Ep 178: Is Your Child’s Diet Causing Behavior Problems or Mysterious Symptoms?

Podcast Introduction and Teaching Mission 0:00

Good morning. Welcome to Connect My Brain podcast. I am your host, Dr. Laura Hanson, and I'm excited to be with you. where I am going to be teaching neurology to future pediatric diplomates in the chiropractic profession. It's one of my greatest passions, just like I bring to the podcast. I love to teach. really brings out my personality, I think, and I just I really enjoy it. And I feel like I've been given a little bit of a gift to take big concepts and bring them down to nuggets for people to understand so that they can make a difference in their lives, in the children's lives in your health, your well-being, how you make health care decisions.

So today what we're going to focus on is how we make energy in the body and how it has an impact on your health. And then of course, depending upon your state of health, when you got pregnant, The mom is actually the driver of what's called the mitochondria, which is an organelle inside of a cell, every one of our cells have it. And it's known as the powerhouse of the cell. It's actually what makes ATP or energy. I'm going to put up this chart for anybody that does watch the podcast live just so that we can get an idea of what we're really talking about.

How the Body Makes Energy 2:00

So I'm going to hold this up for a second so the camera can really get it. And you can see, maybe I can find a link to a picture so then I could show you and what I am showing you for the Podcast audience is literally the biosynthetic reaction of making ATP and all the pathways that are involved. And this is a big deal because where does it all start? It starts with our food source. So our proteins, our carbohydrates, and of course our fatty acids, all three are important. When you kind of think about over time, You know, there's been some fad, FAD kind of diets that want to take one thing out over another.

Is there supposed to be a balance? Absolutely. Are there suppose to good choices? absolutely. Now, to really know what works right for you, this is where I think lab work is so important. Let me give you an example. I've been in practice 30 years, and when I was trying to figure out what my own food sensitivities were, probably the very first test I did was probably 28 years ago, of course, I had many things that my body was actually demonstrating a reaction to. And so with how I merged into this three tier approach, mechanical, chemical brain, I was to reduce the culprits, not just reduce.

That's really not the right word. I had to remove them. Why? Because even a little is just going to create a LITTLE inflammation. A lot is going create even more inflammation and as you begin to clean yourself out, your body will actually get more sensitive to certain culprits because you've cleaned yourself out where before you actually had created more of a tolerance or an acceptance that I eat McDonald's, I get a stomach ache, but I slurp it down with a Coca-Cola. I burp a couple of times and I'm okay.

No, that's not really me. I don't eat McDonald's. Haven't eaten at McDonald since I was probably 15 years old. But isn't it amazing how certain businesses stay around even through COVID, businesses closing down, inflation? There's certain ones that just keep on going. It always cracks me up. And then you see them catch on to the bandwagon. steak and shake is now advertising its beef tallow french fries. So you have to be aware of how things operate and watch and see the quality of the food that you're actually getting.

So when I started this food sensitivity world, I had to remove several things and give my body a chance to heal. And this is some of steps that led me into building the three-tier approach and the chemistry component. Because it takes time and it's not an automatic change in your gut. which is ultimately going to impact the cell, which has ultimately gonna impact, the mitochondria.

Food Sensitivities, Inflammation, and Healing Time 6:00

I'm gonna keep tying it back to that, cause I don't wanna lose that concept. And why, when you probably have heard this, that like children that are identified as being on the spectrum, they have lots of belly issues. In fact, cases like about 20 years ago, that was like the biggest thing that people were identifying in their children was stomach issues. Now, the reason it takes a little bit of time to heal this is we have to give time for cellular turnover. There really isn't a test that could tell me exactly how well an individual cell is functioning.

It's all based on what's going on in the body. And then, you know, working in healthcare that everything goes back to the cell because you're feeding yourself. Don't forget, in our Krebs cycle biochemistry map, it all started with food sources. And so when we start to deflame ourself, I'll call it, let's just say maybe that cell is functioning somewhere around 65%. And then maybe the first month of cleaning, because your stomach cells are going to turn over about every 21 to 30 days. That's the fastest turnover of cells in the whole body.

And therefore, you have to let it learn that something new is going on. So for example, maybe that first month you didn't drop below 65, but you don't have enough time for healing. Maybe the second month, okay, we went up by 5%. It isn't until after 90 days, at least, That the patterns, everything comes back to the pattern. What are you doing inside of yourself? And that's every part of you. It's not just your gut health, it's your mental health. And what we're trying to do is to build metabolic capacity.

And that means that I can endure something, I could adapt to that endurance, and I recover quickly from the endurance and gain strength and energy over time. I think it's similar with heart rate variability. So heart-rate variability is the rhythm between the breath and the heartbeat. And what we should see is, the heartrate go up when you inhale, and heart rates go down when exhale. Go up, when breathe in. Down, breathe out. And that's a rhythm. That's balance. When I'll start people, we know that is biofeedback.

And when I start on bio feedback, lots of times this is one of the biggest areas that I can see that their endurance is really being taxed. Their ability to make energy, make ATP is being And that will always bring me back to mitochondrial health because that is the organelle inside of the cell that manufactures this energy and the respiration to the sell. So we have to kind of get past superficial levels. We have realize that this is layer upon layer, upon, layer on layer. Just like development.

Development builds the most internal components first and then those layers come out. And whatever you're going through at the time of conceiving a baby plays a huge impact on the outcome of that child. And again, that's why I'm a big proponent for working on your state of health prior to making a baby. So back to my personal food sensitivity test. What I started doing was I starting looking at this every year for about the first three to five years because I wanted to see that I was making the difference.

And as I took those foods out of my body and worked on detoxifying my stomach and rebuilding my microbiome, there was great improvement. So by the third or fourth year, there was only a few things. So then I decided to wait about five years. And now I do it about every five and there's only one food that continues to be highly reactive inside of me, and that is chicken eggs. And I will tie that back to you because I do believe we should be able to talk about vaccines.

Mitochondria, Fatigue, and Child Development 12:00

I am completely vaccinated. As a child, I did not get 54 shots. In fact, there was only one shot that I got at that time, but it had lots of stuff in it. And remember the big bump and I still have that scar on my arm. But then, and even today, One of the adjuvants in vaccines is egg, and the eggs that they typically use are chicken. So when you put something in your body and you're driving an immune reaction, everything that's in that shot you will react to because you're bringing a neuroimmune interface together.

So whatever's in there, it's having an impact on that human physiology. And that is why I continue to this day having that reaction to chicken eggs. And I love eggs, I was a competitive bodybuilder and my gosh, before I knew all of this, i was eating sometimes 12 egg whites a day. Then I also started having lots of trouble with my skin, later found out that the egg white in some people will generate acne. So as I move through this journey of getting to know my own human makeup, as i removed eggs from my diet completely, my skin cleared up, I didn't have any like outward body reaction.

This is also what I think is a big misconception is that People, if they don't experience something that they can truly identify as a reaction, it's hard for people to connect that dot. Now, though, If I eat a chicken egg, I get a stomach ache. I don' t get stomachache with duck egg or quail egg. But I also don t eat A lot of egg anymore. I tried using a little bit of that from Bob's Mill egg replacement for baking. I don't like the consistency of what it is that you're trying to bake so I just use either duck or quail.

Quail is very small so it ends up being quite a few quails to finish a recipe. Okay, so that's an example of what I went through with a protein and a fat. Because that is what eggs break down to is protein fat, okay? So back then, of course, my energy was always up. Now, it's so important to be so tuned in to my own metabolic capacity. And what do I need to do in order to maintain that capacity at 65 years old? and that's how old I am. So it really interests me to kind of share this information because there's so many young women out there that are either pregnant, preparing to have a baby, already had a Baby, and you're in a whirlwind of how so Many children are not developing the way that they should.

And one of the things that I noticed, especially in the last now five or six years, the kids have so little energy and they're fatiguing so quickly. And the big picture idea is that does not match a child at all. If we were to play the matching game, and I turned over a picture of a chicken, and then I put turned a over picture a cow, they didn't match. And that's really important in order to understand one of the very first things that does show up when the body is not in optimal health is fatigue.

Okay, so let's kind of let that marinate for just a minute. So what is generating that in the child has to do with us as parents? What are we role modeling? As well as how are feeding ourselves? How much outdoor time are getting? how much movement are you getting Because what you have to do in order to make ATP is you to use ATP, which drives the cell to conditioning and then it becomes a pattern and Then it comes you get your like you're getting your deposit back where you feel fantastic all the time You should be waking up ready to go your children should Be waking Up ready To go and you know now we're going into the holiday season Depending upon when you listen to this particular podcast, for me, it's November 3rd, 2025. And we just finished Halloween and we're going into Thanksgiving.

which I really feel like it's the forgotten holiday.

Parent Health, Epigenetics, and Holiday Stress 18:00

When you go to the stores, I went to store yesterday, the mall, everything's Christmas. And we haven't even had Thanksgiving. I think that Thanksgiving, it needs to be a pause. A pause where before the hustle and bustle, we make a plan. How are we going to go through and enjoy our holiday season, or are we just gonna go, well, you know, it's the holidays and I have to do this, this this and this. Slow down. Savor, savor the breath. Saver your day, savour your life. This is such an important time for all of us.

And there's been so much going on in our world. And honestly, as an audience and myself, we don't have a point of reference for all the stuff that's going on. And even that alone can be incredibly fatiguing. I was also listening to a little documentary on what was called Urban Living. And urban living had to do with the hustle and bustle of living in a city. I live in Atlanta, Georgia, and I can tell you over probably the last five years, this has even become more intensified than before. The way people drive on the road, the way they just whip in front of you without any warning, And without any regard of really my life, are you going to cause an accident?

The way people send gestures out their window, how people are talking to one another, well, no talking, even that. We are becoming so withdrawn. And remember, that's a reflex. You can go listen to another podcast on that. you don't have to always be developmentally delayed to have primitive reflexes. Anything that you do on a chronic level, wow, think about this for a minute. Anything you on chronic levels, that means all the time. What behaviors do you have? What thoughts do have you? Are you speaking life over yourself, your children, you world?

what is it that is going on? What's your lifestyle? What is going inside of your body? what are you doing to take good care of you body. What are doing you to good take care you? Anything, any practice we have. Body, mechanical. Chemical, food, alcohol, drugs. Brain, mental health, thoughts. As long as you keep doing it, I'm going to rub my brain right over here on my desktop, this is what you're laying down and this what your telling yourself this who you are. And what I am concerned about in looking at these children, they come in first of all when you do an assessment, And for whatever reason, how they perceive it, like they'll be doing like a little interactive metronome assessment.

And they look up at me and go, oh, did I do bad? These are kids, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 years old. and they already have the perspective of themselves as doing everything bad. That's not healthy. And as long as that is their thought life, that it's how they're shaping their brain. And that's the difference between us as adults and children. You and I can have a wake up call and say, hey, snap out of it. But a child, they are getting wired up with these impressions. They're getting wire up this information.

You know, I was speaking to a mom who's really having some struggles with one of her children. And we're going to just say more of an adult child. But the pattern that's been practiced for at least forever I think has really reached a complete explosive part to where the adult child's body is absolutely working against her. And this is chronic. We don't change the thought pattern. You can't get yourself to go in another direction. There's certain things that have to be accomplished in order to move it in that direction, it's absolutely imperative that we take a moment and we realize how far reaching our thought life is, how we feed our body, and how we see ourselves in the world.

And then all of this, all this goes back to a cellular level. I believe there is truly cellular energy outside of a chromosome making a gene. and I belief that these genes called de novo genes I think These are truly reflecting this idea of cellular energy because the de novo gene talks about how things are being passed down. It's not a chromosome, but it's literally creating a sequencing pattern that can be identified in the human body. And then this concept of epigenetics, I talk about this quite a bit.

But everything that I'm saying from your thought life to how you feed yourself to to, how do you treat yourself? All of that is what the word EPI stands for. It means what plays upon a gene, meaning that our genes can actually be influenced to do something different. Okay, so if all of that is true, why not step into a new thought pattern? A new lifestyle change, a empowerment of who you are, what you've passed down to your child and who your family is. And especially as we go into the holiday season, I'm really getting on a soapbox, but I do want to say this and I hope and pray that the right ears hear this.

Investing in Child Wellness and Family Support 26:00

I've had this experience many times in my office where this time of the year I am going to be working with a family. And we need something. We need particularly a lab test. And some of these tests are not cheap. Unfortunately, no. Insurance, unless you follow the diagnostic statistical manual and you go to a doctor on your insurance plan, who can validate the reason for the test it's not gonna be paid for. And that's one concept in and of itself. You have to invest in you. you cannot only make decisions about your health based on what the insurance is gonna cover.

If you don't like what your insurance will provide, then find something else. Dave Ramsey is a great author and speaker on how to build your own HSA account. And then there are insurances out there that, like Liberty HealthShare, that's one that I'm actually with, I have the choices to go where I want to and I pay into my membership every single month and in case I need something, then I get to choose where I want to go. And you have an insurance card and all of that kind of stuff. So these are some resources that you can at least consider.

Every year, I give back some families here during this time, and we need data. And we're talking about the wellbeing of a child. And you know, providers can't see inside of you. You have to have this data. It is so important in order to bring that three tier approach together, mechanical, chemical brain. The feedback that I will get, well, you it's the holidays and we have plan for this and plan that. No, I don't understand that. I've certainly gone through periods in my life that I had to go without in order to make sure that what I needed for my family was taken care of because health is not an option.

Health is the greatest gift you can have. And teaching your child that sometimes we have to do less so that we can do what we need to right now so we get beyond therapy and office visits. You're teaching them how to care for themselves. We have be that role model to our child. But I truly believe that as a parent, you must do this first for yourself. One of the things that we do here at Connect My Brain, when we start down our nutrition component of program, we encourage parents to do it with their child.

And I can't tell you how many people have come in, especially the dads, and told me that they have never felt that good. So if we can support you as a parent, you will be a better role model to your child, You will feel better, and you'll make more energy. You'll have a new perspective on life and will bring longevity to yourself so that you can be around with your kids and enjoy things with your kids, running to that next event, getting outside and playing pickleball or tennis or pass a football and thoroughly enjoy it.

Have a hula hoop contest, rock climb, ride bicycles. If we promote this within ourselves and have the expectation that our child will do it and should do, and is going to do. You will turn all kinds of systems around. The human body must have metabolic capacity in order to thrive. If you don't, you're merely surviving. And over time, it's going have a huge impact. And the typical thing that it hits first is that energy level. And these children, they're growing, their developing, and they are ready.

They should be open to learn. Learning should fun and exciting. When they drag it in and I ask them, how was school today? Okay. What did you learn? Nothing. Wow, we don't just have a generation, a couple now, of spectrum, attention, all the other buzzwords. We have children that have no energy and they're not thriving. You can see it in their eyes. Do they have dark circles under their eye? Do the have bumps on the back of their arms? Are they wanting to play video games versus going outside and riding a bicycle?

Do they avoid contact sports? Is there little or no talking going on in your household? What's the sleep quality like? what is the emotional tone of the home? Are we talking? are we enjoying? Now, to me, there's two ends of, I was going to say spectrum, but I don't want to tie that to autism. So there are two end. We can either have no energy and just sit around, get overweight, brain fog, lack of excitement, or we can run ourselves right into the ground. That's the other component that I hear a lot.

Well, we have to do this. We have do that. Okay. I think it is very important for a child to be involved in karate or sport. but we can also be over scheduled. And we also have our priorities where we're more focused thinking that's going to fix the problem versus fixing the problems. The other types of situations I've seen are canceling an appointment so that the event that is going on at the rec center,

Membership, Resources, and Closing Invitation 34:00

whatever, took priority over the child's program of well-being and building the consistency that is needed in order to change the brain. Here at Connect My Brain, we have a program that absolutely requires that you come into the office. Some of our stuff we do at home, but not the meat and potatoes of it. It's working with us. And children are here for 80 minutes, a minimum of two times per week. And I don't think that's a big chunk of time, but it is a snapshot in time. So our goal is to not keep you here forever and a day, But rather, let's focus on what's going on that is disrupting this child's developmental journey.

Restore him mechanically, chemically. Brain. and then be done. You're always welcome to come back for adjustments, chiropractic adjustments. But what's at the heart is trying to restore so that we have a well-balanced child, a child that goes to school and thrives, A child wakes up and can't wait to show his science project to his classmates. A Child that is making lots of friends, enjoying being outside and thriving in every element of their life, not just one. Children should be very well-rounded.

They should happy. Check out the environment. All of these things, all of this things can be re-navigated. You do have to put in the time and you do, have do the things for the inside of your body like, what are you eating? But the payoff, the dividend, is fantastic. Now, maybe this is the first podcast that you've ever heard from Connect My Brain, and you're going, wow, that's a lot. Well, yeah, it is. But it's the truth. And it the information that I want to share with the world, my community, the But we want you to check us out.

Maybe from this, something in your mind came up and you just want to ask a question, want have a conversation. I love talking to you. People send me contact forms all the time.I am the one that will call you back.Maybe you've heard a few podcasts and say, hey, I want get to know this group a little bit deeper. So we want you to check out our Connect My Brain membership, CMB membership. It's very moderately priced. And you can dip your toe in and get to know us at a deeper level. That app is designed to show you what children do as they develop.

So you might have a child whose age is mentioned on that app, and you may have child who is older but you can look back and say, wow, I didn't realize how important crawling was and my child never crawled and how that would impact the timing between both sides of the brain. We want to offer resources because it is an issue today. One in six kids are not developing as expected. If this speaks to you, please reach out. Thanks for tuning in today. Be blessed.