WHOOP Podcast - Food as medicine: Dr. Julie Foucher explains how to eat your way to good health

Episode Date: June 22, 2022

This week’s episode is all about nutrition and how locking in your diet can help prevent chronic disease, fix health problems you might be dealing with, and help you live a longer life. Dr. Julie Foucher, family physician and four-time CrossFit Games athlete, talks about how food can often be used as the medicine for what ails you. She joins WHOOP VP of Performance Kristen Holmes to discuss food's medicinal capabilities (3:25), preventing chronic disease (7:20), inflammation (9:20), processed foods (14:08), eating for longevity (17:36), eating close to bed (22:15), comparing different diets (27:02), injury prevention and recovery (29:48), nutrition and mental health (33:15), and habit formation and behavior change (35:12).Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

What's up, folks? Welcome back to the WOOP podcast, or sit down with top athletes, researchers, scientists, and more. Figure out what the best in the world are doing to perform at their peak, everyone. That's what we're after here. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Woop, or we are on a mission to unlock human performance. We've got a great episode this week. It's all about nutrition and how unlocking your diet can help prevent chronic disease,

fix health problems you might be dealing with and help you live a longer life. Whoop VP of Performance, Kristen Holmes, sits down with Dr. Julie Foucher to talk about how food can often be used as medicine. Julie is one of the true experts in the field of nutrition and high performance. She's a family physician who practices precision medicine with wild health, an organization focused on preventative and proactive health care. Julie is also one of the top CrossFit athletes, the sport, has seen in the last decade, and has competed four times at the CrossFit games,

finishing in the top five in all those appearances. Julie and Kristen discuss what to know about processed foods and how to best understand what ingredients are in the foods you eat, how fasting, meal timing, and eating close to bedtime can affect you, the role your genetics play and how you metabolize food, inflammation in which foods are anti-inflammatory, and how proper nutrition can play a role in injury, prevention, and injury recovery. We have new ways to interact with the WOOP podcast. You can email us, podcast at Woop.com, or you can call

our new listener line and leave a question or comment, and your question may be answered on a future episode. That's 508-443-4952. 508-4-3-49-2. And then we also have an exciting new offer for WOOP podcast listeners. If you're a new member signing up for WOOP, you can use the code Will, W-I-L-L, when you're checking out to get a $60. credit on Whoop accessories. That includes bands, battery packs, and our Whoop body apparel. This week, we have the brand new Mayhem Band, designed in collaboration with nine-time CrossFit champion Rich Fronan. So head to join.Woop.com to get started. All right, without further ado, here are Kristen Holmes and Dr. Julie Foucher. Julie, given your background in the sheer

diversity of your talents, we could take this conversation in. many directions, but for today, I'd love for us to just spend our time digging into the concept of food as medicine. There is some really cool momentum behind the role of diet and food in disease prevention and management, which is so cool and to feel like we're kind of getting to this place where just more folks are really embracing this idea that, wow, diet can have a huge impact on the trajectory of my health. So I'd love for you to just, you know, start by defining the concept of food as medicine and, you know, what got you down this path of being really passionate and doing extra schooling on top of, you know, being a medical doctor, doing

extra schooling in nutrition and kind of functional and integrative medicine, you know, kind of what got you down this path of really digging into, to this, you know, construct of food as medicine for disease and prevention. I love it. I love this direction. I'll just start with what got me on this path. I really didn't know much at all. when I started medical school or even just before that when I started competing in CrossFit and getting into CrossFit myself for fitness. My idea of eating healthy was not eating a lot. I think I was in college and like most probably college, you know, teenage, early 20s, especially women. I just thought, well, let me just not eat a lot or let me make sure that I work

off every calorie that I eat. And so it wasn't the healthiest approach. And when I started CrossFit, what really helped me so much with my own body image and just being comfortable in my body was that suddenly it was about how do I perform. It wasn't about what I look like, but how do I perform? I want to be able to get PRs and I want to be able to do new skills and lift more weight. And so now all of a sudden, food becomes fuel. And now it's this problem of, okay, how do I figure out what to fuel my body with so that it can perform at its best?

And that really changed everything for me. And I think that's really what the concept of food is medicine is all about is people don't always make the connection that food is the basis for every molecule in our body. You know, what we take in becomes ourselves. It communicates to our DNA of what proteins are going to be turned on and off and which metabolic pathways are going to be activated. And so if you think about it that way or you think about it almost like how you would fuel a car, if you have a really nice car, you want to put premium fuel into it, right? You don't want to give it garbage. And so when you start to think about it that way, it makes the decision really obvious of, wow, I want to give myself the best possible fuel that's really going to promote health and promote longevity and promote

optimal performance. And then the, you know, the tricky part is, well, what does that actually look like for me? You kind of tapped into this a little bit, I think, just genetics. You know, I think oftentimes we are just like, well, this is just in my genes. know, I'm kind of left with what I've got here. So can you just explain the role of, you know, what actually does, you know, when you talk about that communication between the cells and the communication with genes and, you know, what is getting turned on versus what's getting turned off? And what is the role of nutrition and whether or not we express certain genes? Yeah. So we are learning more and more about this. You know, we used, I think many people used to

think that our genes were our destiny, right? Or I've heard it in the office, even when I started in residency practicing primary care. A lot of people come in and say, well, my whole family has diabetes, so I'm going to get diabetes. It's just inevitable. And in fact, that's not really the case. It's so much more, our destiny is so much more controlled by our environment and how our environment impacts our genetic expression, which is the field of epigenetics. And food is one of those levers or those triggers that we can pull that play a huge role in which genes are expressed or not expressed. And a lot of that really varies person to person, but there are some things that in general

are probably going to be true for most people. And that's things like, you know, eating a lot of processed food, processed oils, a lot of sugar, refined carbs, things that are going to be more pro-inflammatory are going to promote chronic disease, are going to promote insulin resistance, heart disease, Alzheimer's disease versus foods that are more whole foods, more things that you find in nature, you know, the Michael Pollan quote, don't eat what your great, great grandmother didn't recognize this food, eating whole foods, eating, you know, vegetables, fruits, all the different colors of the rainbow, good quality protein, nuts and seeds, those are going to be more anti-inflammatory

and are going to nourish your body and give it what it needs and really, you know, turn on those genes that are going to be help promote healthy metabolism, help promote, you know, repair in general health and longevity. So this is really the pathway to preventing chronic disease, right? You'd say this, this is really your foundation in a lot of ways. Yeah, I think it is. I mean, it's hard to argue. We could argue about what's the true foundation. There's so many foundational factors. At its core, this is, you know, the building blocks of what our bodies are made of is what we put in our mouth. If we're not putting the right foods in our body, like what kind of diseases, does that actually lead to specifically? Yeah, I think that, you know, the majority are rooted in

some way in insulin resistance or metabolic syndrome, which is largely characterized by insulin resistance. And then that can take a lot of different forms. It can lead to, you know, obesity. It can lead to cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure. It can lead to kidney disease, liver disease. Alzheimer's is now referred to sometimes as type three diabetes. Also, even, you know, mental health conditions. There's a lot of overlap there when we think about things like neuroinflammation. So the disease are endless and I think this is where I've really been attracted to the concept of functional medicine because the same cause or the same sort of root cause, which is this metabolic dysfunction, insulin resistance picture, can manifest

with many different symptoms. Maybe in one person it's high blood pressure, another person it's type 2 diabetes and another person it's, you know, autoimmune disease. But the root cause is maybe diet, sleep, exercise, environmental factors, things like that. And so it's really all about trying to address those root causes to then allow the body to restore to a state of health. So where do you, you know, if you think about inflammation, potentially as being kind of that first symptom, what would you recommend as the best path toward getting a handle on inflammation? you know, because usually that's like something that's a bit more acute, right? And then it leads to something that, you know, then it's all of a sudden it turns into chronic and then all of a sudden

leads to disease if I'm getting that right. Yeah, I think about, I almost think about acute and chronic inflammation as two different processes. So like acute inflammation, you think about if you cut your finger, you're going to have a lot of activation of immune system cells in that local area to help, you know, brings redness and swelling and heat to help heal that area. And then it's going to heal and it's going to go away. Chronic inflammation, we think about chronic disease is generally you're not necessarily going to notice an initial event. It's probably going to be this slow, smoldering process that's often initiated by the poor diet, by lack of sleep, by lack of exercise, other environmental factors, things like smoking. And at first, you're probably

asymptomatic. You're not even going to know that you have it. And so that's where I think things like lab screening is really important. Screening things like blood pressure, looking at body composition, those all become really important to be able to detect when this process is happening early on so that you can intervene before it becomes a diagnosable disease. So that, I think, you know, basic things to look at our blood pressure looking at lab. So like lipid numbers, looking for signs of insulin resistance with, you know, your blood sugar, your hemoglobin A1C, which is an average of your blood sugar approximation over the last three months. You can look at inflammatory markers, so things like CRP, which is a general inflammatory marker.

It doesn't necessarily tell you where the inflammation is coming from, but it can give you a hint that there's something going on that you might want to look into. Yeah, beautiful. Maybe real quick, just kind of talk about the difference between conventional medicine versus an integrated, more functional medicine type of approach, because you're describing, I think, the latter. but most folks have access to the former. So I think just educating folks ahead, there is another option out here if we want to really

understand how we're actually tracking. And because I think to your point, you know, if we, a lot of these things, you know, these symptoms that might be a little bit sneakier, less obvious are just kind of, you know, slow boil until you have that moment where it's like you are diagnosed with a disease. But there's actually a lot of things happening beforehand that we could potentially address and either curtail or totally prevent that onset of the disease. Yeah, absolutely. I like that you said slow boil.

It's like that boiling frog. You don't even necessarily know that something's going wrong until you've boiled. We've seen, like so many people, myself included, changed their diet. They think they feel fine. They think they're normal. And maybe they do a challenge, a diet challenge with their gym, or they change their diet for a period of time. And they're like, wow, I didn't know I could feel this good. I didn't know I felt bad before.

now you have this new level of normal to compare to and all of a sudden you realize how good you can feel. And then when you go back to it, then you really start to feel like, oh, wow, you know, I guess I wasn't operating at my best before. And so if we talk about a conventional approach in a conventional primary care office, you're going to be screened for blood pressure. You might be screened for depending on your age and risk factors for diabetes or lipids every once in a while. Obviously, they're going to measure your weight and your BMI, which obviously there's problems with BMI too. So I'm more of a fan of looking at, you know, like waist to hip ratio or body composition, but some way of looking at that abdominal adiposity. And that I think in general,

in a primary care office, you're just going to be screened on those numbers. And as long as they fall into a quote unquote normal range, you're going to be, you know, checkmark. You're good to go. We'll see you next year. And they'll wait until you get, you know, Oh, now you're in the diabetes range. Now let's give you some medication. And so, you know, the approach that we take at Wild Health and that I think is more of a functional precision medicine approach is let's make sure that we look and know where your numbers, know where you stand.

Like just the way that we know where our performance numbers stand, where we know, you know, you know, our benchmark workout times and we have a good handle on those and we're constantly trying to improve them. Let's also know all of our health markers and make sure that we're moving those in the right direction so that, you know, if they start to trend upwards or trend in the wrong direction, we catch it early. We had one of our members wrote in. We have this kind of hotline where our members can call in and leave a message and ask

questions. And, you know, one of the questions kind of in the preventing chronic disease bucket was around anti-inflammatory foods. And, you know, if someone wanted to really kind of think about food as a way to prevent chronic disease, what would be your recommendations? Like, well, you know, you mentioned, you know, non-processed, you know, things like that. But are there any kind of specific protocols that you would recommend that could really mitigate, you know, inflammation and keep people at healthy levels? Yeah, absolutely. I think,

like I mentioned, first, just getting all the processed foods out of your diet, process oils, sugars. What does that mean exactly? Processed. So process means I love Michael Pollan. I think that his kind of quotes make it really easy. Like if it was made in a plant, don't eat it. Or if it came from a plant, eat it. If it was made a plant, don't. You know, don't eat something you're your grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. But the idea of shopping around the perimeter of the grocery store, you know, look at fruits, vegetables, fresh meats, eggs, nuts and seeds. And generally, if something, if you look, you know, in the aisles of the grocery store, generally things are going to be in packages and they're going to have food labels. And most of the time, if you can eat stuff that doesn't come in a

package or have a food label, that's going to be more real food. It's not processed. If you are eating something out of a package, you know, looking at that label, does it have less than five ingredients? Or can you understand the ingredients looking at if sugar is one of the first couple of ingredients you know the ingredients are listed in the order of content so like if sugar is one of the first or second ingredients that means that there's a ton of sugar relative to other ingredients in that in that food product so just trying to eat real food as much as possible especially oils I think oils are you know sugar and oils oils are sneaky because especially if you're eating out a lot you know canola oil vegetable oils are

going to be more pro-inflammatory and can be really sneaky. I remember even if you go into a cafeteria, sometimes you see olive oil on like the jar for the salad bar. And I've checked multiple times it hasn't been olive oil. It's been a mix of olive oil and canola oil. So they're everywhere and they're sneaky. So for anti-inflammatory foods, I think general rules, tons of fruits and vegetables. And the more variety of color that you can get, the better. Seasonal, the more you can eat fresh. I mean, there's been research to show that if you get foods fresh from the garden or from your local CSA, they're going to be much higher in, you know, micronutrient content than something you buy from the grocery store that's been shipped across the country. Specifically,

berries are really rich in antioxidants and are going to be really anti-inflammatory fish that are high in omega-3. So salmon is a great example of that. There's other wild health. We love the smash fish. So those are salmon, mackerel, anchovies, sardines, and herring. And those are going to be really high in omega-3s, which are anti-inflammatory fats and help to balance out our pro-inflammatory omega-6 fats. But they're also lower in heavy metals like mercury. So that's why we like those smash fish. I think people also often underestimate spices. So spices can be really anti-inflammatory and have a lot of good antioxidants. Turmeric is one that's really well known, but a lot of spices are great. So I encourage people to cook with spices as much as they can. And then, you know, the green teas, coffee, dark chocolate, all those things are good sources of antioxidants and are anti-inflammatory too. All right. So let's talk a little bit about eating for longevity versus eating for performance. There's a lot of overlap, but there are some differences as well. And I know you, you know, as a CrossFit games, you know, a participant and, you know,

being super involved at the most elite level of training, you know, surely you're eating for performance for quite a long time and just your story in the beginning. You know, that was kind of the moment where you realized that, wow, I need to be fueling my body, right? It's restricting calories is not the path forward if I want to PR. But what is actually the difference between performance type of eating and fueling versus, you know, fueling for longevity? That's a great question. And I think personally, for performance, it just requires a much greater level of precision. I think, and this is maybe a little bit more personal, but when I was competing, I was very precise. I did not really have cheat days. I made sure, especially I was getting enough

protein. I think you need, you in general just need more food. You probably need more carbohydrates, depending on the type of exercise that you're doing. And you have to be more precise about it because You're fueling now a lot higher level of performance. I think when you think about longevity, there are still some things that are really important. I think the quality of food is really important. I still think, you know, the amount of protein that you get is really important long-term. And I think fasting can become more important, whereas you're probably not going to want to do as much fasting if you're training, if you're, you know, training at high levels or high volumes. And just on the fasting front, when you're doing, it's just a calorie thing.

You're just literally not getting enough calories energy in in order to expend. Yeah. Okay. So you just need to, is it increasing your feeding window or can you minimize your feeding window and just put more food into that feeding window? I know there's like so much you could eat in one sitting. It's just say you're fasting for 10 hours. So you're really only getting, you know, you're kind of cramming three meals in a smaller window. How would you negotiate that or advise someone? I think so like a lot of answers, I think it depends on the person. I think it depends on the sport, the amount of training. I think there's two ways you can think about it. One, yes, maybe you could just fit enough calories into that smaller window and that would still be out of. quit but then two i also think about fasting as a stressor and so when you're thinking about you know someone who's training at a high level and has a really high physical stress are you able to then compensate for that additional stress of fasting with your recovery and sleep and all those other things to make sure that you're kind of operating at your best and i think it's very much a individual thing that you have to play with um and use your data to track to to be able to tell how that's impacting your performance and how you feel.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think that's a great answer. I think we still have enough data, enough research on the impact of fasting and performance. And it's going to vary by sport. I think there's just so many variables, you know, that need to be considered, I think, to really understand the impact on actual performance and muscle. And, you know, I think that there's still a lot of unknowns there. I think to your point, getting advice and doing blood panels and seeing how you're responding

and reacting to the training, you know, across these various potential conditions, I think is worth exploring, you know, because there's obviously a lot of benefits to fasting, but it's maybe just one of those things that you want to wait until after you're done competing to explore. Or, I mean, if you are going to do it, I think, too, thinking about making your fasting window more in the evening, so making sure, because I think a lot of athletes probably eat later into the evening in order to get enough calories and nutrition after they're done training, because often you're not hungry while you're training. and so it's hard to get the calories in during the day.

But if you were going to fast, if you can try to make that window at night so that it also helps with the quality of your sleep, I think would be important. When we look at our hoop data, you know, folks who are eating meals close to bedtime tend to have a decrease in recovery, you know, decrease in heart variability, increase in heart rate, not as consolidated or, you know, a bit more fragmented sleep. So, again, it's absolutely going to depend on what it is that you're actually eating. a couple hours to three hours before bed. So a lot of times we recommend, hey, really try to make sure that you have this nice big buffer. But I think to your point, if you're fueling for performance, you know, I might not be hungry before I train. So I kind of go into that training session in more of a sympathetic kind of activated state. And when I get done, you know, that's what I'm hungry. Maybe that, you know, that time frame is actually closer to bed. So if folks are indeed

eating closer to bed, what would that composition look like, you know, so it doesn't necessarily get in the way of sleep and end up fragmenting sleep. So surely there's probably some type of protein that's better than another or, you know, maybe including carbohydrate versus not, like what would be your recommendation? Yeah, I think it's totally different if we're thinking about an athlete versus who's been training all day versus someone who is doing, you know, a normal level of exercise during the day or I guess what's normal, but like one workout. I think that, you know, in general, for the average person, we are generally going to be more insulin resistant at nighttime. And so it's harder for us to process carbohydrates. So in just based on,

you know, our circadian rhythm. So I think for the normal person, you're probably going to want to have more of your carbohydrates earlier in the day or like immediately around training. But for an athlete, I think you need to refuel. And so if you haven't been to, eating all day. I would personally push for trying to experiment with finding ways to get that nutrition in throughout the day so that you're not just eating all of your calories at night. And I think it takes trial and air. I remember when I was on Team USA with Rich Froning and Jason Kalippa and we were training together. And I remember the girls on our team just being shocked at how little they ate during the day. This was back in like 2012 or something. And

like they would just have a protein shake and that was like it for the whole day. because they just weren't hungry and then they would eat at night and we were all shocked but I think since then they've both really dialed in their diets and have found ways to eat more food throughout the day and so I think it's doable it's just probably not not intuitive based on how you feel I love that you mentioned circadian rhythm that's an area as you know I spent a lot of time thinking about you know timing of food I think is probably you know one of the more important levers folks can pull as it relates to maintaining a healthy weight and eating with the natural cues in the environment. So yeah, just wondered kind of what you're overarching

advice would be, you know, if we think about it from a circadian rhythm perspective. You know, if we look at what would be optimal, it doesn't necessarily fit with our cultural norms. I think if we look, like even evolutionarily or if you look at the blue zones, like these regions where there are the highest concentrations of people living. over 100, they are generally going to be eating earlier in the day and their biggest meal is going to be like lunchtime or early afternoon. And then they have a small meal in the late afternoon, early evening, and then they are done eating. So basically when the sun goes down, they're not not eating anymore. And I think that makes a lot of sense. Evolutionarily speaking,

it also makes a lot of sense in terms of what we know about optimizing sleep and not having these big heavy meals late at night. It makes sense knowing what we you know, about how our glucose tolerance changes throughout the day with our circadian rhythm. So I think, you know, waking up and eating breakfast, having a larger meal with more of your carbohydrates at lunchtime, maybe you work out midday and then you have like your largest meal of the day around lunchtime. And then dinner is a smaller meal. And then when the sun goes down, you're kind of done eating for the day and you have that window where you're not eating before bedtime. Just in terms of feeding windows, you know, there's a fair amount of research.

Sachin Panda has done a lot of work in this area. And it sounds like eating in a kind of eight to 10 hour window seems to be optimal. And then we're fasting the other hours. Is this something you recommend in your practice? Like how do you advise patients who are, you know, coming to your clinic on how to think about these feeding and fasting windows? Absolutely. I think we start by just saying blank recommendation, which is crazy that we have to say this, but just start with a 12-hour window because, you know, as we know from Sachin Panda's research, most, there's a large portion of people who are eating more than 15 hours a day. And so at least if you can start with a minimum of 12, which is hard. I mean, when I first learned about this, I was like, wow, it's true.

I actually was eating, you know, more than 12 hours day because I would get home late. I would work out late. I would get home and eat, you know, after I worked out at like 9, 9.30. And then I'm up in the morning and I'm having coffee and breakfast or whatever in the morning at like six or seven. So I think that's a great place for everybody to start. And then I think for sure, for most people, a larger fasting window is probably beneficial. I think then it really comes down to the individual in their situation. So, you know, obviously there's people who you don't want to fast, like, you know, someone who's pregnant or breastfeeding or has a history of an eating disorder or something like that. But then you look at Stacey Sims research and she's a strong advocate for for women not fasting at

all. And so I think in women I'm much more cautious. But I personally do think there can be a role, especially in a woman who's looking at, you know, some metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance, chronic disease where fasting might be helpful. Maybe it's, as long as it's balanced with the appropriate sort of recovery and amount of food and things like that. But I definitely take it as like an individual decision in terms of what that window looks like and what their life looks like, you know, what's doable for them based on their work schedule and, and all of that. Is there a particular diet that you recommend? You know, for me, there's not necessarily one diet that I recommend. I think that's also why we try to take a really personalized

approach is because it is, it's like the worse than talking about politics or religion. People get so committed to their diet because it works for them, which is amazing. And then, you know, wanting everybody else to experience that. And at the end of the day, we're all different. We all have different environmental factors and backgrounds and genetics. And so I think that, you know, recognizing that and realizing that we're all going to have to do a little bit of experimentation to find the optimal diet for us, you know, there's some things that are generally going to be true for most people. Like I mentioned, eating real food, avoiding the processed foods. I think the, you know, 12-hour fasting window may be more depending on your situation.

And then from there, I think, you know, it really becomes this process of self-experimentation. And the more data that we have, like, you know, the data that we have on our loop, looking at our lab work, looking at our performance numbers, any of our symptoms, how we feel, that's going to help us to determine if the diet that we're consuming is benefiting us. And it's a process, you know, it takes a lot of trial and error. And if you want to be really precise about it, like following a vegan diet for a while and tracking this data or then following a diet, paleo diet and tracking this data, you could. I think, you know, one of the things that I've really loved about working with wild health and using the precision medicine approach is that there are certain genetic variations that can point us in one direction or another as to which diet may work best in an individual. So, you know, for example, there are certain variations that

we call them SNPs. There's something called FTO or P-PAR gamma that people who have those are much less likely to tolerate saturated fat in their diet. So people who have those might not be a great candidate for a keto diet that has a lot of saturate fat. But we don't know until we try it. So just because they have those genes doesn't mean that they can't. It just means let's try it. Let's look at, you know, how our labs look, how our performance looks, how we feel, and then see if that's something we want to stick with. So I really think these end-of-one experiments are really important in tweaking those throughout time, even if we're looking at specific foods, like, you know, gluten is a great example. And there's some genetics that suggest, you know, people may not tolerate gluten as well,

but we have to actually do the experiment ourselves and track our data and then determine if that's how we want to move forward long term. Let's say I'm a patient and I'm working with you and I'm getting injured a lot. You know, is there any things you recommend or is, again, a lot of these just general guidelines? Would you recommend any supplementation, eating more of certain foods, in the process of healing after an injury, what would you recommend? Well, there's a lot of factors to look at there. I mean, I think this is where they all come into play. Is it sleep deprivation?

Like, we know that athletes who are sleep deprived are more likely to sustain injuries. Is it overtraining? Is it some inflammation? Like, if there's, you know, I've seen this lot in athletes in CrossFit affiliates who are maybe overtrained, are not getting enough recovery, maybe are eating a more pro-inflammatory diet, and they're just, their joints ache, they just have sort of aches and pains, maybe not specific injuries. But then, you know, as we remove, I mean, I think I just talked to a patient recently

who had really significant hip pain for many years and finally removed gluten from her diet and she was feeling so much better. And so it's something different for everybody. The next person it might be sleep, the next person it might be, you know, too much sugar in the diet, whatever it is. But I think it's really trying to look at what those root causes are. And then, of course, you want to look at the obvious things like, what is their movement patterns like, where if they are, you know, getting injured in certain ways, are there mechanical reasons for that that need to be addressed as well, working with a physical therapist or a trainer to, to look at their movement. Food-wise, for example, if you have, especially if you have a tendon injury, things like collagen

can be really helpful for healing, whether it's a collagen supplement or bone broth or sardines with all the bones in them is a great source of collagen too. That was something that I really focused on when I had my Achilles injury, you know, vitamin C is important for tendon healing as well. And all of those, all those anti-inflammatory foods, that's just going to help to reduce the inflammation that may be causing musculoskeletal pain or contributing. Yeah, you mentioned I love that story of when, well, I mean, obviously it was a terrible moment where when your Achilles, it just popped, right? It snapped. Yeah, just tore right in the middle of competition. And then you go to the 10.

they kind of give you a boot and then the official comes over and says hey handstands are next you're like I'm in and with a boot on right you you did the handstand and I think did really well yeah it's a crazy story because I had been practicing I've been working with gymnastics coaches for months beforehand and they had me practicing handstand walks with ankle weights on so the boot actually was I felt very prepared for the boot so it went well and I thought well, of course I'm going to do a handstand walk that you don't need your foot for that. So it was really a incredible moment for me. And actually I found out, since starting working for wild health and actually looking at my own genetics,

I do have a snip called Coal 5A1, which increases your risk for Achilles and other tendonopathies. And so I have it too. Oh, yeah. I wonder had I known that, would I have changed anything? Probably not. I've talked to, you know, I had plenty of other warning signs that I ignored, so most likely not. But it is something that I think can at least flag your attention, and there are a lot of things you can do for prevention, whether it's nutrition, but also, you know, certain exercises like eccentric weighted toe raises are probably the best thing you can do for the Achilles and watching out for certain antibiotics that increase your risk for rupture. So always a lot that you can do.

You just have to pay attention. How do you think about mental health in your practice? How does food contribute to our feelings of well-being and, you know, just what? But yeah, what's your kind of framework around mental health and food? That is such a great question. I think that the mind-body connection, you know, every year, every month, every day that goes on, I just learn more and more how powerful that mind-body connection is. And there is so much, you know, food plays such a huge role.

There is a huge gut-brain connection, as I'm sure many people listening have heard of. and we know that I think 90% or 95% of our neurotransmitters serotonin is produced in our gut and we have this sort of two-way connection. So not only does the food that we eat impact our gut, our microbiome, the production of our neurotransmitters, but also, you know, our brain and our sympathetic nervous system, parasympathetic nervous system balance also impacts our gut and our, you know, any intestinal permeability. And it's really a two-way street. And so what we eat impacts, you know, our brain and our mental health. And we're learning more and more about that all the time. I had the opportunity to interview a psychiatrist named

Uma Naido recently. She's a psychiatrist at Harvard. And she started basically the first nutrition mental health practice. I can't, I'm probably forgetting the official name of it. But she has a great book, too, that looks at all the research, even for specific mental health conditions in which foods impact them the most and how our microbiome and intestinal permeability are related to the neuroinflammation that we see in these mental health conditions. So I think just like food is fuel for our body and all of our cells, it's also so important for the functioning of our brains as well in our mental health. Okay, so behavior change is super hard, right?

how do you go about that process of getting people motivated enough to actually adopt the protocols that you're suggesting? What does that like conversation look like? It's super hard and I think the thing that I've learned to is to try to detach myself from it a little bit because especially when it's people close to you like your friends and your family and you really just want them to experience great health. Sometimes you try so hard and it has to come from them and how the internal motivation has to come from them and everybody is ready at different times in their lives. And so I think what I always try to ask all of my patients is, is the question, what do you want your health for and really identify what's most important to them? Is it, you know,

their performance in an upcoming competition? Is it wanting to be able to play with their grandkids when they're 90? Is it both, you know, is it going on a big trip and doing a mountain climb in a few years? There's, there's so many different things that motivate people. And I think then being able to to show them and give them evidence for why certain lifestyle changes their health will help them get closer to that goal or will support their goal can be really powerful. And just using, you know, just different techniques like motivational interviewing is a really common one,

but helping people to elicit that change themselves as opposed to you telling them that you think this is going to be really good for them is generally going to be more effective. I think it requires a lot of trial and error. I think that data is super powerful, though. I think I've seen so many people, one being just genetics, I had no idea how much of a motivational tool knowing your genetics could be. I think just because it's so much more personal and it gives people something to a little

bit more tangible. You know, everybody knows, you know, I should probably eat real food and eat fruits and vegetables and maybe try going gluten-free and seeing if that helps. But when they see that they have this SH2B3 snip and it suggests they may be not able to tolerate gluten, now they're willing to try it. And so that can be a great motivational tool. And, and then the data, you know, we track every piece of data that we can, whether it's labs. We love, you know, whoop. We love using CGMs. And so I think that has also been a huge motivational tool for our patients is instead of going crazy on dietary recommendations,

let's just like, why don't you just wear a CGM and just see what happens? And what can you learn from that? And we have guidelines around it and experiments to try. But that self-experience and seeing the data for yourself is really, I've found to be really powerful for people and then motivating behavior change that's much more long lasting. Julie, thank you so much. This has been an amazing conversation, so, so insightful. Where can folks find you, you know, on social media and, you know, where are you practicing? Oh, thank you, Kristen. I really enjoyed it. I always enjoy talking with you. And for those who are interested, I'm on social media, mostly just on Instagram at Julie Foucher. And then my podcast is called Pursuing Health.

And if you're interested in learning more about wild health or becoming a patient, our website is just wildhealth.com. And we have a discount code for all of your whoop listeners. They can just type in whoop, all caps, whoop 20, and that I'll give them 20% off. Big thank you to Kristen Holmes and Dr. Julie Foucher for coming on the Whoop podcast. If you enjoyed this, please subscribe, leave a rating. We appreciate it. Check us out on social at Woop at Will Ahmed. Email the Woop podcast, podcast at Woop.com.

Leave a question, a comment, and it will be answered on a future episode. And a reminder, you can use the code, Will, to get $60 off Woop accessories when you join Woop. That's it for now. Stay healthy, folks, and stay in the green. Thank you.