Hi everyone and welcome back to Airway First, the podcast from the Children's Airway First
Foundation.
I'm your host Rebecca Downey.
My guest today is Dr. Becky Andrews, a naturopathic doctor, acupuncturist, and herbalist.
She is a graduate of the University of Kentucky and Bastyr University.
Dr. Andrews specializes in chronic mystery illnesses, mood and neurotransmitter issues,
genomics, pain, sports injuries, digestive issues, fatigue, environmental, and mold
illnesses.
In Seattle, she had a private practice and served as faculty at Bastyr University.
Dr. Andrews moved to Austin in late 2011 to work as the educational coordinator for the
American Botanical Council.
Following that appointment, she served as adjunct faculty at AOME, School of Integrative Medicine.
She currently serves as a naturopathic health consultant at People's RX and has a private
naturopathic and acupuncture practice at C. Shoe Acupuncture Wellness.
Dr. Andrews also serves on the advisory board of the Children's Airway First Foundation.
You can find out more about Dr. Becky at DrBecky.net.
And now, here's my interview with Dr. Becky Andrews.
Alright, thanks so much for joining us this afternoon, Dr. Becky.
How are you?
I'm good.
Thank you for having me.
It's so good to see you, Rebecca.
It's great to see you.
It's been a while.
I know, I know.
It's been too long.
It's been an uncomfortably busy year, hasn't it?
It has.
So I appreciate you being here with us.
And as we dig in, I'd like to start with exactly what a neuropathic doctor is and how
your approach differs from what most people know of mainstream medicine.
Okay.
So first, I'm going to gently correct.
It's naturopathic, which is a weird word.
Thank you.
I think people haven't actually even heard.
So yeah, it's a great question.
I have a spiel, in fact, that I give to all my patients here in Texas because it's so
not well known here.
So I am going to actually answer the question that you asked.
But before I answer that, I think the first thing that I need to make clear is that there's
actually several separate groups of people that kind of use that same title, especially
in states that don't license naturopathic doctors.
If there's no licensure for a profession, that means there's no title protection.
And so in states like Texas where there's no licensure for naturopathic doctors, that
means anybody can call themselves a naturopath and they do.
So the other thing I guess that I'm figuring out, it's taken me 10 years to figure this
out, is that there are a lot of people that hear the word naturopath and they think that
it is a descriptor like holistic.
They think that it's just like it's just an adjective or something.
And it's an actual academic medical degree like osteopath or medical doctor or dentist.
So it's an actual degree.
It's a specific thing with parameters and a diploma and things.
So it's not a descriptor like holistic.
Or integrative.
But I think a lot of people think of it as a descriptor and I think that's one of the
reasons why it's used in so many other contexts and gets tagged on to other kinds of practitioners
that aren't actually naturopathic doctors.
So three main groups.
One of them is the first group is the one I consider myself part of.
And those are what I would call the medically trained naturopathic physicians.
Now the Texas Medical Board does not want me to apply the word physician to me myself
because I'm not licensed in Texas.
The reality is that I am a licensed physician in Washington state.
So actually technically I am physician and if one of them went to Seattle I wouldn't
expect them to say that they weren't a physician.
So medically trained naturopaths, we learn all the same facts about how the body works.
We learn all the same science about how the body works in physiology and biochemistry.
All of that.
What's different from us between us and medical doctors isn't the information, it's not the
science or the data or the facts, it's how we apply them.
So Western medicine has a fundamental assumption that disease can just happen.
It can just be bad luck or it, you know, like almost like an accident that you got this
chronic degenerative disease.
Which in our philosophy is that the body will heal itself if nothing's in the way.
That our bodies have a natural inclination towards homeostasis.
And so as naturopathic doctors instead of just trying to cut off and make, get rid of
the symptom or eliminate the symptom, we look at why is the symptom happening, what is that
telling us.
And what we call it, we call it find and treat the cause is one of the words, the phrases
that we use.
And another phrase in our philosophy is remove the obstacle to cure.
And that one's a really big deal.
And I really, that's a juicy one that I've always really liked.
And that is what is in the body's way of healing itself.
Okay, so what's an example of that?
Fundamental concept that the body will heal itself if it has all the tools and resources
that it needs, and there's nothing in the way.
And that premise is completely missing from Western medicine.
Oh, absolutely.
Like that's one of the biggest places where we diverge.
And then I think that the second it's like on that fundamental philosophy, there's a
divergence there.
The other way we really are different from conventional doctors is that we don't fragment
care.
So in the conventional system, especially now, they pretty much don't have generalists.
Like really your primary care doctors have been reduced, especially in here in Texas,
what I've seen is primary care doctors don't actually give care at all, unless it's just
an antibiotic.
Right, it's something that's responsible.
It's a very important thing to do.
It's something that's very important to somebody, some other specialist.
And I'm always boggled by that.
I'm like, you don't need to send somebody to a psychiatrist for a basic antidepressant.
You don't need to send somebody to an endocrinologist for basic thyroid support or birth control
for like, that's not what the endocrinologist does.
Anyway, so that level of fragmentation, I think really utterly destroys any hope of integrity
of care.
And so the naturopathic doctors are trained to look at all the systems and most importantly,
how they connect to each other.
And so one of my favorite examples of this would be somebody that has, I think I would,
yeah, I'll just go ahead and give the example now.
Somebody like, you say you have a patient that has a sinus infection and has like IBS
and then they also have anxiety and depression.
Conventional medicine would send them to a gastroenterologist and EENT or an allergist
and a psychologist or a psychiatrist.
They would treat them as if those were three completely separate things.
As a naturopath, I would be like, hmm, that's all the same cause.
So I would be like, okay, so that IBS and sinus chronic sinus inflammation are both
being caused by something they're swallowing that's inflaming their mucous membranes and
causing phlegm.
Right.
So it's probably gluten or dairy.
It might be soy, might be corn, might be two or three things combined, but it's probably
something they eat every day.
And if you cause inflammation in the tube as it were, it changes your neurotransmitter
production both in your gut and in your brain.
And when we get inflamed gut, we get a mildly, mildly inflamed brain.
And so if you don't have good neurotransmitter production and you also have mild inflammation
in the brain, you've got anxiety and depression.
And so all of this leads me to lots of questions, right?
This leads me to a lot of questions because I did speak with, and I will slaughter this
as well, just with my lovely speech impediment, osteopathic provider.
Thank you.
Thank you, lastly, thank you.
And she said something very similar and I really, really want to dig into this because
I'm starting to hear this pattern.
We also heard this with Dr. Hall several episodes ago on how everything is connected.
And it really can come down to food.
I mean, something as simple, especially in adults and older children, what we're putting
in is part of what's happening to our bodies, even though we think, oh, I'm eating this
healthy thing.
And then you start to unpack and you realize, no, it's processed up, yin, yang.
That's right.
And we're doing this to ourselves.
That's right.
Yeah.
And the difference between eating food that like you pull the carrot out of the ground,
you wipe it off on your overalls and stick it in your mouth.
The difference between that and, yeah, like a packaged muffin that you get, like just,
like the difference is so stark biochemically and what's in it.
And you, you, you, you on the list of questions you asked, you were asking me also about environment.
And I was like, oh God, how many hours does she have to talk?
Right.
Because, yeah, the chemicals that we're exposed to, oh my God, they are having such a huge
impact on not just our current bodies, but on the gonadal development and then embryonic
development and then the, I mean, yeah, the cycle is being so, we're now at the third
generation of children who are born with a body burden.
Third generation.
Yeah.
We're, so the children being born now, their grandmothers were exposed to chemical, enough
chemicals to change their hormones.
And those changes.
And then so the, the female children, those women had those, all right, so grandmother,
right?
The female children, those women had formed in the uterus in the context of toxic chemicals
being present when that body was being formed.
And so that changed the eggs that were made, that were developed in that, that female embryo.
And then they are now the mothers of the children that are being born.
So they were, those mothers, their entire body was formed in the context of toxic chemicals
being around it.
So trying to put this in something that I can digest here.
Yeah.
So, generation, this next generation that's being born, they are, I mean, we're seeing
them, their whole hormone systems are different.
We're talking about this next generation, just, you know, again, to wrap my head around
the one-hitter teenagers.
Generation Z.
Yeah.
So Gen Z.
So, okay, got it.
Millennials Gen Z.
Yeah.
Their mothers bodies were formed in the context of chemicals.
And therefore they're not only are their mothers hormones different and that they passed those
genes down, but that eggs that are formed in those uteruses, because women are born with
all the eggs that we're ever going to have.
So we form all the, our future children are formed when we are embryos.
And so you dip that in toxic chemicals, it's going to change everything about any future
children those babies have.
Wow.
Yeah.
It's, it's a, what the level of impact that the chemicals that we've started using in 1945,
like we're only just now starting to see just how bad that's really the impact of that.
But that's one of the reasons that we're seeing so much diabetes.
It's one of the reasons we're seeing, I mean, there's, you know, all of the chronic diseases
that we have, they're all multi-factors.
They're not just, right?
But, but, you know, one of the reasons we're seeing so much obesity, one of the reasons
we're seeing so much diabetes, one of the reasons we're seeing autism and attention deficit.
I think part of that is, is the chemical exposure that their mothers had.
Well, that's fascinating.
Yeah.
That was fascinating.
It's nothing new for our airways, but, you know, right, you said the word environment
and this is where my brain goes.
And this is where it goes.
So, all right.
So around the environment, I have, I have a couple of different directions that I want
to go and I want to make sure that, that we cover.
One of which is really digging into food and, and the environment and how it impacts.
And the other is specifically around, and it, and it leads to it.
So I'm going to ask you which way you want to go first.
The other is, you know, what we know historically, specifically, you know, let's start with
Western price on just how our, our, our jobs have changed so much.
And, and again, that it all ties together, right?
And all ties together with food and the industrial revolution and how we've.
Yes.
Changed everything.
So I don't know which way you want to go with that.
I think that we should separate because they're both so big and complicated.
We should separate environmental toxin and mold exposure.
We should separate that from food.
Okay.
And I kind of think of them like food has the impact of structure.
Like that's like the raw materials we build ourselves out of.
And the toxic chemicals are like poisons that are coming in from the outside and changing
us.
So let's start with the foundation of food stuff.
All right.
Let's start with that.
Yeah.
Let's go there.
If you have a specific place you want me to start or do you want me to just talk, start
with the Western price stuff, which was.
Yeah.
So we can start with Western price.
Give it, give everybody just a little bit of a background on Western price, the dentist
and you know, the work he did in the 1920s.
All right.
So I'm going to scroll out a little bit more and put this in some fun social context.
Okay.
So when Candy and I first connected and started talking about forming calf, you know, I was
like, well, I'm not an airway doctor.
I don't know really much about this.
What do I have to offer?
She's like, you're the one that figured this out.
And I made me like think about where would I like where in my training are the pieces
that allowed me to recognize an airway disorder in her daughter.
Right.
And I went then went back to thinking about several of my teachers in medical school teaching
me and again, we didn't talk about airway disorders in any extended way.
Okay.
Well, because it's just not currently a thing in the curriculum, right?
But it was actually mentioned in passing by mentioning the work of this particular dentist
named Western Price in the 1920s.
Okay.
And the context that I was taught in naturopathic medical school was in how profoundly diet
impacts fetal development, like maternal diet affects how the child is formed and then early
childhood diet affects how the child's body grows.
And in particular, they did mention that it changes the shape of the job.
And that was sort of central to this person's work.
And he recorded so much of it that it sort of got trickled down into part of the naturopathic
sort of dogma and ideology.
And so he spent a ton of time talking about it, but I had one of my professors was just
super into the Western Price stuff.
And so, you know, I think that it was when I had just started to teach on faculty and
he and I were having lunch together and we ended up on in a rabbit hole.
And I was really fascinated by this whole idea and it caught my imagination enough that
the memory of it stuck.
So years, what is this like 15, 20 years later, I'm talking to Candy about this and
I'm like, you know, this isn't just about getting surgical or structural intervention
between this age and this age.
This is like, we can prevent this.
Like this isn't a random accidental default thing that happens.
This happens for a reason.
So it's sort of going back to that naturopathic mindset is the, well, why?
And why does this not happen to everybody?
Why is it happening more often?
Right.
And so that and that triggered the memory of Western prices were.
So here is Western prices were.
So basically this guy was a dentist in the early 1900s and in the like 19 teens and 20s.
Unfortunately, it does have the origins in the eugenics movement, which is super yucky
and we wish that it didn't have that affiliation, but he started on this worldwide tour where
he was going to take photographs and measurements of different indigenous people's skulls in
an attempt to prove that white European men were the superior race.
What's fascinating is that over the years that he was doing this, he came to the opposite
conclusion and the eugenics movement.
He decided that it was butchers, which it is.
It is.
Yeah.
And so what he discovered and an irrefutably true was that indigenous people who did not
have a Europeanized diet that did were not eating refined or ground flowers.
We're not eating bread.
We're not eating sugar.
They were instead eating roots and you know, roughage and things that they had to chew
a whole lot.
Those people consistently had these very wide upper palates and wide jaws.
They had perfect teeth.
Now remember he was a dentist, so he was particularly interested in teeth, right?
Took photographs of their smiles and then photographs had them lift their lips away,
photographs of their teeth and photographs of their upper palates.
And so all of them had these big wide palates, big open sinuses, high cheekbones, beautiful
smiles.
He also noticed they didn't have any cavities and that was true throughout the lifetime.
They were born and died with these huge sets of beautiful teeth.
They didn't have to have their wisdom teeth pulled.
They weren't.
There's no crowding.
And he finally came to the conclusion that it was due to that indigenous non-refined
diet.
And he also would find siblings or other members of that cohort and when he was lucky, he'd
find a sibling or a twin that had somehow become separated and one of them had been
fed the European diet and one had been fed the indigenous diet.
And without fail, the child that had been fed the European diet had a, like their face
was very, very narrow, their lower jaw and upper jaw.
They open their mouth and their teeth are completely crowded and turn sideways and crooked and
decaying.
And it was just dramatic.
And I don't, I did not read his work enough to know if he observed that there were already
airway problems in those children, but based on what we know now, it's not possible that
there weren't.
That there weren't, right?
And it's twofold, right?
It's what they ate.
But that what they ate was, if I'm understanding this correctly, it actually caused a workout.
So a carrot is going to work the muscles in your jaw and your, and your oral area versus
if you're eating mushed carrots.
That's right.
So, so some, from what I can tell there's been, he sort of started it, but there have
been several other anthropological studies on this kind of idea.
And the rough conclusion that they've come to right now is that the physical structural
part is primarily due to the chewing early on that, that as soon as there's teeth, they're
working those working in it.
And it's, and it's, and it's helping with the formation.
But there's in, in, and so that's separate kind of from the medical research on it.
And it, I noticed the structure of anthropological research is, right.
Then the structure of medical research, they're not looking at placebo control double-blind
studies.
They're looking at themes and trends and it's, it's really interesting.
It's kind of refreshing.
And so I feel like that the, the, the fiber and the chewing is part of it.
But the other piece I think is the nutrients themselves that are in present in a whole
food's diet, plant-based diet, where you're going to get a lot of vitamin K because you're
eating a lot of leaves.
You're going to get a lot of vitamin D and you're going to get a lot of vitamin A in
the form of adicarotein.
And it turns out that if you look in the medical literature, they, oh, I forgot the other big
nutrient is folate.
So that we're looking for for the vitamins and nutrients that we're looking for.
And this appears to be prenatal.
So nutrients that the mother would consume before and during pregnancy.
And then nutrients that are essential for the baby, the child when they're first developing.
And those are what the mother eats.
So even though you take the pre, right, you take, you take the prenatal vitamins and all
of that business and whatever.
But what you're saying is it's actually, let's go a step further.
Let's talk about what the mom's eating.
Yeah.
So what they, yeah, what the anthropology stuff says and what Western Price found was
that what the mom ate also affected the palate, width and stuff of the child.
So part of that can step the child once the child is born and starts to develop on their
own.
Yeah.
And I think that it would only be very recently in history where a mother might eat one way
and then the child and then, you know, a few months later might raise their child, learn
totally different food.
Like I think that's a very modern phenomenon.
I think traditionally the kid was going to eat with the family eight because we just
didn't have that kind of variety of choices.
You know, this whole part of, you know, this part of France was eating these five foods
every day.
Right.
We didn't have the, the choices that we have.
Right.
But anyway, yeah, I think there's the chewing muscle part and then I think there's the nutrient
part and our nutrients are going to be folate and not folic acid.
That's a really important distinction.
Folic acid is synthetic garbage and our body doesn't actually have a really easy, it has
to go through several steps before it can be converted into real folate to be used
and not everybody can do that.
So folate and specifically activated or methylated folate, that is what our bodies really actually
need.
Okay.
That piece, vitamin K, vitamin D and vitamin A.
And folate is going to be found in leafy greens, foliage.
Got it.
The bigger it is, the more folated it's got.
Got it.
And here's another thing that, just a factoid, you can destroy folate with heat.
So if you cook the bejesus out of your kale until it's mush, then the folate's pretty
much gone.
Oh.
So you want to flash saute things, flash, flash, you know, you want to, what is it called
when you dip it in boiling water and dip it out?
Oh, there's a word for it.
There is a word in a blanch.
Blanch.
Thank you, Blanch.
There we go.
Yes.
You can plant your greens or lightly saute them or even like there's ways to make raw
salads out of things without them really feeling raw by like massaging acid and salt into them.
You can break down the cell walls enough to be able to chew them easily and have easier
access to the nutrients in it without actually cooking it with that heat.
So, okay.
So those kinds of ideas.
But yeah, so basically the folate has to do with the development of the midline of the
human being.
So if you don't have enough folate, if you're completely deficient, you can end up with
things like neural tube defects where the spine doesn't seal and part of the central
nervous system sticking out.
When you see that, you will also see the top of the palate not growing together and you
can end up with a cleft palate or even a cleft lip is the most severe form of that.
Okay.
But if you're not that deficient, you could see that if those things could happen that
it's not a far stretch that if you're just a little low in folate, maybe it grows together
but just barely and you end up with this tall skinny thing instead of a wider arch because
it doesn't finish that.
That high arch palate.
Yeah.
And that's something that I think we talked about.
The halfway, yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
And that's something that we've, I think we've talked about in previous podcasts that if
the apcaras changed and we start looking at mouths of infants when they're born can
be adjusted.
Yes.
And caught early, which will help.
But then we're back to, okay, you catch it.
Now as the child starts to develop, we move into what are they going to eat?
How are we going to help strengthen and grow their palate the correct way?
Yeah.
So I think just those interventions alone give the child a much better chance of that
self-correcting.
And then if we add onto it some of these other techniques that some of the other specialists
on the board know about, you know, of like, you know, without surgery, you know, helping
to restructure that from a, like a more physical structural help.
I think you combine that with diet.
I think you're really on to some like real solutions if things don't get caught early
enough and we can't take care of the prenatal piece.
Gotcha.
But what it strikes me is the idea that maybe somebody cares enough about this that we can
start addressing prenatal nutrition.
And now it's not necessarily just in the rich white women that we need to do that.
We really, where we really need that is in the more impoverished parts of, you know,
our population, people that don't necessarily have access to fancier, you know, and unfortunately
raw whole foods are now fancier foods, right?
Right.
What got substights in our culture is refined, refined crap and sugar.
And so if you are on a limited income or you're getting your food from a food bank or you're
getting your food from a discount place, it's going to be tweekies and sugar and refined
stuff and packages.
It's not going to be fresh produce.
Right.
Or McDonald's are something along those lines that's easier.
It's cheaper.
You can afford it.
And that's what's so important.
So I think that what we really need to do is think about how do we subsidize actual healthy
food and how do we address food deserts in our inner city?
Yes.
You know, like how do we, how do we pay people in the inner city to or in areas where there's
food deserts?
If there's a bunch of unemployed people, can we pay them to grow food in their neighborhood?
Right.
So that it's right there.
That's right there.
Can we subsidize like places like a space for them to can and preserve that food so that
they have it through the winter?
Like let's look at urban homesteading and let's look at, you know, there's so many exciting
and, you know, this all sound far away from airways.
But at the end of the day, no, it's all related now as a naturopathic doctor.
You can see how my brain works.
It goes to like, what's the actual cause?
Well, the actual cause is poverty.
Right.
The actual cause is, you know, refined food.
The actual cause is policy.
You know, the actual cause, I hate to say it is partially capitalism.
Right.
And not that I don't want to live, you know, you know, I understand.
And just kind of as a side note for our listeners, Dr. Dana Johnson will be on the podcast in
a later episode.
And that is one of the things she will be discussing is environment and inner city and
some of the work she's done at LaRie Charter and other places.
Right.
Yes.
So that's going to be awesome.
I was feeling excited about a lot of the things she was talking about.
I was like, yes.
Yes.
Which will be so, so exciting.
And I, you know, another thing is, is, is you were talking that I thought about is I,
I, I try to correlate things to you to what I understand.
Right.
So I try to put it in perspective that makes sense to me.
And I figure if I can do that, our listeners can do that.
But I think about when I was pregnant.
I, you know, I got, okay, don't eat the donut.
That's not good for your baby.
Take your prenatal vitamin and drink lots of orange juice.
These are my big takeaways.
And this is somebody with a biology background.
These were my takeaways.
Orange juice.
I don't remember at this point, but there was something in orange juice that was supposed
to be really good for the baby's brain.
And great.
And I was like, all right.
So drink a lot.
And, you know, in, and depending on the cravings, you know, I was fortunate that the both of
my children see in utero seemed to really dig salad.
So that was great.
But you know, even with my background coming into this, taking the traditional classes,
that was my takeaway.
Right.
You know, and nobody said after the fact, Hey, here are the things you can do once your
baby's here.
Yeah.
This is why breastfeeding is so important.
It wasn't, you know, I always heard it was just the breast milk.
I had no idea.
No, we're talking about jaw development and, you know, setting your child up for success
for airway and dental structure.
And you know, that's great that you want to feed them these, these soft baby foods.
But wow, you realize what that's giving up.
Why don't you just make your own pure aid carrots because the nutrients are there and
it doesn't take you that much longer.
You know, these things weren't there.
So I think when we're looking at one educating revamping how we're educating providers, because
that's something that we're all talking about because like you said, airways not taught,
these things aren't taught.
It's also just education across the board.
I mean, you can just don't know.
I mean, there are still a lot of medical doctors and like, I don't know what the statistics
on it are, but I mean, still.
I really last week, one of my patients said, my primary care doctor rolled their eyes and
said, you're what you eat has no impact on your health.
They actually said that out loud.
That's my goal.
I don't understand how somebody can study biochemistry and come to that inclusion.
Like I just, I don't understand.
You are listening to Airway First with today's guest, Dr. Becky Andrews.
You can find out more about the Children's Airway First Foundation and our mission to
ensure that every child has access to screening, evaluation and treatment of all children's
airway disorders before the age of six on our website at childrensairwayfirst.org.
You can also find a ton of great resources for parents on our website, including videos,
blogs, recommended books, comprehensive medical research and more.
As a reminder, this podcast and the opinions expressed here are not a medical diagnosis.
If you suspect your child might have an airway issue, contact your pediatric airway dentist
or pediatrician.
And now back to my interview with Dr. Becky Andrews.
By the way, I'd like to give my doctor a shout out because he does not say these kind of
things.
I think I'm very fortunate.
And I feel like more and more that is going away.
I mean, I think more and more medical schools are starting to incorporate at least a shout
out to nutrition and a shout out to how nutrients impact your health and that they're actually
important.
You know, I think that also a lot of medical doctors have a whole lot less biochemistry
training than we think they do.
Yeah.
Like there are some, so I mean, just going back to that first question about like what
makes you different than a medical doctor, like the amount of education I have is almost
double that of a medical doctor.
So where, you know, they might get 15 or 18 hours of biochemistry training.
I had a full year.
Right.
They might have 18 or 20 hours of gross anatomy where they walked into a lab where the bodies
were already dissected and they went, hmm, yes, I see, I see the structure.
Whereas I had a year and I had dissected whole human being by myself.
I mean, the difference in what you learn during those two processes is huge.
It's huge.
Let's pick up on that food part because again, one of the things that people are going to
notice when they come to a naturopathic doctor website versus a traditional Western medicine
doctor website is in the blog.
You talk a lot about food.
I like the kale doctor.
Even like every other post is how to make another form of kale.
Right.
Kale.
We love kale.
So you do talk a lot about that and food and environment, obviously both can impact a child,
but it actually impacts the brain as well.
Oh, yes.
Yes.
I mean, not to be horrifically cliche, but it actually is true that we are what we eat
in a very literal sense.
Every single molecule in our entire body, every bone, every muscle, every cell, every
nerve, every enzyme, it all, 100% of it comes from food.
All of it.
It didn't come from the heart of us.
It is all from food.
Every bit of it is built from that.
So if you don't give yourself the raw materials, you can't build a healthy brain.
So I think a lot of people don't realize our brain is mostly, this is gross, but it's
mostly a bag of fat waiting to go rancid.
So we need antioxidants.
We need a wide variety of healthy, unoxidized fats.
So I've had people's doctors tell them to go on a fat-free diet.
I'm like, what is this, 1975?
That's not a thing anymore.
You can't have a healthy nervous system.
I have a patient that has a brain injury, severe, severe concussion, and she suddenly
developed obesity after her head injury.
This is a known thing because the head injury was close enough to the middle of her brain
that it affected her pituitary gland.
And that regulates, there's, there's, our date regulation resides in that among lots
of other things, right?
Also turns out we just found out that she's living in a moldy house.
So she has a perfect storm of she's, every day she's being poisoned with neuro-toxic
chemicals, chemicals that are literally used by the military as nerve agents.
She's breathing those in every day.
So that's keeping her from healing.
It's affecting her nervous system and her immune system.
But she, and she is struggling to eat healthy food because she has brain fog and fatigue
and body pain, right?
And so she doesn't have the energy to plan her food.
So what she does, she goes and eats out.
She's got to eat, right?
But her doctor told her to go because she gained weight.
She said, you need to go on a fat free diet.
And I was like, she understands you have a neural, like you've got brain damage that
we're trying to heal.
How are we going to heal that with no fat?
I mean, just stagger the level of stupidity was just staggering.
Like, so this goes back to credit.
She was just like, I don't think that's right.
I was like, you're correct, that is not right.
What you do need to do is flood your body with really high quality, healthy fats.
Natural fats.
Yeah.
So fats occur in nature.
Some of them saturated, some of them cholesterol, some of them non-saturated from plants.
So you want to eat some avocados.
You need to eat some olives.
You need to have some olive oil.
You need to have some almonds and some cashews and some, you know, walnuts and, but also greens
and salads and some healthy free range animals that ate their indigenous natural diet of
bugs and grass, not corn.
Right.
Or anything else that was injected.
And so this kind of goes back to your comment earlier about the body can heal itself.
If we can remove those obstacles.
Bingo.
And many of these obstacles we're putting there ourselves.
Yeah.
And many of them, we're humans as a group are putting them there, but we're not making
those choices as individuals.
And that's where I feel like a lot of the chemical exposure comes in and a lot of like
the exposure to toxic chemicals from water damage buildings.
Like we're not choosing to have our house be water damaged.
We're not choosing to have that chemical company dump their waste in our water.
We just are not necessarily empowered to stop it.
So we can choose what we put in our mouth.
Yes.
Which and do that.
Let me ask a question.
If you have money, if you have the money and the resources, you can choose what you put
in your mouth.
Okay.
Fair enough.
So let me ask just off the cuff question about how do you feel about supplements?
Where you stand on that?
That's a really good question.
And that is my stance has actually evolved over the years.
Actually I was about 20 years into practice.
I am having a lighter.
Sometimes I'm having a lighter hand with supplements.
I am less likely now to tell people they should take something every day for the rest of their
life.
Like I'm much more inclined to say, let's try to get you into balance and then they
can supplement as a prepaid phone card that like we might need to just top you up every
now and then.
Okay.
That way.
Now that said, there is no question that because of the commercial farming techniques,
our soils have less nutrients in them and our food has less nutrients in it than it
did in 1950.
And that is trackable and measurable.
We know that organic food is often 50% more nutritious than conventionally grown produce
of the same sort.
So we are getting less nutrients from our food like to just to start with.
And that's before we find it.
And then if you find food diet, not only are we not getting more nutrients, we are getting
some of the nutrients that we needed.
But some of those refined like refined sugar or refined flour, it actually uses up nutrients
to process it and get it through our body.
So they only ate like white flour, you would deplete yourself of nutrients and that's
it's not as so rapid and so severe.
That's why they fortify those refined foods with vitamins is that so that people don't
develop nutrient deficiencies so fast that they put that they make the connection and
sue the company.
Oh, wow.
But you can if you had unlike if you did, let's say unrefined or unfortified wheat flour
that is so refined that it's white color, you would develop a couple several different
nutrition nutrient deficiencies bad enough to be obviously trackably sick in under a
month.
Wow.
Yeah, that's kind of terrifying.
So if you're a patient, if you're a patient that hypothetically will call her back and
back up.
Yeah.
Let's just say she the girl loves the carbs and she likes bread.
So yeah, she knows she knows the refined white bread is bad.
And she likes to bake and wants to bake her own stuff.
So for that kind of a patient, I mean, what is how do you in a healthy way, bake bread
with knowing what's out there on the shelves right now.
I will make a deal with that person.
Yeah.
Um, Becca, I think I deal with her that she could if she loves to bake, this is a perfect
opportunity to explore traditional baking techniques with with unrefined whole grains
from different parts of the world.
So you could take, let's say a beautiful muffin out of buckwheat flour, almond flour,
coconut flour.
You know, high fiber, high nutrient and gorgeous.
I mean, that's just gorgeous.
And they're, I mean, they're not going to have that ridiculous fluffiness that you get
from refined flour and all that gluten, right?
But they're still really delicious and tender and, and you throw some blueberries in there
and put some organic grass butter on it.
And oh, so good.
So I get to really stay away from the weeks.
Yeah.
I mean, I do not see a random subset of population.
The people that come to see me have self-selected because they're chronically ill and the Western
medical system didn't work for them.
So by default, I'm getting the people that have fallen through the cracks where there's
something extra going on, right?
So that means that everything that I've seen in my practice is biased, dramatically biased,
right?
Um, but, but, but from that point of bias, I would say that, you know, I'm not going
to say 90% of my patients get 90% better when they take gluten and dairy out of their diet.
Just gluten and dairy.
Just right out of the get go.
Start there.
Yeah.
That's amazing to me.
It's, it has gone to the point where I'm just like, this is standard issue.
You want to work with me, you're going to spend a month gluten and dairy free and you're,
then you're going to come back.
And, and I'm going to give you support for your neurotransmitters because at this point,
everyone is anxious and depressed because we feel like it's the end of the world.
Like on some level, everybody on the planet is in fight or flight right now.
And when you're in fight or flight, nothing else works.
Right.
Oh, I like everybody is now, let me treat your fight or flight and go gluten and dairy
free for four weeks, come back and tell me what happened.
And you know what?
Everybody comes back and they're like, Oh my gosh, I'm pooping again.
I'm sleeping again.
I'm not consumed with negative thoughts of the apocalypse.
I, you know, like all these things have changed because that inflammation is gone because
of that.
They're brain inflammation is gone, their gut inflammation is gone, their sinus issues
are gone, their ear issues are gone, the gut pain is gone, the reflux is gone, the back
pain is gone, the knee pain is gone because right.
And their depression is gone, their anxiety is gone, they're sleeping and now their brain
fog is gone.
And all of that was just taking away the foods that were causing.
Those two things.
Yeah.
And now I'd obviously for a child with an alley.
We got off track.
We were going to talk about the nutrients in the foods.
We were, but, but nope, you're good.
And we'll circle back to that.
But you know, just kind of talking about what we take out, you know, something as simple
as that, obviously it's not going to your course correct.
There's not a firm, the jaw, that kind of thing.
You know, that's a different treatment course, but for a child with an airway disorder that
doesn't sleep that has ADHD, could something as simple as taking gluten and dairy out just
to start with and working with, you know, a naturopathic doctor such as yourself, help
with the information that might just open up the airway, something, get them at least
some relief.
It's, it is ADHD 101.
Got it.
Gluten free, dairy free, sugar free.
And that's hard for children.
If they've already, if they, if they get sugar developed, introduced really early, their
brain evolves.
I think, I don't actually, I could be wrong about this, but I think that what happens
to the brain is very similar to what would happen to a baby who is exposed to cocaine
or heroin and utero.
Is that you develop, it's probably closer to heroin, but you develop addiction pathways
in the developing brain.
If there's, so there will be withdrawal of some kind.
And it's, it can be really traumatic for children to go off of white sugar once they, once it's
been introduced.
Oh.
Yeah.
So, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it while you still have control over what
the children are eating.
Right.
Because we're talking long term.
We're talking long term.
Is that in the days where your child has turned into a demon and they're screaming at the
top of their lungs?
No.
It's going to be horrible.
But do not get in.
Right.
The earplugs.
Make some zucchini bread and yeah.
Or do it slowly, you know, like wean it slowly.
There's, there's a lot of different approaches.
But yeah, like I said, there's, there's, there's multiple factors going on here.
There's the inflammation from things in gluten and dairy that aren't particularly compatible
to most human bodies.
There's the lack of nutrients and refined wheat.
There's the lack of fiber for chewing.
So we like all of those are hitting airway in different ways.
So dairy.
It's a perfect storm.
Yeah.
Dairy very often and I would say maybe gluten a quarter of the time, but dairy almost 100%
of the time makes all these membranes puppy, all the membranes.
I'm pointing because I keep thinking.
Right.
She's pointing up to her jaw and everything.
Yeah.
That makes the nose and the sinus and the throat and the tongue and the mouth and the
lungs.
It makes all of that a little bit puffy.
Dairy does that reliably and it produces more mucus.
And I would say in a quarter to maybe half of people gluten does something similar.
And so yes, you're taking an already narrow airway and then you're adding a millimeter,
you know, maybe two millimeters.
If it swells by a quarter of a millimeter all the way around, I mean, quarter of a millimeter
is not very much, right?
But if you do that all the way around this circumference of stuff, you've now lost more
than a millimeter in diameter.
And if it swells a whole millimeter, that too is closed.
Right.
So here, so just for me inflammatory standpoint, right?
And then there's the development pieces and all the other bits.
And then when it comes to ADHD, not only like you've got the oxygen deprivation piece from
the airway problem, but you also have the inflammation in the brain from the gluten
and the irritating molecules in gluten and dairy.
Right.
So you've got both of those pieces.
And then if you've also got sugar, you've got blood sugar going like this and they're
going to like, they're getting high and then withdrawing and high and withdrawing over
and over and over again.
And so how could we possibly expect a child in that situation to focus?
Right.
I don't know about any other parents listening, but I can tell you as a mom, I want to go
through my kitchen right now and just pull everything.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
I just want to tell people like, imagine that you are now living in a bamboo hut in the
middle of the jungle and you've got to go out and forage your food.
Right.
Think like we think you're focusing on.
Yeah.
Or take yourself back in time to the 1950s when everybody was still growing their victory
gardens and every household in the suburbs in America had a vegetable garden in the yard.
So for people that can't do that, what do you think about frozen vegetables?
That's still going to be in that process?
Oh, no, those are good.
Yeah.
I mean, it does break down.
They'll get a little mushier, but frozen is a great option because they're often barely
cooked if they're cooked in a...
Okay.
Yeah.
And if it's frozen or nothing, frozen's great.
It's better than the other.
I myself am living in a tiny little cave of an apartment right now and I haven't gotten
to garden in years and I really miss it.
And I actually find that I feel I have a level of anxiety that I don't...
Now that I don't have when I've got enough space to have a little bit of a garden and
you can do a lot of gardening in a very small...
In a small space.
Yes, you can.
Yeah.
You can grow a lot of food in a really small space.
Just talk to all my people in Great Britain.
I mean, they have mastered, you know, lots of foods in these tiny little gardens.
So going back to... I mean, we touched on... Obviously, you're seeing more patients with
airway issues and this is that third generation coming through, which I think I understand
that.
I tend to be more optimistic and that's part of why CAF is here.
We don't think it's too late, right?
Right.
Children's Airway First Things.
There is still an opportunity to turn this ship around and fix this.
And I think one of the things that we advocate for is this whole cross-functional approach.
Yes.
So from your perspective, how can we benefit from that?
And then how do we even get this structured?
Thanks.
I honestly don't know how we shift such a deeply seated paradigm as our broken medical
system.
But what I can say is that it's broken in different ways and different amounts in different
states.
So I mean, one of the upsides of the bizarre situation of the United States essentially
being 50 separate countries is that you actually have quite different medical systems in different
states.
And so, you know, one of the things I think we could do is start by looking at the states
that have more integrative models.
And surprise, surprise, those are the states that have been licensing naturopathic doctors
since the 1920s.
Like Washington, for example.
Like Washington.
Or again.
Yeah.
They've been licensed since 1919 and 1935.
And Vermont was really close after that.
So, you know, people think naturopathic doctors are new.
We're not.
We actually predate medical doctors.
We are the original doctors in the United States.
We got almost wiped out in the 1920s.
Whole other story, but in the states where naturopathic doctors have always been part
of the system and the whole medical system evolved with holistic integrative doctors
with a holistic integrative approach as part of they were always part of the medical system.
Those systems are a little bit different.
They look different.
They work differently.
So, you know, in Vermont, a naturopathic doctor, an acupuncturist and such, they're
all covered by Medicare and Medicaid.
And like you're in Washington and Oregon and Vermont, most, not most, but it is completely
normal to have a naturopathic doctor as your primary care doctor.
And like in Washington state, they piloted a program.
It was probably close to 10 or 15 years ago called the Blue Ribbon Commission was, and
I wish I knew more of the details of it, but it was called the Blue Ribbon Commission.
And one of the things they were looking at as naturopathic care as a medical home and
the medical home model versus primary care model.
And medical care is, I think what primary care was originally supposed to be, but evolved
out of medical home is that you have one practitioner that truly quarterbacks and coordinates all
of your care.
So, you have one practitioner who you have a long-term relationship with and they mostly
take care of everything for you and only refer you out for the things that they can't do.
But even when they refer you out, it's still coordinating.
They're all together working together sharing information.
They're talking to that practitioner and sharing information.
And so, they really tried a lot in Washington to make a system like that.
I think that the digital infrastructure became a problem.
And you and I have talked about my secret desire to participate in fixing the digital
infrastructure of medicine so that it's not as broken.
But, yeah, I think that there are models close to where we might need to be, but I think
a lot of it means letting go of the fragmentation in medicine and having changing the funding
and reimbursement in medicine.
I hate to keep coming back down to money, but it drives everything in our company.
It does.
Yeah.
So, the way insurance is set up is...
The way insurance is set up is the primary care doctor gets paid very, very little.
And so, in order to survive, they have to do very little.
But if instead the primary care doctors get paid the most per visit, and then they can
spend a lot more time with their patient, and they can also...
Their clinic or their staff get reimbursed for the time it takes to do all that coordination
of care, which let me tell you takes a lot of time.
It's getting on the phone and waiting on hold and connecting with another office.
I mean, it is labor-intensive to coordinate.
And it's labor-intensive for all the practitioners in a coordinated care team.
They have to have...
The time has to be created for them to actually sit down and review notes and stuff like that
and get themselves up to the peak.
That takes time that currently does not exist.
It's not that they're not being paid for it.
The time's literally not there.
I mean, they're already working 100 hours a week.
They can't cram in another extra 50.
It's not possible.
So the whole reimbursement structure needs to be changed so that those pieces, all those
administrative pieces that have to happen for good coordinated care to happen, it has to
get reimbursed.
Yeah.
So at the end of every segment, I always ask our guests the same question.
And I'd like to open this up to you at this point.
So what would you like to tell parents of children who have a diagnosed or an undiagnosed
airway dysfunction?
I don't know because I don't work with children.
I guess.
I mean, the first thing I would probably do is send them to the CAF's website because
we are starting to accumulate probably the only, not just the best, but the only hub
or resources.
So I would want to educate them on if they're under six years old, there are things that
can be done quickly and rapidly, and we can actually change the physical structure of
the airway and improve it before it has to require really expensive, extensive surgery
and stuff like that.
So I would really want them to find out who those specialists are and do whatever it takes
to get that kind of care.
Because I do really, as much as we talked about the nutrients and stuff like that, I'm
a big believer in the integrity of fixing structure.
When structure is not correct, it impacts a lot of things.
And airways.
So I'm a big fan of structural correction when it can happen, especially if it can happen
as something's being molded and formed.
Which is before the age of six.
Exactly.
So I think I would definitely just be like, you need to go talk to these people, get lined
up, do whatever it takes to get to one of these experts.
Probably almost none of them are local, but it is worth it for the rest of your child's
well-being for the rest of their life to get this done before age six.
And then I would also talk to them about all the diet and nutrient things.
Make sure the kids getting these nutrients, do whatever it takes to get kale and broccoli
into your kid.
And if they won't chew those, find something else for them that they can chew.
If you have to puree their vegetables into a smoothie, fine.
But they also need to chew.
To build the muscle structure.
So I would talk to them about all of those things, about the nutrients and when possible
avoiding refined foods, getting them off of sugar.
Sugar and refined flour are basically what we learned from Western Price are the big
culprits in that palate getting narrower as the kid develops.
So it can start as wide and become narrow from those foods.
So just get off that refined garbage as much as possible.
So I think that's what I'd probably say.
That's awesome.
Thank you so much for being here Dr. Andrews.
I appreciate it.
You're welcome.
Thanks again to today's guest Dr. Becky Andrews for sharing her medical insight and to each
of you for listening to today's episode.
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