What Cradle Cap Reveals About Your Baby’s Health + Reversing Childhood Illness | Beth Lambert

What are some of the earliest warning signs that a child could be set up for a lifelong epidemic of chronic disease in the little years that a lot of parents ignore? So much of the symptoms we see in babies today that are common are not normal, so that might be a cradle cap. Even if you as a parent did a really great job preparing yourself for pregnancy and childbirth, you have to deal with whatever your mother did and whatever your grandmother did. There's this thing called co-regulation, which is that you can actually regulate your child's nervous system. By regulating your own nervous system, autism is now one in 31, but I actually think it's much higher than that in California. It's one in 20. 80 HD is now the official statistic is one in nine. I think it's much higher. You have one in eight kids with asthma. Every one of these conditions, though, if you treat the root causes, which includes nutrition, environment, nervous system regulation, you know, the how we're living our lives that indoor outdoor thing, the device usage, the Wi-Fi. You address those root causes. All of those conditions can be reversed. So your kid is sick. Maybe it's eczema, maybe it's chronic allergies, asthma, ADHD, autism, anxiety, constipation, or even something as seemingly normal as cradle cap that just never really went away. Yeah, this episode blew my mind because apparently cradle cap is not normal. It's common, but it actually is a sign of something kind of going array in your baby. So you're hearing this and you're like, I am doing everything I can, but I am wondering, you know, what could have caused this? Is it genetics? Is it just bad luck? Or is it something in the modern world making my kids sick? And maybe the biggest question of all, can any of it actually be reversed? Today's guest is Beth Lambert. She's the founder and executive director of a nonprofit called Documenting Hope. They are dedicated to uncovering the root causes of childhood chronic illness and developmental conditions. This is such a cool nonprofit. She has spent more than 15 years researching why today's kids are sicker than ever and what families can do to change that. Watch this episode on the real Alex Clark YouTube channel or Culture Path Carry on Spotify. And then before we get started, plus, make sure you leave a five star review. If it's been a while, I am seeing a lot of people listening, but not a lot of people leaving those five star reviews. It's really, really important to help us out. Please welcome Beth Lambert, founder and executive director of Documenting Hope to Culture Path Carry. We have the safest car seats, the most vaccines. All of the pediatric specialists you could want and somehow our kids are the sickest they've ever been. What do you think is happening here? So I think everybody wants to answer that question by looking at one singular thing. Like it's antibiotics or it's chemicals or it's vaccines, but the true answer is it's basically modern living. So we have completely changed the way that we live as compared to our ancestors and even just a few generations ago. And so the things that we're eating, the things we're putting on our skin, the pace of our lives, the digital, I mean, even just our medical care and how we take care of our own health is completely changed. It's actually the cumulative and compounding effect of living in the modern world. I call it the total load. Essentially our children just don't have the capacity to get rid of the toxins to be able to handle the infections that come their way, to be able to deal with the onslaught of modern living health stressors. And that's why we have so many sick kids. You're also collecting one of the largest data sets on childhood exposure. Is that right? Yes, we have a study called The Chirp Study and that stands for Child Health Inventory for Resilience and Prevention. It's kind of a mouthful. But essentially we wanted to understand what is it about modern living that's making our children so sick. And is there something in particular that stands out that maybe we could address? Maybe we could remove it if it's a major problem. So this is a massive questionnaire. It's over a thousand questions long. We asked parents to sit down for like upwards of four or five hours to take it. And then we also ask about their health. We ask about prenatal conditions. We ask about the family health history. I mean anything you could imagine. And we correlate all of those data points with diagnoses and health conditions. And what we found in that study is there are some categories of things that are major health stressors. You know they stand out as really playing a part in our children's chronic health conditions ranging from autism, asthma, ADHD, autoimmune diseases, all of it. Ultimately the biggest finding we found in the study so far is that it is the total load. It is the cumulative and synergistic effect of living in the modern world. So if you take a child who has many health stressors, they're going to have worse health outcomes. And the children who have fewer health stressors are going to have just better health, generally speaking. So it's a hypothesis that we knew going into the study we'd find an answer to. And it's true. There's just too many stressors on kids' health today. So much of the symptoms we see in babies today that are common are not normal. So that might be eczema, cradle cap, colic, GI distress, constipation is a major one. Hold on a minute. What's the deal with cradle cap? I thought that was like a normal thing that just happens randomly. That's a sign of something? Yes. That's a sign of that your body is under sort of an access total load of health stressors. So it's not able to manage what is kind of like a fungal overgrowth on the scalp. So that's true. We actually are seeing fungal overgrowth in the GI. We're seeing fungal overgrowth on the skin. Eczema actually has a fungal component to it too. So these are all what we call the soft signs of I call it a compromised generation. That's the name of my book from 2010. It looks at all the things that are making our children's health compromised. And so, you know, you've talked to grandmothers or great-grandmothers and they'll be like, babies weren't constipated. They pooped at least every day. You know, they would say children didn't have eczema. You know, very rarely, very rarely. But that is the norm now. The other thing that we see in babies, it's very common. And I actually, this is part of what started waking me up to this health epidemic was I was in a, you know, baby play groups with moms and babies, babies are crawling around. And it seemed like every baby was either constipated or having explosive diarrhea diapers. Like, and everybody kind of laughed like, oh, another explosive diarrhea diaper. But that's not normal. Wait, blowouts in a baby, is it normal? Well, you know, it like a little bit of that is normal. You know, like there, there, there is a stool consistency that is normal. But I'm talking about kids who are going massive diarrhea diapers, like six, seven, eight, nine times a day. Oh my gosh. That's very, very common. And ask any parents who are in baby play groups and they'll be like, oh, yeah, I see the kid with that. It's not normal. There's so much here that it's interesting to me. I know parents who are not vaccinating their kids and they're eating very, very clean. They live very clean lives and their kids still have cradle caps. Like, how do you explain that and like what should we do? So I don't have kids yet, but I'm just, I'm trying to prepare because I'm thinking like, okay, I know what I want to do with vaccines. I know what I'm going to be eating during pregnancy, what my kids will be eating. You know, so if my kid has cradle cap, like, what do I do about it? What does that say? Well, this is what I mean about this concept of total load and that there isn't one specific thing necessarily. So even kids who are coming in with very conscientious parents who have really paid attention to diet, prenatal health, all these kinds of things, you are still seeing these kids coming in compromised. And the reason why is because we are now witnessing what is a multi-generational epidemic. So even if you as a parent did a really great job preparing yourself for pregnancy and child birth, you have to deal with whatever your mother did and whatever your grandmother did. If you think about the microbiome, for instance, that is something that is handed down from generation to generation. So if a grandmother took an antibiotic and then the mother took an antibiotic for strep infection or something like that, the microbiome of your ancestors was altered. And then that is passed down to you. And then you passed your microbiome down to your baby. So that's the multi-generational effect. The other thing that's going on is that chemicals were exposed to have a multi-generational effect. So I'm sure you're familiar with epigenetics. Well, what's happening is, let's say your mother was exposed to chemicals, she developed an immune response to those chemicals. And that immune response is actually passed down through the DNA so that you are more reactive to chemicals when you're exposed to them. It's kind of like a one-two hit. Like there's an immune priming that happens. And then the second hit, your body is more reactive. So each subsequent hit you have with chemicals, your body is going to be more and more reactive. So when a baby comes out or there's multi-generational hits, even if the parents are as conscientious as possible to keep things low-talks, no-talks clean, you're still dealing with whatever happened with grandma and great grandma. I mean, it's really incredible. So this is a massive epidemic that is really something that started post-World War Two with all of the chemicals that were introduced into the world. So your mom is three, right? And they're grown now. Yeah. What are the clean, non-toxic remedies to something like cradle cap? So I think it's not just about chemicals. There's multiple ways we need to sport our house. So one is reducing as much chemical exposure as possible. Two is giving your body what it needs in terms of nutrition, right? And we know that the food is just less nutritious today. And you know, we need to get it as close to the source as possible. But the other thing that people don't think about is our nervous system and how dysregulated we all are living in the modern world. And so the nervous system is like command central. So you know, it's going to actually tell your immune system to react or not react. And we live in such fast, pace, crazy, stressful lives right now that We are in a state where our status quo, our default mode is reaction. So that is actually something that gets passed down as well. So what we can do as parents is try and get as regulated as possible. I know that sounds kind of like, what does that even mean to be regulated? But it's really about teaching your body that it is safe because we are just bombarded with chemicals that are not safe. Food's not safe. Emotional environments that are not safe. I mean EMS or making our bodies not feel safe. Digital environments are making us not feel safe. The pace of our life is making our bodies not feel safe. And so these babies are coming out in a state of sympathetic dominance of their nervous system. That means they're in fight or flight. And so what we need to do is basically get them to a place where they are able to feel safe and feel calm. And then their immune systems won't be so reactive. So then you don't see as much of the cradle cap. You don't see as much of the GI issues. You don't see as much of the eczema on the skin issues because your immune system is standing down and is able to manage what it experiences every single day. When parents are dealing with a sick baby or toddler or child who's got some kind of issue like eczema or whatever, I think a lot of times they're asking themselves, was it the vaccines? Was it glyphosate? Was it the antibiotics? But you say that that's actually not the right question. It's more of what you've been saying here that it's this multi-generational thing. Yes, but sometimes it is the glyphosate. Sometimes it is the vaccine. Sometimes it is the antibiotics. And actually in our church study data, the categories of stressors that are the worst are chemicals. So it's like if you took all the chemical exposures and aggregated them into one data set, it stands out as a major problem. And it correlates with worse health outcomes. Same thing with vaccines, same thing with the antibiotics. In fact, antibiotics, as a category, were the single most impactful category of stressors on children's health and development, meaning it correlated more tightly with worse health outcomes with the instances eczema, asthma, ADHD, autism. So again, antibiotics are multi-generational. So all those things do matter. But I think what we need to not do is get caught up in any single one as if it is the smoking gun, because it all matters. It really does. And so I think the answer to this is to try and get back to living as close to nature as possible. It'll be interesting to see what my first child is dealing with, because I did not live a healthy clean life until the last five or six years. And I carpet bombed my gut with antibiotics, all throughout my childhood, all throughout adulthood, fully vaccinated, flu vaccines every year, birth control, ultra-process food almost exclusively. I mean, a mess, a mess. Now, my fiance grew up in a family. Nobody's vaccinated. Everybody was very, very clean from the get-go, no ultra-process food ever. He's never had McDonald's. I was known as the chicken nugget princess before my evolution. So I mean, we are totally different in that regard. So yeah, I wonder what that's going to be like for them. Yeah. But you're the poster child for why I do what I do. Our organization is called Documenting Hope, because we've been out looking for the hopeful stories. The stories of people who overcome that exact kind of thing and end up having healthy babies. And it is entirely possible. In fact, we work with this one woman named Carson Meyer, who's a duelah, and she has a wonderful story about how she used a gap's diet to help heal her gut and her eczema and all these kinds of things before she had babies. And she's had two beautiful, perfectly healthy babies. But before that, she was, you know, standard America, right? Like eating the things and exposed and then she had her health wake up call, right? And so I have not only been documenting the stories of kids who've gotten better, but have also documented stories of moms who have had just what you just described, like a standard American life, who before pregnancy just got their body in a place where it was ready to do that, right? And actually, if you look at the fertility crisis we have in this country, that's a reflection of bodies not being ready to have babies. You know, you can't get pregnant because your body is like, you don't have the right nutrition, your nervous system is too dysregulated, your microbiomes, out of whack, your body is telling you that, right? So follow those cues. If you're not able to get pregnant, if you have a fertility issue, it's like, all right, now it's time to pause, get my body in shape, get my nervous system regulated, get my gut cleaned up, detoxify, and then happy healthy babies are absolutely possible after that cleanup. I love that because I think sometimes people listen to, you know, health and wellness podcasts or episodes or interviews and they're like, everything is going wrong, there's nothing I could do, you know what I mean? And so I love that your whole thing is focused on of hope. And I think there's a good opportunity for more hope in the health and wellness space. That's just it, that's why I do this work is because I've seen how people can overcome pretty much every health challenge just through diet, lifestyle, and getting their mindset in a place that is more oriented towards health and wellness. Our organization has called Documentary Hope, but we had this moment when we were doing the chirp study, which again, is an inventory of all the health stressors in modern life. And we were like, maybe we should call ourselves documenting devastation because that's truly what it is. Like we're collecting data on just how much we're destroying our health and destroying the planet. And, you know, at the end of the day, it is important to know that information, no better do better, right? But at the same time, there's so much hope. And I have every confidence that a young woman, a young man, they're important to, their bodies need to be healthy too. But when a young couple decides to have a baby, there's so much they can do to get prepared for that. And I've seen it and I've witnessed it. And babies come out healthy despite that, you know, the multi-generational hat thing. Oh, good. Because I was nervous I was going to give birth to Grimmis from McDonald's. You might, I don't know. I might. Have you ever gotten so bloated that you start bargaining with God? You're Googling, is it gluten, is it dairy, is it stressed? Did I drink water too fast? Am I secretly four months pregnant? And then somebody's like, no, bloating. It's just bloating and that's normal. No, bloating is common. That's not the same thing. Imagine trying every elimination diet, every probiotic, every digestive enzyme, TikTok is ever recommended. And then you finally do a GI map test. And then you're like, oh my gosh, it's a parasite. It's been a parasite this whole time. The parasites want the candy. Well, at least you now have an answer. That's one of the reasons I love Javity. Javity does not just test your blood, okay? They offer advanced testing, including GI map testing. So you can stop guessing and start understanding what is actually going on in your gut. They build a personalized plan around those results and they don't just tell you what the results are and then, oh, figure it out, which is basically what every other biomarker testing company does. Javity also has a free membership tier. So you can actually upload blood work that you've already done from somebody else and then they will tell you based on those results for free what your longevity blueprint is, right? Like what to do with these results? And then if you are like, okay, I have the answers now. What do I do about it and you do want to go deeper? Like I have, you can become a plus member and you can work with a functional clinician. You can have access to advanced testing like doing your gut poop test, okay? You can get personalized supplements. All of these therapies all in one place. You want to test to see if you have the MTHFR gene, you want to do a Dutch test for your hormones. Like, Javity has everything. Your body has been trying to send you clues. So now we've got to stop ignoring them and start being a detective. Go to gogevity.com, use code Alex for 20% off. That's gogevity.com, code Alex for 20% off your first purchase. I just finished reading this book, came out in 2023. It's called The Frozen River, 10 out of 10. I was completely obsessed. It's based on the true story of Martha Ballard, a real life midwife in the late 1700s. And one of my favorite parts is when this Harvard train doctor comes to town acting like he's God's gift to medicine, wanting to deliver everybody's babies and things are not going great. Meanwhile, of course, he doesn't know anything about birth. He's like 24, just graduated. But he's got the white coat and the ego and the credentials, this fancy education. And then there's Martha, who's actually delivered hundreds of babies and has decades of real world experience, right? It's funny how little things have changed since the late 1700s. We're still taught that the biggest institutions automatically know best, right? If it's a doctor, he has a degree. Well, he must know everything and we just have to trust. Well, just like Martha, back then, I agree. We shouldn't just be handing over our control of our health care without asking questions. That's one of the reasons I appreciate crowd health. Crowd health is not health insurance. It's a community that helps people fund major medical expenses without the traditional insurance middleman. Because here's the reality. Paying cash for routine care, like having a baby, is often dramatically less expensive than people realize. And when something truly catastrophic happens, crowd health's community steps in to help with those big bills. And you're like, no, they win it. I'm gonna be on the hook. If I have a cancer or a crazy surgery or a car accident. No, no, no, no. Crowd health has a 99.9% funding success rate. Okay, that is way more than a traditional insurance company who denies one out of every four claims. Crowd health lets you choose your own doctors, including functional medicine providers, natural pass, whatever you want. They even provide $300 annually toward wellness support. They will give you a dedicated care advocate to help negotiate bills. My mom has one. My mom has just joined crowd health as well. If you have been feeling trapped by the traditional insurance system, it's time to start asking better questions. Go to joincrouthealth.com. Use code culture to get started for just $99 for your first three months. That's joincrouthealth.com code culture. Crowd health is not insurance. What were some of the most shocking data points that you found with the chirp study? You know, the one that I didn't expect to see was that EMF is a major category of stressor. So, you know, when you look at so many data points, there's sort of signal in the noise, and there's obvious ones, like the chemicals I mentioned, vaccines, antibiotics or things we expect it to see. I did not expect to see EMF as a major category that was correlated with worse health outcomes. Now that the science is evolving, and is a little bit more established on electromagnetic radiation and Wi-Fi and all these exposures, I can understand why it is. I mean, it's known to open up the blood brain barrier, you know, it can contribute to things like seizures. So, there's a real biological effect from EMF. I just don't think we pay attention to it. Is today's food actually different? Because a lot of people say, well, I grew up eating goldfish crackers or McDonald's and I turned out fine. Like, why can't my kid have it? Of course, it's so different. It's so different. And, you know, the other thing is, again, food is one piece of the equation. So if you ate processed foods in the '80s, which most people were starting to do, you know, like chef Boyard and craft macaroni and cheese were just as prevalent then as they are now, but we didn't have Wi-Fi. We didn't have the massive number of chemicals on the market. We had a lot of chemicals, but not that agreed to today. We didn't have antibiotics being given out like candy. And if you think about the synergies of things, like let's take antibiotics and chemicals for a minute, when you take an antibiotic, you're wiping out your good gut bacteria. And that matters for nutrition and digesting food. It matters for making neurotransmitters. It also matters for detoxification. Those gut bugs actually help us detoxify and excrete toxins from our bodies. So it's, again, it's the synergy. So if you've taken a lot of antibiotics and you've had exposure to chemicals, you're going to have a harder time getting rid of those chemicals. So it's really about the synergies, you know. Another one that's really well known is the synergy between aluminum and fluoride. So each is a known neurotoxin on their own, but when you put them together, there are much more toxic as a combination. So that's how we kind of have to be thinking about these things. Like the food was bad in the '70s and '80s, you know, we were already in that processed food era, but it is way worse now. We have way more chemicals now, and we have less capacity to deal with the toxicity. And I think the biggest thing about food now is it's so nutrient depleted. We have destroyed the soils. The level of nutrition that we're getting in the food is far less than what it would have been just a few decades ago, and I think that's a major problem. Yeah. And by the way, we can think bare and glyphosate for that, right? Huge contributor, which is why I speak out about it so much. How chemically intensive is the average American child's morning before they even get to school? It's just this is part of what we are facing is a culture that we live in that we don't even know is toxic. Yes. So when you say we get up and what's for breakfast, well, what's for breakfast is usually coming out of a box. It's highly processed. It's nutrient depleted, you know, filled with sugar. That is a major problem. Like, I think people think about when they think of food, they think about the chemicals and the additives and the ultra processed nature of it, but they're not thinking out sort of about the macro piece too, which is that humans were like hunter gatherers, right? Like so we ate, you know, meats and fats from animals, we ate vegetables and tubers, you know, things that we could gather, but we didn't eat these refined processed carbohydrates. And so we're having constant blood sugar spikes and the blood sugar spikes cause inflammation in your body. So if you think about the average kid who gets up in the morning has a bowl of cereal, even if it's like whole green and organic and glyphosate free and has been tested to show that we don't actually know. But that is still going to be a blood sugar spike, which is going to cause inflammation in the body. It's going to change your gut bacteria and it's going to make you more towards gut bacteria that is going to be correlated with obesity. So that's how we start our day. And then you're rushing out the door. Everyone's stressed. Did you bring your soccer cleats? Oh my god. Do you have your iPad? All these kinds of like the crazy intensity of it. And are they taking a shower? What are they? What are they using as body wash in the shower in shampoo? You know, is this child are sitting down to eat their sugar breakfast after their mommy's is a lice all wipe on the counter? I mean, so is there a candle lit? Is there a plug and air freshener in the kitchen? Now again, this isn't like slamming moms. When we share this information, it should be empowering and educating like, okay, I didn't realize this now. I know I can change this. What do you say to people who like when you talk about this, they're like, well, this feels like judgmental or like mom shaming? Well, it does feel judgmental and I absolutely understand that. The thing we have to remember though is that we grew up in this culture, right? So when people are living healthy right now, like let's say you're eating organic or grow your own vegetables or you live a low tox or no tox life, you don't want your kid to eat the blue cupcakes at the birthday party. That is seen as like a marginal viewpoint. You're kind of like an outsider, right? So you're living counter culture and it feels isolating and very lonely to be living in that space, but it's because we are in a culture and we grew up not knowing any different. We just grew up with what we grew up with, you know? I love watching the world cup right now because you have all these people from different countries that are in the states that are like having a blast in America and you know, all these reporters are asking them, well, what do you like about America? And it's usually like Chick-fil-A and I love like the fast food and it's just, it's showing us what others perceive to be our culture and our culture is toxic food and processed food. Yeah. Chemical this and chemical that. I mean, it's just our normal. So it does feel judgey when someone comes up to you and says the way you're living, you're normal is bad. It's true. Yeah. But it's also like we don't know any different, like you're going to eat the food your mom made for you. Yeah. And I don't know your beliefs, but for me as a Christian and a conservative, we're always talking about living counter culturally. You know, I don't want to look like everybody else. My life should be a shiny example of something different. And so for me, I feel like when it comes to food, why should that be any different? And it comes to, you know, how you raise your children, how you're parenting, how you're living your life, the food, like all of that should be counter cultural. I just think there's all these ways in which we live our lives that we can be an example. And again, the way that everybody else is doing it has led to nothing but death and destruction, morbid obesity, chronic illness, cancer rates, rising under 30 years old. You know, so obviously the way that we've always done it, the status quo, is not, it's not going great for us. I feel like what do we have to lose at this point by living counter culture? I don't think very much. Right. I think it's scary, though, for people because living counter culture takes courage and people just want to belong. That's a fundamental need for human beings is to feel safe, accepted belonging. Right. And when you are living in a way that is different from the group, you don't feel that belonging. But I love the idea of getting together with other people who are living the same way you are because it makes you feel safe. It makes you feel like you belong and also you grow people that way. You teach them that way and you invite others in to know and understand why you make the choices you do and they'll come along once they know. So if a child has a couple different things going on, they have ADHD, they have eczema, they are constipated, they've got anxiety. You don't see that as multiple separate things, right? Why do you think that they're all kind of like one big red flag? Yeah, this is such a problem we have to overcome is because when people get a diagnosis for their child, whether it's ADHD or autism or asthma, they go in that diagnostic category in that box and then they're like, all right, well, what's the pill for that? What does my doctor tell me to do for asthma? What does my doctor tell me to do for ADHD? That is the wrong way to think about it. What those labels are, those diagnostic labels are, are just your wake-up call. It's like something is dysregulated in your body, something is out of balance and it is your opportunity and invitation to look at the root causes and see what it is. So ignore the diagnosis. I mean, I can understand how a diagnosis can be important for, you know, like an IEP for people who have kids with special needs that need support in school, that is important. But what I'm saying is, don't look at the label as destiny, don't look at the label as prescriptive of the future, look at the label as a starting place for how do I find out what is causing the symptoms. All of those conditions are basically chronic inflammatory conditions. The bodies are just inflamed. They are in need of deep nutrition, deep healing, deep regulation. So for a parent who gets the diagnosis, the very first thing they should be doing is asking the question, why? Why do these symptoms emerge and what can I do to help reduce the inflammation and get the body into a place where it can heal? Is too much indoor living just as damaging as bad nutrition? Thousand percent. The one statistic you hear all the time is how vitamin D deficient everyone is, right? Vitamin D deficiency makes it sound like, okay, I can just take a vitamin supplement and I'll be fine, not true, because vitamin D is, you know, it's synergistic with other things in the body. So taking a vitamin D supplementation is going to imbalance other things in your body. So you absolutely have to get your vitamin D from the sun. Outdoor time is not just about vitamin D and we know the vitamin D is important for immune function and it's for every kind of process in your body. You need that vitamin D. Sunshine is like another nutrient that doesn't even, like, you can't even quantify it, right? So it's for important for mitochondrial health and for making energy in your body. It helps you detox. Like anybody who's been a college kid has gone like a spring break knows that they can drink their face off and still feel not that drunk. Why? Because you're outside in a bikini in the sun. Oh my gosh. That's what it is. it is. Yeah, when I think about my like sophomore year in high school, I did the whole Panama city beach thing. And you know what, you're totally right about that. That's right, because the sun is helping you detox. Wow. The sun is helping with your energy production. So, you know, sunlight is one piece of the outdoor, you know, the need for outdoor exposure. There is, you know, you're getting exposure to microbes that help strengthen your immune system and help balance out your microbiome. Are you familiar with the concept of shinran yoko, which is Japanese forest bathing? Yes, but, but tell the audience about forest bathing. Why is forest bathing like the new it thing and wellness? You know, it's one of these things that I always laugh about. Like, we need like really high powered and intensive studies to understand the benefits of like being in the sun and going in nature and being in the forest, which is basics, which is 101. But somehow if we do the research on it, we publish in a period of journal, people are like, oh, okay. So it makes, it makes sense to go out in the woods. What basically what shinran yoko is is Japanese forest bathing because the Japanese took the time and the money to study the health benefits of being in a forest. What does it mean to be in a forest? You're in a certain, you know, wave length of green light. You are surrounded by oxygenating plants, plants that are making oxygen and taking in your carbon dioxide. You are moving, right? Like exercise. So what they found is that being in a forest environment causes your nervous system to regulate, puts you into a parasympathetic or rest and digest it. It reduces inflammation. It reduces blood pressure. I mean, has all these health benefits that are measurable, but like it's, it's basics. It's like go outside. I think being in a forest is probably my favorite, like placing nature to visit to regulate the nervous system. I like it even more than the beach. I love going to the beach, but I cannot express how good that air feels to breathe in. So one of my favorite trips I've ever taken was to go visit the Redwood trees in Northern California and do the Redwood Forest thing. Walking through there, I was like, I've never, it's like this must be what it feels like to breathe in heaven. Like the air felt so good and it's just totally different. It's such a different experience. I think every family needs to make national park vacations a more regular thing. Everybody does the beach thing, which is great, you should. But also we should do the parks and go into the forest. And it's just a different experience that is unbelievably lovely. Do you know, you just described is something I don't think is quantifiable. And that is the sense of awe and wonder and closeness to God or whatever you want to call it. So we can measure nervous system. We can measure the turpines in the air. We can measure the microbiome and benefits. But how do you measure awe? How do you measure the feeling of being in a state of complete and utter awe at the creation that we have access to, right? And when you're in a city, you don't really get that sense, right? But when you're in a Redwood forest or you're on a beach or wherever it is that gives you that sense of an mountaintop. I'm becoming very educated on the Pacific Northwest because that's where my fiancee's from. So I spend a lot of time there now. And what's really cool about that area, at least in the summer, you guys, if you really want to do your beach vacation, you should consider the Oregon coast. You can do the Redwood forest. You can do Oregon beach. You get forest beach. The whole thing hiking. It's stunning. It's beautiful. It's totally like reasonable temperatures. And so lovely. I think a lot of people don't think of the Pacific Northwest as like a good beach vacation place in the summer. But I have to highly recommend it. So I'm just putting that out there. Another plug for the Pacific Northwest. It just reminds me what you what you talked about is I have a good friend who's worked in my organization for a while whose son had a praxia and some other health issues. And she decided to send them to a nature school. And a nature school is just your outside all day long. You just learn while you're in nature. And they made some changes and he got some speech therapy and some other things up sport them. But she will say that it was the nature school that really turned things around for him. Cool. I mean, it's so healing and so therapeutic to be in nature. What health issues do you typically see in kids who are not sleeping well? It can be any number of things that can contribute to insomnia for kids or night waking. It can be, you know, the microbiomes out of balance because you're basically your microbiome is producing neurotransmitters. You know, everybody thinks of neurotransmitters as if they come from the brain, only small percentage are actually synthesized in the brain. The vast majority of like your serotonin, which you need for sleep is produced in the gastrointestinal tract by the microbiome. So like you have imbalances there, you might see children having an ability to sleep. Another hidden sleep disruptor is EMF. So a lot of times kids who cannot sleep, you know, you have to look in their environment to see where like the Wi-Fi router is. Do they live in a bedroom where their bed is right up against a wall that has a refrigerator on the other side. Refrigerators are huge emitters of EMF. Even washers and dryers. Everything that's a smart device is going to be emitting Wi-Fi. So you kind of have to really investigate your own home environment and what is your children's bedroom as device free Wi-Fi free and sheltered as possible because that can really disrupt a sleep. The other thing is the metabolic piece like blood sugar regulation. So kids who have dessert in the evening, I know that's like a standard thing, you have your dinner, you have a dessert, but you spike your blood sugar at night that can also cause sleep disruptions. I mean, there's innumerable things going on, but I think it's really about trying to create a dark, cool, quiet environment, no EMF, and trying to, you know, have a pace of life that is regular. You know, like you get up at the same time with the sun and you sort of wind down as the sun's going down. There's a whole circadian biology piece that's really important to sleep that people don't even think about. So by circadian biology, I mean, you know, we as human beings evolved over millions of years in rhythm with the sun, rising and setting. And it isn't just, you know, about the sun. There's sort of like just a rhythm that our bodies lock into with the day and night shift. And so what happens in the modern world is we turn on the lights at night and obviously the day time never ends. And so our body never gets the cues it needs from the environment to quiet down, to get that nervous system into a state where it's ready to go into rest and digest. So our bodies are getting the wrong cues from the environment and we're never getting the cues that it's time to sleep. That's part of the reason why is, you know, we let our kids stay up to 11 p.m. and on devices. When you look at screens, they're emitting blue light. Blue light is daytime light, right? And that is what suppresses melatonin and melatonin is the very important chemical that helps our brains and bodies know it's time to sleep. How much sleep should kids really be getting? It really depends on the age. And you'd be surprised. It's more than you think. So when you're in the infant age, the, you know, stages, you know, each, each, every couple of months, it changes how much they need by the time you get to two years old. It's a little bit less and four years old, a little bit less. But they should be getting, you know, teenagers should be getting like eight to 10 hours. Kids in sort of that elementary school of same thing about, you know, eight hours minimum, but some kids can sleep up to 12. It's bio individual as well. You know, and the other thing I will say is that, you know, some kids who are in chronic illness, when have one of these diagnoses, they might need even more sleep because their bodies really need to repair. And we'll use sleep as that time to do that repair work. And teenagers need a lot. Teenagers need a lot. Which is why I hate, you know, and some people, if you choose to do this for your family, then that's totally fine. But what I, what I really don't like about public school or private school, whatever, just a traditional school setting is this teenagers having to wake up at 6 a.m. to be in class by 725 or whatever. I wish we could have later start times for schools, which is why homeschool appeals to me. Yeah. And also, that's just a structure of society. For everybody, for people who are going to work, like people get up before it's light out. And, you know, again, stay up late. Night shift workers are among the sickest people around. Why? Because they're totally skewing. They're circadian biology. That's what we should be doing. By the way, hot takes. I know those are the jobs we should have AI do. And we should let those people then take jobs during the normal day. Like human beings should be, you know, exactly what you're saying. Up with the sun, rising with this or, you know, going to sleep in the sun setting. That's how we should be living. I feel so bad for the unite shift people and just hang in there. We have done a couple circadian rhythm episodes where they kind of had some advice for the night shifters. But that's tough. That's tough. I think that AI is actually going to change things significantly for us. It will open up opportunities like that. We have to be aware of technology in our lives and how it's influencing our health. But certainly there's opportunities. Yeah, too. What is one bedtime habit that every family should adopt? No screens two hours before bed. That's, you know, and that includes television screens, computers, laptops, iPhones, all of it. Because again, you are giving your eyeball the signal that it's daytime right up until bed if they're using devices of any kind. So that's when, you know, reading books is good, music and winding down. And by the way, we need that too. Adults need that too. So this isn't just, you know, advice for kids. That is something that all humans need. We really need to just give our bodies a cue. It's time to sleep. You guys know I'm obsessive about the foundations of health. And one thing most people completely overlook, especially in the dark winter months, is light exposure. Humans evolved with sunlight, okay? When winter hits, days get shorter. We spend more time indoors and we lose exposure, not just to visible light, but to red in your infrared light, which play a real biological role in how ourselves function. Red in your infrared light have been studied for their ability to support mitochondrial function, which helps drive cellular energy production. That matters for muscle recovery, inflammation, skin health, circulation, sleep quality, [BLANK_AUDIO] overall daily energy. When your cell's function better, everything works better. That is why red light therapy is a non-negotiable in my routine and why I use my Juve. I also, by the way, just got my mom a Juve. This was really important because she's experiencing a lot of arthritic types of complications. What sets Juve apart is that it actually works. Juve uses clinically proven wavelengths, delivers a safe and effective dose of light and offers true medical grade panels that are independently tested and safety certified. That is critical because there are a lot of fake devices out there using the wrong wavelengths with zero testing. Oh my gosh, please be careful when you're ordering online. I personally have used Juve daily for, oh my gosh, it was like during the pandemic. I got my first Juve maybe 2021. So it's been like five years. All right, I use it in the morning about 10 minutes and sometimes I'll do it at night to wind down literally 10 minutes. There's a timer on there. I can read my Bible. I can do my devotions. I can also sit and silence. You can sit, close your eyes, listen to a podcast. It's become one of the easiest, most consistent tools in my wellness routine. Also, put it on and have it on you and your baby as you are breastfeeding. I also love that Juve offers a wide range of options whether you want targeted treatment or a full body set up in your house. If you want to support your health at the cellular level, especially during winter, Juve makes it simple. Go to Juve.com/Alex. It's J-O-O-V-V.com/Alex to get a exclusive offer in your checkout. Juve.com J-O-O-V-V.com/Alex. Some exclusions apply. Have you ever seen a walrus in a nightclub? Not because it's funny, which it is, but because if you did, you would immediately think, but I don't think this environment was designed for you. Well, that's kind of how I feel when I walk into Sephora sometimes, right? There's 17,000 products and people are in their contouring, like they're auditioning for a Marvel movie. And I'm just standing there like, is there any clean foundation that still exists? Beauty has gotten so complicated and very chemical, okay? That's why I really like a Dell Natural Cosmetics. They're a Christian family-owned company in Texas that has a completely different philosophy. Makeup should enhance what God already created, not completely reinvent your face every Tuesday. And what I really love about a Dell Natural Cosmetics is that they have a color matching service because buying foundation online can feel like throwing a dart while blindfolded. Their team is going to help you find the right shade for you. They're going to give you application tips based on the type of foundation you're choosing. And just take all of the guesswork out of it, right? Makeup shouldn't be hard. Another thing I have to recommend is their Blue Lagoon Face Balm. It is insanely good. If you've been out in the heat, it leaves your skin feeling nourished and hydrated. It doesn't feel heavy. It's become one of my favorite prep steps before putting my makeup on. And it's just as good before bed. Go to a Dell Natural Cosmetics.com. Use code Alex for 25% off your first order. That's a Dell Natural Cosmetics.com code Alex for 25% off your first order. Can a parents chronic stress actually be making their kids sick? Oh my gosh. It's like the greatest secret that any parent on a healing journey can learn is to regulate themselves to benefit their child. Well, a lot of times what happens a parent who has a kid that's got some kind of chronic illness is in such a state of stress. You're worried about your child. You know, you're like, you know, and you're watching everything they're eating and putting on their skin and like, you're so stressed trying to protect your child. That stress that you feel is felt by your child. There's this thing called co-regulation, which is that you can actually regulate your child's nervous system by regulating your own nervous system. Wow. So by taking deep breaths, you know, some of those breathing techniques like the 478 breathing technique or box breathing. There's so many simple ways to regulate your nervous system. Doing that before you interact with your child. So let's say your child's having a tantrum or your child is, you know, really doing something that is causing your blood pressure to rise. That is the moment when you need to pause, breathe, and then engage, because your child would be much more likely to be able to regulate themselves if they see and feel that you are regulated. So I feel like it's the hardest thing to do, though, because as parents, we just are so, you know, worried about our children and so stressed so much about their health and their well-being. So that is hard to do, but it's so critical. What is a good tip for how families can regulate the nervous system of everyone in their family? Such a such a great question. We actually, through our organization, Document of Hope recently interviewed a woman who her name is BG Mancini and she has something called the family nervous system. And it's such a good way to think about creating a safe environment for your child. And one of the ways to do that is through music and an environment that is calming. So there are composers who make music that is actually for regulating your nervous system. One of them is called Bere Goldstein and he has like just track after track after track of all this music that is calming and regulating. You can put that on in the background and your children don't even know it, but it's actually having an impact on the whole family. So music is a wonderful way in the evenings when you're trying to, you know, calm things down, turning the lights down. A lot of times people will even put in like red light bulbs or orange light bulbs in their home because that's more closely mimics like the sunset, right? That evening transition from day to night. So they'll put on calming lights. So anything you can do to make the environment calming is going to help reset that family nervous system. And of course, I think parents need to be honest with their own nervous system too. Like can you self-reflect and evaluate like am I causing stress in the family? I have one child who always used to say to me years ago, mom, you're twitchy. And I was like, what do you mean I'm twitchy? She's like, she was trying to describe how I was stressed and she could feel my stress. And that was her way of describing it. And I was like so grateful to hear that from her. I mean, kids are so amazing at reflecting back for us the things that we need to know. And she taught that to me. I was like, I am twitchy. My nervous system is dysregulated. And I could do so much more to support my kids if I could just regulate myself first. What are the most common diseases that we're seeing pop up in American children that you believe can be reversed? So I have seen pretty much every single chronic health condition in kids reversed with the exception of type one diabetes, but I think we're very close to that happening. Autism is now one in 31, but I actually think it's much higher than that in California. It's one in 20. In some places, there's signal that showing it's even higher than that, like in Northern Ireland, it's one in 16 kids. ADHD is now the official statistic is one in nine. And by the way, if you go to any college campus, almost every single kids on ADHD medications. And they're doing it because, you know, they have legitimate ADHD, but they're also using it to lock in and do, you know, just so everybody's medicated. You have 42% of college age kids and teenagers obese or overweight, 42%. So like that is like the probably the biggest thing going on. 30% of kids have allergies. The number of chronic conditions are mind-blowing. And you're seeing more and more kids who have autoimmune diseases. And autoimmune diseases typically didn't happen to children. They happened later in life, you know, so things like rheumatoid arthritis or even teenagers getting MS, which was unheard of just a few decades ago. Type 1 diabetes is on the rise, also an autoimmune condition. So these kinds of things are, you know, really should be a flashing red light that is something is wrong. But we're just sort of, again, because we're in our silos, like, oh, your child has asthma, your child has autism. Like, we don't see the bigger picture that they're all related. And that's a major problem. Every one of these conditions, though, if you treat the root causes and you, which includes nutrition, environment, nervous system regulation, you know, the how we're living our lives that indoor outdoor thing, the device usage, the Wi-Fi. All those conditions can be reversed. Can they be reversed in everyone? Not necessarily. It really depends because every single child has a unique story that got them to that chronic condition and they have a unique path back to health. So I'm a millennial. And when I think back to being in school, there was like one or two kids in my class that would have been obese. I mean, that's it. No one had autism. There was, you know, a special ed class for kids that I would probably have autism or anything more severe. And in the whole school, maybe there was like six kids in that. Now, when I speak at colleges or high schools, and I'm talking to Gen Zers, I ask them this question. I say, raise your hand if you are or somebody you know is significantly struggling with their weight. That's your age. Every hand goes up. Raise your hand if you know someone with autism. Every hand goes up. That just shows you right there. We are dealing with something very disturbing. That is not natural. It's not genetic. That in only like 15 years or whatever, since I graduated high school, there's this much of an explosion. It blows my mind that we're still using this. Oh, we're just better at diagnosing. That's not true. So there are some conditions that you can objectively diagnose like asthma allergies. You can obesity. You can objectively diagnose those. There's measurements that you can say, yes, these are increasing. So those ones, they're not going to say we're better at diagnosis. They're going to admit, yes, we have more people with all of those conditions. But when you get to ADHD and autism, both of those conditions are subjectively diagnosed. That means there's no blood test, no urine test, or something you can do to objectively say this kid has autism or there doesn't have autism. They're like autism, for instance, they're diagnosed by psychiatrist or psychologist or developmental pediatrician who goes through a list of criteria. And when they meet the criteria, they can get the diagnosis or not. And a lot of people will use that to say, oh, we're just better at diagnosing. We missed all the quirky kids, the kids who used to I've been labeled with aspergers. You know, the nerdy kids who are shy, they didn't get picked up in the '70s and '80s. And while that's true for a percentage, it cannot account for the meteoric rise in this condition. - I think there's a meteoric rise in legit autism. I also think there's a lot of kids who say I'm autistic that aren't. I think they're self-diagnosing via TikTok. They're seeing some video that says, do you have a super hyper focused special interest? Are you obsessed with a certain celebrity? Is it hard for you to keep your room clean? Do you feel awkward in unsure and social settings? You have autism and all these kids are like, I have autism and that's, and then they're just going their whole rest of their life, saying that. So some of them, I don't even think it's legit, but there is definitely an increase even in the severe autistic kids who are flinging poop and head banging and biting and hitting and all of that too, which is super scary. - Yeah, and the other thing is about 40% of kids who are diagnosed with autism are considered moderate to severe. You didn't miss those kids. - Yeah, those are kids who need 24/7 care. You know, it wasn't like we just sort of like, overlooked them in the '70s and '80s. But I didn't know one kid like that when I was growing up. Right, and even if you looked in the special education classes, like if I think back to, I was an elementary school in the '80s, and the special education classes had kids with Down syndrome. And you did not have children who had the stereotypical behaviors of autism, the hand flapping, the eye aversion, the stemming. You just didn't have it. - Nope. What is the difference between remission, healing, and reversal? - So those are all just words that people use to try and describe the phenomenon of overcoming health challenges and health imbalances, right? So remission is used a lot of times when people are talking about like an autoimmune disease or cancer, 'cause they believe it'll always come back. So that's part of a mindset, right? We think that if you get a diagnosis, it's forever. And if you're in remission, it's just temporary. But that's not true. People have been in remission for the whole lives. Like what do you call that? That's remission. How about healing? - Right. - How about recovery? So healing and recovery are words that I prefer because it's talking about this, it's a true state of what happened. My body healed, my body recovered. You know, when you get hit by a bus, you don't go in remission, you heal, you recover. - So when it comes to kids with autism, how are those families reversing autism in children? Is it minor autism, diagnoses that you're seeing reverse? Is it severe types as well? And how are they doing it? - So I've been documenting cases of autism reversal for almost 20 years. And it runs again, kids who are diagnosed with level one, or it's just mild, or level three, which is severe. So I know, personally, families whose kids were nonverbal, had seizures, had head banging, fecal smearing, had very, very severe cases of autism, who have fully reversed it and have basically become typical. - How? - It sounds crazy, but it happens all the time. So the way that they typically do it is, they look at what's going on in their child's body through a lot of laboratory diagnostics. So you can take urine tests, blood tests, hair tests, stool tests to sort of see what the nutrient status is. To see what the mitochondrial function looks like. How are they detoxing? You can do genomics tests to see like, what does my body needs help support detox as an example? A lot of times these kids, they had this level of toxicity as they were going through their developmental milestones. So they never develop speech or, you know, they never developed what they need to interact socially. So they have to revisit those developmental milestones. So part of the equation to healing is getting your body to nutrition and eat so the cells can repair and the mitochondria have what they need. That's what you know, going outside in the sunlight again, right? Part of it is taking the toxins out of their environment and getting your nervous system to stand down and not feel like they're in a state of fight or flight or stress. And that's part of what's in their environment. So the detox piece is really important. But the other piece in autism is the developmental piece. So they went through the milestones. Maybe they didn't crawl, they didn't talk. They didn't walk on time, you know. And those things need to be revisited because the brain develops in a very specific pathway. And if you miss those milestones because your body is in a state of survival, your body will always prioritize survival over development. So you went through those milestones and you you miss them or that milestone stage. You have to go back and revisit. So that might mean an eight year old needs to learn to crawl again. Yeah. And that's part of the therapy that is done to help these kids reverse their autism diagnosis. And there are so many amazing practitioners out there that know how to do this work. We teach parents how to do it through a documenting hope. And a lot of it is the parents really getting into and with themselves and their child to try and figure out what their bio individual child needs because every child has a different path to healing. Tell me about a child who changed your worldview completely on this. I think one of the the first things that opened my mind was when I was writing my book of compromised generation, I was trying to understand all the environmental factors that had contributed to this epidemic of chronic illness in children. So I was interviewing parents and doctors and experts. And it was the parents who really blew my mind the most because I sort of understood the importance of nutrition. I understood the importance of detoxification. But I didn't understand with some of the therapeutics that were really important to these families that I would have thought was like, woo-woo and crazy at the time. Like going back and making them crawl again or whatever? That, yes, things like that. But also, I think more things like homeopathy, energetic medicine, things that really science doesn't have a full understanding of yet. Conscious of space healing, there was all these pieces that these parents were teaching me that they had tried because they felt like their child needed it. So what I learned in that process was that the parent is the absolute best person to decide what their child needs for a therapeutic or healing journey. People are always looking for the doctor, right? Like people come to us all the time and they're like, who's the best doctor in New Jersey? Who's the best doctor in California? Like who's the autism doctor or the expert? And they can be helpful. I love the doctors out there doing the work. But at the end of the day, it's mom or dad or both that are most tuned in with what their child needs and knows their child's health history. They know it if they missed crawling. They know if they, you know, never hit that babbling milestone. Like they know all the important things that their child needs to heal and recover. But they don't always take ownership because they don't have the confidence. They don't trust themselves. They think that they need to outsource it to an expert. Is sugar the biggest problem, seed oils, older processed food, food dyes, gluten, dairy, what's the biggest issue in the pantry? Oh, all of it. I know. It's so bio-individual. You know, one of the things I learned early on as I was starting to document cases of kids who had fully reverse their conditions is there's no one size fits all anything. So for instance, let's say a child growing up had for breakfast every morning, orange juice, an English muffin with peanut butter, and oatmeal. Like let's say that was their breakfast every morning. That child is going to be sensitive to if they have some kind of chronic condition. They're going to be sensitive to those foods. Peanut butter, wheat in the English muffin, and orange juice. And so that's going to be different from a child who had taken eggs for breakfast every morning. They developed a sensitivity to eggs. So there is no one big bugaboo, bad food category that every child is going to react to, for instance. Let's say a child had no access to processed seed oils. They might not be sensitive or reactive to it. They might be able to handle it better. It's really what were they exposed to at a time when they were vulnerable and when, you know, wouldn't they have leaky gut? Leaky gut is what causes or contributes to a lot of these sensitivities that kids have. And that's what leads to the inflammation. So I feel like, you know, glyphosate is bad. Chemicals are bad. Gluten and dairy, they're given this bad rap because all these kids are sensitive to it. Why are they sensitive to it? Because they had processed versions of it at a time when they had leaky gut in their body was inflamed. - Yeah. - So it isn't bad for everybody. You can have, you know, organic, sourdough, wheat, and it's absolutely fine for some people. But it's, you know, oftentimes villainized because people react to it. So it's bio individual. - Is bottled water actually better than tap? - It depends. That's like the universal answer. It depends because what are you talking about what's in the tap water? If you want to know what's in your tap water, it might be totally fine because you've got a good municipality that has, you know, decent water. But most municipal waters are horrific. - Yeah. - And you can go to EWG's water database to find out what's in your water by typing in your zip code. And the carcinogens, the endocrine disruptors, the pharmaceuticals, the things that are in our tap water are so horrific, arsenic. It's an endless list of chemicals and toxins by the same token. You might be buying bottled water that is just filled with microplastics. It might even be recycled, you know, filtered municipal water, you know, that has a lot of potential toxins in it too. - Is there a water filter that you really like that's affordable and simple to use? - I think that the burkey filter can be good if it has the right filters in it. There are a lot of different great filters out there. I think you want to just make sure that you test what's in your water. So you know what's there? A company called TapScore where you can get your water for municipals or wells and they have two separate ones. Find out what's in there and then find out what the filters filter for. Did they filter for chlorine? Are they filtering for heavy metals? Are they filtering for carcinogens? And there are specific filters that filter at different kinds of things. A lot of times people have well water that's pretty good. You just need a charcoal filter or you need like a whole house filter to get out. sediment and some of the other things that might be on the well water. So it really, it really depends on where you are, but everybody should be drinking filtered water. - How much does air quality matter in the home? - I think air quality is really important and I think the biggest way to control air quality is to not have synthetics in your home, which, you know, you want to have cotton and linen and wool and things like that in your furnishings. You know, most people don't think when they go on by like a couch or furniture to ask whether it's sprayed with scotch guard or these chemical coverings that are supposed to protect from stains and things like that, but they're actually a very toxic exposure. The other thing is particle boards. Like a lot of our furniture has this put together with like fake wood that's like particle board and it's got all these glues and synthetics that are off-gassing while they're just sitting in your home. So the indoor air quality has a lot to do with what are we putting into our homes. The other thing that's really important that most people don't think about, and we didn't have to think about this, was mold exposure. And mold is a major health stressor for a lot of people in their homes, especially if you live in an area where there's moisture, you know, like if you have moisture, you'll have mold. That's kind of the way to think about it. And you can filter, you know, air filters are great. Like I use a rabbit air filter for instance, but if you have mold, that's not gonna touch it. Like if you have, you know, significant mold or significant moisture in your home. So it's really about making the environment as natural as possible and to make sure you check for things like moisture. You can get a moisture meter at like on Amazon or Home Depot or something like that. And you can just go and check, look for moisture in your walls and your bathrooms. And that will tell you whether you're likely to have mold or not. - What is one thing in every child's bedroom you would remove? - Devices. There should be no digital devices in children's rooms. - For each. - One of my listeners sent me a message that absolutely killed me. She said, "Alex, zebra toothpaste tablets are officially the number one product you've ever recommended to my family." I thought, "That's incredible." You know, it's not a $5,000 sauna. It's not a fancy supplement, it's toothpaste. Somewhere there is a six-year-old refusing to leave the house without his little toothpaste tablet like it's his little emotional support animal. And you know what? Same for me. I cannot live without my zebra toothpaste anymore. I travel constantly. I love the new travel-sized version that has been a complete game changer. They've got mint, they've got coconut. And if you are tired of exploding toothpaste tubes in your carry-on, do the toothpaste tablets. There's no sticky crap. No toothpaste oozing all over your skin care because TSA decided to treat your suitcase like it was being launched from a rocket launcher or something, right? You just pop one in your mouth, you chew it up, brush, it foams like regular toothpaste. It's clean, it's easy. They intentionally leave out both fluoride and hydroxy-apetited zebra because that's the philosophy behind their formula. Black and white ingredients. Get it? Zebra. Honestly, my toothbrush kind of feels unemployed if I don't have zebra anymore. Go to jezebra.com, use code "Alex" for 10% off. That's jezebra.com code "Alex" for 10% off. Being an adult is basically just finding out that everything important requires follow-up. You think that you've handled something once and then five years later, someone's like, no, that expired, that change, that was never processed. Good luck. That's voter registration. People assume that they're fine because they registered once in college or because they voted a few years ago or because they have this touching faith in administrative competence. Meanwhile, all it takes is moving homes, even within the same state, changing your name, not voting in a while or some random outdated info, and suddenly you've got a problem. Here's what's wild. Tens of millions of eligible Americans either aren't registered or aren't even sure if they are. So let's not do the thing where we find out too late and then act shocked. Let's just be adults for 30 seconds. Go to realalexclark.com/vote. I made it really simple. You can check your registration status. That's all it does. Just tells you if you're registered to vote or not and if you're not, register you to vote. Not even telling you who to vote for. Realalexclark.com/vote. Imagine two families. They both have a child with eczema and allergies and ADHD and anxiety. One family can afford to make one change this month. What's the one change that gives them the biggest return on investment? I think going organic would be the biggest and most impactful change because you're talking about something you're putting in your mouth three times a day and into your body three times a day. And that is a very easy way to reduce your total load of toxins is to just make sure the food that you're eating is organic. When somebody asks, what do you do? How do you answer? I am a children's health advocate and I run a nonprofit organization that tries to encourage people to look at the root causes of chronic health conditions. And the other thing is that I'm very interested in documenting the success stories of people who have overcome all kinds of chronic conditions with their children and putting that into the medical literature. So for instance, we have a couple of peer-reviewed studies documenting cases of kids who have fully reverse their autism. We have three kids who fully reverse their autism. We've been documenting this phenomenon for over 20 years and people have been documenting even longer than that. But nobody pays attention or listens until you say it's in the peer-reviewed literature. So actually running research and getting publications into the literature is very important to us because all of a sudden people stand up and they're like, wait a minute, this is a peer-reviewed paper saying that autism is reversible. I'm listening. Yeah, that's really smartly. You guys are doing that. And so what is documenting hope? So documenting hope is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. We were founded to both educate parents and practitioners about the new childhood epidemics and the root causes contributing to these conditions. But we are also dedicated to doing new research that nobody else will do. I used to work in the pharmaceutical industry. I worked for medical device companies. And I understand how much of our medical research is funded by the healthcare industry. And nobody's going to fund a research on healthy food and sunlight and clean water and co-regulation of the nervous system. Who's going to fund that stuff? But it's so important. And I was saying before about Shin Rinyoko and how it required some Japanese scientists to study and measure the importance of forest bathing. For people to take it seriously. So I feel like the part of the role of documenting hope is for us to document the things that other people can't or won't do so that we can say there's a huge body of evidence. Well, we've lost common sense in medicine. And so to the average person, you hear like, why in the world would we need to spend money to fund a study to say that being outside in nature and a forest is going to be good for you? But for conventional medicine doctors, exactly what you're saying. If it is not in some study, they literally will not take it seriously. And so we have to go back to basics and do common sense studies to get back to common sense medicine, which sadly, we have gotten away from in the United States. That's exactly right. And the thing that I see happen all the time is parents will go into the pediatrician. Let's say that they have a child with autism. And they'll go into the pediatrician. They'll say, I heard that diet change can help my child reuse their symptoms. And the pediatrician will inevitably say, oh, there's no evidence of that. Yeah. You don't believe this. You don't believe they're changing their diet. You don't need to do that. Makes one important part in my hair out. But I'll tell you what, though. When we did these two case reports of kids who had reversed their autism through diet was a major cornerstone of that. So once we had published those papers in peer review, all of a sudden I have conventional pediatricians saying, oh, I didn't even know. What sort of diet helped them reverse their autism? Bio-individual again. So the first case report that we published was a set of twin girls. And they basically had gone to kind of like a paleolithic diet, like whole foods, all organic, but bio-individual, like taking out any sensitivities. They were gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free, corn-free. And those were the things that are glyphosate sprayed in GMO and things that are so highly processed. So of course, their daughters were reacted to it. So they took out those reactive foods and fed them an organic whole foods diet. In the second paper we published was actually a really interesting one because it was a very specific therapeutic diet called the specific carbohydrate diet. And this was something that was developed by a woman named Elaine Gatchell. Because her son had Crohn's disease. And so what it is is it requires eating only specific types of carbohydrates, so taking out the refined carbohydrates, the sugars, the processed grains, and then eating just sort of root vegetables and things like that as carbohydrates. But it's all about improving digestion, improving the microbiome, it's bio-individual. So again, I've probably documented hundreds of cases of autism reversal and everybody does something different. There's a lot of gluten-free, there's a lot of case-in-free that happens, but that's kind of like the 101. - So I have a question for the families that have kids with the type of autism where it's like they only eat three foods. They'll only eat chicken fingers and macaroni and cheese and a donut or whatever. And that's all they eat all day long 'cause they will scream and freak out. How do you transition those kids on their food? - It's very challenging for that parent. Like I don't want to minimize how hard that is. Like I get it, that's really, really hard and these kids have picky eating habits for specific reasons, but it absolutely can happen. So a lot of times it is about just rethinking how you're managing their diet. So you might, for instance, instead of like cold turkey one day just like pulling out the gluten in the dairy and changing everything, you might start putting things on their plate and slowly introducing more and more foods. And eventually, you know, like there's certain strategies that a lot of speech-language pathologists who are specializing in nutrition and picky eating, they'll teach you to do. For instance, like, you don't have to have the child eat the food, you just have them touch it, smell it, lick it. You lick it to process, right? In America, we are so used to fast, cheap, quick, easy. So when we were trying to change our child's diet, we're like, what's the quickest, easiest, fastest way to do this? This is a little bit more of a marathon than it is a sprint, where you have a long-term plan and you slowly over time get your child on board. There are people to help, though. There's two great resources out there that I know of, actually three. There's a woman named Shandy Waters who has a business called Speaking of Health and Wellness and she helps with complex picky eaters. Another one named Lena Lovinsky, and she also helps complex picky eaters. They're both speech-language pathologists. - I should have one of them on that show. - You should, you should absolutely have them on. They are brilliant. Like it feels like such a mountain. You just described what the 90% of parents who have kids with autism, that's their daily life, is chicken nuggets, it's white foods, only pasta. And the idea of, I mean, the child's gonna tantrum when they don't get their food. It is going to cause so much stress and chaos to change our food, but it's possible. It happens all the time. You just need a little help and a little support and these are people who can help do that. - Okay, and then you said there was three, what's the third? - The other one is a wonderful nutritionist, named Julie Matthews. She has a book called Neuroshin Hope, and she has a book called The Autism Diet Plan, Personalized Autism Diet Plan. And she is an expert in doing this for decades, helping parents learn how to change their child's diet and get them the nutrition they need. Those three are like gold, just absolutely wonderful resources. - And you're working on a documentary, right? What's this documentary gonna cover? When can we expect it? Where can we watch it? - Well, the working title is Documenting Hope. And it is gonna be made by Rob Herring. Rob Herring did a documentary recently called The Need to Grow. - Yeah, Love Rob, he's so great. So he's gonna basically help us tell our story about how we've been documenting the stories of kids reversing their chronic conditions for a long time. Because people don't know, people don't know. What did they do? They go to their pediatrician, their pediatrician says, "Not possible, door shuts." That's not true. We've been trying to get the word out by sharing people's stories. So on our website, we have tons of stories of kids who fully reverse their conditions. So we need more of that out there. That's why we're making a documentary film. 'Cause we think through media, we're gonna be able to reach people, not only to let them know that it's possible, but also how to do it. - You're in the Charlotte area. Do you guys do any cool events or meetups or things with your nonprofit? - Not yet, but we're working on that. One of the things that I've always wanted to do is have sort of like a boots on the ground, grassroots piece of this. So we actually have an online community called Healing Together. We're parents who, you know what I was talking about before, who feel so isolated and alone, they come into an online community, where we meet twice a month with an integrative doctor and health coaches, and we just sit there and talk about how to help their kids get better. They ask questions, they're like, "Oh, my child's constipated, what do I do?" And we just sit there on Zoom and we talk, and we support each other, and it's amazing. And we actually have a lot of dads who join. In fact, one of my most favorite experiences in this community is we had this dad who came in in 2023, his son had been diagnosed with autism, and he was kind of overwhelmed. And, you know, he was in our calls and asking questions is so active. So active, usually it's the moms. So this was just like a special gift for us to have this dad in our community. And then he just sort of disappeared for a while. We hadn't heard him from him for like two years, and then all of a sudden he reached out a couple months ago and said, "I just want to let, you know, my son no longer has autism." - Unreal. - And, you know, we were all kind of like, "Yes, I mean, he just basically needed to like go away, lock in, change the diet, do the things, and now his stories on our YouTube channel." So we're super excited about these kinds of stories that are coming out of our community. That's online, anybody can join. We're trying to move that into the actual real world though, and eventually have some grassroots meetups in person. - Where can people find you on social media? - So we're at Documenting Hope on Instagram, on X, on YouTube, Facebook, and we have a website, Documenting Hope.com. - If you could offer one remedy to heal a sick culture, it could be physically, emotionally, or spiritually, what would that remedy be? - Get in nature, get in nature, do it. It's really amazing how far we have become removed from the natural rhythms of life, but it holds all the answers. Nature is infinitely intelligent. The wisdom in nature is just something that we don't even know. Like we can wrap our brains around that what is possible through our natural environment. So I think that is the first step that all people who want to get healthy need to take is to just get in nature. - Yeah, we have so many mutual friends from Vani Hari, the food babe, to Hillary Boynton from School of Lunge, Dr. Temple in Charlotte. You are so awesome. I love how knowledgeable you are about this, how much hope you bring, which is great. And I really enjoyed this. So thank you for coming on Culture Pot the Carry. - Thank you, Alex. - If this conversation made you rethink what's really driving childhood illness, make sure you share this episode with another parent who needs to hear it. New episodes come out every Monday on Thursday at 6 p.m. Pacific, 9 p.m. Eastern, wherever you get your podcast. Please leave us a five star review on Apple or Spotify to support the show. This episode is crucial to share to every mom group chat that you're in and your Instagram story. This content is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be taken as medical advice. Always consult with a qualified healthcare professional regarding any questions or decisions related to your health or medical care. I'm Alex Clark and this is Culture Pot the Carry. (upbeat music) [MUSIC]