I was introduced to a functional doctor and it's completely changed my life and save the world. Look at that. Don't say, look at that, we're saving the world here. But I did. I thought that was just really interesting because I was so upset and you're, you're so frustrated when something like that occurs and you're just like I'm not going to take no, or this is just something you have to live with and like something's going on. We have to find out what it is. So I absolutely love love when I saw a root cause approach to healing our kids and I want to know is there anything before I let you go I know you're very busy Is there anything that we haven't mentioned that you think someone should know?
Speaker 2:I think that recovery is possible at any age. I was alluding to this earlier with the two stories of the 30-year-old and the 17-year-old. A lot of times people feel like, oh well, I'm just hearing this for the first time and I have an 18-year-old, there's nothing that can be done. That is not true. So I want people to know there's always hope for healing, there's always hope for recovery. People do it all the time, but it does require change.
Speaker 1:And that can be hard. It's time and adjusting. I know, even as an adult I was in my late 30s when that happened and it was even for an adult. It's tough changing diet, changing lifestyle, changing a lot of things. But what's the alternative, right?
Speaker 2:So, and then you feel so much better and you can also shift your mindset on. You know, when you develop some kind of symptom or you get some kind of diagnosis, you can make that mindset shift away from like why is this happening to me, or this sucks, or I really hate this, or like that. You can go into that place of despair this sucks, or I really hate this, or like that. You can go into that place of despair and if you shift your mindset and you're like, thanking the symptoms, thank you for showing up, thank you for being communication to me that something in my life is out of balance and thank you for giving me the opportunity to course correct, because if you have a symptom that is not life-threatening, it's not cancer, you can turn it around and it's an opportunity before you get to the cancer.
Speaker 2:Cancer is usually like an end stage thing, where the immune system isn't doing what it's supposed to be doing because it's been struggling prior to that. It doesn't just happen for no reason. So I always feel like, if you get an autoimmune symptom or if you get a GI symptom or a mood symptom, listen to that and take it as an opportunity. It's like your gift. You're like, oh, thank you, thank you. Thank you for telling me I need to course correct and I'm going to do that and when I do, I'm going to be healthier, I'm going to be happier, I'm going to feel better and I'm going to prevent worse things from happening later. So that mindset shift, I think is so key.
Speaker 1:That is a great way to end. This is a great way to end the podcast. So, beth, tell everybody how they can follow you and Documenting Hope, yeah, so you can hit documentinghopecom and you can get on our email list.
Speaker 2:That's the best way to find out about our research, how you can get involved, and to find like we have monthly webinars with new experts every month. That's great information. So you stay abreast of that kind of information by being on our email list. But you can also follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn and X and Facebook and all the usual places All of them.
Speaker 1:I'll make sure I have that on the show notes for everybody. So make sure to look below and so you can make sure you can follow Beth and Documenting Hope. So, beth, thank you so much again for coming on, and I want to thank everybody for tuning in to another episode of the Truman Charities Podcast podcast. I really found this episode to be so eye-opening for so many different reasons, especially as a mom. This was a very informative conversation. If you'd like to follow us, you can follow us on Instagram at Jamie underscore, truman Charities. Facebook at Truman Charities. You can follow me on LinkedIn at Jamie Truman. So you don't miss any of our upcoming events, go to TrumanCharitiescom and sign up for our newsletter. We will make sure to send out all the information about our three charity events that we have and also Orbitus' Best Happy Hour. Thanks again for tuning in to another episode of the Truman Charities Podcast. Until next time you.
