Dhru Purohit Show - How One Mom’s Journey to Heal Her Kids Started a Movement to Get to the Root of the Childhood Disease Epidemic with Beth Lambert

Episode Date: October 23, 2024

This episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth, One Skin, and Seed Oil Scout. Chronic disease rates in children are rising at an alarming rate. What’s driving this increase, and how can we support families in protecting their loved ones? Today's guest offers insight by sharing what she learned—and unlearned—while trying to protect her family and how she made it her mission to help others. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with Beth Lambert to discuss the growing epidemic of childhood disease. Beth shares her personal journey of healing her children and what she uncovered along the way. She also discusses what her nonprofit has discovered regarding continuous exposure to toxic loads, the factors impacting gut health, and how small changes can lead to significant results. Additionally, Beth explains why political candidates must address the health crisis and how advocacy and change begin at home. Beth Lambert is an Author, educator, and former healthcare consultant. She is also the Founder and Executive Director of Documenting Hope, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization focusing on root-cause healing solutions for children’s chronic health and developmental issues. Beth has monitored and documented the escalating rates of childhood chronic conditions for 15 years. Her first book, A Compromised Generation, analyzes the modern health crisis and how changes in environment and lifestyle can reverse disease; she also co-authored Brain Under Attack, a resource for parents of children with PANS, PANDAS, and Autoimmune Encephalitis. In this episode, Dhru and Beth dive into:  State of the union on childhood disease (00:00:45) Beth’s journey to uncover the cause of her children’s health concerns (2:30) Toxic Load (17:20) Changes to food and toxic load over generations (27:02) What keeps Beth motivated to continue advocacy (35:32) Increased awareness and focus on this challenge (39:47) Twins study about Autism and the backlash from the results (44:47) Next generation questioning status quo (59:32) Politics and chronic disease (01:03:32) Small changes lead to massive results (1:17:32) Beth’s current projects and studies (1:26:09) Also mentioned in this episode: Documenting Hope site Dr. Suzanne Goh’s study on mitochondria dysfunction and Autism Twins study  Stem Cell Therapy News  For more on Beth, follow her on Instagram, X/Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, or her Website. This episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth, One Skin, and Seed Oil Scout. Right now, get 40% off your Cozy Earth sheets. Just head over to cozyearth.com/dhru and use code DHRUP. Right now, One Skin is offering my community 15% off; just go to oneskin.co and use coupon code DHRU to save 15% and give your skin the scientifically proven, gentle care it deserves.  With seed oil scout, you’ll be joining a movement towards healthier eating options. Download the Seed Oil Scout App now, and dine like your life depends on it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Beth, a pleasure to have you here. Thanks for joining on the podcast. You know, today we're here to talk about a super important topic that's been getting a lot of attention in our community and nationally and with elections. And it's the epidemic of childhood chronic disease. But the thing is, if you listen to the legacy media out there, they'll tell you that things are fine, kids are not sicker than they were before. Everything is okay.

And anybody who's sounding the alarm on this is part of the quote-unquote woo-woo caucus. But let's start off with the fact that I don't think people actually realize how bad things are. Give us a state of childhood chronic disease and why it truly is an epidemic here in America. Right. Well, the statistic you hear the most often is that 54% of American children have, at least one, sometimes two, three or four chronic health conditions. So that's more than half of American children. The thing that's really interesting about that statistic, and you'll hear lots of people talk about that.

That's a statistic that's widely known. People throw it around. But very few people talk about the fact that that is a statistic from 2011. So that was put out by some researchers who took a broad brush look at what is going on with children's health. So that was almost 15 years ago. So we can only imagine that the rates are just increasing. exponentially if you look back at the trends over the last few decades. So what does it look like

over the last few decades? If you go back to 1960, you had 2% of American children with a diagnosed chronic health condition. So we've gone from 2% in the 1960s to more than half and likely way higher than that. And the other thing that's not taken to account in that statistic is that many children have what I would call the soft signs of being affected by this epidemic. So they maybe don't have an ADHD diagnosis or a life-threatening food allergy, but they have chronic diarrhea or they have chronic mood disorder kind of symptoms or behavioral issues or sensory issues that they don't actually get a diagnosis for. So I would argue, and somebody really needs to do this research to get a handle on how many

kids are actually healthy in this country. I would argue the vast majority of American children are sick with some kind of chronic health condition. You have your own story in that boat. You noticed that when you became a mom, your children, they didn't have any, you know, diagnosis at the time, but they just were not well. I'd love to set the stage for today's conversation by really getting a chance to talk about your story. From what I understand from the outside is that, you know, you started noticing this with your kids and you got pretty pissed

as you started to uncover what was driving this childhood chronic disease epidemic, but also, as you mentioned, a lot of these kids that just have these symptoms that seem like people in the past didn't have them. That's right. And my experience is very typical for, I think, the modern American parent because what happens is, and this was with my children, they had a set of symptoms. They had sensory, gastrointestinal, skin symptoms, and it was the kind of thing where I knocked on all the conventional medical doors, went to a gastronorologist, an allergist, an immunologist, a psychiatrist, trying to understand what are all these symptoms. And because I didn't get a diagnosis, it actually was a gift. I didn't realize at the time. But it was what allowed

me to keep pursuing answers. You know, since I don't have a diagnosis, something's wrong here. I've got to figure this out. So it put me into the path of integrative medicine and working with holistic practitioners. And these kinds of practitioners were asking questions like, what is the diet like? What's in the environment? Let's do some blood tests or some urine tests and see what might be out of balance. Let's talk about, you know, your child's birth history and all these things that maybe I wasn't being asked in conventional medical offices. So in finding, you know, that there were some very concrete imbalances in my children. I mean, things like the microbiome that's so important for health, right?

But like there were some imbalances in their gut bacteria. There were some tests we took that showed there were some really correctable nutritional deficiencies, not because they weren't necessarily eating healthy, but because their gut bacteria was out of balance that made those nutritional deficiencies appear. So in finding the answers in integrative medicine, I saw my children's health transform. I mean, in a very short period of time, we're talking about a couple of months. We focus so much on nutrition and detoxifying our lives and doing things in a bio-individual, personalized way for my kids.

So when I saw their health transform, and you're right, I was looking around at other parents, other kids at the time and saw how sick other people's kids were. I was pissed. I was like, this is not childhood. This is common but not normal. And one of the experiences I remember so clearly about being a new mom, when you're a new parent, you're often around other new parents with babies, toddlers, and you don't know what's normal. You know, so I remember being in a baby play group, and a lot of those babies were having

these explosive diarrhea diapers. And the parents just thought that was normal. That's what babies do. Isn't it cute? Or a lot of these babies were on reflux medications. We're talking about gastroosophageal reflux, which is something you know, you typically hear about older people who have chronic health conditions might be put on that kind of medication. But babies are being prescribed this out of the womb. So I remember just having this moment of like, this is weird.

I don't think this is right. It was like some kind of internal voice that I had. And I'm glad I listened to that internal voice. It is weird. It's not right. So that was really my journey was, you know, finding answers for my own kids, finding integrative medicine, holistic medicine, and environmental health aspects that I could change. And then most importantly, when I was in the offices of these integrative physicians

and these holistic practitioners, I met other parents who had kids with way worse situations than mine. So parents who had kids with autism, whose kids were not verbal, people who had kids with autoimmune diseases. And these parents were telling me that their kids were getting better, that they were reversing their conditions. So then I started talking to, through the network of parents, there were some moms whose kids had autism but no longer had it,

who had an autoimmune disease, but no longer had it. And then I was like, wait a minute, if you're telling me that you can reverse these conditions in children and then they can go on to live a fulfilling, you know, typical life, why are we not making that the standard of care? Why are we not catching these kids when they have the soft signs and intervening and just getting the balances that they need in their life and then helping them to have a full healthy life.

So that's really what has had me on a tear ever since I sort of became aware of what was happening to our kids because this is something correctable. This is something we can do something about through education, awareness, through policy work. We can save this generation of kids. But right now, they're really heading down

a very, very bad trajectory. And I don't think enough people are talking about it. I want to drill into your story a little bit more. But first, just a little bit of a preview for our audience. You know, fast forward, you founded an organization. Talk about that organization and the work that you guys are doing. So my organization is a 501C3 nonprofit called Documenting Hope. We've been around for about 15 years, not quite, almost 15 years.

And our mission is to put an end to this epidemic of chronic health conditions in our kids. So how do we do that? We have two main arms. One is through education and outreach. So we have an enormous amount of information on our website, DocumentateHope.com. We have webinars, newsletters, hundreds and hundreds and articles about the root causes. You know, if you're a parent who has a child, let's say, who got diagnosed with ADHD, what are the root causes?

Don't you want to know what the root causes are? So we have tons of information, educational resources about what the root causes are. We also have training for health coaches. We have a practitioner directory. So if you're a parent who's looking for a practitioner who does integrative medicine, holistic medicine, you can find somebody in your area on our directory. and we hold an annual conference called Adventures in Healing because that's what it is. This is an adventure.

We're taking this on to really see what we can learn about health and healing. So we do that every year. The other side of what Documenting Hope does is we have a research program. So we have a couple of IRB approved research studies, basically to better understand the origins of this chronic health condition epidemic in our kids. And then also to document how the healing happens and what we can do. do to streamline that, to scale that, to better understand healing so that more people have access to it. Yeah, when we got introduced through our mutual friend, the way that I was introduced to you was that, you know, there's so many people that are talking about the problem, which is super

important. In fact, our friends yesterday were at Kellogg's talking about dyes in food and cereal that are made from oils that are banned in other countries. Shout out to Vani Hari and the whole team over there at Food Babe that was leading this action, there's not as many people that are talking about in a coordinated way, the solution. And what you guys want to focus on is presenting solutions through case studies, clinical trials, and showing people that there actually is a way out of this chronic disease epidemic. Is that accurate? Yeah, that's exactly right. Thank goodness, there are a lot of people out there talking about the many root causes. And that's the other thing, too, is tackling this epidemic is really challenging because there are myriad influences in the modern world that are making our kids sick.

So a lot of times people get looking for the smoking gun. Like, oh, it's the food. Oh, it's the pollution. Whatever the thing is. Vaccines. It's this. The answer is it's all of it. It's not one thing. It is what we call the total load, which is the cumulative and synergistic impact of living in the modern world and living in a way that is not in balance with nature.

And we know because we've been documenting for 15 years that when you, you reduce the total load of environmental stressors on children when they're growing. You can reverse these conditions. You can certainly even prevent them. So we are very solutions-oriented. So we have a number of ways that we are trying to teach parents and practitioners how to do this work. So as I mentioned before, we have all these educational programming, we have curriculum that we have to teach people how to change their lives. I mean, how do you make the diet changes?

How do you change things in your home environment that would, you know, help your child thrive? importantly, we're also trying to document the stories of people who have reversed their conditions. We just published a paper in a peer review journal this summer about a set of twin girls who were level three or severe autism. They had received that diagnosis. And then their family followed a program that's very similar to what we teach where they changed the diet, cleaned the home up of all toxins, got these girls personalized therapeutics, So things that affected them developmentally needed to be revisited.

This family was, you know, all in. They just decided, you know, we're not going to live like that anymore. We're going to change how we live. So we documented every step of their journey, published it in peer review. And we were just blown away by the response on it. We thought, you know, it's going to go into peer review. That's great. Somebody will pick it up.

You know, we'll try and get out just as some doctors who are looking for this information. No, it was in the top 5% of all peer review papers ever viewed according to all metric, which is a way of evaluating, you know, how research papers, what kind of impact they make, because people don't know that autism is reversible. And in some cases, people are really offended by that idea because they have a different conception of what autism is than what we do. And it's a very complex topic. But our goal is to take all of these anecdotes that we've been documenting.

I have on our websites dozens and dozens of stories of kids who've reversed all kinds of conditions. We want to take those from the realm of story and bring that into science because we know that's what it's going to take to move the needle or regard to, you know, your pediatrician. When you go into your pediatrician, if you have a child with autism, let's say, or ADHD, your pediatrician probably didn't learn that that's reversible and probably doesn't really understand either one of those conditions. Not their fault. Just wasn't part of their medical school training. So you as a parent have heard that these things are reversible, that there's something you can do to help your trial thrive. But when you ask your pediatrician, the pediatrician's

going to say, no, there's no evidence to support that. That's where we come in. We're saying, yes, there is evidence. We're documenting it. That's why we call ourselves documenting hope, because it's documenting hope for prevention, documenting hope for reversal. And we know, we know what's possible. It's just moving the needle now. It's just trying to get people to pay attention and really focus on the root causes, again, to prevent and reverse the conditions that are plaguing. our kids. Yeah, it's tough for a lot of well-meaning practitioners that are out there because in their world, and I have many doctors in my family, and so I empathize with this, in their world as they were trained, something reversible is when you come in with a single treatment solution, a medication,

a therapeutic of some sort, and then that individual can never end up back with that situation. Right. A lot of the practitioners that I talk to in that space, sometimes they'll use the word reversible. Sometimes they'll use the term no evidence of disease. And no evidence of disease, the reason they like that is because, hey, when you are living this particular lifestyle, there's no evidence of disease. You go back to this other lifestyle that's there, this toxic soup that we're all in with food dyes and additives and crazy blood sugar spikes and not enough nutrients and dysfunctional gut

bacteria, toxins, etc. All of a sudden there's evidence of disease, right? Right. And it's a complicated thing, but it really is shaping the future of personalized medicine for people and especially kids. I want to come back to your story. Take this idea of toxic load and what your kids were experiencing, even though they didn't have a diagnosis.

Talk about some of their symptoms. And what did you find or what do you suppose because it's not. always clear that, hey, this one thing was leading to this exact symptom. Right. What were some of the top things that you saw that alleviated the symptoms that your kids were having? Yeah, take us through that journey. I think for me, the biggest aha moment in that journey about what was precipitating

my children's symptoms was gut bacteria because I, you know, I did some tests. You can do stool tests. There's lots out there now, way better than they were when I did this 15 years ago. and I saw that there were imbalances in the gut bacteria. I mean, the gut bacteria are so profoundly important for every function in our body from making neurotransmitters to regulating the immune system to determining whether we're reactive to our environment or not. And they help us detoxify.

So I learned that my kids had imbalances in gut bacteria and I dove right into there, but kind of became a little bit nerdy and obsessed by it because it's so cool what these microorganisms do for our body and how much it's within our condition. control because some, a big part of our microbiome, it can be regulated by the food that goes in every day. And as a parent, even if you're not super resource, you can to some degree control how that microbiome shapes up by food and through food. So I was, I would say our family was eating pretty standard, healthy American diet. So like I thought that was, you know, you ate whole wheat products. And, you know, we ate organic some of our stuff, but not maybe everything.

We ate maybe a lot of pasta in our house, which I thought was healthy because that was sort of an idea, a narrative that's out there. And, you know, my kids eat fruits and vegetables. But I found that the standard American diet, there's the ultra-processed version of the standard American diet. And even the healthy version of the standard American diet is not what human beings evolved to eat over millennia. So, you know, the human body has evolved, if you think about going back to our ancestral roots, eating more hunter-gathered-type foods, right? Like eating things that had been maybe processed in traditional time-honored ways, whether that's a soaking or sprouting or things like that.

So we in the modern world do not eat the way our ancestors do and our body pays the price. The microbiome has changed as a result of it. So that was my first big, heavy move was like, we're just changing our diet. So I started following a lot of Western Price type teaching, which is basically just getting into alignment with the way ancestral habits for preparing food for the types of food you eat. And we stopped eating all things like seed oils and refined sugars and a lot of grains. We dropped a lot of grains out and we started eating a lot of fermented foods. So that was one really powerful or I should even say empowering experience for me because I could I could control this every single day with breakfast. lunch and dinner. And I saw results immediately. You know, within a few weeks, I saw behaviors,

for instance, tantruming, mood dysregulation, all come back into balance. I saw skin symptoms go away. I saw the gastrointestinal symptoms go away. I mean, things like constipation, all of a sudden became normalized because food can have that impact on your body. And I wouldn't say that was the only thing that we did, but that was certainly the cornerstone. And then the other things we did we're just switching all of our products out in our house. Anything that wasn't natural out of the house, laundry detergent, toothpaste, shampoos, like all the products, the stuff and things that we think are normal. Like, I remember being a kid in like a teenager and I now see it for what it was.

I was like captured by the commercials. I remember going into a CVS and like looking at all the products, like the beauty products and the cosmetics like on the CVS counters. And I was like, just, oh, I want that. and I want that. And there's almost this like dopamine hit walking in there because that's how we're influenced when we see things on, I mean, now it's on TikTok, but for me it was on TV. And that is our culture, right?

That is so American is that we want the shiny things, the smelly things, the things that are pretty. And we fill our environment with these synthetic products. But those synthetic products are almost always toxic. They almost always have some kind of endocrine disrupting chemicals or maybe even heavy metals that we don't even know about. like in our cosmetics and these are things that are very easy to change out. So that's one thing we did with our family.

We just detoxified. We detoxified our life. And then the last, I think, major piece about what we did to turn my family's health around was to just start paying attention to nature. Like I grew up in New Hampshire, like a total woods kid. Like I love being outside. That was sort of my roots. So that's easy for me to always go back to.

But I really started paying attention to things like circadian rhythms. and going to sleep or, you know, turning the lights down when it gets dark out and getting up with a morning sunlight and really paying attention to the importance of sleep. And those are things that in the modern world we don't really do that often just because, again, it's not culturally normal to do that. It's culturally normal to turn all the lights on it. You know, as soon as the sun goes down and we stay up till midnight and, you know, we don't pay attention to nature nor do we surround ourselves by it. So I really made an effort to get my kids outside more, barefoot, in the sun with no sunscreen. I actually really feel like those were important parts of their healing journey. And they, you know,

it's it's sort of baked into who we are. I think it's such an important fundamental part of healing to just connect to nature, whether that's in your environment, whether that's in your food, whether it's in your rhythms, or just sort of your outlook. Like we need to be connected to nature to be healthy animals. in any chronic condition they're dealing with or any symptoms they're dealing with, every kid is a little bit different, but there are themes across the board that are there. You went through a bunch of different categories of your lives, but for a lot of these documentation of reversal, no evidence of disease, healing that you've seen for the families, if you had a rank

in order, what are like number one biggest contributors, number two, number three? And the context for this question is that I was born at 82. And I had... a pretty diet growing up. Minus dinner. Dinner was always like a home-cooked meal. I was under protein because we grew a vegetarian, but it was always like a good, you know, healthy vegetarian Indian meal at home that was made from scratch. And a lot of my friends too, like, you know, they all had pretty diets and we're drinking

Coca-Cola a lot and other stuff and things like that. And so we had a lot of processed food growing up, but it seemed something different in this more recent generation of kids that there was like a switch that happened where all of a sudden it's like, yes, I used to get sick a lot as a kid. I had like strep throat and bronchitis and other stuff every time it was like cold season, flu season. But I wasn't dealing with anything more major than that, maybe upset stomach here and there. So something seems like it's kind of gotten more aggressive.

Is it environmental toxins? You know, is it, what has been that lever and have you heard that from other people? I have a couple of answers to that question. First of all, this epidemic is multi-generational. It's not just like all of a sudden these kids are weaker than we were. We could handle toxins and they can't. The cumulative amount of toxins are exposed to is way more than we were. I mean, just think about something like Leifacet.

Leifacet wasn't around when we were little. Like it wasn't on every single industrial agricultural crop. Now it's in everything. And I'm sure you've probably followed moms across America and they're doing all this testing or GMO science or testing things like baby formula. And, you know, average things on the shelf like hummus and all these things. pasta. pasta. It's it's in everything.

And glyphosate disrupts your gut bacteria in a big way. So that would be one tiny example of what's different from like the types of pesticides or the types of chemical. we were exposed to as kids. But I think, and I have a research study called CHRP, that backs this up. So one of the studies we've done is called Child Health Inventory for Resilience and Prevention. It's the longest environmental health survey that parents fill out to assess what is in and around their child's environment, what was their family health history, what is their birth history like?

It's basically an inventory of how any particular child is living in the modern world. So we've been running that study since 2018 and collecting data. And so you asked, what are the things? What's different? And some of the things that come up in that data, you see signal and noise, right? Because this is a massive survey. So we want to know everything. And what comes up with the most signal, the single biggest impactor is antibiotics.

And the cumulative exposure to antibiotics. So again, going back to multi-generational. Think about your great-grandmotherer. mother who might have been the first generation of humans on the planet to have antibiotics, the sulfa drugs that came out in the 1930s. And those were miracle drugs. People were like, you had tuberculosis and you were going to die. You had this magic pill. And all of a sudden, you are restored to health and you get to go on and live your life. So that's actually a foundation, I think, of why we have such capture with our mindset about pharmaceuticals, because we've had that

experience deep in our culture. That first generation of humans in the Western industrial world started taking antibiotics for everything. Shortly following that, you start seeing the rise of food allergies. Food allergies didn't exist before the 19th century. It didn't exist in the 19th century. It was the 20th century when you first started seeing food allergies, life-threatening food allergies. And then if you think about your grandmother,

great-grandmother who had her antibiotics, then she passed her disrupted microflora from her microbiome was all messed up by those antibiotics. that got passed on to your mother. And your mother, who might have had one, two, three, four, five rounds of antibiotics who then passes that on to me. And then that passes on from me to my child. So you have multiple generations of humans who are transferring a microbiome

that has been irrevocably damaged by antibiotics. So lots of us have that in our experience. I've done talks in a large room and asked everybody in the room who's had an antibiotic to raise their hand. There's nobody in the room that hasn't raised their antibiotic. I mean, raise their antibiotic. I mean, raise their hand. There is nobody who hasn't, doesn't raise their hand.

Everybody has had an antibiotic. But it's not just antibiotics that disrupt the microbiome. And again, I think the microbiome disruption is one of the main reasons why I have so many sick kids today. Because it is the seat of our health. But there are so many other classes of medications that came out in the 60s, 70s, and 80s that also disrupt the microbiome. So that would include birth control pills. 80% of women in the United States have been on birth control pills at one point or another. What did the birth control pills do?

There are hormone in steroid medication and there are other classes like asthma medications are steroid and medications that affect your gut bacteria. It basically causes certain types of microorganisms to thrive. A lot of the like more fungal type overgrowth can happen when you're on birth control pills. And it really suppresses some of the better, more beneficial microorganisms in your gut. So again, that is then passed along generation to generation because when a baby is born, the baby receives the mom's microbiome when it's a vaginal birth. The other class of medications would be reflux medications.

And those ones took off in the 90s. Like all of a sudden boom out of nowhere, like I was saying before, every baby was put on reflux meds. And I actually was on, I used to work in healthcare consulting. And I worked on a project once where my job was to find. children, families that would be willing to test a reflux medication in their infants, newborns, zero to six months because there wasn't patent protection or approval for that particular reflux medication.

So I was literally looking for parents whose kids who didn't have reflux but would be willing to trial, you know, just so they could try it to make sure it was safe. That was to extend the patent life. That was to give patent protection to the pharmaceutical company. so that they can continue to make the higher prices on their drug. What we did by doing that is we created a whole market, a whole new market of infants who could receive reflux medications. Reflux medications totally disrupt the microbiome.

They change the pH of your gastrintestinal tract by suppressing the acid that's produced. So think about all those ways I've just mentioned that are talking about just the microbiome. And again, that's over multiple generations that's happened. Now, layer on top of that, this is where that whole total load concept comes in, layer on top of that. Your number one detox tool besides your skin protecting you from the world is your microbiome. Your microbiome actually helps you demethylate things like mercury.

It helps you excrete toxins out of your body. So when you mess with your microbiome and you screw up that balance of what's normally in there, you don't have your normal defenses to get the toxins out of your body. So what happens, those toxins that are going in, all those pesticides, the glyphosate, the chemicals in our, the Ph.T. and the food colorants that they're trying to get out of fruit loops right now, all of those chemicals that we are exposed to on a daily basis, we're going to retain them in our fatty tissues, in our liver, in our brain. So what are we seeing with our kids? We're seeing this profound epidemic of neurobehavioral and neurodevelopmental conditions. Their brains are being impacted by the toxic load and not having the microbiome. them to protect them and nurture the growth of the brain. So it's multifactorial what's causing these conditions in our kids, but there are big baddies. And also, if you take an antibiotic before you take a vaccine, you're going to have a negative impact from that vaccine because you've just wiped out your immune system. And your immune system cannot mount the response it needs to. So it's the

synergy. It's the cumulative. It is these things working in concert together. And these kids just don't have the resilience to be able to tolerate that total load of stressors and they just end up with, you know, myriad symptoms and ultimately diagnoses as a result. It's overwhelming sometimes when you think about all the different ways of the body can take insults. You know, you've been talking about the gut microbiome. We had a physician, researcher, Harvard medical doctor, Suzanne Goh on the podcast. Oh, yeah, I know Suzanne. Yeah. Yeah. And her team was, was pivotal in looking at the work on autism. As you know, I'll just share for our audience, they had a theory that, hey, these kids that have autism, there's something going on with the mitochondria. And their pivotal paper, we'll link to it in the show notes, showed that 80% of kids who are diagnosed in the autism spectrum have some degree of mitochondrial dysfunction.

Exactly. Right. And obviously there's a relationship between the gut microbiome. and mitochondria, toxins in mitochondria, mitochondria are the fundamental way that we produce energy, how well our cells are working, the signaling, everything, mitochondria impacts it all. And that's just two quadrants that we're in before we go even further. What has been the thing that kind of keeps you going in this face of the fact that every year things are getting worse and worse? In fact, my wife was asking me this morning, she was saying, what was it exactly that, like,

I saw some stat on social media that, like, by this year, like 50% of the kids will potentially be on the autism spectrum? Do you know any details about that? I mean, lots of people have tried to project it. We've even tried this, too, based on just using CDC numbers, which I know CDC numbers are always delayed. So, for instance, autism, when I started this work 15 years ago, the CDC statistics were one in 150 children had an autism spectrum disorder. Today, the autism's rate is 1 in 36. According to the CDC,

just pause and think about that jump. In 15 years, we've gone from 1 in 150 to 1 and 36. And so, of course, they're talking about better diagnosis, but I have an answer for that. That's part of it, but it's not the whole picture. If you take that rate, if you look historically and you can go back, we have really good data going back to like 1970, but that's as early as we have any decent data epidemiologically on the rates of autism. In 1970, it was one or two kids, depending on the study you read, in 5,000 or 10,000. So it is an astronomical increase. So if you take the rates that we've seen the growth and you project them forward and we have a research scientist that has done this, it looks like we're going to be at one in 16 children with autism by 2030.

That is what we're talking about because we're at 1 in 30 right now. 36 according to CDC, and I will say that number is actually probably not accurate. It's, our research scientists looked at it. It's closer to 1 in 33 is what we think the actual number is because a lot of times they're delayed and they'll count, you know, kids who are 8 years old, but they're not counting the 4-year-olds. And so they're not getting an accurate representation of just how bad this is. But 1 in 16 by 2033 is what we're rejecting just by looking at the growth rates and taking that curve and following it forward. Stephanie Seneff, who's an MIT professor, has predicted 1 in 4 by 2030, which I think is a little aggressive in terms of that

projection. But there is no doubt that we are headed for some kind of a train wreck if we don't intervene. And I will say this about autism and the numbers of kids that have been diagnosed. We are better at diagnosing. So there is a fraction and some scientists have looked at this. You know, are we calling it something different? So, for instance, in 1970, we might have called it intellectual disability or something else. But this rate cannot all be explained away by better diagnosis.

We frankly have just more children that are affected. And people like Dr. Suzanne Go, who are looking at the root causes, she's looking at sort of the mitochondrial health of neurotypical children versus children with autism. Other doctors look at the microbiome of neurotypical children versus children with autism. And there are stark differences that you can point to how they got there. You look at any one of those kids' medical history, and you can find the path that they, that led to that mitochondrial dysfunction or led to that microbiome imbalance. So it is not something that we're missing. We didn't miss these kids, you know, in 1970. You wouldn't miss non-speakers.

You know, we have, you know, one non-speaker in every classroom in America. You would not miss that in 1970. We would have a different name for it. And we didn't have a different name for it in those kinds of numbers. So I think we have a really strong need for better epidemiological work on the numbers, the trend, and what's causing it. And no one's willing to take that on. I mean, our research program would do it if we got funded. We would do that.

There's all this existing data out there that's ready to be tapped. There's amazing government databases that are ready to be tapped. But no one's putting money in it because I think everybody wants to put their head in the sand and not. face what we're what we're actually seeing here because it's too horrifying it feels right now we're in this very special moment where this topic is getting more attention than it has gotten in a long time and i'd love to get your perspective on the things that are contributing to that i think we are in this new age because of the internet i i think because of platforms like tick to ticot and twitter and instagram and facebook and people are connecting to each other

other and they're connecting the dots. So before the internet, you would have most parents who had one main source of information for health for their family and for their children. And that was typically their pediatrician or their family practitioner. That was the authority. And the problem with that is simply that while most physicians are well-meaning, they have one type of one type of training, their medical school training. They get solicited by the pharmaceutical industry, there are myriad influences that determine what information they give to the family, but it's a very conventional lens. Now, because of the Internet, because the access to the information, people can get their

understanding about what's going on with health through many, many, many different channels. Now, some of that's bad. We know there's good information on the Internet and bad information on the Internet. But I think, if you think about how long it's been around, it's really only been, you know, 25 years, 30 years that people have been accessing this kind of information. And the explosion of information is just mind blowing. But we now are getting, we're going direct to the information. So somebody like me who didn't go to medical school can just dive into PubMed and read all the research publications. You know, you have people who are able to access, you know, reference

libraries that you'd have to go to an actual brick and mortar building for before that. Right. So I do think that's part of what's what's changing. The other thing I think that is probably the biggest driver of why people are waking up is because everyone's sick. So it's not just the kids. We have more than half of Americans with a chronic illness, right? So the thyroid conditions and the autoimmune diseases and the obesity and the diabetes, like what is the most popular drug out there right now?

The Ozempic class of medications because everyone's overweight and everyone's looking for the quick fix. So we are sick. We are not feeling well. The mood disorders that everybody has, these adults, people are starting to be like, I don't want to be like this anymore. Like, I want to feel good. I want to enjoy my life.

And when you're sick, you can't do that. So I think people are starting to ask questions. Like, what is it that's going to make me healthy? And when they go to the conventional medical choices and they don't get their answers, they're going to go somewhere else. And now I feel like there are enough choices out there for people. sadly there is no system to help pay for those choices, those alternative choices, because our pay our payer system is set up to only pay for, you know, surgeries, medicines,

and sort of, you know, five minute, ten minute visits with our physicians. And a lot of the physicians are now looking for different training too. You know, a lot of the physicians who went through conventional medical school where they didn't get nutrition training, they're going to get the nutrition training because they themselves want to know how to help their patients, right? So the Institute of Functional Medicine, the Medical Academy of Pediatric Special Needs, there's all of these physician training organizations that I think are doing amazing things with the medical community and getting them to shift how they see health so they can better

help their patients. And the doctors want to help their patients. And the last thing I'll say about this in defense of doctors is that what the doctors need to get their patients to do is make cultural and lifestyle changes. do you know how hard that is? It's like you have to go tell somebody, yeah, you can't eat what your mama fed you. Even though that's like got all these like emotions tied up with it and it's so part of our identity and you know, what makes us feel comfortable and makes us feel happy, that doctor's got to say, no, you need to not eat the way you grew up and you need to do this

instead, do something that's totally foreign to you. That's a hard job for the doctor to do. That's a very hard job. So I really believe that it is incumbent on us each individually to educate ourselves to learn what supports health. And we do kind of have to live counterculture. I talk about this a lot that, you know, one of the fundamental barriers to a healthy America is that our culture is unhealthy. Like, it just is. Like every aspect of it does not support health. So we have to step outside of the way we've done things for the last 40, 50 years and start living counterculture. That means eating healthy and exercising and getting outside and not staying up late on our devices. other things. I think we can do it and there is absolutely a movement heading in that direction.

You're part of that, Drew. Like you are on these podcasts telling people what those changes need to be. And we need to do more of that and reach more people so that it becomes almost like a revolution, right? Like a health revolution because the alternative isn't too encouraging. Let's break down some more of the research you guys have done. So there was the twin study, which got a lot of attention. I think it was like covered by a lot of media outlets, got picked up. Did you guys get a lot of backlash as part of that? Do you want to talk about that for a second? Yeah, we got both.

We got so many emails. Our poor principal investigator, Chris Adamo, he's an epidemiologist, and he just got inundated because he was the lead author on that paper with messages from physicians who treat kids with autism, who was like, what did you do? Tell me how, like, how did this happen? Where do I learn about this? We got really supportive emails from people who had no idea. You know, a lot of peers and colleagues and professionals who have kids with autism who did not know that there was another approach, did not know about some of these root causes.

So that was really encouraging. We also got a lot of backlash because what's happened recently, and this is brand new. This is like, like in the last five years, I would say, autism has gotten so tied up with identity politics that we've lost sight of what's actually happening to our kids here. because what is happening is people who are very well-intentioned, very well-intentioned, are saying autism is genetic, children are born with it, and they carry it through life. So we must embrace them, support them, make them feel loved and accepted. And all of that is good, wonderful in message and narrative, except for the fact that the part about the always habit. That's actually not true. And like I said, I've been documenting for 15 years, dozens of cases of children who have reversed their autism diagnosis by making a lot of the changes we've been talking about, all those diet and lifestyle personalized therapeutics.

So when somebody says autism is part of an identity, that's okay. But if your identity is gastrointestinal symptoms, if your identity is sensory symptoms, if your identity is not being able to talk and you're tied into those things, that's, a problem because all I'm interested in doing is helping any person, regardless of their diagnosis, become as healthy as possible. And when you address the root causes of the gastrointestinal symptoms, of the sensory symptoms, of what's going on with the speech, the motor issue is going on with speech, when you address those root causes, all of a sudden the symptoms that are diagnosable as autism, you know, it's a subjective diagnosis. And a doctor says, yes, this cluster of symptoms means you have autism, but when you address the root causes, you fix the gut.

You integrate the brain and the body through personalized therapeutics. Those symptoms of autism go away. So then what do you have? You have an individual who no longer has that diagnosis, no longer has that identity. And I have several adults that I know who had autism. Remember what it was like when they had those symptoms, overcame that diagnosis, lost that diagnosis. and they can talk about it, and they will tell you that they did not enjoy having the sensory chaos in their brain. They did not enjoy the pain in the gastrointestinal tract. They did not enjoy not being able to relate to their peers. So I think we get into very murky waters when we start tying autism too closely to identity.

And instead, I would prefer that we don't even talk about diagnoses. I would prefer we just look at each individual person and look at what their, medical and physiological imbalances are and see if we can't help support their body to be as healthy as possible. And if in that process of helping that body to be as balanced, as regulated and healthy as possible, if these symptoms known as autism disappear, is that the worst thing in the world? If you have depression, we wouldn't say, you know, that's part of your identity. We would say, what can we do to help you restore balance, to feel regulated, to have your mood improve, right? if you have anxiety, maybe there's a piece of your anxiety that you feel like in your workplace

gives you a little edge because you maybe got a little OCD in there and it gives you a little edge. So I could see like maybe there's a little bit of identity in there, but we don't go to somebody who has anxiety and say, oh yes, you know, we just accept you for who you are. We're like, how can we help you overcome the symptoms that are bothering you? And we should do that for kids with autism. And to not do that is really just missing the boat and missing the opportunity to help these kids live a full and fulfilling and rewarding life. And so I think we need to stop getting caught up in autism as identity and instead say, say, okay, what is, what's underneath autism? What's it all about? Yeah, it feels like part of the subtext along with it. You know, a few years ago, I produced this

docu-series called Broken Brain. I love it. And in fact, our podcast, my podcast, when it first started, we called it Broken Brain as a way to like continue the conversation. And there was a whole section inside of there about autism and talking to some of the researchers are out there like Suzanne Go, Dr. Suzanne Go, and talking about a lot of these things that you're mentioning, you know, these emerging total toxic load and how it's multifactorial and how the earlier you get involved in some treatment options, the more likely it is that there can be this period, you know, of stepping into no evidence of disease. We did hear that, and I want to talk to you about this, that the later you intervene, it's tougher, right?

It's, you know, just so everybody's aware of that. But we got 95%, 98% was super positive. The backlash that was gotten came primarily, I would say, the subtext of the conversation was, my kid, my child, my loved one is not broken. And obviously we weren't saying broken brain like you're a broken person. And we're saying these are the things that can break the brain. These are the toxins.

These are the other stuff that can break it. And then as part of that, you can restore it. What does that look like? And that goes into the identity. And I think that's from a place of, and you know this better than anybody else, is, hey, nothing is wrong with my kid. But I think sometimes we get so in defense mode of society, anybody that has some sort of possible solution, it's, whoa, whoa, whoa, nothing is wrong. I don't even want to have this conversation because I'm going to be admitting that something is wrong.

Well, actually, nothing is wrong. And it's not anybody's fault. This is just the environment that we've all been brought into. And it's so multifactorial. It's so personalized. One kid in one family can have an issue. Another kid and other family doesn't have an issue. Right.

Right. And we don't even begin to know all the depths of it. But that doesn't mean, this is the work that you guys are doing, that there aren't clear themes of things that can be supportive even if we don't fully understand exactly which one pulled the lever. Right. They all pulled the lever in some sort of way and maybe in the future we'll have a better idea, but at least for right now, there are solutions that are on the table that are available to us.

Right. So going back to this, you know, we talked about the, you know, the backlash that you guys got, but obviously largely there was a lot of positive aspects that kind of came in from it. Just walk us through a little bit, like the basics of it, right? So you had these twins, right? What age were they, what was, you know, how would you describe their diagnosis? What kind of, you know, if you can detail out a little bit more of the protocol that, you know, they were placed on, who was the, you know, the physician that was kind of working with them?

And then how long were they followed before there was a shift in what you saw in the symptoms that were there? So this study was a case report, which is basically looking back retrospectively at what the family had done. But this was a special kind of case report because this case report came from another study that we were doing. It's called the flight study. And the flight study is an acronym. It stands for facilitated, longitudinal, intensive investigation of genuine health transformation. I'm a big proponent of genuine health transformation. I think it's possible for everybody.

So this is a study to basically assess how that health transformation happens in children. And we had put out an enrollment opportunity where we were going to take a small number of children in a pilot study to see what happens to a child with a diagnosis who has that total load reduced, who has personalized therapeutics given to them, who has the opportunity to increase their nutritional support and clean up their environment. So we actually designed this study. It's an intervention study to see test that total load hypothesis and what happens if we reduce that total load. So we actually ended up enrolling two children into the study. One had autism and one had alopecia Universalis, which is no hair on his body anywhere. And I can tell you about those children, too, if you're interested. But in the process of that enrollment, we had limited funding and we could only take two children in.

A third family applied to be in the study, and they just missed that opportunity because they had twins. And we also didn't have enough funding to take them into the study. So this family, instead of joining our study, our flight study, which was 18-mast, months long and a prospective study where we help the family change their diet, clean up their environment, and use personalized therapeutics. In lieu of that, the family with the twins joined our program called Healing Together. It's an online membership program for parents who are looking to learn how to do this healing approach, how to learn about total load and how to make lifestyle changes. We walk families through that in this program. So they participated in our program,

became part of our community, watched our webinars, read our newsletter. So they were basically just members of our community. So we just kept in touch with them as they were going through their journey. And what we found was that they really took advantage of every opportunity avail to them. They used a whole body 365 degree kind of approach with our children. So they did deep dive on nutrition, just like I did with my kids. They did a deep dive on cleaning their home environment, took all the toxins out, you know, addressed EMF in the environment. That's one we haven't talked about. like electromagnetic radiation is actually a stressor on the body. So when you're trying to heal, you want to remove that Wi-Fi and devices, et cetera. Importantly, what this family did because it was

autism and autism is more complicated, let's say, then reversing an autoimmune disease, it's just an autoimmune disease because it's developmental. That means that those children had a total load of stressors during a critical developmental time. So there was a developmental impact. And you can unwind the developmental impact. It just takes a little more work and a little more, it's a little more complex. But this family worked with a very specific autism coach coaching program called autism parenting secrets. They have a great podcast.

And they also worked with a woman named Patricia Lemmer, who was an autism coach as well. So they worked with people who know how to do this work. And they found over that course of about a year to 18 months that their daughter's Atec scores, Atec is a measurement for how severe your autism symptoms are. they're and a high number is severe and a low number is better, milder. They just watch their Atex scores drop. So now one of the twins actually doesn't have any Atex score. She qualifies as a one, which is you don't have any autism at all.

So we actually, we filmed that family. We have some footage of that family to document this on film and see the, and see how their children are doing now, indistinguishable from their peers. But they were labeled and given a diagnosis of level, three or severe at Walter Reed, which is not like some, you know, chop shop somewhere. Like, that's like a real legit institution. Like, we're not worried about them not having had a real diagnosis. And we watched through these practitioners that we work with, their change over time. Like, we, we saw that these families were having, this family was having an incredible outcome. And

and the thing that I, the reason why we got so much attention on this paper when we published it is because this happens all the time in, you know, pockets here and there, in these integrative practices, these families are doing these things on their own. But no one's documenting it. So no one talks about it. So that's where we come in because we feel like it is absolutely critical that it's documented on film. It's documented in the medical literature. It's documented in anecdotal stories. We actually have a YouTube channel. If you go to Documenting Hope, at Documenting Hope on YouTube, we have videos of success stories of kids who have recovered from their conditions. Why do we do that?

Because people don't believe you. They don't believe you. And so we really feel like it is our mission and our purpose to let people know that healing is possible. These recoveries happen. And we have two more papers in the works right now that are going to be submitted to peer review this fall that are one's another autism reversal. And a third one is about a clinic in the Philippines that applies a functional medicine approach to autism. And they have improvements in their ATAC scores, like dramatic improvements in their ATAC scores.

the problem is is people are not going to the functional medicine offices first. They're going to their early intervention or I forget what it's called in California, the centers here, the developmental centers. And they get guidance to go get maybe OT or maybe they get, you know, ABA. Because ABA is applied behavioral analysis is the only thing that's covered by insurance for autism. But if you could get that child into Suzanne Go's practice into the cortica, which is her practice for kids with autism and get that covered by insurance,

we would stop this epidemic in its tracks. We would do such a better job helping these kids have a bright future. But right now our system isn't really set up to support those kids, sadly. It's so many layers to it. It's not enough practitioners that are educated. You have to sort of been red-pilled

to even go down this category. And if you go to like a lot of these conferences where a lot of these practitioners gather, like the Institute of Functional Medicine, you'll see that most of them are there. You know, esteemed individuals, you know, from top schools all around the country and the world, they're there because somebody in their family

had a health crisis or a journey, or they themselves had a health crisis, like a Dr. Terry Walls, you know, doing some incredible and powerful work in the category of autoimmune and MS. And until it doesn't happen to you or somebody that you love, it's kind of like there's, There's no reason to question the system.

Right. There's no reason at all to question the system because obviously there are clearly many life-saving drugs and emergency medicine solutions that are out there that genuinely have made a difference in people's symptoms that are there. But you really need to zoom out and look at things from 30,000 feet up to say, well, we actually need to question the root of this. Like, why is it going on to begin with? It's like that old adage of like, I don't know who discovered water.

but it wasn't a fish. Yeah. Right. When you're in it, you just actually can't see it. You have to have something to be able to zoom out and be able to see it. But it feels like there's this next generation. I'll put my brother-in-law as a cardiologist in this camp as well, too, of people who just are physicians, health care practitioners,

people that can influence this space in one direction, another, maybe executives at insurance or health companies or other stuff. It's small, but it's growing. And they're growing up on this. They want to be healthy. They're listening to people like, you know, Peter Tia and Andrew Huberman and Rhonda Patrick. And, you know, they're coming across your social media and they're following Cali Means and Casey Means and all these individuals. And they're starting to sort of realize like this is like our canary in the coal mine, you know, moment where it's like, hey, a lot of people have been talking about how bad it's been.

But more and more people are waking up. And now they're congregating together to say like, whoa, if we don't do something about this, we're all headed to be driving off a cliff, and we potentially may not be able to go back from that. I love that you just said the canary and the coal my moment, because that imagery has been what's been driving me from day one. There is an author who wrote a book about the six mass extinction. So in the planetary history,

there's been five periods or events where we've had mass extinction of species or biodiversity slash due to environmental changes. And she argues, her name is Elizabeth Kilbert, I think is her name, Corbert, something like that. And her argument is that you are seeing, you're witnessing, the sixth mass extinction happening on this planet right now. And she documents it through the loss of biodiversity. So the number of fish species,

a number of insects that are no longer with us, the number of primates, mammals, all these things where the diversity of the species is declining. And I argue that humans are a part of that. We are part of the sixth mass extinction, and we are in very real danger of extincting ourselves. If you think about the fact that the half of children are sick, at least, I'm going to guess it's closer to like 75%.

And if you had any species, like an elephant or a dog or any kind of, primate where you had, you know, botanist, biologists, whatever, out there looking at the health of the species and you had these guys, scientists coming back and be like, yeah, 75% of these, the offspring of this species are sick. You'd be like, you know, the people would be up in arms, like, oh my gosh, we're losing this species. But that is what's happening to humans. And you look at fertility rates, there's no coincidence that that young couples are having hard time getting pregnant. Their bodies are very smart saying, yeah, you guys can't sustain health. You can't sustain life. So that's part of the fertility piece too. So I actually think that the canary

in the coal mine imagery in my book is yellow. Our logo for Documenti Hope is a canary. It's a yellow yellow canary because we do feel like we are in this moment. Our kids are here sent as special messengers telling the rest of us, wake up, you guys. This is not sustainable. This is not okay. And I feel like if we follow the parents, the practitioners who are getting these kids better, that's the future. That's how humans survive because they're learning the path to support human health. But if we stay status quo and we don't pay attention to the canaries in the coal mine, what's going to happen to us as a species. Like it's really way more dire than I think people think it is.

You know, we're recording this conversation just, you know, a few weeks away from an election. And I want to talk about politics in relationship to this movement because there is a connection that's there. And for everybody that's listening here, like, well, I'm not here to talk about just politics for politics sake, right? more important than how anybody votes or anything that's out there is that this is an issue. It will be an issue whoever's president in another four years. In another four years from that, this is like the issue of our time. Right. Is chronic disease and the fact that so many kids and families are suffering from it.

In particular, the reason that I brought up about the election is that RFK, who can be a polarizing figure for many people, because of especially his stance on vaccines and his thoughts during COVID, has made a huge part of his career well before the COVID pandemic, well before he was known as somebody who was talking, you know, that the media portrayed

has only been, you know, demonizing vaccines. He has been very concerned about the childhood chronic disease epidemic. And more recently this has suffered because, as many people know, you know, he has withdrawn from the race and told his supporters that, you know, if you really care about making America healthy again, Maha, which is their sort of slogan, that he's putting all his support behind, you know, Donald Trump, right?

I want to talk about sort of from the outside, I'll share my perspective and then I'd love to get your perspective on the situation. I feel that the fact that so many more people are talking about chronic disease is the most important thing. The goal of many people who have been here and have been talking about it way before this election cycle is going to be to continue to talk about it, regardless of who ends up winning the presidency. And so any attention that's on there, and if you look throughout history, attention towards movements sometimes comes from areas that we may or may not agree with. And that can bring up a lot of feelings and issues with it. And it's not always black and white in

terms of is this good, is this bad? But I largely see the work that RFK has been doing to raise this as an issue. And obviously, you can't mention his name without mentioning the work of Casey Means and Callie Means, who I'm friends with and have been on this podcast, you know, multiple times and really appreciate their work and have been a huge supporter of their book. It feels like that has really lit a fire amongst people. And even my friends that are like, hey, listen, in no way at all do I like Trump, in no way at all, do I resonate with maybe RFK because of his stances on X, Y, and Z. There's a deep appreciation for the fact that, wow, somebody has the courage to talk about

this thing that so many people have been talking about, but has not been part of our election cycle. Just in the same way that I was watching a town hall yesterday with this hip hop radio host, Charlemagne. Some people know them. Some people don't. And it was in Detroit and it was with Kamala Harris. And one of the things that Kamala was talking about, Vice President Kamala Harris was talking about, was that a key part of her campaign was, you know, trying to attract the black male voter. And she wants to elevate the reason that so many diseases in particular, chronic diseases, are impacting, you know, black people in particular.

Okay, fine. Maybe there's a part of that that's, you know, identity politics. maybe not, but I felt excited that at least people are talking about health, right? And I think that that's the most important thing that's going on here. And whoever wants to talk about health, like, I'm on board with that. I'd love to get your perspective on this sort of political landscape that we live in right now, especially us recording this right before the election. I feel the exact same way you do. I think a lot of people feel very ambivalent about the candidates themselves, but just the fact that we have health as part of a platform that make America healthy again is a thing. It's all of a sudden triggering in people's minds, oh, yeah, you're

right, we aren't very healthy. And, you know, people travel elsewhere and they have the experiences like this. Like, I can't eat wheat in the United States, but I can eat it in Paris. I can eat it in Italy, you know, like they have these experiences where they go outside and they see people elsewhere are healthy. We are not healthy in this country. And the fact that people are talking about it is so glorious. And I, um, I loved the day that Casey and Callie Means did their interview with Tucker Carlson because it broke the internet. I literally feel like it broke the internet because people were, we're all of a sudden listening to them. They are very credible figures who have a very important message. And now that it's tied in with the election,

it is, I feel like it's unstoppable. I'm, I'm absolutely thrilled because like you, we've been talking about this for so long and trying to get people to pay attention to it. So I do. think that this is a watershed moment and in the future, past this election, you're going to have other candidates who are going to take this up because they know people are listening and they know people care about it. I think the thing that's most concerning is that people are looking to our government and looking to policymakers to save us from this health crisis. And that's, you know, that's a fraction of this solution. The bigger part of the solution is everybody needs to take responsibility for their health. Everybody needs to start reading labels. Everybody needs to start

thinking about, all right, am I living in sync with nature or am I living a like totally synthetic life? I feel like that's going to be the bigger movement and the bigger shift is if we each as an individual start doing these things on our own. So that's a lot of education. That's a lot of outreach. That's a lot of providing resources. That's why we, you know, we tell people, we're here for you. You want to make changes in your life? We will help you do that because it's hard. It's very hard. But it is a good moment. It is a encouraging moment for the first time in the entirety that I've been doing this work. There's some people that are listening today to this podcast and they're thinking, oh my gosh, how can you two be both so silly?

These candidates are playing you. They're taking and co-opting this movement, which is built on the back of hardworking individuals like yourself and your team and the nonprofit and so many of the moms and families that are out there that are genuinely raising awareness. have not forayed into the, you know, political landscape to sort of muddy the waters. What would you want to say to that individual? I don't really care. That's what politics is, right? They're going to take any issue, any issue, and they're going to play you. They're going to take your cultural opinions.

They're going to take your viewpoints that you feel most strongly about. And, you know, you can look at any of the issues on the platforms. And that's what they do. They co-op them and they try to convince you and play you. I don't care. If people are talking about it, that is a win. That is an absolute win. So let them play us.

Let them talk about making America healthy again because we should be talking about that every day. Even if the promises are empty, if we're talking about it, that is going to get people listening, reading, paying attention, and ultimately making changes. It's not going to happen overnight. We have a lot of work to do. We have a very toxic culture. Movements are messy. Yes, they are. I love that you said that.

I think that's the best answer, which is that you have to imagine anytime politics is there is a sense of some lip service. And then the challenge is always, when you activate a base, an audience, that cares about a subject, and so many people, regardless of how they think about politics, they care about this topic.

They care about health. They care about getting kids healthy. And if any candidate on the left, right, independent, in between, anything like that, makes a promise that they're going to move something forward, you better believe that that base and that audience that cares about the subject is going to hold them accountable. That's right.

And people have a long memory about these situations, especially when it's a lifelong thing of you trying to figure out what do you need to do this year to make sure that your kid continues to stay healthy and doesn't get worse? And what do you do to make sure that your family avoids an autoimmune condition? And what do you do to make sure that, you know, X, Y, and Z, families are things? thinking about this all the time. I can remember when I first got into health, like I was 19, 18 years old. And I had really bad acne. And I went to this conference actually here in Los Angeles. And I heard a speaker. It was like a, it was a conference for the Jane community, which is my

sort of philosophical, religious background that my mom comes from. It's a lesser known tradition and religion from India. It's all about sort of nonviolence, a huge percentage of the following of that community, it's one of the oldest, you know, religious in the world is vegetarian. That's kind of like a governing principle for them. So I grew up vegetarian and I went to this conference and there was a speaker that was there. It was actually the president of Pita. I think it was Ingrid Newkirk. And she's talking to this group of, you know, kids. It was all kids at this conference here in Los Angeles. And she's trying to convince this group of kids, thousands of them that, hey, you're vegetarian, but you need to take it further, right? You need to get off of dairy. And the whole argument was

dairy is cruel. It's not good for the cow. It's not good for the calf. And it was, you know, a lot of the sort of pita talking points that were there. And you can imagine this group of kids, including me, are like, oh my gosh, we already can't eat anything. Like literally the only thing that we can eat is like a bean burrito and cheese at like Taco Bell when we go out. Like, you're out of your mind if you think that we're going to become vegan and like get rid of eggs and dairy. That's like the only thing that we can eat. And then in their inner talk at the end, she was even saying that like we're also seeing how dairy is, you know, uh, is connected to like skin issues.

And she mentioned acne. And that was enough for me that I'm a kid. I'm suffering. I have bad acne and like I had had all throughout high school. And I was like, all right, let me look into this a little bit more. And so I started reading a little bit. And at the time, and this is the point that I was making, if I wanted to find anything about health, it was typically a health food store in a college town, super liberal, you know,

counterculture. It's not something that everybody from all sort of political spectrums were sort of doing. It's the crunchy granola mom, dad, family that was shopping there. And that's where I got these books that ultimately inspired me to kind of go vegan for a little while. The good news is my acne went away completely. And then obviously later on as I got into functional medicine, I changed and I stopped being vegan and vegetarian when I was measuring my blood work. But I've seen from even that was like what like 20 plus years ago, I've seen how health, which was this thing, which was very specific for a kind of a group of people eating organic, getting things without microplastics in them and plastics.

And now it's so mainstream. Everybody cares about this topic. Everybody's paying attention to it. And that's one of the best things in the world because it's going to take us all working on solutions at every level, businesses, nonprofits in your instance, studies, research, political pressure, companies, entrepreneurship. It's going to take solutions at every single level if we're going to get out of this mess. I agree. And I feel like a lot can be done with your consumer dollars, too, and that's going to cause a lot of the shift. There was once this woman I met many years ago,

who was really interested in getting toxins out of consumer products. And she was going to start this organization. It never happened because she went on to become like a state legislator. or something, but she was going to call it moms moving markets. And the whole premise was that she was going to teach people to like how to, how to purchase in healthful ways that support the companies that are doing things the right way. And I do think that moms are moving markets. Dads are moving them too. But like our kids are so important to us. And when we want, when we learn that that we have to protect them from, you know, things in their toothpaste and their shampoo and their, you know, their toys that are coming from China, we start buying different things.

So I do feel like there's so much power in the consumer choices we make. And that's, that's underestimated. I feel like we can do a better job of educating parents about those things. And oftentimes when you, when you reach a parent, and it's usually the new parent, they're a little bit like deer in headlights because they did, they themselves didn't know about these things necessarily. But when they have a newborn baby that they have to care for, suddenly they're like all the sensors are on and they're paying attention to these things they might not otherwise. So that is a

very important constituency to reach is the new parents because they want the best for their kids. Of course they want the best for their kids. And so I actually think if we could do we could do more in that prenatal neonatal period. You know, we would have the ability to turn this whole thing around by reaching the new parents or the parents to be in their preconception period. That's like the holy grail of this whole hell thing. We can create. healthy humans, if we just educate people before they have children, the fertility journey for a lot of people does result in that because people learn, like, they have to clean themselves up and clean their environment up and change their lifestyle in order to conceive. So there is that sort

of happening on the periphery. I think that people are waking up, but we have so much more we could do with, like, young people in their 20s to get them to understand that the health really does matter. Their health does matter. So there's some families, there's some moms that are listening today, and their kid is going through something. and they're hearing us talk about all these different areas. And as you mentioned, it can feel like a lot in the beginning. They're like EMFs and like this thing and that thing. I do want to emphasize and I don't know if it's completely true,

but probably is true because your story is going to be similar to a lot of the stories of other people. It's not like you did everything all at once. There's things that you guys are doing today that maybe you didn't know of in the beginning. Now, you did a lot because you really saw that your kids were going through something and you were an early adopter in this space. but there were some things that came later on. So how do you sequentially sort of share with people, give them hope, right, documenting hope, giving them hope that there's something possible, but also to make sure that they don't feel overwhelmed.

Now, a big part of that is making sure that the resources are available, and that's what you guys are focused on. In the context of this conversation, could you address that topic for people who are feeling like it just feels like so much to do all at once? now I'll do anything for my kids is what people are saying. And that doesn't mean that it also doesn't feel overwhelming. Well, I think, I think that it obviously can feel so overwhelming. But if you use one guiding principle to make your daily choices and decisions, it gets a lot easier. And that guiding principle is just lean into what is natural in every way that you can.

So that has to do with food and the products you buy. And there's, there's tools. there like environmental working group, for instance, has a database where you can look up cosmetics and home care products or there's a company called Made Safe that certifies non-toxic products. But even just thinking about going into the grocery store and working on, you know, doing whole foods, going around the perimeters and, you know, shopping at farmers markets. And that's just leaning into natural. Like just try not to choose the processed foods and try and do things as natural as possible. If you use it as your guiding principle,

you're not going to do it, you know, it's not going to overwhelm you because you can just take off a little bit of time and do what you can in each, each and every day. But it's that kind of idea that like it's almost like natural got a bad rap for time. Like I remember doing my first fundraiser in like 2013 and there was a mom who was helping out with a fundraiser and she's like, I don't want to use the word natural because it kind of sounds like those like weird burken stuff. We weren't wearing hippie people. And I was like, I never thought that that was like a negative kind of. or the other side of it now that so many companies use the word natural and it doesn't mean anything. Right. It's like greenwashing. It's an empty label. But I think you, you know, it, that's the easiest way for it to not feel overwhelming. It's just to say, I'm doing the best I can with what I got from where I am and I'm trying to live as close to nature as possible. The other thing is like,

I always use them that my grandparents or my great grandparents is like my guiding principle. Like, what did they have access to and what kind of food did they eat and, you know, what kind of products did they use? like just reconnect with, you know, ancestral ways and ways that people did it just a few generations ago. You know, we kind of are locked into this culture, you know, this like post-industrial World War II post-industrial culture. It's a very short period of time. So I think if we can, you know, do the best we can to sort of just embrace and honor the way that people used to live and try and emulate that, we're going to do a lot better. And the other piece of advice I would have for parents who are, let's say, starting this journey or trying to do the best they can,

it's really great if you can find a friend or a family member who wants to go on the journey with you. It's almost like an accountability partner thing, but it also helps you normalize the changes. Because again, we're talking about making cultural changes and that's hard. It's easier if you have a community, if you have people you can do it with. That's why we created our community healing together. It's like a place we have live calls with these parents and we just talk about this stuff. We're like, what kind of shampoo are you using?

And do you guys recommend a toothpaste? It doesn't have toxins in it and just sharing that stuff with people. You can do it in Facebook groups. There's a million ways to connect people who are interested in raising healthy kids. So I think that's probably the most important piece. And that's so foundational to community, right? Like having a group of people where you feel like you belong and you see things similarly in terms of keeping our kids healthy, that's going to help the most.

And it'll keep you sort of moving forward and keep you accountable. So for the community that you guys have built, like if somebody's listening to them, they're like, hey, I need that support. I'd like to be a part of that. I don't want to feel as lonely kind of navigating the space with my kids. And I want the best practices from other people that are out there, especially moms who are usually bearing the burden of sort of making the purchasing choices for the family, but also the caretaking choices, you know, that so much is on their shoulders and they do so much.

So shout out to all the moms that are out there. Where do they go to be a part of that? And are there different communities that they are a part of? So they can just go to Documentinghope.com, and we have a link right there to join our membership community. We also have on DocumentaHope.com access to our conference where people get together in person and are learning how to do this kind of work in, you know, in a weekend setting, which is really nice. You kind of escape for a little while. It's in Orlando. So there's some, you know, nice sunshine as well. But it gives people a way to connect with other people who want to do this work.

I'm going to tell you a really cool thing that happened in our conference last year. We have a lot of parents in our community who have kids who have ADHD, autism. Pans Pandas, which is an autoimmune condition. And in this particular case, I invited my neighbor who has a son with type 1 diabetes. And I, you know, there's no documented cases that I know of children who have reversed their type 1 diabetes. When my neighbor got her son's diagnosis, she knew me and she knew the work that we've been doing with documenting hope. She's like, I'm going to be the first case. I'm going to do it. It's autoimmune. It's like Terry Wells reversed her MS. We have people reversing all kinds of autoimmune diseases. Why not type 1? And, There's complexity to it, but I think it's doable. So she came to the conference trying to learn how does one heal? What are the healing methods that are available for her son? What type one? When she was there, she listened to one of the presenters,

who's an OT who has a therapy for helping the brain and the body connect for children with autism. And she mentioned she has a son with type 1 diabetes. So her ears perked up and she went and found the speaker after. And the two of them found each other at our conference. And they're like, let's do this. We're going to heal type 1. We're going to do this. We're going to use the functional medicine approach.

for type 1 diabetes. And then since then, it's been like moths coming into a flame. Like all these other type 1 families are now following them. They have a Facebook group. And it's literally this community that's built up. For the first time, these parents who have kids with type 1 diabetes are like, this is possible. We're going to do this.

It may not have been demonstrated yet, but we're going to do it. It's the same thing. It reminds me a lot of the autism parents about 25 years ago, that first crop of autism kids, like the first group of them that really, blew up in terms of numbers, they got together in a community called Defeat autism now and they started learning how to reverse autism together. They pulled in physicians and they figured it out and they started reversing autism and their kids. Before those conferences, the Defeat Autism Now conferences, nobody was talking about reversing autism. There was just a couple of parents that got together and said,

we're going to do this. So that's what I mean about community and being in community with people because it empowers you. It gives you confidence to pursue things you wouldn't otherwise do. And it encourages you and gives you hope. So that's another piece or illustration, I think, of why connecting other people is so good for us and actually contributes to the healing process. Definitely the type 1 diabetes feels like super far out there, even through the functional medicine approach, but who am I to poo poo on anybody's sort of journey? But the other cool thing about it is that I don't know if you saw this, but just, I think in the last couple of weeks, there was some major movements on that topic when it came to some sort of like,

stem cell therapy or something in China. I don't know if you saw this at all. I'll put in the show notes. I'm not educated enough on it, but there was some sort of advanced therapeutic, stem cell gene splicing, something that related to type 1 diabetes. I'll put it in the show notes.

We'll find it afterwards. No, that's incredible. You know, I think that regardless of what exactly comes out of that situation, the idea of people coming together and learning. And it also sounds like there's practitioners that are also part of your community as well too. Yes.

And just even navigating this space, right? It makes a huge difference when there's somebody else that you feel you can relate to even if their child's condition is not exactly the same thing that you're going through. We're all going through the same themes and trying to navigate this incredibly,

increasingly toxic world to try to at least stay healthy and stay normal. What are the campaigns and projects that you guys are working on right now? We have studies that will be opening for people to participate in coming in 2025. I'd mentioned the flight study, which was a pilot, a pre-pilot, actually, for another version of flight where we're going to be enrolling 12 children who have autism into a structured educational program and group coaching program. So just like that family we talked about in the peer-reviewed paper, how they followed a certain set of,

a program for helping their children return to good health, we are now testing a similar version of that in children who have autism. So we'll be opening that up in 2025. And then we have another study CHRP, I mentioned, which is actually a temporary close. We're going to open it again in a few months. And that would be something that would be really important for people to participate in if you have healthy children or sick children because we need to know what a healthy child looks like too. What does their birth history look like? What is their, you know, multi-generational total load? So we want as many children, it's for children who are between one and 17. The parent fills out the form for that. So those are two opportunities where people can get involved directly

in our studies. And people can be based anywhere in the States? For the TURP study, you can be anywhere in the United States. The flight study, which is the autism intervention one, that is going to be very specific sites. And we're talking to a couple sites like Kordaca as an example. And so we'll let people know. The best thing people can do to stay involved with that research and finding out what's available to them is just to get on our email list on Documentioope.com. And we send out, like as soon as there's new research opportunities, new papers published

or other educational opportunities, it all goes out through that email newsletter. What have you guys found, you know, because it's a super leading team that's trying to make a big impact, running a nonprofit, that's like a whole other thing that you have to be like get good at, right? What have been the biggest things that you've found that helped spread their awareness that get people to then now contribute to the organization? I think that, you know, every time we make progress with our research, people are inspired to help support because there is, you know, we can talk anecdote all day long and people just, you know,

just it's just not enough, I think, to move people to take action. But when you have it published in peer review, that's a rigorous process to go through. People stand up and listen. So I feel like that's really important for us to continue publishing papers. We're always raising money so that we have so many anecdotes that we could publish. I call them anecdotes because no one's, you know, published on them yet. But we have so many parents, especially after this most recent paper and practitioners who got in touch with us and they said, I have a case for you to publish. I have this case. case. I have this case. So I feel this moral imperative to build a body of evidence about healing. We just need the funding to do it. And it's all out there. It's like, it's like, you're ripe for

the taking. It's just that's, that's something we just need to get more people seeing the value in it and seeing how much we need to do that. Because when it's published in peer review, again, the physicians who rely on that for credible, reliable information will take this whole thing more seriously. And so I'm a big proponent for seeing if we can't push the envelope. I have another research study. I'm dying to do. It's not funded yet. But it would be an early intervention study based in a hospital setting where you would have some very specialized pediatric therapist who are trained to help the infants regulate their nervous system from day one out of the womb because there could be birth trauma. There could be, you know, pre-nital stressors. I have a study

designed that would get early intervention in right, right out of the womb with an educational program for parents so they know how to keep the baby safe at home in terms of environmental toxins and nutrition and all that kind of stuff. We could test that. We could test the outcomes on that and we could see and could you imagine if the outcomes are like, you know, the kids who participated in this early intervention program had these improved outcomes and there was no cases of autism or ADHD and then the conventional path looks like the rest of what America looks like today, like that would be enough to get that kind of early intervention program in every hospital in America. That's how you end the epidemic. So all I need is a little bit of financial support

to get those things pushed through because that is going to make an impact. That's going to make a difference. For some of the studies you guys have done just out of my own curiosity, like the twin study or the stuff, what's like a ballpark of something like that cost? So each case report is going to cost around $30,000 to get the researchers to do the analysis, the documentation, the statistics, and you have to pay to get into the publication for them to review it. So that's about a ballpark for just a case study. We're working on another one that has more complicated data analysis, and that would be more in the like $50,000 range.

But the early intervention study, that's a big one. That's like a multi-million dollar one. And, you know, these things are funded by the NIH all the time. They're funded by the pharmaceutical companies. Like I feel like we're barking up the wrong tree in how we're doing our research. and what kinds of things we're funding, I really feel like if we could get some dollars behind the root causes, approaches,

and the early intervention, we could change a trajectory of this country. But we just need some believers. We need some people who think that's worthwhile. Yeah. That's where I really appreciate people like Kelly Means, who has the right, you know, context and intersection of people who, you know,

you're talking about pennies comparatively to what's being spent on other things that are out there. And in between that, if that comes amazing, if it doesn't, this is all a grassroots movement. So if anybody feels inspired by this, just like I am, you know, every dollar makes a difference for a small organization. Exactly. And in the meantime, we're still here for the parents. Like, that's our meat and potatoes.

That's what we really care about is making sure that the parents have the information they need to protect their children and to get them healthy again. So we will always do that. We'll always find ways to get that work funded. while we're in the meantime trying to move the needle on the research side. Both are important. What else? Anything inside of your organization?

You have a book as well? Do you want to highlight that? Yeah, actually I have two books. My first book was called The Compromise Generation and the subtitle is the epidemic of chronic illness in America's children. And it basically provides an explanation for why we have so many sick kids today. All the things I was talking about with antibiotics and the microbiome and the history of what's happened.

That's actually how I, my roots are, I was a history undergrad. I have a master's in American studies, and I use my master's degree to understand why our culture is making people so sick. So that is really my focus is our culture. That's what that book is about. I have another book called Brain Under Attack that I wrote with some of my colleagues. And that one is about pans and pandas, which is pediatric, autoimmune, neuropsychiatric syndrome. And that is a growing epidemic. you have one and 200 kids who have this condition.

And a lot of times people call it a condition where the child snap is like suddenly crazy is how people describe it. It's literally an acute onset neuropsychiatric syndrome. Kids have to be hospitalized because they have basically psychotic behaviors in many cases, OCD, anxiety, whole host of horrible symptoms. And there's a lot of reasons that precipitate this. But it's very similar to autism in terms of the ideology. Only it happens later when the kids are.

like 7, 8 or 9. So they've gone out of that sort of developmental time frame. It's a very important topic that is growing. So we wrote a book about it to help parents reverse that in children because we've been documenting that condition that can be reversed as well. So that's called brain under attack. And that is, again, our purpose is to help parents navigate it, you know, and have the tools and resources they need.

So we created that for that purpose. Yeah, some of these conditions, I know a couple of people whose kids have pandas. And they're just so complicated, even for people who are in this space. Yeah. And so all the resources are needed to figure out how to navigate that. It's very complicated. Very, it's, again, that's one where the community is so important because you can't understand what PANS is like or PANIS is like unless you've had a child with it.

It's really quite overwhelming. So a lot of those parents, when they connect with each other, it helps a lot because they know what they're going through. And there are doctors that are real specials in it. it, Dr. Nancy O'Hara is one. She's very well known for her book, demystifying pandas, and she's an expert in that. And there's others that are out there. So there is help. Well, you're here in Los Angeles. You're going to be going on a little bit of a podcast tour, right? To chat with folks, raise awareness, continue to spread the word about all the

incredible things that you're up to. Beth, this has been amazing. It's such an important conversation. Thank you so much for coming out to L.A. I'm excited to hear your other conversations with our friends that are out there. Just remind everybody and we'll put the links in the show notes too, how can they follow you, how can they keep in touch, and hopefully participate in what the organization is up to. Yeah, so obviously hit our website, documentyhope.com. I also have a website, Beth dash Lambert. com. On Instagram, we're at DocumentiHope, Facebook, at DocumentiHope X, same, and then also on YouTube at Documentary Hope. And I would subscribe to that because that's where the good stuff comes. That's

where all the good stories are. So definitely get on our email list to keep up with everything that we're doing. Amazing. And like we said, all those links will be in the show notes. Beth, thank you so much for the work that you're doing, you and your team on behalf of all the families that are out there that are just looking for hope. Thank you. Hi, everyone, Drew here. Two quick things.

Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share it with a friend, share it with a friend who would benefit from listening.

Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter, and it's called Try This. Every Friday, yes, every Friday, 52 weeks a year, I send out an easy-to-digest protocol of simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health. We cover everything from nutrition to mindset to metabolic health, sleep, community, longevity, and so much more. If you want to get on this email list, which is, by the way, free and get my weekly step-by-step protocols for whole-body health and optimization, click the link in the show notes that's called Try This or just go to Drew Perot.com. That's D-H-R-U-P-U-R-H-I-T dot com and click on the tab that says, try this.