2018 Podcasts

253: Take Back Your Health From the Grips of Chronic Illness

with Robin Shirley

Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith. Today Dr. Pompa welcomes a special guest with an inspiring story, and her name is Robin Shirley. Robin is here to talk about her incredible journey of how she healed herself from chronic Lyme. Hopefully her story will offer you hope no matter what you’re struggling with.

After 17 years of experimentation, research, and education, she has personally experienced the power of a therapeutic, healthy lifestyle and reducing pain and inflammation. Robin is finally free from pharmaceuticals, running the company of her dreams, and enjoying healthy, happy motherhood. Robin Shirley is the founding president of Take Back Your Health International, a company that hosts internationally attended health conferences and retreats across the US. She speaks, consults, and writes about how to reduce the symptoms of chronic illness. Robin is a certified integrative nutrition health coach through the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, and she’s a member of the American Board of Drugless Practitioners.

Robin writes and posts about the Take Back Your Health lifestyle on her website, which we will link to in the show notes. This episode of CHTV is brought to you by Fastonic. This oral stable molecular hydrogen supplement assists in fasting, shows promise in anti-aging, encourages post workout recovery, mitigates oxidative stress, inflammation, and many other triggers for disease and imbalance. Curious to try molecular hydrogen for yourself? Our CHTV audience can check it out at GetFastonic.com. Let’s get started. Welcome, Dr. Pompa and Robin Shirley, to the show. This is Cellular Healing TV.

Dr. Pompa:
We have a special guest today. Robin, welcome to Cell TV.

Robin:
Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to talk with you.

Dr. Pompa:
I can’t wait on this subject of Lyme disease. I think in our area there’s more misunderstandings here than any. You’re going to clear the way today on the show because you have been teaching some seminars, which we’re going to find out more about. The public can go to this seminar. A lot of people with Lyme and chronic illnesses find they can’t afford to coach or to get the doctor that they need, yet they’re very sick.

I think you’ve opened the way for many people with Lyme disease to get some answers. You have a lot of great doctors that speak at your conferences. We’re going to be able to hear more about that. Let’s start with your story, Robin. You didn’t choose this, it chose you.

Tell them your story. It was Lyme and other diseases that really Lyme led to, which I want to talk a lot about. I think starting here would be a great place.

Robin:
The way you put that is perfect. It chose me. I’ve said a dozen times that I wouldn’t change the way that my life turned out because getting sick pushed me into the career and life path that I’m extremely happy to be on now. In the beginning it wasn’t. I didn’t have that outlook.

Before I was diagnosed, I came down with a fever, aches, joint pain, fatigue when I was at summer camp in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. That was in 2000. I was about 10 or 11. Now you would assume that your primary care would say let’s get you tested for Lyme disease, and that’s what she did because I was out in the woods in Virginia in Lyme country. The test came back negative.

Dr. Pompa:
They probably just did a western blot. That’s what most people would do. Explain why that test would come back negative even though you found out later on another test it was positive.

Robin:
I have difficulty understanding a lot about that particular test, but it was too soon, I believe, for it to show up for what that test was testing for. It was within days that I got tested.

Dr. Pompa:
I’ll add to it. That western blot, if you do it too soon, it doesn’t work. If you do it too late down the road for chronic Lyme, it doesn’t work. There’s this small window of possibly being accurate. Go ahead.

Robin:
I had it within days, and then it came back negative. She was right to test for that, and she started me on the antibiotic just in case it came back positive so I would already have it in my system. She said, “Cancel the antibiotic. You don’t have Lyme. We’ve got to figure something else out.”

Dr. Pompa:
I’ll say that too because antibiotics are typically only useful in Lyme if you do it right away. If she would have kept you on the antibiotic, you may not have gone through what you went through.

Robin:
It’s a little bit frightening looking back at your life that way, little moments that could have changed everything. Obviously, it was meant to be this way. I have to go with it. I love what I’m doing now. We’ll talk about that later.

Dr. Pompa:
I have to say, it’s from pain to purpose. I look back at everything I went through and like you I could be like oh, if only. I’m here today and you’re here today because of from pain to purpose. I can’t regret it now.

Robin:
I obviously went through a lot trying to get a diagnosis. All that pain that we’re talking about, it was six months until I got a diagnosis at all after that initial testing. I’ll spare all the details, but it ended up as a diagnosis of systemic juvenile rheumatoid arthritis from Johns Hopkins. I’m in seventh grade, so we go with it. Luckily, my parents are really interested in holistic options anyway, so they keep my interest up in that area. They found a holistic doctor who suggested some things and some food changes and acupuncture.

I went down the organic route and we juiced vegetables. We did a lot in the beginning. I got massage. She had a [BMF] expert come to our home and put little things on—yeah, it was back in 2000. This is stuff that’s barely talked about back then.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s remarkable. I want to meet your parents.

Robin:
Looking back on it, it was really remarkable. I’m so thankful because they kept that hope alive in me that there might be something else. The real thing that got me frustrated with the diagnosis and kept me looking for an alternative was my rheumatologist kept telling me, “Your immune system, Robin, we don’t know why, but your immune system is wrong. It’s attacking cells that it shouldn’t be attacking.”

Dr. Pompa:
Autoimmune at this point, right?

Robin:
Yeah, systemic JRA, autoimmune. In my head I’m thinking my biology teacher just told me that your immune system attacks foreign invaders. Why don’t you guys check me for every single foreign invader that’s out there? I’m not that evolved in my thinking at that age to say that out loud, but in my head I’m starting to ask the question. Have they really checked to make sure that there’s nothing else in there that my immune system could react to that’s foreign?

That was really what kept me searching for different answers throughout that whole time. In high school I continued with the alternative treatments that my parents supported. In college we tried things. It got really difficult being in a sorority, being in clubs, working on a business degree. I just got sucked into college life, and the symptoms got really bad.

I got to the point where at one point I Googled diet cure for juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. When you start Googling cures, you know you’re really looking for answers. I found top 15 foods to avoid for helping rheumatoid arthritis. I tried it really strict for about two or three weeks, and all my symptoms went away.

Dr. Pompa:
What foods did you take away?

Robin:
The big ones that I can remember, and I wish I had that website, it was gluten, eggs, dairy, soy, corn.

Dr. Pompa:
All the top allergen foods basically.

Robin:
Then some that right now I wouldn’t necessarily suggest to people. There were things like red meat and chocolate. Yeasty foods can really bother some people, but all of those had to go. One day my sister was in town. We were celebrating her birthday. I said I’m going to have one beer, and I’m going to have these gluten-free chocolate brownies. They had eggs and chocolate, but I’m going to have them anyways. This is celebration.

Within hours the rash came back, and the next morning the joint pain was back. Eggs, chocolate, beer is what I had. I knew it was one of those three or all of them. Then, of course, I had sensitivities to a lot of the other foods too. I went through and tested with the introduction. That was so powerful.

I couldn’t keep up the elimination diet and two months later I said, “Mom, can I come home and work on my health? I know I can figure this out. I know I can get better on my own if I am given the chance. I just can’t do it when I’m distracted at school.” They agreed, and they let me come back home and live with them.

Within six months I found Institute for Integrative Nutrition. I went through that program and was all inspired to start doing events and teach cooking classes and retreats. That was kind of the point where I said I’m going to give this a go, and I’m going to forget about college for a minute and just see what happens.

Dr. Pompa:
The diet obviously made a difference. What someone didn’t tell you back then is you don’t just get well by avoidance. That takes the symptoms away, but there’s more to this. There’s something further upstream that’s driving leaky gut and causing you to respond to all these foods. What took you to that next step that I’ve got to figure something out here? There’s something else causing this.

Robin:
What happened is I did the allergy elimination. I’m telling you this because I think some other people might resonate with this. You get on this diet hamster wheel of you go between raw vegan, macrobiotics, Paleo, Weston A. Price, and back again. You go through all of them and you’re like one of these has got to cure me. What’s going on? Why isn’t this helping? It’s because no matter how great you’re eating, it doesn’t take care of the cause of the inflammation.

Dr. Pompa:
Do you know what my saying is? The perfect diet won’t get you well once you hit this point, but you won’t get well without the perfect diet.

Robin:
Exactly. That’s perfect. You’ve got to have the foundation of nutrition that can relieve so many symptoms and enable you to have the energy and the clearer thinking in order to go through with the more intensive protocols, which for me ended up being I had to get the heavy metals out. I was so scared to take that step because all that you read about it—and I’ll tell you my horror story with it. The Cowden is what I used, but some kind of therapeutic herbal protocol to address the infections. Perhaps a parasite cleanse or multiple cleanses like that and then also [12:48] transplant, which is not talked about a lot. I have to say—

Dr. Pompa:
I’m a big believer. I’ve watched people’s autoimmune shut down. Just for people watching, that’s doing an enema with someone else’s microbiome. We’ll make it more pleasant than feces, but that’s really what it is. There’s certain bacteria that we can’t just take. It’s impossible to get.

By doing an enema with a stool sample from someone else, a donor if you will, you can change your microbiome dramatically. There’s these bacteria that we haven’t even discovered yet. I’ve watched people’s lives transform. You know where I always tell people to go because I don’t want to be the person that tells them to do it? Go to ThePowerofthePoop.com. It just teaches people how to do it, find a donor, how to test for it to make sure it’s safe and all that other good stuff. Anyway, go ahead and finish.

Robin:
That’s a great resource because funny enough, when I would start talking about this, I had people asking if I could be their donor.

Dr. Pompa:
Believe me, I get that question all the time. I’m like I’m not getting involved. There’s some risks there. There’s right ways to do it. Investigate it yourself. I’m just telling you to educate yourself and not do it. There you go.

Robin:
That’s great. I’ll look that up. I didn’t know about that website. Hopefully that will be helpful to some people who ask me about it. Those are all the things that combined made me feel drastically better. It was a hell of a journey getting through all of that. It takes time. People want so badly for these things to detox and come out of their body quickly, but it just can’t.

Dr. Pompa:
When I work with people individually, my goal is to teach them the process. Therefore, they can do it long enough to actually matter. It’s not like you just do a 30-day cleanse, 90-day cleanse, whatever it is. It’s just not going to work. I want to ask this; how many fecal microbial transplants did you do, and how much did it help? What symptoms did it help with?

Robin:
I had done the Cowden Protocol already. The first step for me was really honing in on the nutrition. I got really specific about it. I have a subscription from www.chronicLymenutrition.com. I write out exactly what is beneficial for your immune system.

Once I had Lyme, I realized I need to eat foods that support my immune system. I need to eat antimicrobial foods, herbs, spices, all those things. I figured that out. Then I went onto the Cowden Protocol, but there are other ones out there, just some kind of natural herbal therapeutic full spectrum. A significant chunk of my symptoms went away. I was really nauseous.

I was throwing up the first couple weeks, so I knew it was cleansing stuff out. Then I just saw it get better from there. Then I was still having some inflammatory skin, some joint pain. I was still getting headaches. There were a few symptoms from the mercury and lead that were really high in my testing. I moved onto the heavy metal testing, and at the middle part of the heavy metal testing I did the microbiome enema.

At that point I was having a severe rash, and I was having unexplained trouble getting back to my normal weight. I was retaining fluid, and I was having some weight everywhere. My adrenals were still fatigued. With the enema, the rash disappeared within weeks. I had paused the heavy metal detox. That was the only thing because I wanted to see what it would do.

The rash was cured within weeks. It was crazy. That’s the one significant thing that I noticed. On top of that I steadily lost weight from that point on and didn’t have that bloating in my stomach anymore. I had a completely flat stomach after that. The person that was my donor, that was actually something characteristic of her was the extremely flat, great digestion, never a problem with weight or anything. That was probably that unique microbiome.

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, that’s the thing even in my studies. You can take the feces from obese mice and give it to skinny mice and create weight gain problems or vice-versa. You can take skinny mice and give them to fat mice and create skinny mice. You have to understand there’s a genetic sharing there. We know the bacteria affect our DNA.

Robin:
It’s wild. That’s what makes it a little bit scary is if you get a donor who might have some kind of thing you don’t know about, it can pop up. That’s a side story.

Dr. Pompa:
There’s testing. Believe it or not, it is safer than most people think. You just have to get the right donor. You really do. Family members are the best if you have a healthy family member in the same family because you’re sharing a lot of the same microbiome anyway.

Robin:
I didn’t mean to say it was scary, but you’ve got to—

Dr. Pompa:
No, it is. It really is, feces, just that alone.

Robin:
There’s a way to handle it and a way not to do it. Just go in carefully. I think it changed my life, so I’m really glad I did it. I’m glad I’m sharing about it. It’s a good thing to try.

Dr. Pompa:
You started this protocol after the Lyme. First of all, let’s back up a little bit. What tests did you end up doing, if any? Lyme testing is tough. What tests did you do?

Robin:
We ended up going to a doctor who was somewhat a self-proclaimed Lyme disease expert. He went through and did the western blot again, and it came back positive. I believe he would have gone on to different kinds of testing if that hadn’t come back, but I was positive for Bartonella and Babesia. He did a clinical run of all my symptoms. He said, “This is textbook Lyme Bartonella and Babesia. You have it all.” He was the one who introduce me to Cowden and heavy metal.

I took the results to two other doctors who were self-proclaimed Lyme experts, so I got three opinions on the test results with a full clinical workup. They all came back and said the same thing to me, unbeknownst to what the other one said. My mom and I felt that was enough for us. I never went and did DNA Connexions or I forget the name of the one you use.

Dr. Pompa:
There’s a few. DNA Connexions is one. We used to use the iSpot Lyme. Now it’s IGeneX. A new one now, Vibrant America, is doing one that’s really good that my doctor group is starting to utilize. The testing has evolved to better and better testing.

It’s tough to test for. It’s tough to treat. Speed up. What was next? How long did you deal with the Lyme? When did you start feeling better?

Robin:
The Lyme went undiagnosed for 11 years. When I was 23—

Dr. Pompa:
At that point in that 11 years you were basically I have autoimmune, rheumatoid arthritis. You were taking medication? No, you weren’t. You were just doing the diet.

Robin:
No, I had such severe symptoms that I was at my—so I went home from college, and I tried this diet circle. Some things helped and some things didn’t. I was on methotrexate, prednisone, and ibuprofen.

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, those are what most people with autoimmune end up on, the methotrexate with steroids and pain killers. That’s it. None of it gets rid of the cause. At best it deals with some of the symptoms. You did that for a period of time.

Robin:
I tried Orencia and all those too. They weaken your immune system, so all this time I’m taking immune suppressants. The Lyme is going unchecked. My symptoms are getting worse and worse. I’m at the point where I’m so fatigued and in so much pain that I don’t even want to drive to the store because it hurts and I’m too tired to turn my body to pull the seat belt around on me.

I’m just sitting at home on the couch all the time and trying desperately to do a Candida cleanse, parasite cleanse, liver and gallbladder flush. All these things are not going to do a dang thing if you don’t get the metals and the Lyme out. I wasted a lot of time not knowing that I had Lyme. When I found out, I was 23. By the time I was 26 I was at a point where I moved out and moved to LA. I guess that tells you how significantly I felt better. I was from a point where I felt housebound to three or four years later on my own living in LA feeling completely self-sufficient, running a company, everything like that.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s a significant change. We have found you don’t get rid of chronic Lyme without dealing with the metals. I think it’s a classic mistake that people just try to kill the Lyme. It hides in this weird symbiotic relationship with heavy metals. It really does. There are so many of us that deal with these horrible, unexplainable illnesses. I’ve really come to that conclusion.

You have to deal with heavy metals and Lyme properly. Again, most practitioners out there aren’t, so that’s the other frustrating point. Fast forward, how many years was it? Eleven years undiagnosed. Then how long did you end up treating for that you got your life back? How long was that?

Robin:
It was 23 the diagnosis, so 3 years until I felt self-sufficient, maybe 4. That would put me at 27. I spent four years out in LA. Now I’m 30, so I moved out there when I was 26. I moved back last month, so four years in LA. The four years I was in LA I was on cloud nine. I felt so great. Then I got pregnant.

Dr. Pompa:
Which by the way, more lead comes out of the bones during pregnancy and pregnancy itself is a great physical stress. You have two new stressors, which we know that autoimmune triggers after many pregnancies because of those reasons. You get pregnant. Then what?

Robin:
I was doing great all through the pregnancy. I was real good about what I was eating. I was sleeping great because I knew that sleeping was really important for my particular symptoms, and my body needed that. I wasn’t on any pain killers or any prescriptions at that point. I consulted with a few doctors.

I talked to Dr. Cowden. I asked him what should I do? Should I get back on the protocol? I knew I couldn’t do the heavy metal chelation. I had to stop that. You can do that for years and still be getting stuff out, and I still want to continue once I stop nursing.

I had to stop. I couldn’t do Cowden. I couldn’t do any more rounds of the chelation that I was doing. I was doing really low dose. I slowly started to lose sleep towards the end of the pregnancy. Then when the baby comes, I’m not sleeping and I’m not feeding myself well. I’m eating whatever’s there.

I’m starving because you think you’re hungry during pregnancy. Then you start nursing, and you’re the exclusive provider of food for this baby that’s growing so fast. I’m eating whatever is in front of me. I start to get that little ache in my wrists again and all the emotional baggage from the past, the fear comes rushing back.

Dr. Pompa:
I still fear going back. I always say my biggest fear is never death or wasn’t death. It was going back to the way I was, living life the way it was was my greatest fear. Now my greatest fear is going back. If I ever have even a glimpse of a symptom from before, I think I’m going back. Not as much anymore, but for years that was the case.

Robin:
It’s frightening. That started happening, and I realized my hands were tied because I couldn’t do much about it. I’ll make sure that I don’t go into too much boring detail, but the short story is she’s now one year old. It’s been two years since I found out I was pregnant. I got clearance from Dr. Cowden to start the Cowden protocol again once she was six months old.

He said also it would be passed through the breast milk in such small amounts that it would actually be beneficial to her because a lot of mother’s also worry about their children contracting Lyme from them. I thought that would be great because now I can start preventative treating her too. I got real strict about the food again, and I started figuring out sleep training with her. I was getting more sleep through the night. It’s back to normal now. I’m not feeling that scary twinge of symptoms, but I do know that I’m going to get right back on the heavy metal chelation as soon as I finish nursing.

Dr. Pompa:
Most lead is stored in the bone and during pregnancy. It’s normal to lose bone. It’s just part of it. You add up the stressors, not sleeping, whatever it is, nutritional and just the physical stress of being pregnant and having babies. That’s enough. That’s a perfect storm. It will trigger your autoimmune again and even start autoimmune. We always look to those stressful times as a trigger, but pregnancy is one of them.

Robin:
I will mention one other thing because I hope that I can prevent this for other women with Lyme who are pregnant. The way that Lyme affects the teeth and the gums can really flare up during pregnancy because we have such a need for calcium. Your body will probably pull a lot from your teeth if you don’t have enough in your nutrition source. That’s what it did for me. I was really disappointed with myself because nutrition is my passion, and I was taking prenatal and eating the foods with calcium. I wasn’t taking a calcium supplement, and I wasn’t watching the Lyme in my mouth.

I started to get cavities, and I started getting that feeling back in my gums like the Lyme infection was there. It’s this particular feeling that I could tell from a long time ago. That’s another reason why I got quickly back onto Cowden. I started the calcium supplement. I got the cavities filled. I did have to get one tooth pulled, and I just don’t want other women to go through it. It’s hard to prevent if that’s what your body is going to do, but you’ve got to take the calcium and you’ve got to get really careful about getting to the dentist before and have them watch everything and do the protocols. If you are planning to get pregnant, do something in advance to get the infection lower in your body, as low as you can.

Dr. Pompa:
I will say this, Robin; watch Episode 210 where I talk about cavitations and mouth infections. You’re right on what you’re saying. We find that people with Lyme, especially, you ended up with more cavities and gum issues. Lyme is in these cavitations. Oftentimes when we hear that story, we find that there’s a cavitation.

What is that? That’s infection that’s hidden in your bone, in your jaw somewhere. It can happen where root canals are, where wisdom teeth were extracted 25 years ago, any type of extractions. These cavitations are in there with these infections. The Lyme is in there.

During these other times like pregnancy as your example, the Lyme proliferates, creates a bad microbiome here. Then cavities form and other changes form in the mouth. You have to look. We suspect cavitation when we hear that story. Have you ever had a cone beam done?

Robin:
I did recently, actually, when I had this last extraction. It came back negative with no cavitations, which surprised me. I’ve had six adult teeth pulled.

Dr. Pompa:
Who read it? Did someone who looks at 3D x-rays read it? A lot of people just read it like a plain film. They don’t have the software.

Robin:
I need to go to someone else because I need a second opinion on that. I really thought I did.

Dr. Pompa:
I have these people that say I had a cone beam. Then I go did he have the software? Oh, he said you can just look. I’m like no, you have to have the special software because otherwise it looks like a plain film. They look at it and don’t know how to read it. Then we send it to one of our dentists, and they look at it and go there’s three cavitations right there. I’ve seen that happen so many times that I don’t even listen to them. Please get a second opinion on that.

Robin:
I will. You’re kind of meeting me right in the middle of this because the tooth was extracted a month ago, so now I’m going through all this process now. I’m going to probably ask for some recommendations on someone if you know someone.

Dr. Pompa:
The guy who I did the interview with, Dr. Gerry.

Robin:
He’s in New York?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, Dr. Gerry Curatola. You can do a Skype. You can send him this thing, and he’ll do a Skype interview with you for a half hour. He’ll review it for you and go over it. You just have to send him your disk, and then he’ll put it on his software.

Robin:
He’s a great resource. He’s on my list. I’ll go ahead and make that appointment.

Dr. Pompa:
Let’s fast forward now from pain to purpose like my life. I love how you started these seminars. I want you to tell how they can find out about the next one. Tell us what goes on at these seminars. They’re two days. Give us some information because this is how you’re giving back. People can show up and get the information that they need. I hope to speak at one of these seminars.

Robin:
We’re going to make that happen. I started in Virginia in 2011, so this was before I even got the proper Lyme diagnosis. I was at home. I was learning from all these great people online, Donna Gates, Marianne Williamson. They were people that I latched onto everyday to keep me inspired.

I said I need to bring these people to my community for a conference event so that my family and friends can be inspired too. They’re not just going to listen to what I’m saying. I want them to experience it. I just decided I wanted to do it, and I did it. It was really weird to my parents and my family, but they just went with it.

Dr. Pompa:
I have to know one thing. I always say [three-percenters], these are the people that get well. They just decide things and they do it. They hear a lot of reasons why they shouldn’t do it and fear of it. They just make a decision and do it. You made that decision that you’re going to well, and you did it. You made a decision that you’re going to change the world and bring people this information, and you did it. Thank you for that.

Robin:
If I can add one thing to that, I think this is really important for healing. I think that it takes that kind of ability to make decisions in that way and cut out the clutter in order to heal. The people that I have spoken to that are having a hard time healing are those who cannot make the decision that they’re going to heal. They can’t let go of the identity of being sick, and they aren’t able to change their thought patterns. It’s a really hard thing to do.

I just made the decision I’m not going to—it’s a little bit of the self-taught thing. It’s so hard to let go of the negative self-taught, but I don’t do it anymore. When I coach myself, I tell myself the opposite. I reword it into something positive. I think that’s really important to be able to work with your brain and change the way you think about things and just make decisions that this is how I want it to be. You start thinking that’s how it is already.

Dr. Pompa:
You said it. You have to shake the identity of where you are and see yourself, speak yourself in a different place. It sounds hokey, but it’s really not. Your thoughts direct yourself and direct the proteins that we make. You become what you think, honestly. I teach my kids this often.

It’s so important, especially when you’re sick and challenged. It’s vital to change the way you think. I had to do it with my chemical sensitivity. I had to realize that I’m reacting to these chemicals, and it’s actually really good. This is a good thing.

Our body is getting better. This isn’t bad. It’s good for me. I literally had to change the process. Once I did, it rewired the way my body was reacting to these chemicals.

Robin:
It’s amazing. The mind is a powerful thing. It should not be overlooked. I didn’t mention that before, but it was a significant part. We did one event in Arlington, Virginia in 2011. It was wildly successful. Everyone loved it.

I opened up presales for the next event six months later, and we sold 25 or 30 tickets. I was committed. I’ve got to do this again. We’ve been doing it every six months since then except there was one or two years when I needed to take a break to reconfigure everything. It’s every six months. We do it in the fall in Northern Virginia in the D.C. suburbs and then in the spring in May in Pasadena.

We’ve had Robb Wolf, the Food Babe, Donna Gates, Robyn O’Brien, Ty Bollinger and his wife, Charlene. They’ve been in the past and are coming again in 2019. Hopefully you’ll be there. Dr. Cowden is finally going to show up this spring and speak, Dr. Nick Gonzalez, [Preston Pace] was there before he passed, Daniel Vitalis, Frank [Gillio], [Marie Wilding], all that kind of stuff. We talk about anything from nutrition to supplementation to lifestyle, mindset, fitness, everything that you need to become healthy, whole health.

Dr. Pompa:
How do they find out about it? How do they sign up for it?

Robin:
It’s called Take Back Your Health Pasadena and Take Back Your Health D.C. If you Google that, that will probably show up. That’s the website also, TakeBackYourHealthPasadena.com and TakeBackYourHealthDC.com. It’s two days and food exhibitors, speakers, yoga, lots of stuff going on.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s awesome. We’d love to be a part of it. Thank you. You’ve inspired many, believe me. We have so many of our viewers and listeners going through these neuro toxic bizarre and unexplainable illnesses and symptoms. This gives people another resource and definitely more hope.

Thank you, Robin, for all that you do. Thank you for going from pain to purpose. Thank you for being a [three-percenter] and making that decision. Most of all, thank you for encouraging our viewers.

Robin:
Thank you for having me on the show. I really enjoyed it.

Dr. Pompa:
I appreciate it.

Ashley:
That’s it for this week. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode, which was brought to you by Fastonic Molecular Hydrogen. Please check it out at GetFastonic.com. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10:00 AM Eastern. We truly appreciate your support.

You can always find us at Podcast.DrPompa.com. Please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, or sharing the show with anyone you think may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.

 

252: Bio Hack Your Muscles with Blood Flow Restriction Training

with Dr. Jim Stray-Gundersen

Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith. Today we are discussing a major bio hack that everyone from Dr. Pompa and his wife Merily to Olympic athletes are regularly training their muscles with. That would be resistance band training, otherwise known as blood flow restriction.

We have Dr. Jim Stray-Gundersen on today to discuss the benefits. Blood flow restriction works to improve fitness, strength, power, and lean body mass, and is anti-aging all while using less weight in less time with better results. You’ll learn what this type of training is, why it’s safe, and what all of the benefits are. Just for you viewers, Dr. Pompa will be demoing this training for you on site at the Olympic training facility in Dr. Pompa’s hometown of Park City, Utah.

Before we get started, I’d like to tell you a bit more about Dr. Jim. Dr. Jim Stray-Gundersen is a world-renowned expert in sports medicine, exercise physiology, and training for sports performance, and is a world-renowned expert in blood flow restriction training. Dr. Jim is an MD in sports medicine and is the CMO co-founder/co-developer of B Strong and B3 Sciences powered by B Strong.

Drawing from his lifetime of experience, the elite-level athletes, and clinical populations, Dr. Jim is one of the world’s leading physiologists and strongly believes that blood flow restriction training will revolutionize training and rehabilitation everywhere. As a sports scientist, he has worked with elite-level teams in skiing, cycling, running, soccer, and countless others. He predicts B Strong Training will change how the world gains the benefits of exercise, improving longevity and quality of life. B Strong Training will change your life.

Just for you, our wonderful CHTV audience, you can check out these bands if you go to DrPompa.B3Sciences.com and hit the Shop button to check these out. You can also hear more about the science behind the training by visiting Dr. Pompa’s other show, Health Hunters. We will have the link for you in the show notes. Let’s get started and welcome Dr. Pompa and Dr. Jim Stray-Gundersen to the show. This is Cellular Healing TV.

Dr. Pompa:
All right, welcome, Dr. Jim.

Dr. Jim:
Hi.

Dr. Pompa:
You and I actually met some years ago because of Kaatsu. It was a similar technology, and I heard about it because you were working with some of the top skiers in the world, actually.

Dr. Jim:
Right.

Dr. Pompa:
My fascination became evident because this is something I get, but yet from a different perspective that I want them to hear about. I get the fact that the magic happens because of the body’s adaptation, meaning that when the body adapts, we get this hormone optimization. I actually have a term that I talk about, hormone optimization via, meaning from, adaptation. That’s what this is about, right?

Dr. Jim:
It is, and I think the aspect of this that is particularly important is that in the past and with these other devices, it was—they weren’t really affordable. They weren’t easy to use. It wasn’t for the adult fitness crowd to be able to get the advantages of this sort of thing relatively easy on their own.

Dr. Pompa:
Matter of fact, back then, I wanted to purchase one, but it was definitely costly, so I was like, “Well, I don’t know.” Let’s bring you in on what we’re talking about. I’m here on location because—we’re actually in the Center of Excellence building where the top athletes in the world in multi-different sports, but mostly winter sports—is that correct?

Dr. Jim:
Yep, it’s winter sports, primarily, but it also includes a number of summer sports and athletes from a variety of disciplines who come to visit us.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s why we’re here because that’s where I was introduced to this, actually, technology. They use this for, as you’re going to hear, actually recovery, injuries, and as well as really training at a very top level very quickly, which you’re going to hear about. What the heck are these things that I have on? By the way, folks, I have them here, too, because you’re going to get a demonstration of something that I’ve used now for a while. This new one, I’ve only been using, admittedly, the last, probably, three weeks, so these new ones.

Dr. Jim:
It’s just come out.

Dr. Pompa:
Exactly, it’s because it just came out. I was really anxious to get my hands on them because of the price point, and I’ve wanted to bring them the technology, as well.

Dr. Jim:
You’re definitely on the cutting edge, here.

Dr. Pompa:
No doubt. First of all, what are these called?

Dr. Jim:
These are called B3 Sciences Bands or blood flow restriction bands. What they do is they essentially delay a little venous outflow back into the central circulation. Kind of the so-what of that is that muscles that are working don’t get the blood and oxygen that they need to sustain that work. That process creates a metabolic crisis that does a couple things. One is there are local effects of this metabolic crisis in terms of building new and better blood vessels, but also new contractile proteins, a variety of other things that help you do the job better.

In addition, this metabolic crisis is signaled into the brain, and that’s where you get into this neurohumoral output that has been documented by an increase in growth hormone 15 to 30 minutes after a workout.

Dr. Pompa:
I always love to give the analogy that people understand this cold thing now, moving from cold, very cold, 150 degrees for three minutes, and then coming out, and even going into warm. The body has to survive. It panics. It thinks it’s dying, but it raises up through that process that you just talked about. It raises up growth hormone and norepinephrine that creates this anti-inflammatory reaction for hours, even a day later. Similar principle, right?

Dr. Jim:
Absolutely, and really, it’s not that we’ve discovered anything new. We just found out how Mother Nature does things and found a kind of shortcut to getting that so we don’t have to be chased by that saber-toothed tiger to get those things going.

Dr. Pompa:
Or, in this case, work out like a madman in the gym. I love studying everything, and I looked at one study where they literally looked at almost 12,000 or maybe over 12,000 people. They were comparing old people, young people doing heavy weights, very light weights, or very light weights with these bands. The people doing these ridiculously light workouts with the bands got the same response or better than the people crushing it with these incredibly hard workouts and heavy weights. How could that be?

Dr. Jim:
It’s essentially because of this paradigm shift in the way we think about this. We used to think, or at least I used to think that if I wanted to get any muscle better trained, I would use that muscle, and over time, it would get better. In this case—

Dr. Pompa:
Even tear it up—that was the goal, at least my goal, back [00:07:35]

Dr. Jim:
Right, and in this case, we’re using the muscle to send a signal to the brain to release this hormonal response that ties into how we adapt to everything. Anything that gets used in an exercise format, then ends up benefitting from this systemic hormonal response—

Dr. Pompa:
Hormone optimization from the adaptation.

Dr. Jim:
Right, exactly.

Dr. Pompa:
The body panics and thinks, uh-oh, I’m in trouble. As you’ll see in a minute, quite the opposite because I’m going to be using five-, ten-pound dumbbells, and you’ll see me failing, and yet that’s the whole idea.

Dr. Jim:
What Dr. Mike, the head of the B3 Company says is you get twice the benefit in half the time with half the load.

Dr. Pompa:
Okay, you just brought the benefit because people are going, “Okay, so what do you say? I’m not a pro athlete.” If you desire to work out in a fraction of the time with a fraction of the perceived effort, but the body doesn’t know that, and get at least good of results or better—

Dr. Jim:
Better because you haven’t done any damage in the process. You don’t have to repair that damage that is normally done.

Dr. Pompa:
I know that some of our viewers are familiar with Bode Miller. How did he use these? He’s, by the way, one of the all-time skiers.

Dr. Jim:
Yeah, he’s actually our best American male skier ever. I worked with Bode over the years. He ended up having a back pain problem, and we started working with him. We got him so that he was able to train with his lower back pain, but it still didn’t—

Dr. Pompa:
Because he was using such light effort?

Dr. Jim:
Yeah, so whatever the exercises were, they weren’t enough to stir up trouble in his back at that point, but it didn’t really solve the problem. He ended up having a microdiscectomy of L4/5 at a point. Then we really hit him hard with the bands because immediately post-op, we weren’t really able to do much with him. He was able to do some B3 exercises then the next day after the operation.

In just two months, we got him ready for the World Championships in Vail, Colorado, or Beaver Creek, Colorado. He just had two months of doing nothing but B3 bands and a little bit of training skiing. He ended up getting in the Super-G and was leading the race, and then had a crash, but his progress to that point was remarkable.

Dr. Pompa:
I know some of the studies that I’ve read, it showed just with very little effort how with the bands, they were able to increase vertical jump far faster and even higher than all of the typical methods.

Dr. Jim:
Again, it’s this idea that—normally we have this idea that we have to—there’s a certain level of damage associated with workouts that are sufficiently strong to elicit this kind of hormonal response to adapt. Here, we found a way to do that without getting that damage. You start taking off right from the get-go, and—so adaptations happen very quickly and very robustly.

Dr. Pompa:
I know people watching are like, “Okay, if I don’t have to put in as much effort and get the same result, I’m in.” Honestly, that’s what the average person says. The athlete, though, is going, “Wait a minute. I want to put in that hardest effort I can because I’m associating that with the results.”

Dr. Jim:
That may be true. One of the things, though, that I think where the real breakthrough for this is is for adult fitness. Basically, I think that this is anti-aging medicine. This allows everybody—

Dr. Pompa:
Nice going there, yeah.

Dr. Jim:
This allows everybody to get the benefits of regular exercise with, again, half the load and half the time for that regular benefit.

Dr. Pompa:
I think when you get into your 50s and 60s, the problem is that. To get the results that you’re looking for, you have to go hard, and now you are, in fact, risking injury.

Dr. Jim:
Or you do get injured, or something happens, and then you can’t do your workouts anymore, and then everything starts falling apart. There’s kind of a downward spiral that ensues. This is a way of breaking that spiral and getting it to go the other way.

Dr. Pompa:
What we’re saying is because you’re able to go so light, not tear muscles, put a lot of pressure on joints, you’re not going to get injured, and so—but the results are still there, if not better.

Dr. Jim:
There’s even a more subtle facet to it. That is is that if we do our kind of normal workouts and something hurts us a little bit, that signal stirs up an inflammatory reaction, which it usually has a catabolic response to things and is a negative for overall fitness and adaptation.

Dr. Pompa:
And overall health.

Dr. Jim:
Right, and where—what we do with this is we avoid any of that stuff during the exercise itself, so knees don’t hurt, or the back doesn’t hurt, or whatever injury is healing, that healing isn’t aggravated. We cut out that whole negative catabolic process.

Dr. Pompa:
One of the reasons why people feel what’s—one of the reports is just, “I feel better after these types of exercises versus going in the gym and doing my normal routine.” You said there’s an anti-aging effect. Is part of that because of the growth hormone rise that we’re getting?

Dr. Jim:
I don’t know for sure, but I believe so. What we know is that we know that after a proper B3 workout, you will have an increase in circulating growth hormone, where if you just did the exercises by themselves, there’d be no change in growth hormone. In my view, I use growth hormone—growth hormone has a lot of really positive effects, but it’s probably a marker hormone of a whole cascade of things that is happening. Exactly what causes what, I don’t think everybody’s worked out exactly quite right.

Dr. Pompa:
When you look at the science on forcing that adaptation—I even talk about it as even dietary changes, but going in and out of the cold, etcetera. The norepinephrine is not talked about a lot, but you’re getting that with this. Norepinephrine is—it’s massively anti-inflammatory after the stress is over, and not to mention it’s also shown what it does for the brain. When you look at multiple neurodegenerative brain conditions, all of them are associated with low norepinephrine.

Dr. Jim:
That has been documented. An increase in norepinephrine immediately after a B3 session has been documented. As you know, the only way you get norepinephrine is you had to have a reflex arc that has gone into the brain to have that autonomic nervous system put out that signal.

Dr. Pompa:
Saying, we’re in trouble and—

Dr. Jim:
Exactly.

Dr. Pompa:
Really, the body is just—we’re forcing a survival adaptation.

Dr. Jim:
We kind of fool it.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly, we’re fooling it, but that adaptation is what creates the hormone optimization and, in this case, really, the muscle optimization and recovery. We talked about it makes athletes stronger, jump higher, recover faster, but again, you talked a little bit about Bode Miller. What about the average person’s knee injury or average person injury? Are we seeing it being used for that?

Dr. Jim:
With top athletes, all these little nuances are critical to their performance. They make their living out of how well they perform athletically. For the rest of us, these things still work in the same way. While we may not be able to measure what’s going on with how much more money we’re making or how faster of a time we’re running, the same things are operative for all of us.

Dr. Pompa:
I would argue that it’s the hormone optimization of why it speeds up recovery, even a bad joint, an injury is that—is that truth to that?

Dr. Jim:
Yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
Okay.

Dr. Jim:
There’s another spinoff, and that is as we age, we become less and less able to do the functional movements that we need to get around and to have a free-living life, if you will. This kind of training will get that function back for us or at least prolong that course so that we can lead a healthy and normal life and optimize the length of time we have so that we’re not just sitting around in a wheelchair somewhere.

Dr. Pompa:
We know that this is anti-aging. It’s, no doubt, a way to become faster, stronger, healthier. Let’s give them an idea of what it looks like. In other words, we already said it takes less time with less effort, but what does that mean? Give us an idea of what the workout is like.

Dr. Jim:
The way we designed this is that we now have a affordable, safe, and effective, easy-to-use solution that can be used anytime, anywhere by anyone. This lends itself to what I think of as an optimal way of living where you have a base of exercise. Maybe 15 minutes five days a week in the morning in the privacy of your bedroom, you go through your B3 workout, and then that way, you enjoy the increases in fitness and hormone optimization that is carried with these kinds of things. Then you have the rest of your day to enjoy whatever recreational events, or your work efforts, or taking care of the kids, or whatever it happens to be.

Dr. Pompa:
We don’t need an hour or two hours in the gym. You’re saying that in 15 minutes we can—

Dr. Jim:
Here’s an idea: You can get your workout in in the time it would take you to drive to the gym.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. I like that. I do like that. Then back, so you actually save time. Fifteen minutes, I can get a full-body workout in?

Dr. Jim:
Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Pompa:
I can tell you, I add onto it, so I’m doing what used to take me an hour in less than 30 minutes, honestly, and I’m probably even doing more than I need to.

Dr. Jim:
You may be. The key to making this effective is getting that metabolic crisis or fatigue signal. Once you get that signal, you’re good. If you’re doing a series of—let’s say your goal was to do five different exercises, and you wanted to do three sets of 25 of each, for example. After the third exercise, you’re pretty well gassed, and you’ve gotten a good fatigue signal. That’s good enough.

Dr. Pompa:
We’re going to show you what that looks like here, so stay tuned. Listen, you can get the bands. We’ll put the link right here as well as in the show notes so you can get them right off of my website, the very bands that I’m using. What used to cost thousands is now—

Dr. Jim:
Hundreds.

Dr. Pompa:
Hundreds, yeah.

Dr. Jim:
Literally, it’s, in order of magnitude, less expensive.

Dr. Pompa:
And just as effective?

Dr. Jim:
Just as effective, even probably safer than the original equipment.

Dr. Pompa:
Notice if I use the word occlusion because I think—I said, “So, Jim, this occludes it.” “No, it’s not occlusion. It’s restriction.” You don’t want to occlude; you want to restrict. It is that restriction that we’re—that creates the adaptation.

Dr. Jim:
This technique has its roots in 50 years of history, but it took probably 30 years of literally trial and error and not doing it quite the right way for this to come to this point. I think we’ve taken a further step in making it safe, and effective, easy to use, affordable, all these sorts of things. Now, this is ready for prime time and the—for all of us adults who have otherwise busy lives, and we’re trying to sneak that workout in.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and the hormone optimization and anti-aging, that’s what I love. Hand me the pumper-upper. Let’s see. You had mentioned for demonstration’s sake to—let’s use one arm more—pump up one arm and the other, right?

Dr. Jim:
Yeah, here we have—and it’s probably going to be a little hard to see on camera. Right now, there’s no pressure in the band. We have a little number on the—

Dr. Pompa:
It says 200.

Dr. Jim:
The proper place to go is 200. What I’d like you to do first is feel your radial pulse and just confirm to the audience that you’ve got a nice, good, radial pulse.

Dr. Pompa:
I got it.

Dr. Jim:
Here, we’re out at 200, which is the recommended pressure on the band. Do you still have a pulse?

Dr. Pompa:
I do.

Dr. Jim:
Okay, so now, just out of an abundance of caution—all unsafe things that happen with BFR training happens when you occlude the arterial inflow.

Dr. Pompa:
BFR, blood flow restriction training.

Dr. Jim:
Now, I’m going to take this up to the maximum capacity of the pump. Here we are at 500. You still have a pulse?

Dr. Pompa:
I do.

Dr. Jim:
This shows that no matter what I do with this—this is way too much for you to be exercising. No matter what I do with this, I can’t get an occlusive situation.

Dr. Pompa:
Now, what about the tightness of this, like if I strap it on even tighter? Is that going to cause—that’s as tight as I can go, actually, to be honest with you.

Dr. Jim:
One of the things that I was not super happy about with some of the previous devices is it was possible to get into an occlusive situation. We designed these bands specifically to, pardon the expression, make them idiot-proof so that if someone put them on in the right place, and no matter what they did with the pump, and no matter how tight they made them, they’re not going to occlude their arterial circulation.

Dr. Pompa:
Got it. I remember before, too, from being here, there’s a way even to check the—yeah, I kind of messed it up. That’s why I was trying to—

Dr. Jim:
[00:22:40].

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. Go ahead. Yeah, I spun it around, but here—I made it easier for you, but that’s the—now it feels normal. There’s a way to check even—

Dr. Jim:
Yeah, so one of the things we could do is look at capillary refill. If I let go, all of a sudden, your pink color comes back quite briskly. The key is that if it’s longer than four seconds coming back, then it’s—

Dr. Pompa:
Maybe too tight, yeah, okay.

Dr. Jim:
This comes back within a second or so, so this is really good stuff.

Dr. Pompa:
We’re going to leave this arm alone, right, and we’re going to pump this arm up.

Dr. Jim:
Just to make this a little more dramatic, instead of 200, I went to 270.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s about where I train, to be honest with you.

Dr. Jim:
Now, what we’re going to try to do with this is demonstrate that fatigue signal.

Dr. Pompa:
Little more delayed, but not much.

Dr. Jim:
One of the things you’re going to see—or the audience is going to see is the skin on this arm is going to turn a little redder, and the veins are going to be a little bit more prominent. Just for the sake of demonstration, let’s go ahead and take this one off.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that way they know.

Dr. Jim:
Then it’s clear to the audience what’s going on.

Dr. Pompa:
Hand me a dumbbell. I’ll move the chair back just so I’m still in the thing and kind of spread my legs. These are five-pound dumbbells.

Dr. Jim:
Let’s do one of our typical protocols where—

Dr. Pompa:
Here, you can move that over. You can come in here so you’re still in the camera.

Dr. Jim:
Let’s do one of our typical protocols, basically light arm curls. We have a protocol of three sets of 30 repetitions. Full extension on the arms, palms facing forward. Bring the arm up, and then kind of give a squeeze up at the top. Really, what the comparison here is your left arm has blood flow restriction applied to it while the right arm is exercising normally. What we’re looking for—the exercise is the same. We’re just looking at the difference having the band in place makes. One of the things about these protocols is—what we do with the first set of exercise—

Dr. Pompa:
Move back in there just so they can see it.

Dr. Jim:
What we’re doing with this first set of exercise is we’re actually trying to use up some ATP in these muscles. What that does is it sets the stage for blood to come back in and provide more oxygen so you can replace or regenerate that ATP. What happens when we have blood flow restriction bands in place, we just can’t get as much oxygen as the muscle would like. Now, if we just take a rest—let’s say a 30-second rest—

Dr. Pompa:
I was starting to fail, by the way, this arm.

Dr. Jim:
Yeah, excellent.

Dr. Pompa:
Not this arm. I could do [00:25:52] dumbbell over here.

Dr. Jim:
We say failure is fun. One of the things here is now, while you were doing those arm curls, your muscle was actually helping pump some blood back into the central circulation. Now, when you’re resting, we call that pseudo-rest because now, you’ve lost that muscle pump, and now you have even less blood flow going to that muscle that needs to regenerate the ATP.

Now, when you start the second set, all of a sudden you’re going to have to use additional motor units, additional fibers to perform the work. They’re going to get in metabolic trouble even quicker, and before you know it, we’re going to get that whole muscle fatigued and ready to send a nice signal to your brain. How we doing?

Dr. Pompa:
Burning, this arm. This arm’s fine. I could keep going with that arm fast.

Dr. Jim:
This is really a good demonstration. Notice the difference in skin tone from one side to the other. Look at his fingers on his right versus his left hand. The veins are prominent. What we’re getting is a really good session here. His brain is aware that his left bicep is in trouble, and that’s the stimulus to cause this hormonal optimization. Now, again, we’re in a pseudo-rest period. While it’s nice that you don’t have to do arm curls, there’s even less blood getting into this thing. This third set is really a killer. You’re going to really be tough to carry it out.

Dr. Pompa:
How long in between, rest?

Dr. Jim:
Generally, 30 to 60 seconds, but for the purposes here, we’re good to go. One of the things that’s really nice is you got a good smile on your face.

Dr. Pompa:
[00:28:00]

Dr. Jim:
You’re enjoying this.

Dr. Pompa:
It burns, yep. I can tell you, when you’re doing the legs, that’s the worst, even though that burns, but the leg muscles are just bigger so they burn bigger. Yeah, it’s failing.

Dr. Jim:
Okay, so usually on that third set—go ahead. We’ll just take that off and give you some recovery.

Dr. Pompa:
Okay, now, people are saying, “Okay, you just worked your bicep,” but actually, that’s not true. I worked more than that.

Dr. Jim:
You did. Your core was active throughout this whole thing. Usually, what we do is we do a series of exercise that gets as many muscles of the body involved in this process as possible.

Dr. Pompa:
What would we do next?

Dr. Jim:
Typically, when we’re doing just upper body stuff, we might do things like some hand squeezes, three sets of 30 of those.

Dr. Pompa:
Right, you have the—like these.

Dr. Jim:
You’re right, the hand grippers.

Dr. Pompa:
You could do presses.

Dr. Jim:
Right, or push-ups, or some sort of—

Dr. Pompa:
Push-ups, I do all these things.

Dr. Jim:
With elastic cords, you can do kind of tricep extensions, but just something—

Dr. Pompa:
Do we have those? I saw those somewhere.

Dr. Jim:
Yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
Grab me a couple cords.

Dr. Jim:
You could do something like put it around your back.

Dr. Pompa:
The point is with me showing these is just how simple it is. This is too light of a cord for me normally to get a workout, but literally, I could do something like this with the bands on here and literally be screaming, burning from my triceps.

Dr. Jim:
Or, for example, switch—

Dr. Pompa:
Or I could stand on it.

Dr. Jim:
Right, switch it around, and then instead of having the weights, you’re doing the arm curls—

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I could do it like that. Exactly, I could even do it like this.

Dr. Jim:
With very little equipment—this goes anywhere. It goes to your hotel. When you’re on a business trip, you can get your workout in.

Dr. Pompa:
Then, of course, when I have these on, I’m just—I just do body squats, and I’m telling you, it—move you back into the frame here. Body squats, which normally wouldn’t—unless I jumped off the ground and made it really dramatic, wouldn’t really burn. With these, I’m burning just with that. I did it in my hotel room.

Dr. Jim:
We have something called chairs, which is literally getting up and out of a chair, and back, and forth. That ends up becoming an impossible task after a few sets with the bands on. Those things have direct application to seniors to be able to get in and around the house to do things. Then you could do things like stairs where you’re just walking up a flight of stairs. That’s enough of an exercise that you really start getting all this stuff done. There’s ways of taking, essentially, the equipment around you, that you’re normally around you, to get a really great workout in a very short period of time.

Dr. Pompa:
I started cycling with them. I just put them on, 15 minutes on my bike. You should see, I’m burning. Literally, I’m like rip them up. What I notice is I get stronger faster. That’s what I notice [00:31:34] —

Dr. Jim:
Because you haven’t done the damage that you’d normally do. It’s a big, strong signal for adaptation. Because you don’t have to repair this damage that you usually have to do to get that kind of workout in, you just start going right up from the get-go.

Dr. Pompa:
One of the things my massage therapist—her feedback was just that. I’m finding that my cycling, I’m getting stronger really fast and going at fractions of the effort.

Dr. Jim:
Isn’t that nice?

Dr. Pompa:
It is. Obviously, in the gym—that’s important to me. I love being on the bike and—

Dr. Jim:
We all have to be efficient with our use of time.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s it. I oftentimes don’t have but under an hour to get out there, so if 15 minutes of it were this—and I just loosen them, and then I go about my business the rest of the time. Fifteen minutes with these, I’m getting like a two-hour workout. At least, my brain thinks so.

Dr. Jim:
The other thing is any exercises are good to go as long as you’re evoking your muscle mass in this. Choose things that are specific to the kind of hobbies or recreational activities that you like, or the needs that you find. For example, again, in your hotel room, this is a great way. There’s various equipment in that hotel room that you can use to get a really nice workout.

Dr. Pompa:
Muscle optimization, strength optimization, hormone optimization, all via forcing adaptation, that’s why it works, man. It’s so simple.

Dr. Jim:
Absolutely, great.

Dr. Pompa:
Thanks for the interview, man. Thanks for these. On the website, you’ll get the link. You can get them here. Send me your feedback, man. This is the new thing. This is the way to go. Loved it, man. Love these things, thanks.

Dr. Jim:
Thank you.

Ashley:
That’s it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. This episode was brought to you by B3 Sciences. Please go to DrPompa.B3Sciences.com to buy these game-changing blood flow restriction bands or to learn more. Check us out at Health Hunters. The link is in the show notes if you’d like to hear more about these bands.

We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 AM Eastern. We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us at Podcast.DrPompa.com. Please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, and sharing the show with anyone you think may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.

 

251: Proper Alignment For The Best Night's Sleep

with Dr. Peter Martone

Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith. We welcome you today to join us for a particularly fun episode filmed on location from a bed. You’ll have to watch to find out why. Our guest today is chiropractor and lifestyle specialist, Dr. Peter Martone. Listen while Dr. Pompa and his long-time friend break down the mysteries of sleep.

Dr. Martone has been working with his patients for over 20 years, helping them maximize their true life potential by identifying how their lifestyle habits are causing imbalances in their life. Dr. Martone believes that the foundation of it all starts with getting a great night’s sleep. He has dedicated the last five years on sleep research to fully understand how a person’s sleep position can cause them to become sick. Today he is debuting the solution he created to address all of our sleep problems.

For the first time ever, Dr. Martone is sharing information about his new patent pending pillow called the 8 Hour Pillow. He’s even offering a special deal just to Dr. Pompa’s CHTV audience. Please go to the8hourpillow.net/DrPompa/ to order your pillow at a special price and use the promo code CELLTV to take 40% off your second pillow, and Dr. Martone will throw in a free pillowcase. Wait until you see this amazing new product.

Until watching this episode, you’ll never guess two doctors can have so much fun talking about sleep. This is definitely an episode you won’t want to miss. Let’s get started and join Dr. Pompa and Dr. Martone to the show. This is Cellular Healing TV.

Dr. Pompa:
Dr. Peter Martone, welcome to Cell TV.

Dr. Martone:
It is great to be here, Daniel, Danny, Dr. Pompa.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s actually one of the confessions that I have to make is that we are actually really good friends. This is one of the funniest, smartest guys that I know. The health topic today is a really serious one because we’re going to talk about that. I’m not going to spill the beans. This is something that you’ve put a lot of passion and time and effort into, something that our friend, Joe Mercola, and something that excited me. That’s the topic today. I had to come all the way to Vegas to track you down to do this interview.

Dr. Martone:
I saw that you have a $5 chip there. That’s all you have on the counter is a $5 chip.

Dr. Pompa:
I lost the rest. You have to understand, I’m not much of a gambler. I was sitting there at the table with the boys. You actually saw me there. I’m just playing around with it. As soon as I realized I only lost $25, I’m out of here. That’s pretty good. I had $25 to play. You can tell we’re in Vegas. Peter, you’re one of my favorite people in the whole world.

Dr. Martone:
Thanks, I really appreciate that.

Dr. Pompa:
This is a topic that most people I’ve talked about, sleep. I kind of want to start there, the importance of sleep. You introduced something that really does not just transform people’s sleep, but their structure, which affects their function and ultimately their health. That’s what you’re going to learn today and more, trust me.

Dr. Martone:
I think that’s a great place to start. I’m a lifestyle specialist. As an exercise physiologist, nutritionist, and a chiropractor I love teaching people how to live a healthy lifestyle like you. I often make the analogy that people wake up every morning early before they go to work and workout. As they workout, what happens to the metabolism? It goes up. As your metabolism goes up and speeds up, what do you need more of? You would think that people know that. They’re like no, I’m waking up early.

They’re sacrificing their sleep. I say what’s more important, sleep or working out? Guess what they’ll tell me? Working out. Let’s do a little experiment. I want you to go one week without working out. Then I want you to go one week without sleep and tell me which one’s more important.

Dr. Pompa:
That would be an easy answer.

Dr. Martone:
That’s an easy answer. We can go only a short period of time without sleep before we die. You can go a lifetime being sleep deprived, and then your body internalizes that and slowly breaks down your health from the inside out.

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, that’s happening to so many people unknowingly. Would you agree with that?

Dr. Martone:
Absolutely. They’re internalizing it as fatigue. When your body doesn’t get enough sleep because we do 80% of our healing at night when we’re sleeping, not just the right amount of sleep but proper sleep, what ends up happening is our body goes into a state of survival. What systems are suppressed when your body is in survival? Your digestive system, your reproductive system, your immune system, and your hormonal system, and your body can’t balance. I’ve been working on sleep for 20 years trying to get—

Dr. Pompa:
He is to sleep that I am to detox. I’m serious. We’re passionate about these topics, but most people do sleep wrong. From A to Z, we’re going to cover all that.

Dr. Martone:
They sleep wrong. They don’t know how to put themselves to sleep. Sleeping right is an art. It’s an art form what you eat to go to sleep—people don’t know what to eat. They fall asleep with the TV on, and we’re a culture that’s always on our phone. We need to take a step back and say if we want to improve our quality of life, we need to start a few different places; cell detox, which you’re an expert in. We need to drink more water, simplistic things.

You can’t pass Go before you collect $200 type of thing. I love Monopoly. I love sleep. As you know, I’ve created something very specific for people that we’re going to talk about today for sleep. I just appreciate you having me on this show because I know that you have helped millions of people. With your reach and being able to do this, this is just a great symposium.

Dr. Pompa:
Sleep is so important to me. I think I learned it in my athletic days. It became more important to me once I lost my health and I couldn’t sleep anymore. Then I realized I’m not going to get better until I start sleeping. Let’s start with some tips for them to sleep. Then we’re going to talk about what you developed that not only transforms your sleep but also transforms your health in many other ways, which you’re an expert in.

Give them some definites. You mentioned about not doing things before bed, doing things before bed. By the way, I’m so serious about sleep, I actually wear a ring to monitor my sleep, the amount of deep sleep that I get versus the amount of REM sleep I get. All of these things are monitored. That’s how serious I am about sleep as well as you are. Let’s give them some pointers, things they can start right now to help their sleep.

Dr. Martone:
That’s great, and I love tips. If you can just dive into even a few of these tips, you’ll actually today implement a better night’s sleep tonight. Right now what part of the brain are we using? We’re using our think type of brain. We’re using the front part of our brain. When you’re awake, our body uses something called the prefrontal cortex. When you’re sleeping what part of the brain are you using?

Dr. Pompa:
It’s the back part.

Dr. Martone:
The back part of your brain. Do you think back here? No. What do you do back there? You remember back there. All of your thoughts, everything that happened yesterday, I find that you have to go through a night before you can think about it.

Dr. Pompa:
People watching this are like that’s the problem. I think I hit my head too many times back then. That’s why I can’t remember yesterday.

Dr. Martone:
I just broke my arm eight weeks ago.

Dr. Pompa:
A mountain biker like me. You actually broke your collarbone. That’s not bad.

Dr. Martone:
I’m part of the bump club. You can’t think yourself to sleep. When you’re trying to remember what you have to do tomorrow, remember what happened today, you’re thinking. You can’t think yourself to sleep. You have to remember yourself to sleep.

A lot of people say what do you mean by remember? You think about something that happened to you in the past. People say I don’t even want to go back there. I had a bad childhood. I had a bad past. You can establish a memory today that you can sleep on and think about tomorrow. What I mean by that is go for a walk through the woods. Smell the air. Smell the flowers. Go for a walk by the water.

Dr. Pompa:
You’re telling me you’re imagining this.

Dr. Martone:
I’m saying do that today. Then tomorrow night think about every step, the smells. The more detail you remember or when you remember when we first met, we had a great time. We went out. We were dancing, and you remember that. You’ll put yourself to sleep. You can’t think about what we’re going to do tomorrow. You have to remember what we did yesterday.

Dr. Pompa:
I’ve never heard that, honestly. I can honestly say I actually do that. I know that helps me when I do that. It’s absolutely unbelievable. I’ll remember something that was important to me in some emotional way. I do that. That’s amazing. I want to pat myself on the back. I’ve never heard that. It’s something I thought it was just me. I didn’t realize it was a brain thing. That’s pretty cool.

Dr. Martone:
I used to count people in the seminar. I could know where everybody sat. In a room of 40 I count every single time. You put people in, and then you’ll sleep on that. What is sleep? Sleep is when your body just defrags your brain and categorizes stuff. If you can tap into that, you’ll go to sleep within ten minutes.

Dr. Pompa:
What about the light thing? Most of my viewers are very educated in these areas, and we’ve done things on the importance of light. What about light? Is it a big deal, small deal, medium deal? What your opinion on it?

Dr. Martone:
The issue is and the reason why we get sick is because we stay up way later than we’re supposed to.

Dr. Pompa:
We’re not doing that here though.

Dr. Martone:
We’re in Vegas. We’re going to bed right now.

Dr. Pompa:
Soon.

Dr. Martone:
What ends up happening is even when you close your eyes, if there’s any flickering light, if there’s any light in your room that goes through your eyes, it stimulates your brain. Light in the room stimulates your brain. When your kids are falling asleep with the lights on or you have a TV on, that is affecting your quality of sleep. This is something you might not know. I know you know it, but we have to go through eight sleep cycles a night.

What a sleep cycle is is you fall asleep and you drop into a deep sleep. Then you come into a shallow sleep, then a deep sleep. You’ve got to go through that eight times. The body has to get used to that. We’re going to talk about the best way for your body to get used to that, and we’ll talk about how food and different things affect you. Light affects your body. When you come up out of a shallow sleep, light will wake you up.

Dr. Pompa:
There’s a lot said about the blue light. You look at a screen, you look at a television, there’s too much of a blue light frequency. That depletes melatonin, which is another way your body falls asleep and goes into deeper levels of sleep.

Dr. Martone:
I put something over my head. I call it the head garage. It wasn’t something I was going to talk about, but I think it will be interesting.

Dr. Pompa:
Next project.

Dr. Martone:
That’s actually my next project.

Dr. Pompa:
I knew that. I know who he is. Any other tips? I know one thing. Some things are different for everybody. Some people do good with a hot shower before bed. Some people do good with sauna/cold shower, and it puts them in a parasympathetic mode. I’ve heard opposite.

One of the things I have is a ring, I mentioned. I’m able to actually look at things for me. If I do too much screen, it measures my deep sleep. I don’t get deep sleep in the beginning of the night, which you should. Is it different for everyone? What about some of the things I just mentioned, hot shower, cold shower? Are they real things?

Dr. Martone:
What your body likes is patterns. It likes to do the same thing all the time. You can vary things but when you vary things too much, it puts your body into survival. The best thing that you can do is whatever you do all the time. You go to bed, and you wake up at the same time. You shouldn’t wake up with an alarm clock. Your body should be on a self-regulated clock.

Go to bed at the same time and eventually what the body will do is maintain a healthy sleep cycle. People often ask me how much sleep should I get? What I tell them is the importance of getting eight hours of sleep is critical. I know how much sleep my body needs. I get eight, sometimes nine hours. What’s even more important than that is going to bed at the same time and waking up at the same time because your body can justify and self-regulate itself. As long as it goes through those eight sleep cycles, it’s good.

Dr. Pompa:
I couldn’t agree more. I do fine on six hours. You’ve got your body used to that, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s good. Is that correct?

Dr. Martone:
It is correct. There’s HRV and readiness. You have to establish your goal. What is your goal? I want more energy. I want a better sex life. I want to have better relationships. You can run on adrenaline and think you’re awake. Don’t think of sleep as I’m not so tired right now. Think about it as irritability. Think about it as mood swings, brain fog.

Dr. Pompa:
If you don’t get a certain amount of REM sleep, which the ring measures my REM sleep, your brain the next day doesn’t function as well. The REM sleep actually recalibrates the brain literally. Oddly enough, there’s times where I can tell I use my brain a ton, and I’m getting three hours a night of REM sleep or more, even up to four hours. That means my brain needed that. That’s how critical sleep is.

We’re not just talking about being tired because people can use caffeine and stimulants and get through that to a point. We’re talking about performance, athletes. One of the things on my ring that shows is recovery status. It will tell me if I should workout the next day or if I should workout hard or easy. Where is it getting that information? Mostly how I sleep. That’s how critical sleep is.

Dr. Martone:
It’s performance. What I’ve done is I have almost reversed engineered lifestyle habits. I’ve said what do I believe in order to be in your game—I just went down and broke my arm. To me it’s in inevitable that there’s going to be some life-defining injury. Let’s say somebody has a heart attack or I break an arm. It’s not about a matter of if I go down, it’s a matter of when I go down.

What’s important to me is how quick I can get back in the game. My family depends on me. My kids depend on me. My employees depend on me. What I’ve done is I’ve reverse engineered a lifestyle that allows me to live optimally in an elite life. I don’t like to settle for a half-ass life and settle for I’m slightly tired. I want to be up here.

Dr. Pompa:
We function on a high level now. I have so say sleep is the hidden thing that people don’t take seriously. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to do this show. Here’s a bigger reason; people are talking about light. People talk about sleep. I’ve never heard anyone think of the [16:28]. I love that. There’s all these different nuances, but I don’t hear anybody talk about what you discovered.

You hear a lot about mattresses, different things, but pillows—my past was structural correction. I would educate people on if their head is just one inch from the center of gravity, it doubles in weight to the body. That goes from a 10-pound bowling ball to a 20. You can hold something here, and you’re going down. These muscles are working all day for that anterior head; more time at computers, kids playing video games, all the things that we do that drive the head forward. What the heck are we doing to bring it back? You’re going to talk about that.

I want to say this; it’s not just a pain issue. Yes, when your head goes forward, we know you’re going to end up with more neck pain, back pain. I used to educate people that the spinal cord will stretch and cause this constant sympathetic drive, which would lead to more sleep problems, which would lead to anxiety, which would lead to adrenal problems.

Dr. Martone:
Issues and scoliosis.

Dr. Pompa:
All of that because the head is tethering your spinal cord, and that creates this constant tension that most people aren’t aware of. I talked about that, structural correction. We would do all this stuff to bring the head back. We’re learning more of that correction happens in our sleep than what we do during the day. That’s your expertise. Let’s move into the topic.

Dr. Martone:
You’ve got to put that back. You climaxed when you weren’t supposed to, Daniel.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s getting weird.

Dr. Martone:
We knew this was going to happen.

Dr. Pompa:
I warned you in the beginning this could happen.

Dr. Martone:
It will happen. Wait until we lie back.

Dr. Pompa:
What’s that supposed to mean? My wife is behind there.

Merily:
I’m watching my husband blush.

Dr. Martone:
Let’s talk about structural correction. This is where I really started thinking about I have to design something. Like I explain to my patients, let’s say I’ve got a golfer and this golfer all day long is golfing. What are they going to create? They’re going to create imbalance because they’re always swinging this way. Our bodies adapt to stress. It adapts to stress on a daily basis.

What you do ritualistically defines your health and well being. I tell all my golfers to swing the other way. That analogy, let’s convert that to the spine. If we’re texting all day—we just did something with CBS News called Text Neck. Kids are losing their cervical—

Dr. Pompa:
They walk around like this all day.

Dr. Martone:
Their entire spines are structurally—I have a 17-year-old and their spine looks like they’re 70. It is deteriorating their spines. It’s because we’re not off setting that stress like we talked about. You’re supposed to have a curve. As you lose the curve and the head comes forward like Dr. Pompa said, it’s going to put a lot of extra weight back here.

Everybody says my shoulders are tight. Muscles are minions. They’re only being told what to do. There’s a nerve signal that’s constricting the muscle to hold that spine up. The muscle has two functions, movement and protection. When you have a tight muscle, it’s always protecting something. As the head goes this way, the body has got to make up for it somewhere else, so it twists the spine.

What ends up happening is people come into me with lower back pain, and I’ll tell them the problem isn’t in your lower back. The problem is in your neck. If you take a stick and bend it, where’s it going to break? It’s going to break in the middle. That’s not where the problem is, that’s where the stress point is. What I found is as people start to reverse the cervical curve, they pick it up in their lower back and hurt their back. Then they try to start sleeping in what we’re going to talk about in a neutral sleep position, and they can’t because their back is in pain, their hip is in pain.

Their life has adapted to this side sleeping position or their forward head posture, and now they’re a mess. Now it’s a road to be able to sleep properly. It’s not just let me sleeping in a position that’s going to be perfect. You have to work at it. That is what we’re going to talk about today. We’re going to reveal a new way to sleep that will change everything.

Dr. Pompa:
With that said, I do believe that not many people are actually focused on this. When we look at your quality of sleep, which is deep sleep, REM sleep, all those things I was talking about earlier, this actually could be the most important factor of your sleep and then what’s happening in your health, you’re not correcting. To your point, we’re doing this. When we do the right position at night, that’s correcting everything we did that day. That’s swinging the opposite way.

Dr. Martone:
Nobody is going to put their head in traction for 45 minutes a day. It’s not going to happen.

Dr. Pompa:
Look at those beauties back there. You like those.

Dr. Martone:
Those are some nice pillows back there, Daniel. We’re going to go back and see the difference. That’s a pillow for what?

Dr. Pompa:
That looks good though.

Dr. Martone:
It looks great.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s a pillow for the bed.

Dr. Martone:
It’s a pillow for your bed. It’s not a pillow for your—

Dr. Pompa:
Head.

Dr. Martone:
He learns so quickly. Wait right there.

Dr. Pompa:
I’m a quick learner.

Dr. Martone:
Let’s dissect. The definition of a pillow is a rectangular support for your head.

Dr. Pompa:
Do we really need that definition?

Dr. Martone:
I think they do. I believe that the pillow is obsolete. When I did an article for Dr. Mercola—

Dr. Pompa:
An article?

Dr. Martone:
I’m from Boston. I can still focus because I have ADD. I can talk the way he wants to talk and still talk to you.

Dr. Pompa:
We’ll see if I can distract him.

Dr. Martone:
I was watching the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I remember the Chinese actors came out of a room after sleeping together all night, Daniel, and for their head they had a block of wood. I said that can’t be for their head. Then I researched it, and the block of wood was for their neck. They would sleep with the block of wood for their pillow.

Dr. Pompa:
You know what I read somewhere? Cowboys would use a log for their neck.

Dr. Martone:
I tried it with a shoe, a sneaker when I went camping.

Dr. Pompa:
They don’t need your device now.

Dr. Martone:
Can you turn this side so I can show our audience? When you look here and you evaluate the distance between the back of your head and the cervical curve, which needs to be supported, you’re only looking at supporting inches. You’re used to supporting inches. Look at this thing! What the hell is this? This is a pillow for your bed. When you’re sitting here and I lie down, look at my head. I’m going to sleep like this.

You’re going to snore. Let me sleep on my side. Now my head is all jacked up. What have we done? We’ve created very comfortable beds to be able to sleep in the horrible posture. I tell my patients lie like this and try to watch a movie like this.

Dr. Pompa:
Blood gets cut off.

Dr. Martone:
If you go to sleep like that, do you think you can stay in that position? You toss and turn all night long. Let’s say you have a little bit of alcohol or sleeping medication if somebody takes it or you take melatonin. What that does is drop you down into a deep sleep, and you don’t toss and turn as much. You wake up stiff. You’re like I slept the wrong way.

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, that’s actually a fallacy. People drink alcohol and fall asleep. They’ll fall asleep all night, maybe, but they don’t get any deep sleep. We can measure this stuff now.

Dr. Martone:
What’s more important is quality of sleep.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s why we measure.

Dr. Martone:
Now what we’re going to do is get rid of the pillow for your bed. It doesn’t work anymore. Are you ready? Here’s the reveal.

Dr. Pompa:
What’s the pillow for the head?

Dr. Martone:
Hold on. We have an assistant. Can you throw me the fluffy thing in the back? Throw it into the camera view. Just throw it. This is the reveal. Are you ready for the reveal? For the first time on Cellular TV, Daniel, the 8 Hour Pillow.

Dr. Pompa:
That is the name.

Dr. Martone:
That is the name. This traveled with me from Boston, so it got a little dirty. Back up, camera guy. When you look at this you’re going to say holy mackerel. I’m only talking about this much space that we need to support. Look how big this is. The type of feel that it is in the design, it crushes all the way down to nothing.

A neutral sleep position I’ve defined as a position that you sleep in where your weight is distributed over the greatest surface area. The only way that we can do that is on our back. We can have a pillow under our head because what our goal is is to use our head as a weight to be able to help restore the proper curve. We’re supposed to have a curve like this. What I want is the weight of my head over the pillow just like this. I’m going to lie down and take this pillow and put it right under my head.

Dr. Pompa:
There’s the ear. There’s mid shoulder. It’s exactly where it should be. That’s where you want to measure. I have my finger in your ear.

Dr. Martone:
I don’t feel comfortable with this, but that’s okay.

Dr. Pompa:
It is a perfectly straight line. That’s what you want. Even one inch up is not.

Dr. Martone:
Then what you’re doing is using the weight of my head—my head is not supported, but my neck is. It is such a comfortable position. It’s a neutral sleep position.

Dr. Pompa:
You called it the 8 Hour Pillow. The first question I ask, which I love the name, but then you know my brain. My brain starts looking for contradiction. Wait a minute, you’re saying this is going to keep me on my back for eight hours? You’re answer was—

Dr. Martone:
It’s the 8 Hour Pillow because I believe it will eventually give you the best 8 hours sleep possible. Your body adapts to stress that you do on a regular basis. If you walk with one shoe on and one shoe off, that creates an imbalance. Let’s say you come into me with back pain. You’re going to say that’s killing me. I have problems in my back. I have disk issues. I’m going to say put your shoe back on.

Dr. Pompa:
I go to a massage therapist four times a week. I still have back pain.

Dr. Martone:
You’re going to say there’s no problem with my foot. I’m going to be like put your shoe back on. You’re like no, the problem is in my back. Once you put your shoe back on, then your knees are going to start bothering you. When you restore balance, it’s not a straight way back to heaven. You have an up and down road.

What ends up happening is once somebody lies down, I only need you to start on your back and be in that position for 45 minutes to an hour a night. What you do for the rest of the night is on you. I don’t care. If your lifestyle habit that you implement is only to start on your back and you’re only in that position for 45 minutes to an hour, it will transform everything. Eventually your body will catch up to that.

Dr. Pompa:
You made the point people think pillow and neck pain, headaches. You already made the point about back pain. I’m making the point general health for two reasons. Number one, obviously it affects your deep sleep, your REM sleep, all of the sleep stages that we talked about. Ultimately structure affects function, even from a visceral standpoint, meaning how your organs work, literally. Your autonomic nerve system is determined by function.

One of the examples I always give is quadriplegics. How important is the spine? They die early, and it's for no other reason. It just impacts how the central nerve system that runs and heals your body continually—that's interfered with. There's been studies showing anterior head position. Those people literally die of heart attacks statistically far more. People don't think of this is effecting the heart. Fact is it affects every organ system in the body. If your head is forward, you literally die sooner. There's tons of studies on that.

I worked on, some years ago, with a guy named Martin Pall, brilliant biochemist. He developed a theory on something called the NO/ONO cycle and by the way, people that are chronically fatigued, chemically sensitive, they have an over-stimulation of this cycle. Here's the point. It's an inflammation cycle that feeds back into itself. There's certain, literally, neurons in the upper cervical spine that when the head is forward, they're firing constantly. It's putting you in a state of inflammation, through part of which is this NO/ONO cycle. It affects your health, bottom line. That's how important this is.

Okay, so the question that I have is alright, so I'm on my back. No doubt it works. It keeps you on your back for that hour that you desire, and probably many times through the night. Now I end up on my side. How is that going to support me? How does it support with the head flat and then its side? It's two different positions, so you got to explain that. That was a question I asked.

Dr. Martone:
Yeah, that was a good [31:37]. The pillow works on your side. Now it will work on your side, but the pillow will—it's not designed to change the structure on your side. When you sleep on your back—

Dr. Pompa:
If my head's like this or like this when I'm on my side, you're screwing things up, too.

Dr. Martone:
Right. It will keep your spine in line regardless if you're on your side or your back. It's designed to change the structure of your spine sleeping on your back. When you sleep on your side, that's fine; you can do that, too, because your spine will be in a straight position. It's the habit that I want people to get into. I want people to get into the habit of lying on their back and just do that for 45 minutes.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, because obviously 45 minutes—2 hours is better than 45 minutes Three hours is better, yeah

Dr. Martone:
What I'm not telling them is your 45 minutes will turn into an hour. Your hour will turn into an hour and a half. Your hour and a half will turn into two hours. Then eventually—I just broke my arm like we talked about. People say oh, my God, I broke my collarbone. It must be so uncomfortable sleeping. I go to sleep like this, and I wake up like that. I don't move.

Dr. Pompa:
Really?

Dr. Martone:
At all. Dr. Mercola, if you listen to this doctor, he sent me this device. In this device, it was called a PEF unit or PMF unit. I had to take these two discs, put them on top of each other, lay them here, and then I turned it on and fell asleep. It helps stimulate bone healing. He's like, “Oh, you're going to have to tape them to yourself because they'll fall off in the middle of the night.” They rest on each other. I put them on here. I fall asleep, and I wake up, and they're just sitting right there.

Dr. Pompa:
That's incredible. You trained yourself for that.

Dr. Martone:
I [33:15]. I'm so competitive.

Dr. Pompa:
If he can do it, I can do it better, and you can, too.

Dr. Martone:
But you can only do that having your body in the neutral position.

Dr. Pompa:
[33:26] Here's what I want to do. I want to actually go lay down. I want to show them. Cara's going to follow us over there. I want to show that transition, because you still didn't answer—and you will when they see it—why it can work on the side.

Dr. Martone:
Because it [33:40].

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. We'll show that and you can re-explain it. Let's head over. I'm going to take this pillow.

Dr. Martone:
If you look at Dan lying on his back, his head is angled up. That's very important to understand That's reinforcing texting right there. A lot of people say oh, I sleep on my back. Yeah, but you're sleeping on your back in this position that's reinforcing improper biomechanics.

Dr. Pompa:
If I'm like this all day, this is the last thing I want to do.

Dr. Martone:
Right. What's important to also understand is him being in that position is—that's alright. Him being in that position, his eyes are looking this way. We want his eyes looking straight up. What we're going to do, we're going to remove this pillow. We're going to take this pillow, put it underneath him, put it under his head, and then kick your head back. Now what you look at is you look at his eyes and they're going straight up, which is exactly what you want. It's like a hug for your neck. What it's doing is it's cradling your head. It comes with two custom zippers, and you can actually add fill and take out fill if you need to.

Dr. Pompa:
The zippers are on this side.

Dr. Martone:
The zippers are on this left side, yeah, which is the way it's designed to be used. When they purchase the pillow, they get all the videos that explain how to use it.

Dr. Pompa:
That's smart.

Dr. Martone:
So now if Dan says okay, you know what? I'm uncomfortable because lying on my back, my ribs are going to start stretching out because I'm not a back sleeper. You're going to be uncomfortable at the beginning. When you're uncomfortable, what did I say you do? You sleep center and your pain center are close together, so you're going to toss. What ends up happening is he'll go on his side. Now when you look at his head—

Dr. Pompa:
It is. It's level.

Dr. Martone:
His spine is level. You can sleep like that. Then what will happen is his body will turn. He'll go back to his back, and then he'll go back to his side. You'll do that for a good month, two months, three months. It doesn't matter. Just the habit is start on your back. That's the only habit you need. You don't have to say oh, I'm not a back sleeper. I can't sleep on my back. Start on your back and then what I just—what I was explaining, one thing—stay like that, Dan. I said I have this thing called the Head Garage. Just like an ostrich, one of the reasons we don't like to sleep on our back is we feel exposed. All of this is exposed. When we sleep on our side, we're curling up and we feel real protected. That's why they make weighted blankets.

Dr. Pompa:
You actually took one of my—I was going to ask that. When I'm on my side, there's a calming, protective feel.

Dr. Martone:
It's feel; you're correct. If you take a—one technique that I use is you take a pillow and you just put it on top of you. Just that extra weight of a body pillow on top of you will help you sleep on your back a little bit.

Dr. Pompa:
That's brilliant.

Dr. Martone:
Then the other thing is—

Dr. Pompa:
I told you he's smart. Here it comes. Watch your finger.

Dr. Martone:
Now this is the ostrich thing. Right now, he looks like a raccoon, but that's okay. Just stay like that, Daniel. You're doing very good.

Dr. Pompa:
Is this just to make me look really stupid? [36:52]

Dr. Martone:
It looks unbelievable. You really look good. When you see this cut, you're going to love it.

Dr. Pompa:
If this is one of your jokes…

Dr. Martone:
No, you're going to love this. Right now, what's happening is his eyes are covered, and he also now feels protected like an ostrich putting their head in the ground, in the sand. Now he has a weight over his shoulder.

Dr. Pompa:
I actually love this.

Dr. Martone:
That's good. Now the other thing is we want his arms down by his side because that's a neutral position. Then when you sleep, your body always needs to temperature-regulate. Because we have something over his head, his hands and his feet need to be outside of the blankets. A lot of times, people say oh, my feet will get cold. They will not get cold because you're keeping the core so warm and you have the head covered.

Dr. Pompa:
That's smart; you're right.

Dr. Martone:
Your body does need to temperature-regulate. These are tips to help you sleep in this neutral sleep position.

Dr. Pompa:
Do I have to do the rest of the show like this?

Dr. Martone:
It might not look pretty but let me tell you something. I don't care as long as you're increasing your quality of sleep.

Dr. Pompa:
Can we go back and sit on the [37:51].

Dr. Martone:
Alright, yeah, we're going. We're good. We got to get everything set up here.

Dr. Pompa:
Follow us over there. The reason—you explained to me because I'm thinking well, if it's squishing here when I roll on my side, it's going to squish, but you said the filler actually makes its way to the outside, so there's actually more filler on the outside than that.

Dr. Martone:
Yes. It is designed—I use this. This is a iteration. This is the tenth attempt at this. I use this with too much fill. It's dangerous because I don't toss and turn. I'm at risk. I have to sleep in a neutral position. If my bed's too hard, it hurts my ribs. I had a little too much fill in this, and I slept and I'm like oh, wow, this is great; it's comfortable. The whole thing was fill. I woke up. I had bilateral tendinitis in my shoulder.

Dr. Pompa:
It just shows you how important to have the right amount. You said personalized, obviously You can add fill. How do they know how much to add, and where do they get the fill? Explain all that.

Dr. Martone:
Okay, so the pillow will come with the stuffing I recommend and then what I've done is I've added 30 percent more stuffing in the bottom chamber. When you purchase the pillow—I'm a lifestyle individual. Like you, I like to educate. You get ten videos, and these videos explain sleep position, some of the things we talked about, neutral sleep position, how to stay in that position, what foods to eat.

Dr. Pompa:
You think they can actually handle ten videos of you? Go ahead, I [39:20].

Dr. Martone:
Ten three-minute videos, which is 30 minutes; they're going to be good.

Dr. Pompa:
[39:25] going through the Boston accent, you'll be fine.

Dr. Martone:
You're good.

Dr. Pompa:
You'll fall in love with the guy, truthfully.

Dr. Martone:
Okay, let's focus. Let's focus. What ends up happening is 30 percent—but I explain how to use it and that ultimately—if they ever need more fill, they can contact us and you can always [39:42].

Dr. Pompa:
No, the video actually is smart. Okay, I do have one thing I have to say. Where do you come up with this thing, man? There's no cover on this thing. You can see you actually got make-up on there.

Dr. Martone:
That's not make-up. That's [39:56]. Forget that.

Merily:
Drool.

Dr. Martone:
This is not my pillow.

Merily:
No, it's not. It's a few years ago.

Dr. Martone:
This is one we use in the office.

Merily:
It's not my pillow.

Dr. Martone:
[40:05] coming because it actually launches in December.

Dr. Pompa:
It should be coming.

Dr. Martone:
It definitely—in January, it's coming with pillowcases.

Dr. Pompa:
What about my people here watching? They need a pillowcase, man.

Dr. Martone:
They can purchase a pillowcase.

Dr. Pompa:
You need—we're friends. You need to help them out. They need—you should be giving—

Dr. Martone:
You're going to do this on video.

Dr. Pompa:
Yes, I am going to do it on video. You should be giving them something on top of the discount on the pillow, and I think it should be the pillowcase.

Merily:
Hey, today's December 1st. Maybe this won't air until January.

Dr. Martone:
Alright. I will add—I will throw in a pillowcase. You will get a free pillowcase with the purchase of a pillow.

Dr. Pompa:
There you go. I'm serious. It'll make people get the pillow. You think not, but a pillowcase is a big deal.

Dr. Martone:
Alright, now, you will get—

Dr. Pompa:
No, it's a big deal because this needs a special pillowcase. You can't just use a regular pillowcase.

Dr. Martone:
Alright, fine.

Dr. Pompa:
That's ultimately our point.

Dr. Martone:
Alright, you get a pillowcase. I'm sorry.

Dr. Pompa:
They can't just use—

Merily:
You can fight later.

Dr. Pompa:
If it was a regular pillow, they could stuff their pillowcase on, but they need a special pillowcase.

Dr. Martone:
I would love—listen, if I could—alright, you ready? If I'm giving something, I don't want to create—please. I'm going to send you a pillowcase, but if they could just go online and they use it, if they could write me a review on it. That would be great. Just let me know what you think. You get the pillowcase anyway.

Dr. Pompa:
The pillow, not the case.

Dr. Martone:
Okay, that's good.

Dr. Pompa:
Okay, we're going to put a link to get the pillow and the case, but you want to tell them what that is, but make sure—we're going to make sure Ashley puts it in there.

Dr. Martone:
What will happen is there'll be a link, I believe, that's attached to this, but it's the8hourpillow.net/drpompa. That link will be—

Dr. Pompa:
We'll make sure it's there.

Dr. Martone:
I'll make sure on there, I add in the pillowcase, and you'll be able to—what I was going to offer is you could purchase one pillow at the regular price and your second pillow would be 40 percent off, plus a pillowcase.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that is what you agreed to, but I threw in a pillowcase.

Dr. Martone:
Plus a pillowcase.

Dr. Pompa:
You can't use it a regular pillowcase.

Dr. Martone:
I understand. If that's for me, I brought a dirty pillow because it went through luggage and all that kind of stuff.

Dr. Pompa:
That's why you need a pillowcase. We discussed that. Alright, now, listen, I love you, man. They can tell. That's why I warned you in the beginning. No matter what, when you put us together, it gets funny. You know what? We always go intellectual, too.

Dr. Martone:
[42:28]

Dr. Pompa:
You're one of the best chiropractors that I know.

Dr. Martone:
[42:31].

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, man. In your heart, I'll tell you what. Heart-filled guy, man. Everything you do, man, you pour your heart into. We're here with some of the most successful life-changing chiropractors and doctors on the planet, and you are one of the most revered here. That's no doubt, in my eyes, for sure.

Dr. Martone:
And my wife's who's been riding the camera. Am I right, camera girl?

Merily:
Absolutely, glad to be here.

Dr. Pompa:
We love you, man. Thank you for this, and thank you for that.

Dr. Martone:
Thank you.

Ashley:
That's it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. This episode was brought to you by the 8 Hour Pillow. Please go to www.the8hourpillow.net/drpompa to buy this game-changing pillow for your best night's sleep. We'll be back next week and every Friday at 10 AM Eastern. We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us at podcast.drpompa.com, and please remember to share the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, and sharing the show with anyone you think may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.

 

250: How to Overcome Picky Eating in Kids

with Jennifer Scribner

Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith. Today’s episode is one that will hit close to home with so many of you. We’re discussing picky eating in children and what to do about it. It is more than just a nuisance; there is an actual psychology behind it that we can start to address. Our guest today is an expert on the topic, Jennifer Scribner. She is here to discuss the mindset traits of parents who successfully change their kids eating habits. She’ll offer tips that you can try with your kids today.

Jen is the author of the book, From Mac and Cheese to Veggies, Please: How to Get Your Kid to Eat New Foods, End Picky Eating Forever, and Stay Sane in the Process. She’s also a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner, a Restorative Wellness Practitioner, and a GAPS Diet Practitioner at Body Wisdom Nutrition. She teaches families how to make step by step changes to create a non-toxic lifestyle. Her focus includes food choices, non-toxic home products, and mindset and stress management tools included EFT tapping.

Today’s episode is brought to you by CytoDetox. CytoDetox is a powerful detox supplement that can help you safely and naturally support your detoxification systems and flush away the toxins you encounter on a daily basis. All CHTV listeners can go to buycytonow.com to discover the science of CytoDetox and what makes it different from all the other detox products on the market. That’s buycytonnow.com for more information or to purchase. Let’s get started and welcome Dr. Pompa and Jennifer Scribner to the show. This is Cellular Healing TV.

Dr. Pompa:
Welcome to the show, Jen. This is a show that we’ve had a lot of requests for. The reason is because, my gosh, everybody has picky eaters in the house. I was going to say picky kids, but this could be adults, too. Anyways, welcome to Cellular Healing TV.

Jennifer Scribner:
Thank you. Yeah, and you’re right; I was a picky eater myself still as an adult. It’s not just about kids. We often grow up and stay picky and that’s where the problems come in.

Dr. Pompa:
I said at the top of the show, look, I wasn’t a picky kid; I just didn’t eat many vegetables. That kind of funny, I guess I was picky. I was blessed to grow up with my mother’s home cooking with every meal. We ate better back then; trust me, we did. I still didn’t gravitate towards vegetables. Even as an adult today, I eat vegetables, and even enjoy them really, but I still definitely enjoy the fattier foods probably that I grew up with.

I reach for nuts, meat over the vegetable where my wife, on the other hand, is exactly the opposite. It’s funny, Jen, because when you look at our plates, I clear the fatty foods first. Then I’ll start eating the vegetables. She goes after the vegetables. Sit there’s the meat that she’ll eat some of it and I get the rest type thing. I think a lot of it has to do with our childhood.

Anyways, I want to start here. This is a big deal because obviously, you like myself, and so many of the doctors watching, we work with kids in particular that struggle to get the better foods in them. You’re the author of Mac and Cheese to Veggies. I love the title by the way. You’ve obviously developed some really good strategies that we’re going to go through. Let me start here though; why do we have picky eaters? Why are we picky?

Jennifer Scribner:
There’s a lot of reasons for that. There is a normal phase of picky eating. I find that most parents when they go through that, they think that their kids are just going through it as a phase. Let me define that normal phase first which is between the ages of two to four. It might be the type of pickiness where you love green beans one day and you can’t stand them the next day. You get really into some things; then you dislike it. There is still variation within the foods that you’re eating. You’re open to trying new things at various times. That’s the norm for kids and every kid’s going to go through that. When we’re just giving our kids all whole foods, you can run with that cycle, and they’re still going to be making good choices in the course of a week or whatever’s appropriate.

Where we run into problems when it becomes chronic is when it goes beyond two years. That is when we’re still often holding onto hope with our 8-year-old, our 10-year-old, our teenagers that are highly picky, and often limiting to food groups like carbohydrates in particular, and not having any veggies still. A lot of it comes from the poor gut flora because our microbes can demand those carbohydrate foods. That’s what drives I think the majority of this type of picky eating. There can also be structural issues within the mouth where it’s hard to chew where kids like things with certain textures and really don’t like others. Also, there can be neurological issues or sensory processing issues where things don’t taste or feel like we expect them to for our kids, and so they’re having a different experience of food than we are.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s interesting. With that said, the microbiome, there’s a physiological reason for it—I would expect so—and a psychological perspective here like you said, even to the point of what we feel in our mouth. Is there any other connections? Did they make any other psychological connection with it?

Jennifer Scribner:
Yeah, sometimes there can especially if there’s sensory processing issues or in the cases that I’ve worked with kids with autism where for example one child had an aversion to eggs. He was nonverbal and so his parents were constantly trying to fight to get him to eat eggs. Later on, he recovered speech and he was able to explain to them that he didn’t want the eggs because he saw the chickens that they had in the yard eating the bugs. In his mind, eggs were just full of bugs and that was gross. He had this perfectly logical reason for not wanting to eat eggs; he just couldn’t express it. Sometimes if we ask our kids, what is it you really don’t like about this, they might have a reasoning that makes sense to them about a certain color or a certain association that we can help them work through as well.

Dr. Pompa:
Is there any logic to this, and is there truth to this, and is this part of the strategy: if you raise kids on vegetables, they gravitate to vegetables later in life? Maybe because the microbiome; it changes the microbiome. Or are we born with a set of genetics that determine what we like and what we don’t like?

Jennifer Scribner:
Most of it is really what we’re fed. Some of it can even go back to what mom was eating while we were in the womb because having exposures to these different—all food breaks down into chemicals. We have exposures to “flavors” that way as well. Then as foods are introduced as we’re giving kids all-natural foods, they’re opening up their palette naturally. In our culture, we tend to introduce refined grains, artificial colorings and flavoring and things to kids pretty earlier. That gives a different chemical signal and that’s where we’ll latch onto especially that, the fat, sugar, salts kind of thing where we get really triggered. It promotes us overeating and wanting those types of foods where we just want that hit of dopamine that we’re getting from that food rather than recognizing what our body truly needs. If we’re raised with real foods, we’re more in tune with our body’s needs and that’s what we’ll go off of.

There is a little genetics at play in people who are supertasters is the term for it where they genetically taste things bitter more strongly. They have more taste receptors for bitter than the average person. That is something that you’ll recognize as a real extreme example that will run through families where they really don’t like the greens. Often, aversion to things like coffee that most people do enjoy. That can be its own special category, but that’s not most kids. Most kids are carbohydrate addicts and that’s why they don’t like veggies.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly; if you’re feeding your kid sugar at a young age or all the boxed foods that have the excitotoxins in them, these are drugs to the brain. The brain is going to not want broccoli when it can get these very excitatory—neurologically excitatory foods.  It’s not a perfect analogy, but it does work the same as drugs.

Jennifer Scribner:
Right, and this is something that as adults, we can often recognize in ourselves after we’ve cleaned up some of our own diet or we’ve been on some type of sugar cleanse. Then you go off of that, and you have a candy bar, or you have a piece of cake, something really sweet, and you notice yourself buzzing and amped up. In my own process of moving away from sugar addiction, I really realized how much I loved that high. I loved that energy because I was a low energy person running on the carbohydrate up and down constantly. It was my upper.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no doubt; I’ve seen it. We have one picky eater. Actually, it’s funny; my son, Issac, my middle child, he was picky. He wouldn’t eat a vegetable growing up. I think a lot of it was in utero, he had some—he inherited mom’s lead just like my first child, but it affected them differently. Issac became very picky, but he’s less picky now as an 18-year-old.

Now, my son Simon, he’s our last one; he’s our youngest. We were just hands-off with him. We were very strict with our diet with all the kids. Matter of fact, you should hear the jokes in the house by the way. Oh my gosh, you wouldn’t even let us—God forbid, we had a piece of candy wrapper in our thing. You’d track us down. That was the ongoing joke. Then our youngest came, and it was like, he’ll figure it out. It’s like typical youngest.

Jennifer Scribner:
Typical youngest.

Dr. Pompa:
He was the kid who ate everything. Honestly, we were like, well, don’t have to worry about him. He eats healthy. He eats everything. If you say, try okra, he’d be like, okay, and he’d eat it. Now, we let the hands off, he got sucked into carbohydrates because he had a bike and he could ride to the end of the street to the convenience store; of course, he got addicted. We watched it happen. He became overweight; our only child to become overweight. He’s not anymore. If you saw him at 15, he’s slim and he looks completely different. He had to figure it out himself and bring it back around.

Because of it, he became the picky eater. It was his binge if you will that made him now picky. Even though he eats good now, he still—to get a vegetable in him is impossible. What are some of the strategies? I know that’s what people want to hear. People are, okay, how do I get my picky eater from mac and cheese to veggies? That’s the title of the book.

Jennifer Scribner:
Yeah, and it can depend on the ages of kids, and what you’re dealing with, and why you need to make the change, and how dramatic that change needs to be. For teenagers, to me it’s really like you were talking about with Simon, getting them connected to why they want to make the change. What is their motivation? Are they uncomfortable about their weight? Are they having mood swings, or social anxiety, or skin issues? That was my thing.

Dr. Pompa:
Skin was a big one for at least two of my teenagers because they were raised on the healthy diet, my older ones. They went out. We said, op, they’ll figure it out. They went out. They got bad skin and some other symptoms. They came back. Now, all of my kids eat very healthy. That’s what happened with them.

Jennifer Scribner:
Yeah, and that’s such a common thing that is really embarrassing. Those are points where you can open up that discussion and try and—for me, it’s all about, what are foods leaving you feeling? How are they showing up in your symptoms? When you’re binging on this thing, did you break out? Let’s try this for two weeks or a month really doing this particular eating plan, or really getting this amount of veggies in, and see what happens. See if that helps your skin clear to have cruciferous veggies and lots of sulfur to help you with your detoxification system for example.

With older kids, it’s really about negotiating that and having these conversations that are open and curious rather than demanding and saying, this is the way it has to be. What you’re providing at home is still typically the majority of their food, so you do have that level of “control” in what’s offered to them. You want them to internalize how their choices are working for them and why they’re making them. Just having that open dialogue so that they can really think through. Because like you saw with your kids, when they are going off to college, they’re out of your sight, they’re going to make their own choices anyways. Are they going to be able to circle back and have the reasoning to do so?

Dr. Pompa:
I’ve found that if they don’t make the decision themselves even as teenagers, they just—they’ll eat very little here if they don’t like the food if they’re picky about it. They’ll go out and they’ll find the other food that they’re addicted to or that they want. Unless they make the choice themselves, which our kids eventually did, it’s really hard. You can’t just hold them back from it.

Jennifer Scribner:
Yeah, and I think those of us who are really into healthy eating, we find that in our social circles with all different ages of people because we want so bad for them to eat real foods and understand these things. It’s not always just the kids, but it can be spouses; it can be other family members that we want to bring around to our way of thinking, but really, it’s finding out what motivates them and having them make their own choices because often—

Dr. Pompa:
I would send my kids some articles. I would say, “Did you read that?” My wife would send them articles too or different things about—I’d say, let me tell you what this says. It’s just persuasive argument. Alright, let’s back up to little ones though because that’s what we see a lot or dealing with an autistic child who is—come on, it’s even textures of food as you pointed out can be a big deal, colors of foods, you name it.

Jennifer Scribner:
Yes, foods touching other; all those things.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. What are some of the strategies here because there may be even more harm?

Jennifer Scribner:
Yeah, and that’s what I’ve worked a lot with kids with autism and sensory processing disorder. That’s where I really had to figure out so much of this strategy. There’s a few different ways to go. As I talk about in the book, I use Applied Behavioral Analysis, so ABA therapy, which is you’re having a bit of this, or you’re having this kind of food, and you’re going to get some type of reward that you’re very motivated by. Then we’re going to increase how many bites for that same reward. That’s a system that works well for some families that are already using an ABA program for other reasons or some kids are really motivated by their favorite thing whether it be a certain play, or activity, or video, or something like that.

Other families will back into it. That’s where you can choose one or two types of food that you want to just start working in the diet. Be creative about out. Maybe your kids don’t like boiled Brussel sprouts, but would they liked them shaved up and sautéed where they don’t see it whole. Would it be okay if it had cheese on it because then the taste was different or another sauce like that? You’re just working in more foods that you’re aiming for and you’re squeezing out the others.

Then the most dramatic method is what I call the cold turkey method. That’s when you’re implementing a healing diet that’s going to be therapeutic. You choose a day, and this is the day where the food all changes. That’s that ripping off the Band-Aid: these are the foods you’re going to eat. If you don’t want to eat these foods, you’re not eating. You’re not going to starve yourself to death. You’re going to come around. We’re going to keep offering you these foods and you’re going to choose which one you’re going to eat.

Dr. Pompa:
That could be called the pet method or the dog method because when you change a dog’s diet to all raw, which is better for a dog, what happens is they don’t eat.

Jennifer Scribner:
Yes, my cat did that, too.

Dr. Pompa:
Then the owner goes, oh, they didn’t eat. Then they feed them the next day. It’s, I tried, but it didn’t work. How many days did you go without food? One. Okay, dogs can go many days without food. It’s actually really good for them. We call that a fast. Eventually, they will eat. Okay, of course, we can do that with children, but that’s a little tougher with children.

Jennifer Scribner:
It’s emotional. That’s the toughest part. Getting people mentally prepared, making sure that spouse is on board, or other people in the household are on board to really stick it out, and to have a goal, and see the light at that end of the tunnel instead of just the everyday stressors. Because when we do that method, your kids are going to refuse to eat at first. I’ve had kids not eat for five days. We keep them hydrated, and eventually, they come around. To be able to be with them and not be emotionally triggered by it is really important. I talk about a lot of support.

Dr. Pompa:
Yes, there’s a certain mindset and trait like, I could do that. Because I know the value of fasting, I’d be like, it’s good for them. He’ll be fine. I’d even tell him every day, this is really good for you. Not every mindset is going to be that way, so is there a special mindset that goes with that personality?

Jennifer Scribner:
I think some people are more—they lean more that way to begin with, but that’s why mindset is one of the first chapters in my book because I want whatever method you’re choosing to be able to choose it, feel good about it, run with it. Because when you do that, the kid didn’t eat all day, so I gave in at the end of the night, and then you’re going to try to start over, then you’re going to have twice as long without eating because there is that battle of the will where the kid knows that they felt sorry for me, took pity on me. It may not be them being willful. Again, this is their microbe typically craving carbohydrates that are screaming for their drugs that we’re really going up against when we are in that period of fasting and we’re in that period of transition.

There’s some people will take that method and run with it, and it’s easier for them, but there’s other people who their situation is more desperate that they need to do something therapeutic. They’ve tried some of the other methods, and they just really don’t work, or they aren’t working quick enough. If you have a child with an inflammatory bowel disease, and you’re having a lot of symptoms from that, and you’re looking at surgical procedures, or increasing drugs or something, that can be more motivating to say, okay, we’re just going to build the resilience, all of the mindset steps, really talk with our family, really get our self-psyche up to this, to do it once, and to roll with it beyond that.

Dr. Pompa:
In the book, you said you start with mindset. What does that mean? Meaning that you said choose a mindset. You’re telling the parents to choose a mindset or what mindset are you?

Jennifer Scribner:
It’s about developing a growth mindset, and a resilient mindset, and to do things like getting support. In particular, I have section on talking to your spouse. Typically, it’s a mom that would initiate these type of changes. Often, its dad needs to be on board. Not just like, yeah, that sounds good, you try that, but really on board. Because if there is an energetic disconnect between the parents, the child will sense that. They’ll hold out longer on not eating if you’re doing the cold turkey method for example.

Grandma needs to be in on that. Sometimes I’ll advise people, ask people for support, but you might need to leave out some people for a time who are not supportive. Looking at who you’re discussing this with because if you’ve really got this goal that’s important to you, and other people think it’s torture to not let your kids eat cupcakes at school, those are the people who if you call them crying because you’re struggling that day, they’re going to tell you to give up. You want to really look at who you’re associating with and set things up so that you can be successful. That can even be things like choosing a restaurant that you can go to in a pinch because life happens. Maybe you can’t cook that day, but what is in your neighborhood that’s organic, or farm disable, or paleo, or whatever suits the dietary plan that you’re going for that you could get something close enough so that you’re mentally prepared for that so that nothing’s going to turn you back from this plan that you’ve set.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so you’re helping them develop the mindset that they need for success. Let’s back up to the very first strategy that you mentioned. Also, the question is, do you tell them where to start? Do you give them like, okay, I would start here, or depending on the child, start here? How does that look?

Jennifer Scribner:
With the ABA strategy? The applied behavioral analysis?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.

Jennifer Scribner:
Yeah, it’s really, start with—my book isn’t about a particular dietary plan; it’s really whatever you want to implement. You’re choosing what food is most important or what’s a starter food for this plan that you’re working in. It’s step by step: okay, give them a bite; give them the reward. Give them two bites; give them the reward. Give them a lot of praise.

Dr. Pompa:
What kind of a reward?

Jennifer Scribner:
Preferably, non-food rewards, but if that’s all that would work, that would be fine. A good reward is something that your kid would do anything to get, that they’re highly motivated by. It could be a particular game that they like to play. It could be something special to do with you. It could be a few minutes of a video. Whatever is most important to them because choosing the right reward is crucial because they’ve got to be willing to do whatever it takes to get that reward.

Dr. Pompa:
Do you find that—

Jennifer Scribner:
If they won’t go along with it, it’s not the right reward.

Dr. Pompa:
Right, exactly. Do you find then eventually, they start not minding the food if you do that long enough or is it something that’s just always—you’re always have to reward because that could be draining in itself?

Jennifer Scribner:
Yes, for super picky eaters, part of it is getting the multiple tastes allowing the brain to register because even for a typically developing kid, it’s 8 to 10 tries of something before they really know if they like it or not. As you’re introducing new bites, or you doing this over the course of time, they are starting to register what this food means to them, and starting to recognize it. It can take a while to do this type of method. Especially if they’re already working with an ABA type program particularly with autism, then it can just be one more thing that they’re working into ABA. Maybe they are really aiming to get some veggies in or get some meat in if kids are self-limiting on protein to bring in a little bit more variety. Then the other thing that happens is as we start to bring in more foods, get more nourishment, that can unravel some of the toxicity that’s within the brain, the signaling issues that they may have had with the taste of something. There’s this whole cascade of positive things that happen through both the tasting of it, but also just the nourishment and the rebuilding of health within the body.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, admittedly, I didn’t read the book because I don’t have a picky kid. If I did, I’d be first on it. I’d absorb it just like that because that’s what I do. For the parents out there, many that have picky eaters, or even people watching that says, gosh, I want to fix this in me, describe what the book takes us through. You said it starts with the mindset, but other strategies that you feel you just want to pull out of the book just for the people here.

Jennifer Scribner:
Yeah, I talk about how you got a picky eater, those physiological reasons. In particular, the whole cascade of things that happen in a gut that has dysbiosis or imbalanced microbiome. Then we shift into mindset. Then we talk about choosing a method and getting prepared to make sure that when you start whatever method you choose, you’re starting it, you’re doing it once, and you’re finding success. Then I also have sections on troubleshooting those first couple of weeks. What happens if my kid vomits? What happens if my kid gets constipated? There’s a lot of those things that are expected especially with making a major change.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, what’s normal? Because if a parent sees a kid vomiting, they’re going to be like, okay, that wasn’t a good food for him perhaps. Meanwhile, it’s a reaction.

Jennifer Scribner:
Right, are they having low blood sugar? What to look out for with that. Are they having problems digesting fats? If that’s what’s causing nausea and vomiting.

Dr. Pompa:
Probably, you give tips on what about it if that happens?

Jennifer Scribner:
Yeah, I’m very in depth about those type of things. Then I also have a whole troubleshooting section as well where we talk about things like bed wetting, or eczema, diarrhea, all these little things that can crop up that you just need a go-to place to find out what can I do to handle this? Is there something that I can adjust? Because I want parents to understand how to be a detective as they’re making these changes and how that they can shift the foods and shift what they’re doing with their kids so that it’s really individualized to them.

Then I also include a section, “My Kid Won’t” with a lot of different examples. If you’re doing something like the GAPS diet, or a lot of therapeutic—not healing diets; you’re doing broth. Your kid won’t eat broth, here are multiple ways that you can work that in. Here are ways you could—my kid will only eat ground meat. What can we sneak into ground meat? My kid will only eat smoothies. How can we use smoothies to get more nutrition? There’s a whole bunch of ideas about that as well to make it really practical.

Throughout, there’s a lot of encouragement as well. A lot of comments I’ve gotten on the book is that, oh, this is really authoritative, but it also makes you feel like you’re really going to be able to do it. There’s some hard things, but it’s not that big deal that it can seem like. Tons of other parents have done this. You’ve got this. That’s always my message to parents: you’ve got this. Take one step. Evaluate where things are going. We just have to keep moving forward to make these changes because if they’re chronic, and you’re really seeing the health issues become apparent in your kids, it doesn’t turn around on its own very readily.

Dr. Pompa:
This is going to be a question. I’m sure you address it in the book. It’s like, okay, we’re now successful at home, but what do you do at school? Because there’s peer pressure, there’s this, you have the teacher, you have other kids giving them food. What do you do at school? I’ll ask the question.

Jennifer Scribner:
Yeah, and some of it depends. That’s one of the other mindset things I talk about is do you need to talk to your kids’ teachers? Do you need to talk about the school environment? What’s appropriate for your situation? Should you be providing the nut flour cupcake for birthday because everyone else is having one? It really depends on—I’m not somebody who thinks you need to be 100% strict all the time, but you need to understand what are the outcomes or the consequences of the times that you’re opening this up.

If your kid gets sugar or for some of the kids I’ve worked with in particular, your kid had gluten that day. Parent calls me. Their kid is a little nightmare. How long is this going to last? If that happens, and your kid’s a little nightmare for three days, you know it’s not worth it to make that choice again. These are some of the things that you’re learning as you go along.

Schools are often really tough because they are so sugar saturated. They’re so food-based reward. That’s an ongoing issue. It’s really important for parents to be bringing this up and to talking to each other. Because often, there’s a number of parents who feel the same way, but nobody wants to go first about bringing it up about having this type of change.

The other thing to be sensitive to is that when you’re suggesting change, people often take it very personal even within your family. Being confident of why you’re making the change for you, and saying, this isn’t really about you. This is just about us. You do you; we’re going to do us, but we want to be respectful of each other, can be helpful. Because when you make a change, people start examining some of their habits and getting angry with you rather than facing their own stuff around food.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s remarkable. Nobody likes people that step up and do something harder or different. It’s just an odd human behavior I’m telling you. Especially amongst those women groups, it’s vicious, literally. It’s remarkable. This was a question that was poised to me not that long ago just like a couple of weeks ago is, okay, he’s going to a birthday party, which he really loves to—he’s on the autism spectrum. She’s trying to get him more socially interactive. Birthday party going to, very good thing. Friends are really important. However, they’re going to have these foods that he’s not going to eat. What should I do, Dr. Pompa? God, I wish I had you in my back pocket at that moment. My advice was—

Jennifer Scribner:
I have a blog post specifically about that.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we’ll share that here in one second. That’s a great idea actually. My advice was this, is look, I would first of all call the mother who’s having the party, and say, here’s my challenge. Recommendation: should I send them after the cake and cookies and he wouldn’t even know it happened? Maybe. Or if the kids say, oh, you missed getting cake, mom could just, hey, we’re late; sorry. Or maybe it’s a special thing that you could bring for her ahead of time, but then he might see that his is different. That may not go over well. I think I landed on, I would have her see if she could just do it before somehow and he comes late. That was all I could think about. Did I miss something? Is there something better? What would you have recommended?

Jennifer Scribner:
Yeah, those are the suggestions that I make as well: talking to the parent upfront. When you’re bringing something different for your child, talking to them about that. Particularly if they’re not eating a lot of sugar, then having one of their favorite treats could be really exciting. You can say, they’re going to be serving this kind of thing. You know that doesn’t feel good on your tummy or that really affects your sleep. Whatever way you can connect with them on that. Would it be really exciting if we could have this almond flour cupcake or if we could have this lemon bar? Something that would be fun for them to substitute in so that they still feel like they’re participating in something special, but they have their own version of that. Some people do arrive late, leave early, miss out on that, and just participate in the other activities.   

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, almond flour or stevia sweetened homemade treats are a lifesaver in these cases for sure; there’s no doubt. Okay, where can people—you mentioned your blog. Where do they find that to get questions answered and what about your book?

Jennifer Scribner:
Yeah, my website is bodywisdomnutrition.com. I have a tab right on there that’s for parents that talks about the book, and also has a freebie, and has some blog listings as well. My book is called, From Mac and Cheese to Veggies, Please: How to End Picky Eating Forever and Stay Sane in the Process. It’s available on Amazon. It is also available locally if you’re in the Portland area where I live at Barnes & Noble.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that good. Alright, perfect. Alright, let’s one last question. A parent wants to start tonight. What do they do?

Jennifer Scribner:
There’s different strategies you can do. I would say if you’re choosing one food, try it a new way. Often, we’ve introduced especially vegetables to our kids a certain way that we’re used to making it or it’s come in a certain mixture. If you want to try that again, try it a different way. Look something up on Pinterest to find a new recipe, to find a new preparation. Another thing that really gets kids involved is having them choose something new at the market that they’re willing to try and having them help with prepping the food.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s smart.

Jennifer Scribner:
Because they get a buy-in and an ownership about—and they’re more willing to try something that they grated, or that they mixed together, or that they participated in making.

Dr. Pompa:
Great advice. Jen, thank you for being here. I hope my clients with picky eaters are listening. I’m going to make them listen. This is where I say, okay, episode…then I give them the episode. She knows more about this than I do. She has more ideas than I do. Thanks for your book. Thanks for being on Cellular Healing TV. Great knowledge that you brought, thank you.

Jennifer Scribner:
Thank you so much; thanks.

Ashley:
That’s it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. This episode was brought to you by CytoDetox. Please check it out at buycytonow.com. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 AM Eastern. We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us at podcast.drpompa.com. Please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, and sharing this show with anyone you think may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.

 

249: Brain Optimization and Neurofeedback

with Dr. Andrew Hill

Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith. Joining us today is one of the top peak performance coaches in the country, Dr. Andrew Hill, and he is here to talk about how to take control of your brain health. He’ll discuss the concept of neurofeedback, how it works, and how you can implement it. From general brain health to brain health hacks to mindfulness and supplements, you’ll hear many effective ways to engage the wellness of your brain. First, I’d like to tell you a bit more about our guest. Dr. Andrew Hill is one of the top brain experts in the country. He holds a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from UCLA’s Department of Psychology and continues to do research on attention and cognitive performance. Dr. Hill is the founder of Peak Brain Institute and lectures at UCLA, teaching courses in psychology, neuroscience, and gerontology.

Today’s episode is brought to you by CytoDetox. Long-term exposure to toxins such as environmental pollutants, cancer causing chemicals, preservatives, pesticides, heavy metals, and industrial waste affects our metabolism, behavior, immune system and can also lead to disease. These toxins are stored in tissues and cells throughout the body and brain, often for years. CytoDetox is a powerful detox supplement that can help you safely and naturally support your detoxification systems and flush away the toxins you encounter on a daily basis. All CHTV listeners can go to buycytonow.com to discover the science of CytoDetox and what makes it different from all the other detox products on the market. That’s buycytonow.com for more information or to purchase. Let’s get started and welcome Dr. Pompa and Dr. Andrew Hill to the show. This is Cellular Healing TV.

Dr. Pompa:
Welcome to CellTV, Dr. Hill. Appreciate you being on.

Dr. Hill:
Thanks for having me, nice to be here.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely. We’ve had a lot of requests for this topic of neurofeedback. I think a few years ago most people haven’t even heard the word, right? It’s like now we’re getting all kinds of questions asking me—here’s what I get. Dr. Pompa, what do you know about neurofeedback? I said you know what? I get that question enough. I’m going to bring on one of the experts. You lecture at UCLA, and this is your field. You have PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience, so you know something about the topic.

Dr. Hill:
I do. I got my PhD studying how neurofeedback works. When I got into the field, I was pretty impressed by what it could do, but at the time, about 15, 20 years ago, there was different churches or schools of thought within neurofeedback. They had different functional approaches and different theories underpinning how they worked, and yet, they were all getting great results. I joke this is a blind men and elephant situation. We all had a piece of the truth, and no one really had the big perspective. This is why I went back to grad school and got a PhD.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, look, I mean, I think this can benefit everyone listening right now. Stay tuned because you’re going to realize that there’s some major conditions where this will really benefit you, but I really do believe we all can benefit. Start with your own story. I love to start there. How do you get into this? I mean, how’d you become an expert here?

Dr. Hill:
Sure, well, broadly, I’m a neuroscientist. I’m a cognitive neuroscientist, so I tend to do the mind-brain intersection. What I care about is, essentially, how the brain produces the human resources of mind, stress response, sleep management, attention management, all the high-level human resources that are to some extent combinations of different underpinnings, different physiological resources. A lot of attention is managed by inhibition, prefrontal. Hitting the brakes on your resources, so I wanted to understand how that all goes together. The neurofeedback stuff came up for me. I’d been working in health and human services for many, many years. I’ve always been somebody who wanted to understand what made people tick and machines tick and would dig into anything and try to understand all the mysteries around me. In working in health and human services for years, I discovered that we didn’t have a lot of the answers. I worked inpatient psych in a crisis environment and worked in dual diagnosis units and residential developmental disability houses. For years saw lots of services applied, but not a lot of change from those services, a lot of revolving doors in inpatient situations and chronic holding patterns for people who had developmental issues.

This is a little frustrating, so at some point, I left human services and went to high tech. Then the tech bubble corrected, and I, after a few years, left and went back into human services and went and worked in an autism center that used a lot of neurofeedback; a place in Providence, Rhode Island called The NeuroDevelopmental Center. I was shocked at what I was seeing. I was seeing symptoms lift, eye contact show up for some of these kids and adults. Sensory integration issues drop away, every so often language coming off where it hadn’t been present. Definitely all the other things that come along with developmental stuff getting addressed like seizure, sleep issues, anxiety. I was seeing all these actual change, and when I say change, I mean change in a matter of weeks and months. For ADHD, let’s say—I was seeing this back then. We still see it at our Peak Brain centers. We do 30 to 40 sessions typically for everyone to start the process of neurofeedback, and we get about 1 to 3 standard deviations of change in executive functions.

Dr. Pompa:
Stop right there. Let’s back up a second. I bet you most people have heard the word, but they really don’t know what it is. They definitely don’t know how it works, so walk us through that because you’re talking sessions and stuff.

Dr. Hill:
Yeah, sorry. Let me unpack that for you. Neurofeedback is a form of biofeedback. Biofeedback broadly is taking a physiologically nonconscious or not aware process, elevating it to the point where you can learn from it in some ways. Classic biofeedback from the 60s and 70s is hand warming. You stick a temperature probe to your finger, and you tie it to a pitch, and when your hand gets warmer, the pitch goes up in tone. You practice making the pitch climb. That’s a hand warming exercise. That’s used for headaches. It’s a form of biofeedback that’s classic for headaches.

Neurofeedback is somewhat similar in that you’re learning from the physiological signals, but you’re doing it from brainwaves or brain blood flow directly. Because of that, you aren’t tying into a signal in the body you can monitor and control like your breathing, or your heartbeat, or something. You’re tying into a very specific little brainwave parameter. Let’s say the amount of alpha waves, or the amount of theta waves, or delta waves, or how fast the wave is running, or connectivity between two regions, and so these are brain parameters you can measure in real time.

Dr. Pompa:
You’re connected to a machine, so you can watch it.

Dr. Hill:
Yeah, you stick a wire or two to your head, and you measure your brain in real time. Your brain shifts because that’s what it does. Things are fluctuating. When it happens to shift in the right direction, for half a second you go good job brain with audio and visual input. When the brain does the wrong thing or something else, you withhold the input. The brain goes, hey, wait a minute. I was watching that information. I think that was interesting. Where’d that go?

Then the brain happens to move in the right direction. The audio and visual presume, and the brain goes, ooh, interesting, and gets rewarded for having just done the shift it did. It’s an involuntary form of operant conditioning, essentially, shaping things up and down.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I was just going to say similar to how I train my dogs. I mean, it’s very similar.

Dr. Hill:
Yeah, it’s the shaping. It’s Skinners pigeons. It’s not a Pavlovian thing. We aren’t making you salivate. I promise. We are taking resources that already exist, and we’re gently exercising them up or gently exercising them down by applauding the brain for certain things we think it might want to do more of.

Dr. Pompa:
Okay, so you gave us example of autistic children, ADHD. Walk us through. Okay, what are some of the other conditions that you see incredible results for, where it’s effective?

Dr. Hill:
Yeah, the low-hanging fruit for neurofeedback would include ADHD and broadly executive function, as you said earlier. Even if there isn’t anything wrong, you can usually boost these same resources, but for ADHD, the efficacy is extremely high. It works for almost everyone, and it usually eliminates ADHD in three or four months of time on the calendar. Also, very high efficacy for sleep issues, anxiety, and seizures, extremely high efficacy. The seizure is the average person has over 50% reduction and 5% of people have complete suppression of seizures for over a year. It’s a dramatic effect, and the field is discovered because it suppresses seizures.

Dr. Pompa:
Does it matter the causative factors of the seizures, or it seems to just…

Dr. Hill:
Great question.

Dr. Pompa:
Blanket over all the seizure conditions?

Dr. Hill:
It’s a great question. I don’t know is a short answer. I’m not sure anyone does. I would say the ideas about how it works would suggest it works broadly. The way we reduce seizure is by training up a frequency in the brain that neurologists call sleep spindles or sigma. Neurofeedback people call it SMR, sensorimotor rhythm. You’ve seen SMR if you’ve seen a cat lying in a windowsill, that liquid body but laser-like focus where the body—it’s the predator mode where the body is completely relaxed, preparing to spring, and the mind is locked into one stimulus or two stimuli. That’s the opposite of ADHD, by the way.

If you train up SMR in human brains, you raise the seizure threshold. Make the brain seizure resistant. You also add inhibitory tone to the frontal lobe. You get more self-control, and therefore, ADHD drops away. SMR is this rather magical frequency in neurofeedback.

Dr. Pompa:
A lot of the work that teach, we end up in a brain phase where we’re detoxing neurotoxins out of the brain, which create all these bad signals. Gosh, we can see now why this would be a perfect match for what I do. We’re up here getting rid of causative factors. You’re down here, basically, reprogramming how the brain fires and wires, I mean, pretty interesting.

Dr. Hill:
Yeah, so it’s just gentle exercise, and then you tell us if you—what you notice in terms of resources. Then we iterate and try something else. It’s like working with a personal trainer where you build a training machine together and see what happens, and then adjust it and continue.

Dr. Pompa:
Is there a way of looking at the brain pre and post? How do you measure that? I mean, symptom-wise is one thing subjective. What about objectively? How do we do that?

Dr. Hill:
Yeah, so I use two sets of measures for our clients. One is a map of your brain activity, which is stable year after year unless you do something to your brain, and the other is an attention test. It’s called the CPT, a continuous performance task. We use one called the IVA, usually. It’s pretty basic. For that test, we’re measuring your ability to sustain your focus and to not be impulsive under very boring conditions. We flash a number on the screen, and you click the mouse button when you see one number and not when you see another number, very, very unloaded resources. Then you make bored mistakes and impulsive mistakes. We see which kind of ways your attention frays under a very low load situation.

Dr. Pompa:
Can we see a difference on MRIs, cat scans of the brain before and after it?

Dr. Hill:
Not MRI so much, I mean maybe, FMRIs, sure but not MRI, structural MRI, unless you’re rebuilding tissue. Then that takes a lot longer than most of what we do. In terms of the other assessment, the physiological assessment, the brain mapping or the quantitative EEGs will be used for that. For that, we put a full head cap, like a swim cap, on your head. We spread it full of gel. We have you sit with eyes closed and open for about five minutes each, and then we take the resting baselines of your eyes closed and open brainwaves. Compare them to a normative database of several thousand people, and out of that, get statistical heat maps or Z-scores that show me how unusual your brain is in several thousand different parameters from the average person your age.

Some of those discriminants or phenotypes are valid diagnostically. Most are not. I can’t say, oh, this is true about you. I can say, oh, hey, this often—for instance, one of the most valid, the high ratio of theta to beta brainwaves. If your theta/beta ratio is elevated, that is the most valid marker that we can find for ADHD. It’s 95% or 94% accurate for blindly sorting ADHD and non-ADHD people into buckets simply on a brainwave parameter. It’s really quite robust.

Other things are not quite so robust. If I saw the anterior cingulate is extra active, more beta waves in somebody, I might say, oh, this often shows up when you sit there and ruminate or perseverate a touch. Do you get a song stuck in your head? Are you a little bit OCD? What’s going on? The person would usually say something like, oh, yeah, that happens to me, but it might not be OCD problem in the resource. It might be this person’s a high-powered CEO who uses that resource, and I’m seeing the activation of that switching circuit.

I can’t necessarily put it in terms of is it a good or bad thing, or which diagnostic label does it fit into? My job is to help people demystify which of the resources look elevated, or bottlenecked, or stuck. Then they help me understand which of those models I’m coming up with about their brain because most accurate and which thing they want to exercise. What they want to do with those resources once we figure out where the resource bottlenecks are.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s why I said it’s good for everybody. Obviously, it’s just like a muscle, right? We can all train the muscle what we want to activate, strength. That’s why I at the top of the show said, everyone listening, this could help you. You talked about autism, an exploding pandemic. What about Alzheimer’s and dementia? Have you noticed any improvements with that?

Dr. Hill:
I have not. I’m also a gerontologist. What I teach at UCLA is a course series in healthy brain aging and biological perspectives on diseases of aging. I’m pretty familiar with the state of the aging in gerontology research and biohacking around that. Neurofeedback is not your best bet there. Once you’re significantly symptomatic, you’ve lost a great deal of tissue, especially in the temporal lobes, and it’s really hard to rebuild that tissue unless it’s there.

That being said, there are—I used to teach this stuff, the gerontology courses, from the perspective of, well, dementia and Alzheimer, those sorts of things are progressive, degenerative, irreversible, and here’s what’s happening in the brain, students. It was a little bit of a depressing lecture as you may imagine or two. Now we include lots of discussion around the metabolic pathways that cause synaptic pruning versus synaptic density laid down. This is, basically, the work of [Dale Bredesen] showing that there’s metabolic factors driving synaptoblastic versus synaptoclastic processes. The same way those processes balance in bone density in the body. If you take statins, you throw off your bone density, and you lose density because of the osteoclast-osteoblast imbalance. It turns out there’s some evidence that Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia may be an imbalance of the synaptoclastic and synaptoblastic, that balance that deposits or prunes stuff in the brain. Dale Bredesen found 37 metabolic factors where if a certain—enough of them get out of range, the system seems to prune towards losing tissues in those resources that we think of dementia drivers.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, there’s more and more studies showing why certain neurotoxins drive—what you’re talking about is an upstream cause of that process that you just described so well. People learn from the stories, right? What are some amazing stories you have seen with this because I know there’s a lot. I’ve read some of them.

Dr. Hill:
Yeah, I mean, I’ve seen some amazing things. One thing isn’t necessarily starting off on a good note, but I had a client come in. A mother brought her 8-year-old son in, and he crawled into the office, and crawled under the desk. He was high pitched, whining, and there was no eye contact. It was pretty obvious he was on the spectrum. He’s autistic of some sort. According to the mom, six months prior, he had been relatively high functioning, making eye contact, and speaking. Now, sometimes kids developing autism do lose language, but it happens around age 1 or 2, not later. As language shows up, it goes away, so it was very unusual this happened.

It turns out she had done a brain map, got some neurofeedback protocols. Actually, no, it wasn’t a brain map, just some neurofeedback protocols and some equipment. Went off and trained her son without any supervision for I think 45 sessions of training, which is a fair amount of training, and he progressively got worse in language and sensory things the whole time. In retrospect, it was because the protocol wasn’t’ right for him, but she didn’t know that. She thought, oh, this is neurofeedback. It’s good for him. Let me just keep going, and he regressed back to where he had been at age 2, before years of very intense work. She came in, of course, in tears. What’s happening with my son?

We reassessed and some very careful work with him. Over a few months, he developed—he regained all of his skills, and he continued to thrive. We set the mom up with her own system at home again and were supervising her use of it. That kid graduated valedictorian of his small liberal arts college in the northeast a couple years ago.

Dr. Pompa:
What was the reason for regression? You answered another one of my questions. Are there negative or drawbacks to this?

Dr. Hill:
Yeah, usually, the answer is no. If I train you the wrong way—let’s say I’m training you for sleep onset. I have protocols that help you turn on the sleep reflex when it’s time to go to bed. If I’m training you for sleep onset and you feel pretty good in the office, and then you leave, and instead of getting better sleep onset, you’re wired, and you can’t fall asleep. Normally, you come back in and say, oh, that protocol didn’t quite work. That’s useful, and it wears off the next day. It’s conditioning, so it pushes you off in this direction. Unless you keep pushing it, you swing back to where you were, so you can use gentle side effects, if you will, as informative, right? If you ignore side effects, they get stronger and stronger and stronger, and before you know it, you’ve created a more permanent resource as a side effect as opposed to the resource you’re looking for.

Dr. Pompa:
Right, so okay, you answered the question. You better do this with somebody that knows what the heck’s going on, right? It’s like detox, right? It’s like people keep pushing in times when they shouldn’t, probably not pushing when times that they should, and they end up worse so very similar, I would say. That’s why I train doctors to do the work that I do. Where do they go to get this? I mean, people right now are going, okay, I think I need this, or my child needs it. Where do I go?

Dr. Hill:
Most people in the north—sorry, in North America, in these two continents here, are therapists. There’s about 5,000 people in North America, about 10,000 worldwide that do neurofeedback, and the vast majority of them are therapists. That’s one of the things we’re doing differently at Peak Brain is we’re trying to create a network of brain gyms. While I happen to have a PhD, I’m not your doctor in this role. I’m really the coach of a big program, and my technicians are your personal trainers. They’re there to develop the relationships, understand your goals, help with data tracking, help deliver the techniques the right way. Then I’m -inaudible- 10,000—watching your brainwave data come in and talking on the phone and making treatment plans and things. Peak Brain has several offices. We have five open throughout the US, and we’re opening several in Europe.

Dr. Pompa:
How do you find?
Dr. Hill:
I’m sorry?

Dr. Pompa:
Just google Peak Brain?

Dr. Hill:
Yeah, Peak Brain Institute, we have peakbraininstitute.com, and we have our five locations there. Then we also work a lot with people remotely, so if you want to work with us and you’re not near one of our office, you can come to one of the larger offices for three days, get a brain map, learn how to do neurofeedback on yourself, leave with equipment, and for three months, we do live chat support, weekly calls. Do a shared shard, and help you learn to do your own protocols. It can get you just about the same effects you would get by coming into an office for a few months.

Dr. Pompa:
Can they lease the equipment? How does that work?

Dr. Hill:
I used to lease equipment, and then no one ever wanted to give it back.

Dr. Pompa:
How much is it?

Dr. Hill:
They all buy it, typically, yeah. The way I do it, equipment doesn’t expire, so it’s just getting them set up with their own hardware. Most of my clients, they’re home trainers or either peak performers who are training for a long time, or they have brain injuries, which take longer to work on than ADHD, or anxiety, or something, or they have a bunch of people in their family or friends they want to share with. It becomes cost effective because the equipment’s a one-time purchase, and then we do the supervision period. We also at Peak Brain provide brain mapping for our clients. After the first time that you do mapping, there’s no charge. If clients of ours out in the world have equipment, we’ve done a few months of training, instruction. They often address most of their big needs in that time, but we expect they’re going to want to check on their brain again, get some protocols, keep training. We provide the soft support, data access if you will, without charge long term for clients too.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s great, yeah, so it’s pretty accessible. I mean, like you said, you made it available, yeah, to anybody.

Dr. Hill:
Trying to, yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly.

Dr. Hill:
It only works if you have a brain, though.

Dr. Pompa:
Therein lies part of the problem, I think.

Dr. Hill:
Right, it’s checking the head, yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, man, okay, so that’s one way. Are there other ways to engage brain health? I mean, you’re a neuroscience man.

Dr. Hill:
Sure, lots of ways, yeah.

Dr. Pompa:
You have a lot of things. Give us some other ways.

Dr. Hill:
I would say there’s a handful of top foundational ways to address brain health. Some of those are really easy and accessible. Some are a little more esoteric or technical. Neurofeedback’s very high tech, and none of them can reach out and just administer it, so to speak. The other end of the spectrum is mindfulness or meditation. You’re carrying around the equipment with you to do it all the time, I hope, and it’s a basic set of practices. I mean, most people when I teach meditation think that it’s getting to a place of stillness or a blank mind, and they get very, very concerned they can’t do that. I have to spend a lot of…

Dr. Pompa:
ADHD people, ADD people, it’s like—I can’t meditate. I can’t even sit for a second, and yet, maybe need the most.

Dr. Hill:
Yeah, exactly, you need it the most, and meditation is not the act of getting to a still mind. Just like going to the gym isn’t the act of being strong. It’s the act of lifting weights. For mindfulness or meditation, sitting in—it’s an anchoring of your attention, your executive function in some way. To use Jack Kornfield’s definition, mindfulness is paying attention in a specific way on purpose to the present moment and that I’ll add with curiosity instead of evaluation, if you can. It’s about anchoring your attention in some specific way.

Then when you notice your attention has drifted—because guess what? You have a mind, and you think, dream, wish, plan. Your knee hurts. She’s cute. I’m hungry, whatever it is. When you notice you drift away from the anchor, the anchor of your attention, you let it go, and go back to the anchor. That’s essentially one rep of your meditation. If you’re really ADHD or distracted, you have lots of opportunity to go, oh, I’m thinking, back to the anchor. Ooh, I’m planning, back to the anchor. Oh, my knee hurts. Not right now, back to the anchor, and you’re doing meditation even if you’re not still.

Dr. Pompa:
If you were teaching me to meditate that way and have mindfulness, if you will, where would you start with me?

Dr. Hill:
I would simply have you find something you don’t find too annoying to pay attention to. I typically start with a couple of basic techniques, single point awareness and present time awareness as some complimentary practices. For present time awareness, which classically in the history books you would call Samatha, I have people watch the sensation of air crossing the philtrum, the little divot under your nose. You breathe in and out. You simply watch that one point, and try to pack your attention down into only noticing that one point of stimulus.

Dr. Pompa:
You’re saying watch it. You can’t watch air. You’re saying visualize it as you’re…

Dr. Hill:
Put your attention on the sensation of air crossing that spot of skin and try to…

Dr. Pompa:
As you’re breathing.

Dr. Hill:
As you’re breathing in and out, naturally breathing in and out, allow your breath to have it—do whatever it wants to do, and pay attention to the sensation of breath at that one spot. The point here is to become single pointed, to pack your attention down. Then within a few moments, you’ve drifted, and so you’ve practiced laying back, going back again and again and again. I have people do that for five minutes.

Dr. Pompa:
You said, okay, here I am. I’m doing it. Okay, in 30 seconds, my mind just starts thinking of my kids, right? Okay, then I’m back to it. Okay, now, I’m picturing that. Okay, that was one rep. Okay, now I’m doing it maybe ten seconds. I just thought of my wife. Okay, there’s another rep. Is that what you—how many of those do you do?

Dr. Hill:
Now, you can count reps, but I suggest, if you’re going to do that, there’s another technique. What I suggest for basic practice is do 5 minutes of single point awareness, and then 15 minutes of present time awareness. That’s 20 minute practice. If that sounds daunting, cut it in half. Do two and a half minutes of what you just described, watching the sensation. Then do seven and a half minutes of a different practice, and for that one, watch something rhythmic like the breath in and out of your body, watching it. Pay attention to the sensation of breath coming in and out of your body, or maybe listen to cars coming down the street, getting closer and closer and then going far and far away. Practice anchoring the sensation of the change, watching the process instead of the point.

Again, within a few moments, your mind’s drifted. Your knee hurts. She’s cute, whatever, but it’s a different type of anchoring. Now it’s anchoring to a flowing thing as opposed to a single point.

Dr. Pompa:
One was present. What are the two called?

Dr. Hill:
Sorry, single point awareness followed by present time awareness.

Dr. Pompa:
Okay, yeah, single point and then present…

Dr. Hill:
Present time.

Dr. Pompa:
Present time is what a car—you said going back and forth.

Dr. Hill:
Yeah, most people, breath is the classic one. When I’m sitting by the street, I can hear cars. Close my eyes, and listen for a specific engine sound, or specific truck, or something far, far away. Then hold my attention on as it gets closer, and watch the quality of the sound getting louder as it gets by my house, or as it goes away, watch it go away. I’m going to hold my attention onto that one discreet stimulus until I can’t notice it anymore. Then I pick another stimulus out further down the street, and do it again. It’s the same thing as your breath. Just not as boring.

Dr. Pompa:
What does this do for the brain, and what does this one do for the present time versus -inaudible-? What do they do for the brain?

Dr. Hill:
Great question. Broadly, all forms of meditation build inhibitory tone. A lot of human resource is driven, is enabled by the ability to say no. I’m not going to eat this, fight with that, spend this, and that’s a really human resource. The prefrontal cortex is the most human, if you will, part of the brain. It’s the part that’s most unique to us, and a lot of its job is inhibitory, and it’s the brakes. I mean, would you rather go down the mountain on a mountain bike with or without brakes? Will you get to the bottom faster with or without brakes? It’s going to be a—having control is really important.

Dr. Pompa:
You would actually get there faster with brakes.

Dr. Hill:
Exactly, you have control, exactly, and so without the control, without the brakes, executive function is very reactive. We get ADHD. We have emotional reactivity. If you would learn to anchor repetitively, the single point awareness especially builds that prefrontal tone that inhibits our ability, ability to pump the brakes in a thought, an emotion, an idea. More importantly, your working memory, the space within which you think, the scratchpad of your mind where you experience everything, that is about five to nine items is the human range, and when the tenth item comes in, stuff gets kicked out. The better you are at protecting what’s coming in and out of your mental scratchpad, the better you are at thinking.

You can have a working memory of seven items, but your ironclad control about what you’re thinking about, that’s inhibitory tone; deciding what gets in there, which memory pops up, what thing you’re seeing in the environment gets registered. You can resist that if you have good inhibitory tone and lock stuff into your mind, hold concepts up, throw words around, and have just what you want come out in behavior and action. Single point awareness brings the inhibitory tone up. Present time awareness brings the sustained ability to do that.

Dr. Pompa:
All right, so sustained versus inhibitory. Okay, yeah, my wife’s going to kill me here, but I have to do it. As I look at the two of us, we’re very, very different, right? She, I mean, pops here, pops there. Pops it to the point where I’m always bringing her back to a certain point, and there’s open circles everywhere. I’m bringing her back in conversation. You left an open circle up there. Meaning there’s a topic, and you moved onto another one. We still didn’t finish that topic.

I am the exact opposite. I’m laser focused and have almost an inability to think of too many things. Is there genetic components to this? Is it some people are just more gifted at this, other people who aren’t? Are there positives to being the other way versus the other? I don’t even know what I just asked.

Dr. Hill:
No, I think I understand. Let me see if I—I’ll take a crack at it. Broadly, my perspective in the brain and genetics and this is true of resources in general, also true of aging, about a third, maybe 35% of your experience is genetically bound. What I mean by that is most things that are genetic are not Mendelian, dominant recessive, where you have two copies of a gene and whatever wins out in that math ends up being what’s expressed. That’s not how most things work. Most traits are encoded for by thousands of proteins. It’s like a river. Way upstream, different genes are doing different things that accumulate effects to produce what’s happening in the body.

Dr. Pompa:
You’re talking about epigenetics here.

Dr. Hill:
Yeah, the environment changing what’s expressed but also the accumulation of thousands of genes producing one trait so that subtle differences in the genes don’t have dramatic differences in the trait, generally. The genes are a tendency to do something in the resources as opposed to a hard thing.

Dr. Pompa:
No different than any disease process. I mean, there are some genetic—like you said, some actually hardcore genetic things, but most of it’s not that at all. Most of it’s things that get triggered in susceptibility.

Dr. Hill:
Exactly, and so there are some benefits for having a mind that is novelty seeking, synthetic, pattern matching, and go squirrel like your wife or being blinders on, heads down. I can ignore the environment, very, very hyperfocused, perhaps like you. This is essentially hunters versus gatherers. You have the ability to sit and focus on a plant and go that’s a weed. That’s not. This is important. Here are some nice records. The sun’s coming up three hours earlier, pretty late in the summer, so we should plant earlier. You have the brain that can very carefully organize on low stimulus details.

Your wife is looking for the high stimulus and is cued by the environment. Some people have the ability to move back and forth between those states pretty well but often can’t go to either extreme. Some people are at an extreme but stuck there. When you’re stuck deeper where your wife is, they called it ADHD, but it’s a super power when it’s lined up with the environment. I mean, any ADHD kid in the world can play videogames for 25 hours straight without a break in a way that is supranormal. It is beyond typical by far. That same kid can’t find focus 20 minutes in a classroom. Why not? He has the resource. He’s relying on the environment, the stimulus, the high valence, the high stimulus stuff to drive it, so things need to be threatening, sexy, dangerous, yummy, something to engage that resource.

In the concept of neurofeedback, I would look at somebody with a high stimulus driven ADHD brain and probably find high theta. They’re very reactive. It’s a stuck state, so I would then gently train it down over time. At the end of that time, they wouldn’t have stuck theta, so they can bring the focus resources on at will. It feels effortless. It doesn’t feel like it’s an engaged problem. Here’s the nice thing; when you then sit down to play videogames again or do your high stimulus thing you need to do, you bring the ADHD back, and it’s still there. The resources don’t go away. You get control over them, so you don’t have to be an ADHD in the boardroom or the classroom. You can be in front of the easel, or the typewriter, or whatever it is you want to do to be that synthetic, highly tied together individual.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you’re right. I mean, these ADHD people, I mean, they are amazing at running companies. I mean, there’s some really amazing gifts, but again, it could be very destructive. With the neurofeedback, you can absolutely channel it, man, and bring out the gift of all. I love that.

Dr. Hill:
You can decide what you want to work on. It’s very cosmetic in that way. Ooh, I’m a bit too impulsive, or I’m a bit too easily traumatized by relationships. Let me dial down the sensitivity, the circuits, and get a little more resilience in my attention resources, stress response. People choose what they want, which for me, the enabling of agency, this is why I do Peak Brain. It’s why we’re doing it the way we’re doing it. I saw how mental health and human services do the human cattle thing where they take—where once you’re in the systems, it’s hard for clients and patients to have agency. Especially in residential, long-term, and severe cases, it’s hard for people to have agency when nothing—when no interventions do a whole lot.

I’m trying to take, oh, it’s anxiety, or ADHD, or a seizure? Oh, that’s just your brain. The same way it’s, oh, it’s just your shoulder, or your abs, or your knee problem. Great, what do you want to do about that? A, we can look at it. It’s no longer mysterious because it’s just your impulsivity, or your brain injury, your slowed processing speed, your aging, whatever it is. We can help you demystify it, so it’s not quite so scary. Then it’s not your fault if it’s your brain.

Then, B, you can take control of it and decide what you want to do. This is really why we have this mission is to say, oh, you don’t like what your brain does? Okay, what do you want to do about it? Your brain is a more changeable organ than anything else in your body.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s the good message, and like you said, the neurofeedback’s the fast track there. You have the mindfulness in the mediation exercises you gave us. Right now, I think more popular than ever are certain supplements and drugs called nootropics, which is something, a supplemental, if you will, or a drug that focuses on the brain in giving you better brain function, clarity. I mean, come on, caffeine’s a nootropic, if you will. Talk a little bit about that as possible solutions.

Dr. Hill:
I think there’s lots of good stuff there. I think that it can be very difficult for people who are new to brain science or to nutrition or something to really navigate a bit of a Wild West of brain supplements and nootropics. I would draw people’s attention to the fact that nootropics strictly speaking, as the original definition, include things that promote brain health, memory, attention, language. Protect against damage or disease, and they do so without appreciable side effects.

The modern category of nootropics as a marketing and branding tool includes things like modafinil and Adderall, and it doesn’t really fit the original category. People are distorting the word nootropic.

Dr. Pompa:
-inaudible- of damage.

Dr. Hill:
Even caffeine has some side effects. It’s habit forming and some other—it doesn’t, from my perspective, strictly fit. The reason I’m being—I’m harping on this is because I think—especially if you’re a high performer. A lot of high performers without really big deficits go after nootropics. Try to squeeze out a little more performance. I think if you’re already a high performer, your tolerance for side effects risk should be very, very low, and you should only go after things that really boost you without too much side effect.

I’m a fan of encouraging people to go after the true nootropics, if you will, supplements, natural ingredients, amino acids that generally don’t have a lot of downside as opposed to going after the more cognitive enhancing smart drugs and other things, prescription things that I think often do have some downside. I would put a bunch of things in the true nootropic category like L-tyrosine, which is a precursor to dopamine, or acetyl-L-carnitine, which is used by mitochondria for cellular fuel, or L-theanine, amino acid found in tea that buffers caffeine. It’s GABAergic. It’s very calming. If you like caffeine—and believe me, I love caffeine. It’s usually quite good for your brain. If you’re a little sensitive to it, you can add some L-theanine to your coffee habit, and suddenly dial in the smooth push. Your coffee treats you like tea instead of coffee.

You don’t have to go crazy with nootropic substances to get a nice effect. You can do one or two small innocuous, low-key things, and you should because these things are often are synergistic. You can get polypharmacy with supplements as easily as you can with prescription drugs sometimes. It’s really important to be a little strategic, slow, cautious.

Dr. Pompa:
What about some people are—now it’s in vogue, the micro-dosing. Whether it’s micro-dosing of mushrooms or things that would normally be definitely damaging, they micro-dose and say it’s a nootropic. Is there truth to that?

Dr. Hill:
It’s a great question. The short answer is I don’t know. The longer answer is I have a hunch that most of these micro-dosing phenomena—and I do think they’re doing something. I think most of the micro-dosing phenomena are irritating the brain into plasticity, and that’s the primary effect. I don’t think it—I don’t think and I could be wrong, but my read on it at this point is that it doesn’t—it’s not so much about the serotonergic effects of psilocybin, or the LSD, or the MDMA, whatever it is—or the cannabis, whatever people are micro-dosing. I don’t think it’s about the substance per se. If you monkey with one of the big neurotransmitter systems, you get downstream upregulation of trophic factors, plasticity factors like BDNF. In fact, SSRIs do this. The way the SSRIs actually produce a true deep lift of depression is by causing plasticity in the hippocampus through a BDNF regulation that’s quite a bit downstream from the serotonin reuptake inhibition at the serotonergic neuron, but the mood effects aren’t actually, from my perspective, not directly serotonergic. Some stress and anxiety things may be, but the mood things are more about hippocampal plasticity and BDNF.

I have a hunch that there’s some slight dopaminergic effect from these psychoactive substances. People feel them a tiny bit and feel interest, and they motivate a touch. They’re more engaged with their environment through—it’s like dopaminergic effect, and beyond that, it’s plasticity boosting. I don’t really care what you do to your brain to boost plasticity. Do something, meditate. Do neurofeedback, exercise. Do some good nootropics. Do Sudoku or whatever it is, but do something to cause plasticity and maintain it and even enhance it. If those things are controlled substances that may have some downsides and may have differences across individuals, my concern with those things would not be so much about the purported benefits and how they should work with people. It’s the fact that they’re controlled substances that are on a gray market or black market, and you might end up with something you don’t expect.

That’s the problem, nootropics too. You buy lots of stuff, white powders from random countries, and it shows up with improperly synthesized compounds and heavy metals. That’s in things that are supplements that are supposed to be good. Now you’re talking about psilocybin or MDMA on a black market website or something. I think it’s very risky, and I’m a little bit—I think it’s foolish, and people that are trying to go after cognitive enhancement are smart enough to know better.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so we just spoke to a small group of people even know what those things are and are looking for them. Let’s go to the other end of the spectrum. My children tell me all the time, dad, all of our friends utilize Adderall, whatever the other names of them are. It used to Ritalin. It went to Adderall, and now there’s some new ones. I mean, they use them just to focus, to study. I watched a special on it. They said, really, you think you’re able to focus more, but at the end of the day, the test scores were no different. I mean, tell us about those things.

Dr. Hill:
I mean, stimulants do work to add some focus and add some inhibition. They don’t work all that well. It’s not just about the attention control so a couple things. One, I think that it may be worth considering psychostimulants if your behavior is profoundly dysregulated, and you can’t deal with your classroom, your boardroom, whatever it is. You’re so ADHD that you can’t control any of your behavior. It may make sense. For everybody else, you can get control of it with other things. You probably should.

Adderall and Ritalin and methylphenidate and all the other brand names of the second stimulants, second-class stimulants like Vyvanse and things, the problem with those is not so much if they’re effective or not. They can be, but they aren’t, as you say, super effective. The problem is, if you look at kids that are put on those drugs, they have self-esteem issues later on about their cognitive performance. It doesn’t improve academic performance as a drug supplement, and it does impair the social cognitive neuroscience, the understanding of your own brain, your own resources. These kids don’t learn to structure their time, not procrastinate, engage with low stimulus tasks without frustration, and those are the things a stimulant actually should be scaffolding for them. Adults tell me all the time they take stimulants and spend a lot of time heavily focused on Fortnite, or porn, or something else they don’t necessarily want to focus on.

You mentioned the kids are taking the stuff, and your kids mentioned their peers are, and this is rampant. It’s also rampant that parents are taking their kid’s Adderall to function during the day at work. There’s a fairly large stimulant—not all that silent but stimulant abuse problem in this country. ADHD is over diagnosed. From my perspective, it should only be diagnosed when it’s a significant impairment in multiple aspects of life. I think we’re all armchair psychologists. When we see an impulsive or a fidgety kid, we go, oh, ADHD, and then the kid gets Adderall. Some of these drugs do actually produce behavior change, but maybe it’s a sleep issue, or maybe it’s trauma, or maybe it’s something else that produces the same kind of dysregulated behavior in a kid, and stimulants might just mask some things and cause more problems in the future.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and one of the problems, doc, is we know that, just like any other drug, often times you need more of the drug to get the same response, or you end up on stronger drugs. In this case, you can use street drugs.

Dr. Hill:
Yeah, with stimulants, you feel them, and so you’re teaching kids essentially how to take control of their difficult resources with an external locus of control. It’s coming at you. Studies show that it doesn’t produce any improvements later in life in self-esteem or ability to structure time. It’s a Band-Aid sometimes on the most destructive behavior in the classroom without really any support of the person. I think it should only be really medicated when it’s really quite extreme, and somebody has disruptions in more than one area of their life, school and home and work. There are some cases where it’s quite poor in terms of self-control with ADHD, but the vast majority of cases, people are—most of us are armchair psychologists. We’ll see a fidgety kid or impulsive person, and think that it’s ADHD. Suddenly there’s stimulants onboard, and without digging more deeply in, we don’t know if it’s a sleep issue, or some trauma, or some anxiety, or other things that produce distractibility or inattention.

Stimulants can make all other things like that worse. Then ADHD, even if it truly is ADHD, often comes along with a sleep issue and some anxiety and some other things, and so the stimulants will exacerbate some of the problems while maybe addressing some of the other problems. It’s an imperfect situation, and worse than that, I think it takes the agency away from the kid. Something’s wrong with you. Here’s a pill to make—to fix you. While the pill’s active, you’re okay. When the pill’s not active, you’re a problem.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I mean, that’s why it’s a shame because you have something like neurofeedback that’s so available today, so effective. We’ll make the resources—we’ll put them in the show notes and how people can find this resource. I mean, it’s beyond ADHD. I mean, there’s so many conditions this benefits, as you mentioned. Name you would say the top five conditions that you would say, absolutely, you need to do neurofeedback.

Dr. Hill:
Things that it works better—neurofeedback works better for, the first line, I would say, intervention would include ADHD, anxiety, sleep issues, seizures, migraines, PTSD, OCD, concussion, post-concussion stuff, sleep issues, slow speed of processing with age that produces word finding issues and sluggish processing when you’re older, creativity, T-cells, boosting your T-cells in your body. Those are just the things where there’s decent research support. Those are the high points. It works on lots of things, obviously.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s pretty incredible. Wow! Okay, last question, I think it’s the most important of all. What’s going on with the guitar collection behind you? How does that fit in there?

Dr. Hill:
Actually, over my shoulder, those are mandocellos. Those are eight string; tune in fifths like a cello, the size of a guitar. They’re electric cellos, basically. I have quite a collection for quirky instruments, and I designed a couple of those. They’re a left hand and right hand version of the same instrument. I’m left handed, and I play both ways. I tend to design and muck around with quirky instruments whenever possible.

Dr. Pompa:
Wow! There you go. Yeah, it’s probably something to do with your interest in the brain. He’s left -inaudible- ambidextrous, oh, my gosh, if I could only hear about your childhood. Hey, well, listen, Dr. Hill, thanks for being on, a wealth of knowledge in this area. This show is going to affect a lot of people. I can’t tell you…

Dr. Hill:
Thank you, Dr. Pompa. Oh, I appreciate it. Thank you for having me. I really had a great time chatting.

Dr. Pompa:
We’ll make sure your resources are put here in the show notes, so thanks again for being here.

Dr. Hill:
My pleasure, thank you.

Ashley:
That’s it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. This show is brought to you by CytoDetox. Please check it out at buycytonow.com. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 a.m. Eastern. We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us at podcast.drpompa.com. Please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, and sharing the show with anyone you think may benefit from the information heard here, and as always, thanks for listening.

Episode 248: The Neuroscience Behind Sugar Addiction

with Dr. Nicole Avena

Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith. Today, we welcome an expert in prenatal and childhood nutrition, Dr. Nicole Avena. She will teach us ways to recognize and reduce sugar in our diets. She’ll offer research on the addictive properties of sugar. She’ll also articulate the importance of eating well during pregnancy, followed by what we can do to start our babies and children off with healthy diets. Sugar is addictive and we as a society certainly eat too much of it. Dr. Nicole is here to help us discover ways to reduce sugar intake. She’ll tell us how to eat healthy as a family despite exposure to sugary foods early in life.

Let me tell you just a bit more about our guest. Dr. Nicole Avena is research neuroscientist and expert in the fields of nutrition, diet, and addiction. Dr. Avena has written the books, Why Diets Fail, What to Eat When You’re Pregnant, and What to Feed Your Baby and Toddler. Dr. Avena is a sought-after speaker and she regularly appears on the Dr. Oz show. She has also been a guest on several radio programs and podcasts and has been filmed for several documentaries on the obesity epidemic. She has the TED-Ed talk, How Sugar Affects Your Brain as well as a blog on Psychology Today called, “Food Junky.”

This episode of CHTV is brought to you by Fastonic. This oral staple molecular hydrogen supplement assists in fasting, shows promise in anti-aging, encourages post-workout recovery, mitigates oxidative stress, inflammation, and many other triggers for disease and imbalance. Curious to try molecular hydrogen for yourself? Our CHTV audience can check it out at getfastonic.com. Alright, let’s get started and welcome Dr. Pompa and Dr. Nicole Avena to the show. This is Cellular Healing TV.

Dr. Pompa:
Dr. Nicole Avena, welcome to Cellular Healing TV.

Dr. Avena:
Thank you, happy to be here.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, it’s great. We actually had you on Health Hunters Radio, our radio show. I loved the topic, so I wanted to have you here as well. When we look at addictions today, come on, there’s so many. I think most people are familiar with of course drug addiction, alcohol addiction. They understand the severity of it, but sugar addition. This is your expertise. You’ve written three books really dealing with this subject even from what to eat during your pregnancy because what you eat during your pregnancy has a lot to do with addictions in the child later. Then even what to feed your babies and toddlers, that was your other book because, again, that leads to addiction. Then obviously, breaking addiction. Was that your first book was breaking addiction?

Dr. Avena:
It’s called, Why Diets Fail.

Dr. Pompa:
Oh, Why Diets Fail; yeah, Why Diets Fail. All those books, folks, you can find on Amazon I’m sure. After interviewing her, I can tell you; you might want to pick some of those up because sugar addiction; let’s get into it. Look, I think I said it. Everyone’s familiar with alcohol, drug addiction, but I don’t know; more people are probably sugar addicts than anything. It’s a real problem and it’s a problem in the brain. Would you agree with that?

Dr. Avena:
Yeah, I think you’re right though that people generally recognize that drugs like alcohol, and morphine, and cocaine, they’re addictive. They can be addictive. People avoid them because they’re afraid of getting addicted to them in some cases, but I don’t think the general public has really gotten on board with the idea that sugar can be addictive. I think a lot of people experience sugar addiction, but when you look at our modern food environment, there’s just sugar in so many of the things that we eat. It’s generally recognized as a safe substance. It’s an ingredient in most of the grocery store items; at least pre-packaged one that you can find when you go grocery shopping. I think that there’s a lot of research that’s now been supporting this idea that this could be a real thing. This is a real problem. Like you were saying, a lot of that comes from the studies that show how it affects the brain. In many ways, it’s much like what happens with a drug.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, look, you have a background in psychology. You have a background obviously in neuroscience. Obviously, you get what’s going on here and here. I believe this is a combination of both. With the background that you have, you have extensive study. How did you get into this one niche?

Dr. Avena:
Yeah, great question. It just happened. I was doing my Ph.D. at Princeton University. I was working with my advisor trying to come up with what project I was going to do for my dissertation work. We started talking about different ideas. I had been interested in behavior and motivated behaviors, why people do and don’t do things. Obesity had come up as something that was particularly interesting because we were starting to see this rise in obesity epidemic. There was a lot of media attention being given to that. It was curious to me because we have all these diet programs, all this advice, all this information out there to help us to eat healthy, but people just can’t do it. People have such a hard time giving up the sweets, giving up the junk food essentially.

We started thinking about, well, maybe it’s like a drug. Maybe some of the foods that people tend to eat like ice cream for instance, there’s no ice cream tree; it’s not a natural thing. It’s a concoction of a bunch of different ingredients and sugars that are designed to make us like it and make us eat it. What if some of these designer foods are more like drugs than anything? We started off doing a series of experiments to try to understand whether or not sugar could be addictive. Almost 15 years later, I’m still doing the same studies. We’re still trying to learn more and more about this.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we know that drugs or any addiction stimulates dopamine. Even pulling a slot machine lever, you get a dopamine spike, and literally, there you go. You just want that quick fix. Look, I’ve read recent articles that people that just—it’s an email, it’s a text, it’s Facebook; they’re saying its dopamine spikes. Once you just go back, then all of a sudden, you’re addicted. How is sugar doing that? Explain the difference with drugs, what I just described in sugar. Is it all doing the same thing in the brain?

Dr. Avena:
Yeah, it has to do with the degree to which it’s doing it. You’re right that pulling on a slot machine handle, or pressing a button, or whatever they have on those machines anymore, or using drugs, doing all these activities, even healthy things like running for instance, they’re reward reinforcing. That can release dopamine in reward-related brain regions. Smoking also releases dopamine. One of the things that’s unique about food and about many of these other behaviors that we don’t always get addicted to is that the dopamine release tends to habituate over time. If you were to eat a new food that you’ve never tasted before, of course, your dopamine is going to rise when you taste it because it’s more associated with the novelty of the food than anything.

Once your body has coded a steak, meaning you didn’t get sick from it, your brain doesn’t release dopamine every time you eat food. It only really releases it when the food is new. Drugs of abuse are different though because every time you use a drug of abuse like alcohol, or cocaine, or morphine, or nicotine, that releases dopamine in the reward-related brain regions. That’s the big difference between foods and drugs. What our studies have shown and what others have confirmed is that when you overeat sugar, it releases dopamine in a way that looks more like a drug than food.

Dr. Pompa:
Got it.

Dr. Avena:
It’s not like just the first time you have sugar it’s releasing dopamine; when you’re overusing sugar or over-consuming it in excess, it can release dopamine repeatedly. That’s where this whole addiction cascade comes into play because that release of dopamine causes a whole series of events to occur that change the receptors, change the gene expression. All these other pathways are all connected in the brain. That’s really where it begins.

Dr. Pompa:
You can tell me if I’m wrong. With alcoholism or drugs, we’ve discovered I think that there is a genetic component of some people are way more predisposed to this. Is it the same with sugar? There’s some people just like, hey, if they do too much sugar, they’re going to be hooked, and some people not?

Dr. Avena:
That’s a great question. There is some evidence that there’s a genetic predisposition toward food addiction. It actually turns out to be there’s same different alleles of the genes that are also associated with a predisposition to use drugs or to use alcohol. There’s certainly overlaps between the two. There’s also some really interesting research that’s looked at the overlap between alcohol use and sugar use and the hereditary component of that. There’s some data that suggests that having a mother or a father who might have been an alcoholic or had a problem with alcohol predisposes some people to them maybe become addicted to sugar or to have issues overeating sugar; and vice versa, people who are diagnosed as being alcoholics, there’s data that suggests that when they go back and retrospectively think about what their parents were like when they were younger, there’s often the case that the parents, one or more of the parents was identified as being someone with a sweet tooth or really liking sugar.

There’s certainly an overlap between the two, but I think it’s not just genetics because our entire -inaudible- is a big part of it. Our food environment is really I think the thing that we have a hard time changing. We can’t change our genetics obviously, but we can fight against them with our behavior. Our food environment’s a lot different because you might want to cut back on sugar, but if you don’t even know where your sugars coming from, you don’t know that the sugars in maybe a coffee creamer that you use when you’re at the coffee shop, then how are you going to cut it out of your diet, or how are you going to reduce it? It’s in so many places; it’s hidden in really so many places.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, right. The alcoholic, they just don’t go to the bar, and hey, no alcohol, but it’s not hidden in every food like sugar which makes this obviously more difficult. You referred to the gene, I agree. Epigenetics is what we realized is most of this. Meaning, you have a gene of susceptibility and it gets triggered. Part of what you talk about, and one of the reasons you wrote the books on what to eat during your pregnancy, and even what to feed your baby and toddler later is because you state that a lot of the addiction happens then in utero. Is that epigenetic? Does mom trigger the gene in the baby or is it simply physiological?

Dr. Avena:
Yeah, I think it’s a combination of both. I got interested in the genesis of sugar addiction. For many years, they were studying and trying to establish whether or not sugar addiction was a real thing, whether it was something we could experimentally see in the lab. That has been continuing to grow and that literature I think has been pretty well established now. It became more apparent to me that we need to try to understand, well, where does this start? It’s one thing to know that people are addicted to sugar, but then we’re left treating them. How do we prevent it from happening in the first place?

We’ve been doing a lot of research looking at the effect of diet during pregnancy. There’s this literature that suggests that the first 1,000 days of life, the time period from conception through Age Two is really a critical window for nutritional intervention; meaning that food preferences can be entrained early in that space. It has an effect on immune response later in life. Exposures to various different things during that critical window can have long-term health outcomes. I got interested in looking at the effects of overeating sugar during pregnancy and how that might affect the offspring. We’ve done several studies that look at this and found that when—in our laboratory animal studies, when the mother is exposed to sugar, excessive amounts of sugar, it actually produces change in the babies where they’re overweight when they get older, they have a preference for a high-fat diet, and they’re also having increased triglyceride levels, which is really interesting when you think about because they’ve never even had sugar in their life; they just were simply exposed to it in the womb.

Clearly, there’s a lot that goes on developmentally. There’s so much sensitivity during those critical windows, especially during pregnancy. We don’t really pay much attention to diet during pregnancy. A lot of the advice that women are given, and I can speak from personal experience having had two babies of my own, it’s just all about body weight. Don’t eat this. Don’t eat fish because it has mercury in it. Don’t eat hot dogs. It’s all about not gaining too much weight and avoiding toxins, but there’s really not a lot of support or guidance for women about which foods are going to promote a healthy pregnancy, why you should maybe cut back on carbohydrates and processed sugars, especially if you’re having cravings a lot. That’s what inspired me to write, What to Eat When You’re Pregnant.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and I think if women knew that, hold on, eating sugar during my pregnancy could cause this later in my child? I think that they would really say, well, what do I eat then? That was what the basis of your book was. I want to talk a little bit about that.

It’s interesting because I think about the Duke University study that they took identical twin mice. They exposed one to a toxin: this group to a toxin, this group not. They had the same DNA. This group became obese. The next generation and next generation became obese eating the exact same diet as the group over here that remained skinny. Meaning, they triggered a gene into the next generation.

Sugar obviously from what your study is showing does the same thing. Later in life, they become obese. Later in life, they become high triglycerides. It affects their blood chemistry. We’re seeing that sugar, in fact, is doing the exact same thing. Let’s talk about what women eat because this is a big deal; we could change generations. I think the advice is, okay, eat more fruits and vegetables, but nobody does it. Is that the advice or is it more than that?

Dr. Avena:
I think that especially during pregnancy it’s really more about having a healthy diet that has a lot of variety in it so that you’re able to get all the essential macronutrients that you need but also the micronutrients. Especially in the first trimester, it can be tough to do that if people are nauseous or just not feeling well. It can be hard to eat things that are good for us like eggs for instance which contain lots of things that are going to be beneficial especially for brain development. I think that it boils down to helping women during pregnancy and helping new parents too when they begin feeding their baby to really just understand what are some ideas? What are some healthy things that I can eat at given points?

Because you’ve got to keep in mind during the nine months of pregnancy, the nutritional needs are not the same on Day One as they are on the last day before you give birth? There’s lots of differences in term of what micronutrients are needed. I think that kind of information can be helpful. It can also be helpful for women to just understand that it’s not a period of life where, oh, you’re gaining weight, so you might as well just give in and eat whatever you want, which is the -inaudible- many people have. It’s really about what these foods and exposures to these foods can do to the baby long-term. I think that’s what not a lot of people are aware of. That’s what I’m hoping to bring more visibility to.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, in your book—we don’t have to get into it because your book has—it has what to eat when because your point is well taken. There’s certain demands and needs for different foods at different times where I would say people are going to fail because they don’t have a plan. You offer a plan. Meaning that, look, they have all—mothers have good intentions until—I think it was Mike Tyson said everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. It’s like everybody has a plan until they show up to work without food. That would be the analogy I’d make. Do you give them a plan?

Dr. Avena:
Yeah, in What to Eat When You’re Pregnant, I do give a plan that really breaks the pregnancy down week by week. What happens is each week, there is a different food of the week that is rich in certain nutrients that are good to be getting that given week. For instance, early in the pregnancy, the food of the week in one of the weeks in the first trimester would be like spinach because spinach is really high in folic acid. I talk a lot about ways in which you can get more spinach in your diet; it doesn’t have to be sautéed spinach. You can throw in a little bit of a salad. I also include some recipes. It’s really just about giving people ideas so that they understand what nutrients are important to be getting at specific time points so that then they can implement them. Then also so that they can be prepared.

If you have ideas on what food you should be eating, then when you go grocery shopping, you can load up on those, and then prepare food, so you don’t have to get into a situation where you’re making an unhealthy food choice because you didn’t have a snack. My advice is to really always be prepared, always have something to eat on you especially if you’re pregnant because you never know when you’re going to suddenly just feel like, you know what, I’m hungry. I think pregnancy is the time when people go from zero to hungry in two seconds flat. It has to do with hormonal fluctuations. It has to just do with the taxing that the baby’s taking on our bodies. It can lead to poor food choices if you’re not prepared, so having a bunch of healthy snakes on hand at all times is really critical.

Dr. Pompa:
When you make decisions in emotion. When you’re hungry like that, it’s emotion; they’re always bad decisions.

Dr. Avena:
Yeah, it’s never good.

Dr. Pompa:
It’s never good. It’s like when you make decisions when you’re not hungry, you’re going to make them from a point of logic like, oh, I need to eat good; I’m pregnant.

Dr. Avena:
Exactly.

Dr. Pompa:
Let’s move into the babies and the toddlers. Babies, nursing, that’s the number one. Then we start to introduce foods. Then we want to introduce foods because your point is so well taken. You see kids that ate well as children even if they as teenagers go back—or go out in the world. All of my kids came back. They all went out as teenagers and started eating things and then they came back to the diet that they grew up on. There’s proof right there and I have five kids. We’ll talk about my youngest one in a minute. Yeah, talk about that, the importance of feeding the kids right.

Dr. Avena:
Yeah, I wrote a follow-up book to What to Eat When You’re Pregnant that actually just came out about a month ago. It’s called, What to Feed Your Baby and Toddler because this is really the next step as we talk about the importance of good nutrition during pregnancy. We know from that research that the window is really the first 1,000 days. That goes through Age Two. There’s a lot of questions about what you should feed a baby and when. There’s lots of conflicting advice. There’s lots of different arguments out there depending on who you ask. Some people advocate you could start a baby at four months on solids. Most people, I fall into this camp as well, will suggest waiting until six months.

It really comes down to helping parents to understand the importance of basically training the baby to like healthy foods because you can do it. It’s just that people are usually quick to rush to try a whole bunch of different foods because they’re excited that the baby’s eating. They want to let them have exposure to all these different things. If you can get the baby eating lots of vegetables early on, it can really help because then they’re going to develop a taste preference for vegetables. They’re not going to bulk at them in a couple of months when they’re deciding that they do or do not want to eat something.

Dr. Pompa:
The brain is developing those things; that’s why it happens. The brain is literally developing. As you’re giving them those flavors, the brain is liking them.

Dr. Avena:
Right, and the brain’s encoding that they’re safe and that they’re nutritious. Part of the problem that we face in the baby food world is that if you look at the commercially available baby foods, a lot of them are blends. A lot of them are things that contain a lot of fruit. It’s often the case that the fruit is masking the taste of any vegetable that’s in the food. My favorite example is around Thanksgiving time, a lot of the companies who manufacture baby food will put out a turkey dinner. It’s supposed to be the equivalent of our turkey dinner and our Thanksgiving dinner. It is promoted to be a turkey—it’s going to have turkey in it. It’s going to have maybe some cranberries, a little bit of apples, and vegetables, but when you look at the actual ingredients and the amounts that’s in there, there’s hardly any turkey. It’s mostly apples. That happens with a lot of different blends.

What happens is I think we start our babies off liking sweet. They naturally are going to like sweet. They’re born liking sweet; it’s innate. They’re going to like it no matter what. What happens is of course if they taste something sweet like an apple, then, of course, the peas aren’t going to taste that good because they don’t -inaudible- those apples. I think that many parents fall into this trap of wanting to please the baby and make them happy. They end up giving them too much fruit in my opinion. I advise that people try to stick to giving vegetables by themselves without the fruits blended in. If anything, chase it at the end with a little bit of fruit as like the desert.

Dr. Pompa:
I could not agree more. Let’s take it one step worse; fruit juice, oh, that satisfies them. Then there they are; it’s basically a cup of sugar, but because it’s 100% orange juice, moms think it’s okay, or dads -inaudible-. The fact is its just pure sugar.

Dr. Avena:
Right, The American Academy of Pediatrics I guess about a year or so ago came out with guidelines stating that there is no place for fruit juice in a child under the age of one. I think there’s no place for a fruit juice in any child or adult for that matter. Yeah, when you give your kids fruit juice, it really is just sugar water. You’re sucking all the fiber, all the nutrients out of the fruit, and you’re just giving them the sugar. I often suggest to people if you really want your kid to have a fruit juice type of beverage, blend up a whole fruit. Make a smoothie for them, so that at least they’re still going to get the fiber. They’re going to get the other nutrients that’s in the fruits. It’s not going to be just this bolus of sugar because that’s essentially what your kid’s going to have in fruit juice.

Dr. Pompa:
Look, yeah, we’re starting into the solution of the problem. You can see it starts in utero. Then it starts what we’re feeding our children. Obviously, the more vegetables mom eats, the more vegetables the baby’s going to like. As children, the more vegetables we give them, the more they’ll like later. We’re beating this sugar addiction here.

Alright, let’s step back because we’ve created a world full of addicts at this point, some worse than others; let’s face it. We already talked that could be genetic. What do we do? We talked about the alcoholic. We can just say, hey, just stay away from the alcohol, but as we mentioned, sugar’s in everything. What do we do about this? Do we cold turkey? Do we wean them down? What have you found in your studies to be the best?

Dr. Avena:
Much like with drug—treatment for drug addictions, it’s not always going to be that one approach is going to work for everybody. I think that there has to be multiple ways to treat this. When people try one thing, if it doesn’t work, they might have to move onto the next. Some people advocate a cold turkey approach just like you would use with drugs or alcohol. I personally think that is very difficult to do in our modern food environment because we’re constantly bombarded with food, with sugar. It’s everywhere.

The advertisements for it are everywhere. That’s not the case for drugs and alcohol. You don’t ever really see advertisements for alcohol. You never see billboards with drug paraphernalia on them or anything like that. People who have drug and alcohol problems are constantly having to fight off these urges from the visual cues in our environment; whereas people trying to cut back on sugar are—you walk down the street, and you get hit with hundreds of images of food, and smells, and things like that.

I suggest that if cold turkey isn’t going to work, then more of like harm reduction approach is better. A harm reduction approach really is exactly what it says; it’s reducing the harm that the substance is causing you. It’s getting to the point where you’re back in control of how much of the substance you consume. When it comes to something like sugar, I think it really comes down to taking baby steps. I know this goes in the face of what everybody wants because people want to just be off the sugar, have it done and out of my life, but if you want something that’s sustainable, it’s going to have to be something that grows slowly. I often suggest that people start off by picking the one thing that’s the worst for them, that’s causing them the most harm when it comes to sugar. That happens to be sugar-sweetened beverages. If you’re -inaudible- drinker, it ties addiction to soda; same with the fruit juice.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. In your books, that’s step one. Get rid of all these sugar drinks, which by the way, there’s multiple reasons for that. These drinks as we pointed out, they’re the biggest culprits. They’re the thing driving the diabetes epidemic and the obesity epidemic. Again, it’s the ones you even think healthy that say 100% orange juice. Then you have your vitamin drinks. Then you have your Red Bulls. It gets higher and higher with the levels of sugar, caffeine. Then the chemicals that are addictive in the brain. Now, you have a chemical, the sugar, the most addictive things. All the kids are drinking them, so how do you get rid of them?

Dr. Avena:
I think that you made some really good points about the liquid beverages being the culprit; and they are. In my book, Why Diets Fail, which is a book that is really all about the science of sugar addiction, all about what the research is telling us, and then ways in which you can reduce sugar in your diet, and to recognize all the different places that it is. That’s also a part of the problem is people don’t know what to look for because when you turn a label over it doesn’t just say sugar; it says brown cane syrup, or it will say agave. It will say all other things. There’s like 50 different terms that are used that are under that umbrella of sugar.

I think the thing about the sugar-sweetened beverages is that they’re basically -inaudible- all the things that you never get full from. Nobody ever says, oh, I just had a can of soda; I’m full, even though it could be 200 calories or 300 calories. We should feel some satiety from that amount of calories, but we don’t. The liquid calories just do not affect our satiety system in the same way that solid calories do from food. That’s why it’s so easy to consume a gallon of soda a day because you really just never get full off of it. That’s I think a big factor that contributes to why people become overweight.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and it leads—it actually does the opposite; it actually leads to more hunger. Then it’s so high in sugar, it blunts your insulin receptors, your leptin receptors. Then it screws up your feedback that shuts your brain off permanently, so now you have issues with that. Alright, what’s step two? After, okay, we get rid of the sugary drinks, step two.

Dr. Avena:
Right, sugary drinks. Don’t forget the sugary drinks also includes fruit juice and also coffee drinks. That’s a big one that people don’t realize.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it is. The additives in coffee is the killer.

Dr. Avena:
Creamer, and even like soy milk, or almond milk. Those types of things.

Dr. Pompa:
Listen, if you go to a Starbucks, and you see what’s in those lattes that the world is drinking, it is a nightmare. It is a disaster. I’ve looked at the ingredients and the sugar is through the roof. That’s why it’s all part of the addition. You have the caffeine that’s addictive, the sugar, and the chemicals. It’s ridiculous. Cut that out.

Dr. Avena:
Yeah, and a lot of those coffee drinks, they’re—let’s face it, they’re deserts. They’re not coffee; it’s a desert. If it has whip cream on top of it, it’s a desert no matter what you say.

Dr. Pompa:
No problem with regular coffee.

Dr. Avena:
For the second step after you’ve gotten rid of all the sugar-sweetened beverages, and the beverages that are high in sugar in your diet, then it comes to identifying what are the trigger foods. What are the foods that you tend to overeat or the foods that you go to that you feel like you don’t have control of? I don’t think people need to empty out their pantries and get rid of everything; I think you have to keep the foods one at a time. For instance, if you’re a cookie person and it happens to be cookies, you have to really sit down and evaluate. Okay, well, what is it about these cookies that I like? Is it that they’re chewy? Is there something about them? Could I bake cookies or make them in a way that’s healthier that’s not going to contain so much sugar.

You really have to understand what it is you like about the food, so that you can replace it with something healthier. It’s not about depriving yourself; it’s about replacing it with a non-sugar alternative. That’s really the next step. That step can last a while because you really need to then go through each of the foods that are high in sugar that you’re coping with and come with alternative foods that can satisfy that. In my book, I have lots of examples about the typical foods that people tend to overeat that have lots of sugar in them. Then safer foods that aren’t going to contain as much added sugar if any at all.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, I think that’s a great idea. That’s a great step. I think the other thing too that we talked about is preparation, being prepared. If you end up at work or at the church meeting without one of these things that you switch with, you could be in trouble real fast. My advice would be, be prepared. I’m sure you discuss that.

Dr. Avena:
I do; I think preparation is really key. The reality is we’re busy people. Everyone’s got a lot going on. We tend to put our food on the side in the sense that we know that you can always pop into a store and grab something to eat. You know that there’s convenience stores everywhere you go. It’s not as much a priority for people because they know they can get food and it can be pretty cheap to get it if they need to get it. I think a lot of people really rely on the convenience factor a little bit too much and it causes us to sometimes make poor food choices. I think it’s really important to come up with a plan of snacks or food items that you can have with you if you’re on the run or if you’re taking your kids places and stuff like that. You can make sure you’re eating something that’s healthy and that you want to eat so you don’t have to make an impulse decision and eat something out of a convenience store that is going to be loaded with sugar.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I said my son, Simon. My five kids, the four older ones, we raised them the right way, the way you’re describing. As I said, they went off as teenagers. They all came back, and they all eat healthy now, all four of them. Now, Simon, he was—when we moved from Pittsburgh to here six years ago in Park City, Simon was raised well on a good diet, but we had a lot of stress in our life. We moved. We just took the hands-off, which you do with the last child anyway. You just say, they’ll figure it out; the other ones did.

Evidently, he was going riding his bike down to the convenience store at the end of the street. He got sugar addicted. We had one of the five who was sugar addicted. Of course, he became 30 pounds overweight, the whole thing. Of course, the other kids would be like, why do you let him get away with this? We couldn’t eat anything. We were just like, Simon, you’ve got to figure it out. Of course, he didn’t want to hear it.

Then he saw a picture of—I was doing a power point. She had severe eczema and psoriasis really. He saw the before and the after. He asked of course what she did. Of course, I said, she did these dietary changes, everything I teach, my cellular detox, and she fasted. He left the room and came back and said, “I’m going to fast.” Of course, I didn’t think he was going to. He made it the next day—or he made it through that day with which I was amazed. The next day, he did another day.

Bottom line is he went 11 days, okay, on a fast. It actually ended up fixing his addiction literally. After that, he started eating more vegetables. He started doing better and all the weight came off. That was a couple of years ago. To this day, he’s lean and mean. It really was the thing of him seeing the picture of the woman. That must be something that is a driver for this because if you just say, I want to lose weight, I’m going to get rid of the sugar, I don’t know if that’s enough. It seems like it takes the hard thing. Am I right on that?

Dr. Avena:
I think you’re right. I think part of the issue is that people don’t take their health seriously until there’s something wrong with their health. All it takes is a -inaudible- pull out because I think people generally tend to just assume that they’re well. Oh, maybe they’re a little bit overweight, but hey, you know what? Everybody’s a little bit overweight, so it’s not a big deal.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s it, yeah.

Dr. Avena:
That can be okay, but I think that what happens is because obesity is a chronic condition. Meaning, you’re not going to drop dead after—because you ate one cupcake, but over the course of many years, the long-term effects of overeating and carrying the extra body weight can increase your risk for diseases. It’s really like a chronic condition. It’s a slow killer essentially. That’s why it’s not something that I think really resonates with people until they have a problem, until something physically happens to them, until they get told, oh, you have diabetes. Oh, you have high blood pressure. Now, you need to be on a statin. It’s one of those things where they need to hear something happened before they take it seriously.

Dr. Pompa:
Even that, people get on the statin, and they think, hey, the drug fixes it; I’m fine. They get on the diabetic medication. There’s a time and a place for medication; however, they don’t realize that people that take the medication die at the same rate that the people who don’t. You look at the stats, it’s like, okay, because you didn’t get rid of the cause. I think it’s even a false protection even then.

Dr. Avena:
It is; and I think it’s always better if we can have food be our first line of defense in terms of preventing diseases, and use nutrition to our benefit, I think that’s really key. I’m hoping we’ll start to see it change in the way in which people think about their health, and especially the role of diet in our health. Because right now, I don’t think that there’s really much seriousness taken about how your diet can affect your health long-term. It’s certainly among little kids, we don’t see that happening as well. I have two little kids of my own, so I can speak from personal experience, too. The mindset is really about having fun. Health is not taken all that seriously and nutrition especially.

Dr. Pompa:
I some years ago marketed, it’s not your fault really talking a lot about what we’re talking about. Your book, your first book was called, Why Diets Fail. I think we answered the question, but simply put, why do diets fail?

Dr. Avena:
Diets fail because of the way we think about the term diet. Everybody wants to go on a diet and then go off the diet once they lose weight. That’s not how it’s going to work. Diets fail because people have this mindset that it’s a temporary thing. You’re going to do this for a few months or a year, and then you’re going to go back to eating your old ways. If you really want to make long-term changes in your health and your weight, the diet has to be the way you eat for the rest of your life. It’s not a quick fix. It’s not something you’re going to do temporarily. It has to be a big change.

The other reason why diets fail is because our diets are loaded with added sugars. With all this research that’s supporting this idea that they could be addictive, it’s really hard to beat something when it’s an addiction especially -inaudible-. We had have avoided it’s an addiction. Just like one of the first steps when someone becomes an alcoholic or wants to seek out treatment for an addiction to drugs, they have to admit that they have an addiction. That’s it. As a society, if we’re not admitting that sugar’s addictive, then how are we ever going to get off of it or reduce how much we’re consuming of it?

Dr. Pompa:
I think that’s the importance of your research, your books, and your work. What about the artificial sweeteners? I’ve read that some of them are more addictive even than sugar. Of course, they’re showing up in many of the foods.

Dr. Avena:
Right, artificial sweeteners are an interesting case because, in terms of the addiction, it has more to do with the sweet taste than it does the actual type of sweetener. Studies show that artificial sweeteners can still activate the dopamine system and that reward system in the brain much like what happens with regular sugar. You might save calories, but there’s also studies that suggest that you’re going to eat more calories later on if you consume something with artificial sweetener compared to a regular caloric sweetener. I think we’re starting to see a lot more artificial sweeteners and sugar alcohols in our food supply. That’s because there’s new regulations in place that companies need to disclose the amount of added sugar in food products.

Artificial sweeteners aren’t added sugar. You can have artificial sweeteners in a box of cookies, and also have regular sugar, but they only have to report how much regular sugar they put in. They might want to make it taste extra sweet. They’re going to add some artificial sweeteners to do the job too because that way, they don’t have to say on the box that, oh, this is 200% of your daily recommended value of added sugar because no one wants to see that on the back of a menu label. I think that’s really something we’re going to start to hear more and more about as more companies are having to change their formulations of these different foods to address the fact that we’re going to have more artificial sweeteners in our diet just because of these new regulations.

Dr. Pompa:
Draw a distinction for our viewers and listeners because it’s very confusing when you look at a label as you pointed out. We can look at the total carbohydrates. Then there’s sugar. There’s fiber. There’s different parts that make up that total. That’s confusing. There’s a difference when you get natural sugar from a sweet potato versus as we were saying, just the straight sugar in the drink. Clarify some of that for people because I know people are confused on it. That’s what leads to the failure oftentimes.

Dr. Avena:
Right; when you’re looking at for instance, if you buy a really good applesauce let’s say. It doesn’t have added sugar in it. It’s just really pureed apples. You would look on there and you would see how many carbohydrates it contains. That number might be relatively high. Then you’d see that it contains let’s say nine grams of sugar. Now, that sugar is all coming naturally from the apples; it’s not added sugar. There’s a new regulation that now requires on the nutrition facts label—and you’ll probably see this on lots of products if you haven’t already. That line under sugars is added sugars. This is -inaudible- the added sugar.

When you’re looking at labels, that’s the one you want to pay careful attention to. Because you can have like I said, pureed apples, or something that has a sweet potato puree, something like that’s going to naturally be high in sugars and that might be fine. The added sugar is what you need to watch out for. You want to take a look at that and hopefully see that to be as low as possible. Like I said, keep in mind that the companies are cleaver. There’s going to be some changes. You’re going to start to see a lot more sugar alcohols added to these different products to make up for the sweetness that they can’t get by adding all that sugar in that they typically would.

Dr. Pompa:
Right, and an alcohol sugar might not raise blood sugar the same; however, to your point, the sweet still gives the addiction. Those who struggle with the sweet and the addiction, you’re not solving your addiction problem.

Dr. Avena:
Right, exactly. I think that’s the big point is that if you’re really looking to cut out sugar, then you have to cut out fake sugar, too. I think that people use it as a crutch. That’s fine in the beginning, but I think eventually the goal should be to try to just get rid of the excess amount of sweetener in your diet whether it’s Stevia, or a sugar alcohol, or something. It really is about reducing the amount of sweet that we’re exposed to because that’s what’s activating these brain systems and causing us to want to overeat it continually.

Dr. Pompa:
I guess the hope is—obviously, in your book, you describe this process of weaning down. It could be done? Because I think that’s the worry is like, okay, am I the alcoholic that can’t just ever have one drink and I’m doomed? With sugar, it works a little different than that. In fact, you can wean down and get your brain to not desire as much, correct?

Dr. Avena:
Yeah, that’s really the goal is to get to the point where you’re back in control where you feel like, I can have one or two cookies, and I’m not going to have to eat the whole bag. It might mean that for a couple of weeks or months, you don’t have any cookies. You’re eating something that’s a replacement for those cookies or for whatever the food it is that you’re trying to avoid. The goal is to get to a point where you can enjoy these things but in moderation. That takes a lot of self-monitoring because when—a lot of people will ask me, well, when will I be there? When can I have this again? I can’t answer that; it’s really about you, and about what’s happening in your physiology, and where you are, and where you feel that you can be in control. I think that is a very individual thing. It involves a lot of stepping back and taking a look at yourself, and saying, hey, if I go for this little piece of cake, am I going to be satisfied with that or am I going to feel like I need to have another and another? That’s when you have to ask yourself those tough questions and be able to give yourself those tough answers if necessary.

Dr. Pompa:
I think one of the things you’ve pointed is you can’t—your brain can’t ever feel like it’s deprived. If it feels deprived, you’re going to break. You’re going to break at the next emotional thing or whatever it is. That’s going to be a little bit different for everybody what makes you feel not deprived. You have to figure out what is going to make me not feel deprived because then it can be complete lifestyle. One of the things we talked when I interviewed you on the radio show, I talked about how we have my diet variation concept. We throw in one or two feast days a week. I was surprised that people said, that’s the thing that keeps me going that I can do this forever. I’m like, huh. Because again, these are—feast days, I’m telling them to eat healthy carbohydrates like sweet potatoes and different things. It becomes the treat for them. They’re like, I can do this forever. Is that a strategy?

Dr. Avena:
Yeah, I think so. It’s the whole idea of you have something to look forward to. You’re not sucking all the joy out of life. You know that, hey, I can indulge in the thing I want; I just got to wait a couple of days. It’s going to happen. I think that can be a strong motivator for people. I think that can work on many levels. I think the key though is just to make sure that you’re in control when you do have those feast days.

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, because otherwise, you just keep going.

Dr. Avena:
Yeah, and that the feast day doesn’t turn into the feast weekend, or the feast week, or those types of things that might happen.

Dr. Pompa:
I think that’s the importance of making sure there’s still no refined added sugars in there because they’re going to be far more addictive than the sweet potato because the sweet potato has vitamins, fiber, etc, which is not going to be the same addiction.

Dr. Avena:
Right, exactly.

Dr. Pompa:
That’s a good point though because you can replace some of that desire with really healthy—there’s a sweet component like you said. We’re innately driven to some sweet. Going towards the more fiber, healthy, vitamin-rich foods that have the sweet, it’s going to be far different than saying, you know what? I’m just going to eat the cake. If you’re an addict, don’t do that. You’re going to end up in great danger.

Dr. Avena:
There’s lots of things out there that—if you have a sweet tooth, you can crave them by eating a date. That’s super sweet. What happens when people get off the processed foods and stop eating so much of them, I’ve had so many people come to me and say, oh my goodness, I never realized how sweet strawberries could be or how sweet blueberries could be. Because they never experienced it because their tongues and their brains were so used to being bombarded with added sugar that they weren’t able to detect the sweetness in the natural things that have sugar. If you start to look at the information that’s out there, a lot of this I have in my book, Why Diets Fail, there’s a lot of foods that are out there that are naturally sweet that can satisfy your sweet craving. It doesn’t have to come from added sugar. It doesn’t have to come from highly processed foods. It really can come from nature.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely; well, Dr. Avena, do you have a website that people can get to?

Dr. Avena:
I do; yep, I do. It’s www.drnicoleavena.com. There’s links to all of our research papers on the site. There’s also links to my books, and presentations, and different events that I’ll be attending. Definitely check it out.

Dr. Pompa:
I appreciate your research, wealth of knowledge. Thank you for being on Cell TV. Hey, you’d be a great addition to one of my seminars as well. Appreciate it, thank you for coming on, great information.

Dr. Avena:
Thank you.

Ashley:
That’s it for this week. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode which was brought to you by Fastonic molecular hydrogen. Please check it out at getfastonic.com. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 AM Eastern. We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us at podcast.drpompa.com. Please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, and sharing this show with anyone you think may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.