Realfoodology - 3 Pillars of Health with Andrea Nakayama

Episode Date: October 13, 2022

115: Andrea Nakayama is a Functional Medicine Nutritionist, educator, speaker, founder of Functional Nutrition Alliance, and the host/producer of the 15-Minute Matrix podcast.  She joins me today to discuss what she calls the 3 Pillars of Health: Genes, Digestion and Inflammation. Topics Discussed: Shortcomings of the healthcare system  Precision medicine  Epigenetics Functional self help  Getting back to the basics  Dieting culture  Digestion  Feeding the microbiome  Hashimotos  Inflammation Autoimmune conditions  Food sensitivity testing vs tracking and understanding  GMO's Theories behind the rise in autoimmunity  Sponsored By: LMNT Get 8 FREE packs with any order at drinkLMNT.com/realfoodology Organifi www.organifi.com/realfoodology Code REALFOODOLOGY gets you 20% off Cured Nutrition www.curednutrition.com/realfoodology REALFOODOLOGY gets you 20% off Check Out Andrea: Online Check Out Courtney: Courtney's Instagram: @realfoodology www.realfoodology.com Air Dr Air Purifier AquaTru Water Filter EWG Tap Water Database Further Listening: The Drugless Doctor with Dr. Bob DeMaria

On today's episode of The Real Foodology Podcast... We're self-prescribing things, diets, protocols, supplements, we as patients, that aren't necessarily the right thing for us because we're looking to solve from the branch without understanding what we can do for ourselves. Hi guys, welcome back to another episode of The Real Foodology Podcast. I am your host, Courtney Swan, and today's episode is with functional medicine nutritionist, Andrea Nakayama. She's also an educator, speaker, the founder of Functional Nutrition Alliance, and the host and producer of the 15 Minute Matrix Podcast. In this episode, we talk a lot about

America's healthcare system, or what I refer to as the sick care system episode, we talk a lot about America's healthcare system or what I refer to as the sick care system. And we talk about the shortcomings of the medical care system, things that we can do to better it. We dive into epigenetics, which is incredibly important when talking about health and nutrition. And we talk a lot about bio-individuality and how important this is to recognize when we talk about health and chronic disease management and our diets and et cetera. This is a really great episode if you are learning to be more of an advocate for yourself when it comes to your own health and when you're in the doctor's office. And before we dive into the episode, I just want

to remind you very quickly of the giveaway that we have right now for the podcast. So this month I am giving away a higher dose sauna bag, an Aqua True Carafe, which is their new glass carafe water filter, an Aqua True Classic, which is the classic water filter that I had before the glass carafe, an Aroma True, and an Air Doctor 3000 air filter. And all you have to do in order to be entered for the giveaway, it's so simple, you guys. You just need to rate and review the podcast. And once you've done that, screenshot it and email it to realfoodologypodcast at gmail.com. It's important to note this needs to be on Apple Podcasts

because that's where you can leave a star rating and a review. Super simple. Email that in to us and that's going to be your entry. Now, if you want a bonus entry, you can go to Instagram and share any of my reels. I'm at Real Foodology. Just make sure that you tag me if you share any of my reels in your stories. And then I would go ahead and do a little screenshot of that in your stories and just send it to the email. It's realfoodologypodcast at gmail.com, just in case if I miss it. And that's it. And then you guys are entered to win and we will announce all the winners on November

2nd. Good luck. With that, let's get to the episode and I hope you guys enjoy it. Did you guys know that over 70% of sodium in the US diet is consumed from packaged and processed foods? When you adopt a whole foods diet, you're eliminating or hopefully eliminating these processed foods and therefore sodium from your diet. Now, the solution is not to reintroduce processed foods in your diet, but by not replacing that sodium, you can actually negatively impact your health and performance. If you guys listened to my episode, The Salt Fix, with Dr. James Dinnick, we learned that sodium is actually a really imperative mineral for the body. Sodium helps maintain fluid balance.

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journey is getting my sleep in order. I would go to bed really late for the longest time. I am so proud to announce that I have finally really gotten my sleep on a pretty consistent schedule. And I'm going to bed a lot earlier than I used to. One of the ways that I have really been able to support my sleep is taking things that support my sleep and the calming down of my body. I love drinking Organifi's Gold. They have a chocolate and a regular flavor that's kind of like a vanilla turmeric flavor. And it really does help to calm down my body and like clockwork. It makes me so sleepy within about 30 minutes. It's basically like a golden milk tea sleep tincture, which I just love. It also tastes like a, it's like a tasty little treat before bed. This is one of

the many ways that I have been able to support calming my body before bed. If you want to get 20% off of Organifi's gold or any of their products, go to Organifi.com slash real foodology and use code real foodology. That's O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I. Andrea, it's so good to be connected. I'm really excited to talk to you today about so many things. I know you and I are very aligned when it comes to health and you yourself are a functional medicine nutritionist and you're a podcast host. So we have a lot of similarities, which I just, I'm excited to dive into. So why don't you start out by sharing? I know you have a really, it's a really sad, but very profound story about how you kind

of got into all of this. So if you want to share a little bit about what got you started in a functional medicine and let's go from there. Yeah. Thanks for asking. And yes, we have so much alignment, which is really exciting. So my catapult, what I think of as my bootcamp into nutrition was when my husband, Isamu, my late husband was diagnosed with a very aggressive brain tumor. And I was seven weeks pregnant at the time of his diagnosis. I had already had a real passion for food. We lived in the Bay Area. We had these elaborate dinner parties and shopped at the farmer's market. And I was already starting to notice some changes in my own body, which are precursors to my own autoimmunity.

So I would do these funny little cleanses and things with food to figure out what was going on with myself. But when he was diagnosed and given about six months to live, and again, I was seven weeks pregnant, so we can do the math and that's not a good outcome. I started to just look at what else could be done from an integrative perspective. And I got really inspired by what we could do with food. I started reading about the connections between tumor metabolism and sugar intake and blood sugar and looking at anti-inflammatories and just started to think through a different lens and introduced new things into our diet and changed our diet to support both of our body systems. He lived about two and a half years. So he died when our son was 19 months old. That son is now 21 years old. So that was quite a while ago, but really was my bootcamp

and my realization, not just where food can be medicine and support the body through treatment, but also in its healing, but also where there are gaps in our medical system. And that really woke me up to a desire to make a change. Yeah. So this is also where you and I are very aligned, and this is what I wanted to dive into a little bit. So you're very vocal about this, like the shortcomings of the healthcare system and the shortfalls taking place.

Can we dive into a little bit about that? Where do you see the shortcomings and where can we improve? Yeah. So I want to first and foremost say that our medical system does some things brilliantly and the advances that our medical system are making are incredible. And my husband couldn't have had two craniotomies. I mean, he had brain surgery and radiation and so many things. And I've witnessed so many people go through medical treatments that are reliant on incredible advancements. And yet we have a medical system that doesn't know how to handle chronic health situations. It's more geared towards acute care. And we don't

see our medical providers in the way that we actually need healthcare these days. So there's a gap in time between our appointments. There's a gap in understanding the connections between things. And our medical providers don't get much training in nutrition or diet and lifestyle modification. I don't mean dieting. I mean our nutrition and lifestyle modification. There's more and more research that tells us that it's important and evidence is pointing in that direction. But doctors are trained about 17 hours and they're near 70,000 hours of medical training. And that's okay if we recognize the need for a new kind of practitioner. It's not okay if we're looking to our doctors to solve all of our problems and agree with all of

our self-care that happens between our visits, which depending on our healthcare situation, maybe once a year, maybe twice a year. It may be once a week depending on what we're managing, but there's still a lot of time between each of those appointments. So there's a tremendous amount of gaps and the gaps go further for me in terms of what I experienced with my husband in that he was treated like his diagnosis and not the person who has the diagnosis. And no two people who have the same diagnosis got there for the same reasons. The diagnosis is essentially a tipping point. Yeah. And I think that's a really great point. And it's why it's so important that we need to be moving towards a more bio-individual care system.

Because like you just said, no one person got to this place of disease on the same track. And so we really need doctors or just we need people to understand that if they're dealing with a chronic disease or a sickness like that, they need someone who's looking at every area of their life, you know, and they can't be treated the same as someone else who has a completely different lifestyle and a different diet, et cetera. All of these things need to be addressed. And also to piggyback on what you were saying about our healthcare system, I refer to it as the sick care system. A lot of refer to it as that now, because right now we're at a place

where we're just managing chronic diseases and we're just throwing a bunch of pills to mask symptoms. And this is not to say that I don't believe in medicine and pills. And I think many of them can be very lifesaving, but we're kind of at this weird place right now where a lot of what we are trying to manage with pills and cover up the symptoms with actually could be fixed with simple lifestyle diet changes. Not saying

everything, but we need to be more clear about differentiating between the two and really seeing doctors that are actually taking all of this into account. And then also understanding that our doctors can only go so far when it comes to nutrition. Yeah, I'm even going to take the onus off of our doctors, right? So I will have patients and people I'm working with who are saying like, why doesn't my doctor believe that nutrition matters? And my answer to them is, why do you need them to? Why are we looking to our doctors to validate the decisions that we're making every single day? We're not consulting them about what toothpaste we're using or what soap we're using or what

we buy at the grocery store. So really just kind of shifting the paradigm, especially for chronic care, there may not be a fix for some of our chronic health challenges. It may be about management, which is not a sexy word, but we're all looking for the quick fix. And I think if we reorient our relationship to our bodies and to our healthcare, our responsibility to our bodies, and we have the support if we need it to go deeper into making those connections. Then we introduce a new kind of health care that empowers us as patients as much as the practitioners like you and those that I train that bring a different light to the entirety, the holistic picture. I always will use the example of just looking at different areas of

science as the evidence, right? So my three areas that I love to look at are epigenetics, omics, and precision medicine. And precision medicine is that bio-individuality that you're talking about. It's patient-centered care. And it's mostly been used in oncology and pharmacogenomics. And it helps us to understand that the same thing isn't going to work for two people just because of their diagnosis. But our healthcare system is protocol-based. Here's the X for the Y. You have whatever it is. Here's what you do. So even if we look at two women who have breast cancer and we say they're the same age, the same height, the same weight, the makeup of that tumor in their breast is going to be different and need different treatment. And it may have

gotten there. It likely got there for different reasons. One might have high inflammatory markers and the other have hormonal imbalances. And we have to understand that in order to help the individual. And that's a lot of what we're missing in population health. And a lot of medicine is based on population health versus individual health. Yeah, that's really important. And to bring it all kind of together, which is kind of what you just said a little bit, but we hold our doctors to this certain standard of they know all the answers. How dare we even question them at all?

How dare we bring up anything in a doctor's office? And I mean, I feel like this is kind of widespread. I even have had situations like this with doctors and I'm aware of this, but we are not allowing the space where we forget that we are the ones that know our bodies the most more than any. We are the experts of our own body. And we need to be working with our doctors together because then the more that we can tell them that we know about our bodies, the more than they can take their expertise and apply that. And then you can work together and you can really get to a solution that actually works instead of just having your doctor, you

know, spend five minutes with you and go, okay, well, I have all these patients that have breast cancer. So I'm just going to do the same thing with you. And it's like, well, but no, but what is happening in your body specifically? What can we address the underlying estrogen imbalance or whatever it is? And I think this is such an important component of treating patients. Yeah. And I think of this as functional self-health, right? How do we, as patients, become better partners? And I will say that one of the primary tenants of a functional practice, and there are three primary tenants, is a therapeutic partnership. And so I spent the last decade training providers to encourage the patient to be their own partner

in their healthcare. And now I feel like, yes, that's rolling. I'm still training about 3,500 practitioners a year. And I need to turn my attention back to the patient to say, wait a minute, you need to be a better partner for yourself. And you do that by understanding your own body, advocating for your own body. You're not showing up emotionally and in a reactionary way with your doctor. You're showing up as part of a partnership, as a balancing act to, as you said, advocate for yourself, advocate for what you know is true for you. I think we're putting too much pressure on the doctors. And I don't say that to get them off the hook. I just think that we're asking things of them that's out of their scope. We're so ready to go charging at people

for scope and what they're doing that's out of scope. And yet we are asking our doctors to do things that are out of their scope and that the institution cannot allow them to do that most of them are working in, especially for when we're talking about access to health care. They just cannot do all the things that we're asking them to do. And I don't think we need to show up with our hands on our hips blaming them for it. I think we have to say, wait, I'm an equal part of this equation. I know what's true for me. Here's what I think we have to say, wait, I'm an equal part of this equation. I know what's true for me. Here's what I think I need. And if we're able, I think we also have to

select what we're looking for out of our different providers. And I don't mean that we divide it into a bunch of ologies. But for me personally, in my mid to late late 50s I may go to one person for my well woman exam that's covered by insurance that's different than who I'm working with on my thyroid that's different than who I'm working with on my sex hormones it doesn't mean I'm bring not bringing the whole picture together and making sure they're informed. The well woman exam doesn't necessarily need to be informed, but there are times that on paperwork they might need to be. But I'm picking and choosing based on what the needs are. That's, again, a matter of access. But I think we're looking to one person to do all the things that they may not be experts in. And again, like you said, we are the experts in ourselves.

Yeah, that was so beautifully said. We need to empower each other to take more ownership over our own lives. Yes. Because you're right, it feels like, you know, often people go into the space of they wanna blame everyone else and aren't willing to look at the role

that they're playing in themselves. And I think this is also an important component of all of this. And what an amazing way to show up for ourselves by really looking at ourselves and taking ownership over it. Because then if you're dealing with something like a lot of Americans are right now, we're dealing with really high rates of horrible chronic diseases. And not at all saying that anyone's at fault for this. I could go on a rant about how I believe that it's our corrupt food system, which we can go down that path. But just there is a level of, okay, I'm here now. I got to take ownership for this. And what can I do moving forward? And that's going to help you in your diagnosis and help you in conjunction

with your doctor. Yeah. And I think that that's 100% correct. And oftentimes, we want to overlook what is easy in favor of the quick fix. So I always like to think of this as the simplicity on sleep, relaxation, stress reduction, hydration, eating a whole foods diet. There's the simplicity of that. And then when we have a complex condition, we often want to throw that out the window, either in favor of very restrictive practices and protocols that then don't work and we get frustrated with them and then get really angry at them. But those things, when we understand their connection to our physiological being, to our body systems, actually are the things we still have to do to build the foundation

for anything else to work. And so what I'm often finding is people are skipping steps for these fancy protocols that are tons of supplements and really restricted eating, lots of testing, lots of quote unquote functional testing, but we haven't worked with the gross systems, meaning what does the body need foundationally for any of that other stuff to even be effective? Yeah, that's a really great point. So for someone listening, how do we get more granular with that? How do we get back to the basics of treating our health in the way that you were just speaking to instead of having to do all those powders and supplements and all the tests and stuff? Let's go over the basics.

Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of different ways I look at the basics, but one of them is really understanding what I call three roots, many branches. So any sign, symptom, or diagnosis is a branch. That's not at the roots. So we can't say, how do I address my Hashimoto's and find a protocol online or in a book? We have to look for the roots. And furthermore, we have to look at the soil that those roots exist in. So the model that I've created is that with any chronic condition, there are always three roots that are at play. And those are the genes, digestion, and inflammation. So if I'm to think about each of those, we can't change our genes, but our genes also

don't tell us a lot. Like when everybody's running out to get genetic testing, when we know what single nucleotide polymorphisms we have, that just tells us what's there. It doesn't tell us what's activated, turned on or off, or up or down. So it's kind of like getting the script for a play, but we get to determine how we act that script or being dealt a hand of cards and deciding how we play that hand of cards. And so the epigenetic factors, this goes back to how I was looking at science, are the food, movement, environment, and mindset. And those are the epigenetic things we could be thinking about. And then if we talk about food, as you know,

there's so many things we can look at right there in terms of quality, quantity, diversity, and timing. So instead of taking food as a factor and saying, I have to eat an autoimmune paleo diet or a ketogenic diet, or I should be intermittent fasting or whatever is in vogue at the moment, we can break it down and say, am I eating fat, fiber, and protein at every meal? That's going to support my blood sugar balance. That's a non-negotiable for me. Fat, fiber, protein. Of course, Courtney, we can then look at quality of each of those things, right? Am I eating the rainbow? This gives me a lot of my nutrients and my antioxidants that I need from my food sources. And then the third one for me are, am I working towards my non-negotiables?

And I've heard you speak into this for yourself that it took time, but you found the way to say, you know what, when I eat that, that doesn't feel good. And within that area of our non-negotiables, we may have our path, our poison ivy, and our bike lane. And that's going to be different for each of us. And I live in Portland, Oregon. So when I say bike lane, that may be the shoulder of the road for other people, but we're going to drive in it sometimes. That's our ability not to feel like we're walking a tightrope. So really just playing in the area of what do we bring in instead of always what do we take out? And that's just looking at what I think of as the soil or the circle of influence for one of those roots. And each of those roots has a

circle of influence where we're not getting too restricted and we're not getting too anxious because we don't know what to do. I like knowing something to do. And so coming back to the influencers helps me to think about where can I focus my attention in this moment, given what's going on, with a little bit of room to breathe and know myself better as opposed to buying into some restrictive protocol. I've really struggled with chronic anxiety most of my life. I've been really honest about this on the podcast as well as my Instagram. Outside of talk therapy and really addressing the root cause of my anxieties and getting to the root of my traumas, one of the things that has really helped me the most with my anxiety is taking CBD consistently.

I am obsessed with this brand, Cured Nutrition. Everything is organic. They use really high quality ingredients. And I know the founder personally. I love his mission. His desire and commitment to really high quality products is above and beyond any other CBD company that I have seen. Their commitment to quality is so high that they test all their products. So you can actually go to any of the products that you buy, look at the batch number, go on their website and see the lab results from that specific batch number. They test for heavy metal toxicity, they test for pesticides. Also, they show that the amount of CBD that they claim is in their product is actually in there,

which shockingly enough is a huge problem with CBD companies. Many of these companies are claiming that they have higher amounts of CBD than they actually do. Some companies that are really sketchy are claiming that they have CBD when they don't have any at all. So quality control is really, really important. It's super important to Cured Nutrition, which is why I love this brand so much. Also, if you guys go to curednutrition.com

slash realfoodology, you're going to save 20%. Make sure that you use the code realfoodology. And again, that is cured, C-U-R-E-D, nutrition.com slash realfoodology. Wow, there was a lot that you said that I want to dive into. I think first and foremost, it's really helpful to explain that to people that you don't have to be so restrictive and have this be almost like an obsession or a disordered eating. I know there's a lot of conversation online about if you eat too healthy, it gets described as being disordered eating. And there's a very fine line. Oh, I don't even know if I would say a fine line, but there is definitely a difference between the two. And you can be

mindful of what you're eating, but not be obsessing over it and allowing it to completely ruin your life. I mean, I had my own journey when I was first learning about organic food and the quality of foods. And I was not really eating out at all. And I was skipping going out to eat with friends just to eat at home so that I knew that I was eating organic food. And then I hit a point where I was like, I got to find balance in the middle of this. Like you said, I got to drive in the bike lane sometimes to still nourish the other parts of my life that I love, like my social life and being out with my friends and stuff. So you do have to find a balance and all that, that I think is incredibly important.

And I think it's important for people to understand that you can be healthy and you can be concerned about the foods that you're eating and putting in your body, but it doesn't have to become this total obsession where you're teetering this really tight line of just a really restricted diet. Yeah, and you did a great previous podcast on the topic,

which I really appreciated. And I think, yeah, this goes into the realm of orthorexia and how people are like, oh, if you're concerned with healthy eating, what's really confusing in this current climate as a nutritionist is that there's either the obsession with the protocol that is so tight or there's this... Free-for-all. Yeah, like this anti-diet culture. And bravo to the anti-diet culture. In that, we have to stop dieting. It should just be anti-dieting culture because if we're dissing the powers of nutrition, we're buying into a system, a pharmaceutical system, a pseudoscience system that's not feeding our spirits and our souls.

So where is it that nutrition actually works? And that's going to be very different for each of us. My passion is in working with people with chronic illness. So I call them big bigs. They have big health issues and they've already made big efforts and they may have gotten to the place where they're only eating three foods because they're reactive to everything or they're so frustrated because nothing's getting better and they thought nutrition would serve them. And this is where we have to bring more food into the diet as opposed to restricting the

diet. We have to think through the realm of heal versus ideal. There might be studies out there about the benefits of intermittent fasting and intuitive eating and all of the things. But we can confuse intuition when we're coming from a place that's more emotional versus the quiet that actually is telling us what works for us and what doesn't. And if we're still symptomatic, it is very hard to know what works for our body and what doesn't. And I know that can sound really confusing.

And that's why we might need somebody like yourself to help us walk through our tracking and our understanding of what makes us feel worse and what makes us feel better. In functional medicine, those are called our mediators. The more of them we know, the better off we are. Yeah, yeah. And you spoke to that so beautifully. And I was just thinking about, so you were talking about the three roots of health, the inflammation, genetics, and digestion.

And I was thinking of applying that to, you know, this new realm that we have of, of, um, the anti-diet culture and what we're doing when we're saying, you know, just have a free for all, there's no bad foods. You can eat whatever you want. We're completely dismissing, um, all these people that are dealing with chronic inflammation and digestion issues. And also the, the whole thing with epigenetics is incredibly important for people to understand because just because you have the genes for something does not mean that you're necessarily going to get that disease. But if we're not teaching people how to take care of their bodies with the nutrition and lessening their toxic

burden load, we are not even giving them a chance to not allow those genes to be turned on. And so this is why it's so important that we approach this very carefully because we don't want anyone to have a disordered eating, but we also want to really take note of the inflammation and all these other issues. And then going into that, so you talked about epigenetics. Can you talk a little bit about the inflammation component of it and the digestion component of it? Yeah. So those three roots, the genes, digestion, and inflammation, I always say you cannot talk about nutrition without talking about digestion. It's where the symbiosis happens. So if anybody is talking about nutrition and they're not talking about digestion, we've got a mismatch

because nutrition doesn't exist outside of our body. We can say eggs, good or bad, coffee, good or bad. We get in this good or bad conversation in our social contexts. And the missing piece of that is for you, right? And the for you is where the food meets physiology. It's where it interacts with your body. So yay, we can tout coffee's antioxidant properties, but if you have epigenetic factors that have been turned on and your genes don't digest caffeine, or you have digestive issues, or you have inflammation in your gut, those antioxidants aren't going to be good for you. And so that's a process of getting out of this thinking about food outside of the body and understanding that when we're talking about food,

it's this interaction within the body. So for me, the circle of influence around digestion is the mechanical, the chemical, the structural, and the microbial. And again, we rush to want to look at the microbial because it's very sexy, but there's a lot of ways we feed our microbiome. We feed it when we chew our food, when we eat more fiber, when we're eating polyphenols like our blueberries and our green tea. There's so many ways we could be feeding our microbiome that have to do with, are we chewing our food? Do we have the secretions we need to break down our food? Are we structurally taking in the nutrients and leaving the things behind that we do not need that are then leading to inflammation if we're not? So it's this understanding that we have to optimize our digestion and our digestion, if it feels off

balance, is something we want to be focusing our attention on if we're thinking about food. And again, that's an area to get help. And I notice for myself, I usually have good digestion, but if my stress level is off the charts, my digestion is changed right away. If my sleep is off, my digestion changes. So it doesn't mean we have to go be digestive gurus or pay for help. It's just noticing by tracking, oh, when I eat dairy, I have gas. Or when I don't sleep, I'm more hungry and then I'm grabbing for foods that actually make my elimination different. And those little associations are what empower us to take better care of ourselves. And I use that word take like in all capitals because it's ours to take. I love that. You're very good at making this easy and digestible, I feel like,

for people to understand, which is helpful for people listening, which I love. The body is complicated. Yeah. Well, and it's why so many are confused on what it truly means to be healthy and what we should be eating. And we're also getting a lot of information from a lot of different people online, and it's just hard to know what to trust for people. Actually, I mean, let's talk about that a little bit. So for people listening that are struggling maybe with where to start or really what true health is or how they find it, what would be some advice you have navigating this world that we live in? So in terms of navigating, I think we have to take stock in what we're looking for. And one of the things that I find

people are kind of stuck in is the sympathetic, the fight or flight, but we're bringing that fight or flight to our health and healing. So we are seeking, we're in this quest for how do I feel better? How do I address my adrenals? How do I look at my hormones? What's wrong with my period? Why can't I get rid of this brain fog? What about this belly fat? Whatever it is, we're in this push and fight forward and we're looking and seeking what's the thing that's going to help me with that. And that is a sympathetic state that is perpetuating the fight or flight that doesn't allow us to be in the rest and digest the parasympathetic state and actually invite healing. So if we're in a chronic state of speaking, we are promoting inflammation and we are not listening to our very own bodies. So that is the first step of even asking ourselves,

why does that appeal to me? What's the appeal of that bit of information? Or what do I think I'm going to get from that? And I'll notice that if I post something more thoughtful on my personal Instagram, it gets less attention. People want to see what we do, what we eat. They want us to tell them what to eat and I'm putting my foot down and not doing it. I never, ever speak about one supplement on a podcast or in a teaching because it's sending people off into this realm of what they think is self-care and is actually an epigenetic mismatch. They don't know we're self-prescribing things, diets, protocols, supplements, we as patients that aren't necessarily the right thing for us because we're looking to solve from the branch without understanding what we can do for ourselves. So what do we do versus what does a practitioner do? That's gotten really mixed up these days.

Yeah. I mean, it's a great point and there's a lot of it online and it's confusing. It's hard to navigate. I mean, I try my hardest to not play into that confusion either. I just want to be a resource for people to start asking questions because I think that's really what is the most important is you can listen to all the experts in the world. They can listen to this conversation. They can listen to all the experts. But at the end of the day, you really need to get clear on what you're dealing with and what you need to possibly fix in your life, what you need to address. There's so many different components outside of just food. There's a health component or a, sorry, a mental health

component to it. And yeah, and so we need to, in one way, kind of cancel out all the noise. I think it's helpful to follow the experts because sometimes if you're really stuck and you don't know kind of what path to go down, someone can say like, hey, it could be this. And then you can go dive down that path and see if it resonates. But ultimately, we're so bio-individual that what I'm dealing with is not, it's going to be really different than someone else online that's just following and listening to my protocol. Right. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, I have Hashimoto's and I know that everybody who has Hashimoto's got there for different reasons. Again, it's just the tipping point that receives the diagnosis. So why my immune system is attacking my thyroid tissue is different than why another person's immune system is attacking their thyroid tissue. And that's where we just have to go back to some of the simplicity on the other side of complexity.

And that's where the inflammation piece comes in. So for me, the circle of influence around inflammation is to clear, calm, enhance, and modulate. And that calming is what we were talking about with the sympathetic, that fight or flight, or the parasympathetic, that rest and digest. When we can calm our entire system, we actually are reducing inflammation. And that is one thing that we all can do for ourselves in recognizing where am I getting over anxious? Where am I striving, seeking, trying to find the answer versus taking care of myself like I would a friend or a loved one. I love that. Yeah. So let's dive into Hashimoto's a little bit. Why don't you first describe to people if they're unaware of what it is? It's an autoimmune disorder, but if you want

to talk more about it. Yeah. And again, Hashimoto's is a branch, just to use our analogy, and my roots always are going to be the genes, digestion and inflammation. Hashimoto's is an autoimmune condition of the thyroid. So it's an inflamed thyroid because my own immune system, my own antibodies, which are part of my adaptive immune system, I created them, are attacking my own body. So we have several layers of our immune system, starting with our skins outside and inside our digestive system. Then we have our innate immune system, which are like our Pac-Man. And then we have our adaptive immune system, which starts to be trained in utero. And this is where we are bio-individual. We're all going to be very different in terms of what antibodies we have and to what.

So somebody who's hyper allergic to things outside is having an immune response to things external to themselves. And somebody who's autoimmune is having an immune response to tissues in their very own body. And the location of that attack is how we label that branch or that diagnosis. So Hashimoto's, Crohn's, colitis, MS, lupus, these are all autoimmune conditions. And again, we can look for the protocol that's based just on that, or we can go back to the three roots. And so for me, as somebody with Hashimoto's, I'm constantly looking to manage my immune system, modulate my immune system. Ideally, I don't want to suppress it

with immune suppressants, which is medicine's answer to autoimmunity because I need my immune system to fight bacterial and viral infections and cancer, right? So I want an immune system that goes to work for me, but that isn't overactive so that it's attacking me. So the really interesting thing with food here is that the antibodies, the part of our immune system that we make that attacks our own tissues are the IgG antibodies. We have five different types of antibodies. Our allergies are IgE antibodies. Our sensitivities are IgG antibodies. We have more of them than any other antibody in our system. Those are the same antibodies that make us reactive to food when we have food sensitivities versus allergies. So the more the sensitivities are up, the more those guys are activated and confused,

and the more likely they are to attack my own thyroid. So for me, understanding which foods are in the poison ivy that I can't eat because they will activate my immune system to attack my thyroid. And then the symptoms come like the weight gain and the brain fog and the hair loss and all the things we don't want that I could be searching for answers to. But really the answers come back to how I support those three roots, understand what's true for me. And my food sensitivities are going to be different than somebody else's food sensitivities. And I don't mean this as a call for people to get food sensitivity testing because that can be confusing as well because we don't understand our immune system

and the context in which those sensitivities exist. So the better route is tracking and understanding like you did, where do I feel better? Where do I feel worse? What foods make me feel better? What foods make me feel worse? So that we're not looking for that information in a test unless somebody understands what questions to ask to interpret that test. While we do recognize that an autoimmune disorder flare will be different in each individual body, where do we meet in the middle? Where does it converge where we start recognizing, okay, but we're seeing all of this in these patients,

like for example, in these Hashimoto's patients? Because I'm zooming out right now and I'm thinking, okay, in the last like 50 years or so, we've been seeing autoimmune disorders just skyrocket. And there's gotta be, I have my own theories on why I think that's happening. And I'm curious to hear what you think as well. Like, why do you think we're seeing

so many autoimmune disorders? And where do we converge the two of, okay, we're definitely seeing that this is a similar, we're seeing this in all of our patients, but then also there is room for that bio-individuality as well. Yeah. And this is a different conversation, right? If we're talking to the patient versus the practitioner. And I have like 10 years of like, how do we talk to the practitioners? And then thinking, what's the difference here? And I just want to mention two books that are not in the health arena that are by journalists and

scholars that are really helpful in understanding how and why there's more autoimmunity, especially among women, and there's an increasing amount of it. So Maya Dusenberry is a science journalist, and she wrote a really brilliant book called Doing Harm, the truth about how bad medicine and lazy science leave women dismissed, misdiagnosed, and sick. And then Eleanor Cleghorn, she's a British scholar and a medical historian, and she wrote the book Unwell Women, Misdiagnosis and Myths in a Man-made world. And there's a lot of reasons that immune issues are on the rise that have to do with our food systems, pharmaceuticals, the microbiome, so many things coming together to confuse the immune system overall and confuse digestion overall. And then we add stress and hormones and lack of sleep on top of that. And this is, in my opinion, why women are getting diagnosed and diagnosed earlier

with autoimmune conditions. My dear friend, Donna Jackson Nakazawa just released her book called Girls on the Brink, which is why girls are experiencing the stress and neuro inflammation that we've been looking at women experiencing. It's happening earlier than it's ever happened before where girls are experiencing immune issues and autoimmune issues because of the stress response, how that impacts the hormones, and then the cascade from there. So there's so many reasons, I think, that are conflated together to result in higher incidence of autoimmunity. I'm curious to hear your hypothesis, Courtney, too, and if it resonates with what I'm talking about here. And I think then in terms of what we do

about it, that's an emotional instigator for me to say to somebody, I may need to come to that conversation later. Yeah. Do you want me to share now my theory? Yeah, share it. Go for it. Yeah. So it's very multifaceted. And I think it's because first of all, that we've been messing with our food. I know this is a controversial opinion, but genetically modified foods, we've only been eating them in the last, when were they introduced? The seventies? Yep. So like the last like 50 years or so. And the problem with the genetically modified food,

regardless of anyone listening's thoughts about it, the real concern is that we are messing with the DNA of the food and we're creating new proteins that our bodies have never seen before. So we can say, oh, they're safe, they're safe, they're safe. But anyone saying that doesn't actually really know because we don't have any long-term studies. I mean, we have 50 years, but we might be right now seeing the results of messing with our food and introducing new proteins to our food. And it

could also be why we're seeing so many kids with food allergies now. I mean, when I was a kid, we could bring peanut butter to school. There wasn't any sort of concern about that, really. There would be maybe one kid in the whole school that was allergic to peanuts. And now, I was a nanny. I mean, this was like seven years ago now. But even then, the mom was like, you cannot make peanut butter and jelly, almond butter. You can't send the kids with any nuts at all at school except for sun butter because there were so many kids in their kindergarten and in their schools that were allergic to nuts now. And we're seeing such a rise in all of these allergies

and the autoimmune disorders. And I also think it's on top of the GMOs where we're heavily spraying all of our food with all these different pesticides that we weren't using until more recently as well. I think it was about 50 years as well with that. And then on top of that, the beauty product industry and skincare in general is not regulated at all. And you think about with women especially, and we see that women are more affected than men and women on average put, I think it's 168 toxins a day on their body between their perfume, their body lotions, their shampoo, their makeup.

You know, like you just, I mean, name off everything that women use on a day-to-day basis and we're being exposed to all these toxins. And I think people have this notion that if it's on the shelf, it's safe and it's vetted for, it's regulated. The beauty and skincare products, they're not being regulated at all. Literally a company can put formaldehyde. They can put formaldehyde in their product and sell it and it doesn't matter. And we know that these are having an effect on us. So I think it's multifaceted. It's coming from all different angles. Oh, and cleaning products as well. Those are not regulated.

And mouth products, things we put in our mouth, which is getting right into our digestive systems. Yeah. Yes. And I think it's making our bodies go haywire. They're like, what is happening? We're being exposed to all this different stuff on so many different fronts. Yeah. So if we put that in the model and Bravo, yes, I completely agree with you. And I love your passion around that. If we put it in the model, we can think about the food part of the epigenetic, because what you're talking about are epigenetic factors that actually influence our health over time. We can put it in the environmental factors. So those are all epigenetic influencers.

And then we also think about the structural part around digestion. Everything you're talking about starts to be, as you said, multifactorial and the symbiosis with where all of that interacts with an already compromised body because of microbial lack of diversity and other actually activated immune factors that have happened over time. And then we have the perfect storm. So it's so important that you get your word out and that we're aware of what do we even mean when we talk about food? This is where I think we're confused today. We can't even talk about good or bad because the way I'm defining food, the way you're defining food

may be different than who we're talking to and how they define food. So what are we even defining as food? And then for me, nutrition is about growth, metabolism, and repair. It's a physiological function but we have to back it up and like you're talking about consider what is the food that feeds growth metabolism and repair and what's the food that impedes growth metabolism and repair and i would add on to that as well, we need to stop conflating the two. We need to take the emotion out of this because when someone says it's a good or a bad food, I think what's happening and why there's been this pushback in this movement is that people automatically equate if this food is not good for you, that if they eat it, they're a bad person. And that is not what you and I are as nutritional practitioners are saying. We're not saying if you eat this And that is not what you and I as nutritional practitioners are saying.

We're not saying if you eat this food that's not nutritionally dense, that you're a bad person. And we're conflating two things that are very, very different when you take the emotion out of it. We should be able to say, hey, this food is not good for you, but if you eat it, that's okay. You're human. You're human. Yes. And looking at where you are in your journey, there may be a time and a place for saying, fuck the diet, right? There may be a time and a place where that is necessary. If you are sick and you're tired of being sick and tired, we can't not talk about what it is that you can do with the choices that you're making. That's a huge opportunity going back to that agency and self-empowerment and the way we can

be better partners. And I think that's what's just getting so confused in the current climate. And it's not just the body, it's the brain too. It's the psychology. We can't separate these things in the body and brain. So it's a pretty interesting time, I think having been in the industry for a while to go like, whoa, wait, what's happening here? Like, wait, food isn't medicine? That's a bad thing to say? Because it can be, but we have to think about how is food medicine

for you. Yeah. I like the way you put that and I completely mirror your sentiment. I feel the same way. I mean, I've been in this space for 15 years and I've really, my message hasn't changed. It really hasn't. I started Real Foodology 12 years ago. Real Foodology. My message has always been eat real food. But lately it feels like some of the stuff that I've been saying forever, I can't even say anymore because they're, like I said, there's so much emotion behind it.

I get it. It's, food is very emotional. And we all have like our emotional ties and connections to food, but we have to be able to talk about what's nourishing and what's not. Because otherwise we are doing a disservice to people that are really suffering or it's a missed opportunity to keep someone from going down the path of suffering later with chronic diseases or whatever it is from eating these foods that

are not serving their bodies long-term. Yeah. Yeah. It's so important and you said it really well. So I'm glad that we're on the same page and we've been around and there needs to be an awareness that people are very triggered by food. And this is where I have a bit of a beef with a lot of functional medicine practices because making changes to our diet and eating patterns isn't a handout. It is a very careful process where we have to recognize who are we talking to, what's their relationship with food, what's going on in their particular body. And this brings us back to the earlier part of our conversation where nutrition needs to be in the hands of a trained practitioner who isn't just looking for the protocol and is able to do the deeper dive work with each individual to understand how do we take the steps forward

at the pace that's right for you. Yeah, I love that. I mean, bio-individuality. Well, is there anything else that we haven't gone over that you find is really important for people to know or understand? Yeah, I think that I just want to bring us back to the non-negotiables, right? So that is our biggest rebellious act in all of this is to understand our own non-negotiables. And our non-negotiables aren't just, I don't eat this, or I do eat that every day, whatever that might be. It's also, I go to bed by 10 p.m. because I need my rest to feel nurtured for the next day. So it's what I say is on my functional nutrition matrix, the right side of the matrix. It's sleep and relaxation, exercise and movement, nutrition and hydration. You'd be surprised how many people think they're hydrating and they're fatigued and

they're not realizing the ways in which hydration actually impacts some of the things we're suffering with, stress and resilience and relationships and networks. So really just diving in and if we can't focus on our food, thinking what can I make minor steps towards that I can then see, do I feel better or do I feel worse? And that's our constant work that is really about self-love, knowing ourselves and being able to be an advocate for ourselves. And I do think it's a rebellious act because culturally, that's not what we're being, we're being told to anchor

on so much information outside of us. And I wanna invite us back into our very own selves as the expert, as you said. I love that so much. That is such a huge component of my message is coming back to yourself because that's really, really important because that's where we really important because that's

where we're able to tune into our needs. We're able to tap into our intuition and our intuition is really powerful if we learn how to tune into it. And that's a huge component of eating healthy and eating what is truly nourishing to your body because if you're able to tap into that intuition, then you're able to use that to guide you to healthier foods. And it also helps you with every other area of your life. And I'm just so glad you brought that up. I think it's really important. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. And it's amazing that you brought up non-negotiables as the end of what you wanted to say, because that is the last question that I ask all of my guests is what are your personal

non-negotiables? So what are yours? Oh my gosh, there's a list of them. But yeah, no, bedtime for me is really, really key. So I do for my adrenals, for my thyroid, for my sex hormones, for my stress management, resilience, which is one of my favorite words, like resilience is really where we want to be thriving. I need to get to bed by a certain time. And if I miss it, I have a harder time falling asleep. I have a harder time staying asleep. And then the cascade goes from there. So my bedtime is probably my number one non-negotiable. I'm getting to that place as well. It's simple, but it's not easy because there's a lot of appeal to staying up later for... Depending

where we are in life, I'm an empty nester. So it's a little easier to just honor my time. But as a parent, people want to stay up because they have a second wind and that's their alone time. Prior to that, that may be when friends are up or things are going on. And so it's just, again, it's simple, but it's not easy to do. And we need to recognize that. Yeah, you said it. It's true. Well, for everyone listening, where can they find you? And please plug your podcast so they can check it out too. Oh, yay. Thank you. Yeah. If you go to andreanakayama.com, lots of A's, you can find your way to Functional Nutrition Alliance, to the 15 Minute Matrix podcast,

and to all the other things. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Andrea. I really loved this conversation. It was great. Yeah. Thank you. Me too. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of The Real Foodology Podcast. If you liked the episode, please leave a review in your podcast app to let me know. This is a resonant media production produced by Drake Peterson and edited by Mike Fry. The theme song is called Heaven by the amazing singer Georgie. Georgie is spelled with a J. For more amazing podcasts produced by my team, go to resonantmediagroup.com.

I love you guys so much. See you next week. The content of this show is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for individual medical and mental health advice and doesn't constitute a provider-patient relationship. I am a nutritionist, but I am not your nutritionist. As always, talk to your doctor or your health team first.