How Soil Health and Food Quality Shape Children’s Neurological Health

Opening Remarks and Webinar Introduction 0:00

You can indulge in sweets and treats, holidays. You don't wanna take it too far, but at the same time, it's the bulk of what you eat that's most important. Your habits, your daily habits are what's critical. And you're up against a marketing machine that is marketing to your kids, and you are up a food industry that knows how to make the food addictive to you kids. So there's that addictive part that we have to remember. That's what your up agains as a parent. This is an example. Kids will adapt to what they're presented at home, right?

And if they only presented chicken fingers, pizza, and cereal, they are not going to expand. Hi, welcome to the MAPS webinar series, Healing Tomorrow's Future. We are thrilled to be bringing you this series packed with valuable information and education within our community. My name is Honey Rinusella and I'm the Executive Director of MAPS, the Medical Academy of Pediatrics and Special Needs. Within these webinars, we're able to empower clinicians on the knowledge and tools to support patients facing a variety of health challenges.

For more information on MAPPs or to register for a conference, please visit us at www.medmaps.org. That's www dot medmapps dot org. Thanks for joining us on this journey towards a brighter, healthier future.

Dr. Gaitanisu2019 Background and Lecture Overview 1:32

Hi, everybody. My name is Dr. Larry Polewski. I'm a New York State licensed pediatrician, and I am here in Charlotte, North Carolina in March 2026 at the MAPS Conference, Medical Academy of Pediatric and Special Needs, medmaps.org. And today I m talking to Dr John Gaitanis. Dr Gai-tanis, nice to see you. Great to Please tell everybody who you are, what you do, where. Absolutely. So I'm a child neurologist. I've been in New England my whole career. Graduated medical school at Brown. Did my training in Boston at Children's Hospital, Boston.

And then I have been to multiple centers between Boston and Providence throughout my career, but currently in a private practice situation. Okay, so today you gave a lecture, and why don't you tell people what the title is and then a brief overview of the subject. And I'd like to really get into the topic matter and how it's important for children. So what I spoke on today was really a little history of how we went from GMOs, genetically modified crops, to this increased rise of herbicide and pesticide use.

And then I gave a little warning of what's ahead in the future. So that's kind of the cruxed lecture that was born really of a personal interest and background in agriculture. I opened the lecture explaining that before medical school, I really saw myself working in Agriculture or Environmental Science and made a pivot to medicine later, but having majored and studied horticulture and doing my senior thesis on peach breeding in particular, Back then I had a healthy appreciation for a how traditional breeding work and then it gave me an appreciation For how this knew at that time what was new in the night early 90s idea of genetically modified Organisms was gonna evolve right and I remember even back then we've approached it with a little bit of skepticism But I don't think we understood what to come was not known and So when you go back to the early 90s, what was being told to us, was that genetically modified organisms would lower pesticide use, would be safer for the environment.

Because the idea was you would breed resistance into the crop and therefore lower pesticides use. What actually transpired, however, was that what we did is we bred pesticide resistance into the crop, allowing us to use far more pesticides than we've ever used. And so suddenly you have this onset of Roundup Ready Seeds. farmers were sold a system of both seed and pesticide herbicide, which all that's happened since is it's exploded the use of herbicides. That's absolutely the wrong direction from what we had hoped, but it gives a little bit of a warning for how we use technology,

GMOs, Herbicides, and Broken Promises 4:17

how technology is being sold to us, and really thinking of what the true implications will be when the technology's being proposed for purpose A, whether it is actually going to live up to those, to what those promises are or is it just gonna be a series of broken promises? Which I think is the story of GMOs was really a serious of broke promises. So I started medical school in 1983. The dean of the medical stood up within the first five minutes of medical and said to the class of 1987, nutrition is not a field of medicine.

And so Western medicine is predominantly practiced that way. So why is the nutrition or the issues of GMO and pesticides, why's it important to pediatrics and why it is important for parents who have children with special needs? It's really amazing that that statement was made. First of all, I shared in my lecture, shared a similar statement that was me on my interview trail where I spoke in an interview for medical school. I talked about the importance of agriculture and the anesthesiologist interviewing me stopped me and said, what does any of this have to do with medicine?

And, you know, it seems inherently obvious. It should be that nutrition and agriculture are completely tied into human health. And there are so many reasons to support in pediatrics. But what I would argue is that the health of humans is really directly linked to the help of our soil. You can't separate those two. those two have a very, very strong interaction because our food, with the exception of seafood, so, I mean, that really gets the help of the oceans, which is a whole other topic, microplastics, et cetera.

So our oceans have their own problems, right? But with exception seafood everything we ingest and what we're made of is coming from soil, ultimately. and soil health has eroded, and as soil has erupted, human health is eroding. The two have really followed. So the rise of chronic disease really mirrors the drop in soil quality. And with the dropping soil qualities, the drops in food quality, then there's this rise in chronic diseases. I would say that if you really want to trace back chronic to the source, You go beyond even the nutrition, but you go really from nutrition.

You actually bring it back all the way to the agricultural processes used to grow that food. And so that's really the truth. So what is the value of the soil that we're missing that is lost? It mirrors so much human health. So one of the things we talk about is microbial diversity. That whole area, when we went to medical school, we didn't ever talk the gut microbiome. We didn''t really think about any of these critters that make up most of our body composition. But now we really are beginning to have a greater appreciation of gut microbium.

Same is true in soil. Really think of it as a living organism. It is teeming with a wide array of bacteria, a species within the soil, And unfortunately, the chemicals we use to kill weeds are also killing many of the bacteria in the soil, are killing the bacterium in our gut. And so that microbial diversity, just like it is in intestines or our skin, that's just declining over time. So many people don't know that there are about 100 trillion bacteria, just bacteria alone, that it's lining the body and the human intestinal system is maybe 24 to 26 feet in length that has all these micro...

bacteria and other organisms. So what's happening to our soil when we're eating foods that are being grown in depleted soil?

Why Soil Health Matters for Children 7:54

Yeah, so many things. Well, first, it affects the child mostly because, I mean, children, when you think of soil quality, there's a lot of, for example, glyphosate or atrazine or any of these really common herbicides. they will absorb into the soil, and they stay there, they have a fairly long half-life. For a child who's ingesting these herbicides, their bodies are smaller, so the percentage for body weight is much greater in terms of their dose. Children are much more affected. The nutrient quality of food has declined as well in the last decades.

And who needs nutrients more than any other population? It's children. They're actively growing. So we're getting a combination of more toxic herbicides and pesticides combined with lower nutrient-quality. What could go wrong to the kids that need it the most? So I just want to stress something. I don't think parents really understand why good gut bacteria and good microorganisms in the gut are directly related to the health of not only the child, but the children's brain. And so we're losing the proper microbiome.

One thing that you mentioned is the role that the pesticides play in depleting minerals. So we are losing minerals in addition to nutrients. And then you have the toxicity of the chemicals themselves. Correct. And so how is that affecting children? So across the board, so you, have again, the lower nutrient density of food itself that they're eating, which is really directly linked to that lower soil quality. So you've got lower nutrients density to the food with the increased toxic exposure. in an actively developing human being where you need that growth and development demands those things.

It's a really dangerous combination. And then coupled with the fact that when you think about the effect that the pesticides we're using actively kill the bacteria in our gut. And the majority of those bacteria are susceptible to even that trace contents. And those bacterias, so that gut-brain highway, like the neurotransmitter production that happens in the gut, the role for monitoring inflammation and regulating it, when you have a healthy gut you produce butyrate. So butyrite enhances mitochondrial function, it lowers inflammation.

A healthy cut produces short chain fatty acids, which improves mitochondria function and lowers information. So now you wipe those things out in a developing kid. So they can't regulate inflammation. Their mito function is not what it should be at that critical time when they're growing and developing. Right. We're seeing one in six children with neurodevelopmental disabilities, one and 31 with autism, 1 in 10 with asthma, One in nine with ADHD, almost one-in-five with mental, emotional, psychological conditions.

Every four child has at least one allergic condition. One in five is obese. Should parents really be concerned about the quality of the food and where it's grown? Absolutely. I'm laughing because it seems so inherently obvious. But first of all, those numbers are frightening. They're overwhelming. And as a pediatrician, the nutrition answer is yes, absolutely. We worry about nutrition and the equality because that's one of key core components of why the chronic disease is rising. Let's think back to your medical school experience of saying nutrition is not really part of curriculum.

That's not medicine. The way that so many of us come into medicine is you treat the symptom or the disease, right? So you don't really proactively, it's reactive medicine, not proactive medicine.

Gut Microbiome, Toxins, and Chronic Disease 11:30

If you do pediatrics, you've done pediotrics for the last few decades, and you start to see more and more kids affected, then you say to yourself, this isn't the world I came into as a pediatrician. You know, at some point, rather than just treat reactively, wouldn't a wise person want to come back and think of, no, what can I do to prevent? You have that healthy baby coming into the world. How can it make sure that baby stays healthy? What we're given in medical school residency or training is really here's the med for that problem.

Correct. Right. So you have asthma, here's your inhaled steroid, and here is your preventative kit. We're not really trained, like let's look at, do you food allergies? Root cause. Do you multi-exposed? The root cause is not part of our training at all. You have arthritis, say, well here are your methotrexate, or here your monoclonal antibody, right? But none of that root causes is part the discussion. So I think at some point, and I've think we've already hit the breaking point. How much more do these numbers have to rise of chronic disease before people say, listen, we can't allow this any longer.

There's an ethical especially as a pediatrician, we have an ethical obligation to make sure we bring kids into a healthy world. It starts with preconception and not to include nutrition and quality of the feed. When we say nutrition, here's the protein content, carbohydrate content. That's not the nutrition we're talking about. We're taking about really high quality food free of toxins is critical. We absolutely cannot fight chronic disease without that core component. Okay, so you have parents listening to this.

You have physicians listening this, they're sitting on the edge of their seats, John. What foods am I giving kids that is filled with glyphosate that's ruining the bacteria in their gut, that getting into their brains, depleting them of nutrients? What food do I need to know about so that I can make a different choice? Easiest thing in the world. I know a lot of people mentioned before but first you start by shopping the outside of the supermarket, right? Never go in. The middle everything in The Middle is boxed or bagged.

So if it is a box or a bag or has fancy labeling, it's a no-go It's ultra processed. That's not gonna be a healthy food Even as you go through the perimeter though, you know when you're looking at different choices of vegetables and fruit and obviously the organic is more expensive in all those cases and And then you're also thinking, so you've got the fruits and vegetables. You've Got the meats and milk. So you got all these choices to make of what's going to be safest and healthiest. Just going on the perimeter.

First of all, that step alone and cooking from actual food and not ultra process. just that Step alone is making a huge difference. That's like 80 90% of the battle. Correct. So then, though, if you want to take it a little bit further, I think one of the things that we have to think of is when we think about how many kids are, say, like gluten intolerant, the question I always have is, are you truly gluten-intolerant or are glyphosate intolerate? Correct. So if he were to actually give, let's say wheat from a clean source, you might tolerate that wheat.

And the best way to test that is, for those who are inclined, you can buy the full wheat berry. So, wheat is grass. The wheat berries, I mean, think of it like a coffee bean. There's little berries that grow at the end of that grass, and that's what we're using to make the wheat that we have refined. But the wheat berry is not actually, we're not getting the full berry. There are three components to the berry, the only one that we are using in the flour we use is the endosperm, which has no nutrient value.

So because the endsperms doesn't contain the B vitamins that you need, it's then supplemented with folic acid. which is not a natural version of folate at all. It's a synthetic version.

Food Quality, Nutrition, and Pediatric Prevention 15:28

But if you actually ate from the entire wheat berry, you get lots of natural B9 in a naturally active form. You get a lot of protein. And here's the beauty, You can actually buy wheat berries directly from farms. There are farms that are organic that will sell you the full wheatberry. Wheat berries, they store really well. You put them in an airtight container, you can keep them for a year. And think about it like coffee. Like I grind coffee from the bean because I feel like the flavor is better.

So it's the same idea. If I'm going to bake, I'll get the wheat berry, pull the weed berry. I have my little mill that I attached to my KitchenAid. It grinds it into the flour, and then I get all three components of the berry including the bran, which is where all of that nutritive value exists. So, and if I'm buying directly from a farm, a single farm that it's sourced in one place and there are many, many farms that would do this, then suddenly, okay, now I can actually bake and enjoy all the baked goods I enjoy.

But more than that, you can then start to experiment. You could buy different forms of wheat berries and see, well, this one is good for pastries, This one's good bread. This ones a little heartier and gives you a So if you enjoy baking or if enjoy cooking, I think it gives you a lot more options. It's not that much harder to do. And honestly, it's feasible because it stores so well. So I know it seems a little more costly up front, but when you save it properly and you can store it for a year, you're actually saving money in the end.

Especially because your kid isn't sick. Right. I'm going to bring back to a weird like segue, but here's the problem is we don't cook anymore. Right, right. So when we think in nutrition, how could we separate those two? Most of us are eating out. We don' get to control the source. You only control source if you do your cooking. Correct. Let's think of what happened. Everything's integrated. everything is like tied in. But let's of how education ties into this because when you go back maybe 20 years ago, there was a big push for standardized testing in schools.

So school systems were buying all those booklets for standardized testing. It forced them to hit certain measures. So math and reading were the focus. What did every school system do? Because they're spending so much on the testing booklet, they got rid of Home Ec. They got ready to gym. they get rid art. Get rid music. Let's think of what the end result is here. Home ec, you learn how to shop. You learn to cook. We're actually teaching kids how to choose healthy foods and how they make those healthy fruits, right?

You got rid of gym, so now they don't learn the joy of exercise, all right. So we've actually destroyed now your physical health, and then how about your emotional health? Well, we get rid music, get get of art. We've destroyed their emotional help. And that goes back to the educational system. But if you don't learn it at home, now we have multiple generations that don''t know how to cook. Correct. So it sort of makes sense to reintegrate this into schools. And there are a few. There are couple of charters, but this is not a national thing.

but there a are few that will have gardening as part of it. Yes. and they'll grow the vegetables. They'll bring them back into the kitchen, teach the kids to cooked from them. What a wonderful way to help kids understand what they're putting in their body. Yeah, so there's a real push in this country for parents to give their kids snacks. It's like, there is such an attempt to overfeed kids on so many levels, not just food, but information and stimulation. But snacks are a big, big problem.

Shopping for Real Food and Safer Grains 18:58

I mean, we know fast foods are problem, you already mentioned ultra processed foods, But a lot of snack foods are in schools, are lunch boxes, parents are constantly feeding kids. What snacks do parents need to know is filled with glyphosates? Yeah, I mentioned avoid the bag, bag and box, try to avoid. A lot of them are actually labeled as being healthy. The more things that say healthy, healthy healthy it's ultra-processed. You have to be aware of that. So in terms of what has glyphosate, I mean, you can look for organic.

It doesn't mean it is glycosate-free. Correct. That's not a guarantee. Or I could say non-GMO. It probably has some, but the highest content are in breakfast cereals marketed to kids, and a lot of those bars, granola bars marketed kids. So a lotta the things that are being marketed specifically to kid as healthy foods. Granola bar, I mean what sounds more wholesome than a granolabar? And then the pouches. Yeah. What about the patches of all the fruits and vegetables? Yeah, well, that gets more complex because some of those, I mean, some will have food coloring or other additives that are not needed.

So you have to avoid like red dye 40 and yellow five. And so that's always a separate concern. Right. Toxins. But yeah, so the fruit, you know, now you get into a whole different group of pesticide use. So, you know, the dirty dozen is commonly applied to really identify these are the fruits and vegetables with the highest. So bell peppers and strawberries really have spinach, spinach very high pesticide use and all these seemingly healthy foods. And I think if you're gonna spend the extra money to buy organic, really focus on fruits and berries.

There's not a skin there to peel, right? So you can wash it and you could soak it, but that's really where you wanna spend your extra. And if it looks too good, That beautiful strawberry that looks perfect or that bell pepper with that beautiful orange color, not a flaw. Probably not organic. That's not. And if it's non-organic, you want to soak it. You want really let it sit in water. I usually let my berries, for example, sit and water for like 10 minutes. you can add a little baking soda, actually, to help try to bring out some of the pesticide.

But the fact is, if doesn't have a skin, it all can absorb in there. So you really want to be careful about eating those kinds of things on that dirty dozen. And they're all really healthy food choices, but that's where you want spend your extra money. So the three main grains or three foods that are filled with glyphosate, and we're going to talk about another couple of pesticides, wheat, soy and corn. And I think parents need to know that, and oats, I can't forget oats. And barley. All the grains.

So if we look at the food pyramid pre-February of 2026, we see that it's heavily focused on grains, And that's going to alter gut health tremendously. So yeah, I think it's a good segue into where, like, we have to remember the times when medicine was 180 degrees wrong on a topic. And so let's think back to the 80s for a second. Let's dial it back. when heart disease was a big thing, right? And it still is. But when we were making the story about cholesterol, cholesterol was evil, fat was even. So what did we do?

We sold people on this idea that they have to get rid of fat at all costs. And we replaced that with a lot of bad grains and sugar. which was just pro-inflammatory feeding metabolic syndrome, feeding type two diabetes and ultimately feeding heart disease which we're trying to prevent. And that was being promoted by really the standard medical community, which I don't think ever made appropriate amends for that error.

Snacks, Dirty Dozen Produce, and Pesticide Exposure 22:48

And so we grew up with a food pyramid that we all remember that had grains at the bottom, lots and lots of grains, healthy grains. Of course, the picture they'd show would be like the raw wheat, you know, we think of this whole grain, somebody with the bushel. That's the kind of image we got. But the reality of what we were getting was ultra processed grains with very low nutritive value. And except when we grew up, the glyphosate use was like a tenth or less of what it is today. Correct. So we grow up pre-GMO.

At least our grains were not so drenched in poison. Right. Today, it's just exponentialism. You spoke about glyphasate, but you also spoke two other very important pesticides. Besides glyphase, why don't you talk about those? Yeah, so the, you know, I think glyphosate gets all the attention, but we forget sometimes that we're using quite a few pesticides in practice. So, number two, glyphasate is by far number one in fibsias. Number two is atrazine, and three is 2-POR-D. Those are the three most common.

All three have some similar features, but in the case of atrazine, it's an endocrine disruptor. And that's been a major concern that we've seen the feminization of tadpoles from atrozine has been something we have known for more than two decades. and all that's happened since its use has gone up. And more than that, atrazine really gets into our water supply, so you don't just eat it, you drink it. So it'll get into aquifers, it gets in to wells, and it has a pretty long half-life. In areas where large quantities of atrazin are being used, there's heavy content in our supply.

2,4-D, similar, a lot of the similar foods are being applied to 2-4D. But 2 4-d is also an endocrine disruptor, also has some association with cancer and developmental delays. And so when you look at all of these, how is it doing that? You got to remember all these pesticides are designed to kill living organisms. That's what they do. How they kill is by, one is through oxidative stress and two is their mitochondrial disruption. And these are the two things that we're most concerned about in terms of a developing brain.

Correct. Right? So the brain is the most metabolically active organ and it's most metabolicly active in childhood. It needs every bit of mitochondria function it has and needs to manage oxidatives stress exceptionally well. And yet kids are consuming poisons that basically negatively impact both of those two things. Correct. And so that should raise serious concern. It does. But I think the problem is you can't taste it or see it. So it's somewhat invisible. A little bit silent to many of us. And I would question, too, whether the medical community has really done enough to do the research.

The research does exist. But have we done it enough, A, to advertise as patients, but, two, really promote the search to draw the connection to a lot of the very specific diseases that we're seeing every day? So recently, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. put out a statement with agreements with medical schools that all medical students are going to get at least 40 hours of nutrition education in medical school. And certainly, it remains to be seen how that's applied to clinical practice. So there's a little encouragement in that regard.

But all right, a parent is listening and says, Dr. Gaitanis, What do I give my kids?

Glyphosate, Atrazine, and Other Common Pesticides 26:30

What I feed myself? And so would local farms be an important step that parents could use? Can do? So I talked about shopping the aisles, real food. Because one thing Kennedy did say about the food pyramid, I mean, one major emphasis was eat real foods. If it has a list of ingredients, it's been processed on some rules. So keep it to real But beyond that, look for organic when it's something that we know has high use of pesticides. So a lot of the fruits and vegetables with those high-use. And then for grains, that's where you really should look, for non-GMO organic for breads and grains.

Try to limit those, right? Like what we grew up with, with that being the base, now he's reversing that. But I think that is actually a really good move. So for the parent who wants to know what to do, first of all, that is our job as pediatricians to counsel that. We didn't get that in med school. You and I never had that benefit. So we never got those 40 hours. And I hope the students who get the 40-hours continue that education long after graduation because they need to. But what I counsel to families is what do for myself.

You can indulge in sweets and treats, holidays. You don't want to take it too far, but at the same time, it's the bulk of what you eat that's most important. Your habits, your daily habits are what's critical. And you're up against a marketing machine that is marketing to your kids, and you are up a food industry that knows how to make the food addictive to you kids. So there's that addictive part that we have to remember. That's what your up agains as a parent. This is an example. Kids will adapt to what they're presented at home, right?

And if they only presented chicken fingers, pizza, and cereal, they are not going to expand. Right. We need to get the restaurants to take the kids' meals off the menus. Every kids meal. You have to change every meal in the school system. They deserve healthy meals more than anyone. So schools have play a role. The restaurants have a play role, but I think what we do at homes is to look for organic when it comes to fruits and vegetables. for grains, absolutely try to go non-gm or organic. If you're a little bit adventurous, buy the wheat berry, grind it, have fun with it or do some baking at home.

Then if you have a farm that you can do a CSA, you could actually buy directly from a firm that can visit, and I've done this. I visited the farmer, I asked him about his methods. He was a bit of nitrogen, but he wasn't using pesticides or herbicides, he felt comfortable with that. But I got to actually see where he's grown. That's fun too because what happens when you'd have farm share, you get basically what's growing in season, and you have to actually learn to cook what is in seasons. So the farm shares, we're in March right now, they start around April, right?

And it's going to start with cabbage. You're going get a lot of cabbage, you're gonna have figure out how to use it. Now, that wasn't part of my cooking repertoire, but suddenly I've got to look up all these new recipes and searches. And you begin to eat seasonally, which is really, it's a nice change. I think for parents, at least in my experience, when schools and parents start to bring kids to farms, and they get to see where the animals are raised,

Practical Family Strategies and Local Farms 29:38

where are the chickens are raise,d where do the eggs come from, Where the actual fruits and vegetables come form. And they actually get onto the farms and start picking them and then go into the kitchen with the parents to cook it. the kids start to get the kind of education they need about food. And so in my practice, local farms, regenerative farms grass-fed, you know, protein products, organic, non-GMO, pesticide-free, antibiotic- free. So we didn't even talk about the use of antibiotics. Yeah.

But I think that's a resurgence of that. And, you know, the market goes by way of how people spend their money. As pediatricians, we have that obligation to start really encouraging this shift. We have the obligation, but I thing sadly, it was the parents who led this, not the pediatrician's. Not the medicine community. which is true of a lot of things. And where we should have been leaders, we've been the followers in there. But this is an important time to listen because I think the families were, they're recognizing this need.

One thing, too, to think of. I mean, this is, I think, important too for parents to recognize. A lot of parents will say, my kid won't eat that. They have their three foods they eat, and that is it. So this a really important time to thing about the fact that part of what we have to do in parenting is we to expose kids to different things. It's necessary. so a good example, i looked up once, sort of curious, in cultures where foods are really spicy, at what age your kids become accustomed to that.

It's usually around age five. So when you give a really spicy food to like a two-year-old, if it's part of your natural cuisine, that two year old still makes a face. They don't like it at first. Over time, they actually become accustom to it. If you don' expand their culinary palette, They're never gonna have to benefit at all. so it really is part what we have do in every way expand that child's world. and food is a great place to start. So for summing it up, we want to make families aware that organic food and non-GMO, regenerative farming, grass-fed, and go around the aisles, find your local farms, recognize what your kids need to eat, not what you kids want eat.

And of course, want the parents to be modeling for the kids, so let them eat those foods, and the kid have no other choice but to eat the foods. That's the key. I recognize that challenges can be great sometimes, because you really are up against a marketing system that's quite effective. A lot of families will say, well, I just don't have time for that, but I get that. Life is busy and it's hard. I would just say this, you're making an investment. You're not losing that time. Your investing that because the time you will spend in managing your kid's chronic disease dwarfs the times that you are going to spend cooking,

Lifestyle Medicine and Closing Thoughts 32:48

shopping and having that shared dinner together. Sure. That's quality time together, never waste it's an But God forbid that you're spending the time with doctor visits, medications, managing chronic disease, hospitalizations. I mean, that is the kind of time that don't get back. Sure, in all the years of practicing medicine, I've never seen more of a cognitive dissonance than the fact that food doesn't affect your health, or how food is raised doesn' t affect you health. Or where I buy my food, doesn t effect your heath.

And the parents are leading it, you're right. But if we're going to take care of chronically ill children with all of the data that we talked about, We have to make a shift, and I'm so glad that you gave that lecture. Can you tell everybody how to find you and where you are and what you're up to? Sure. So I practice in Norwood, Massachusetts, term precision neurology, Nor wood mass. I am a child neurologist, so I don't do the general pediatric side, but I will counsel, I think a lot of my patients would say I counsel quite a bit on really the four pillars of lifestyle medicine really is exercise, sun exposure, quality food and nutrition, and then sleep.

All those things are critical. And of course, avoiding toxins. If you don't get those right, then there's not a med I can use to treat you. So even as a neurologist, I'd say especially as neurologists, those basic lifestyle factors are important. Right. There's more to neurology than CAT scans, MRIs and physical therapy, isn't there? There is. if you really care about a developing brain, there absolutely is, yeah. All right. Thank you, John. So we're here at MAPS, medmaps.org. This is in Charlotte, North Carolina.

If you're interested in Dr. Gaitanis' work, please go to the website, MedMaps .org, as well as the web site that he said. And also, just to add another thing, Dr Gai-tanis is on the board of Med Maps, so you can find him on their website. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Thanks so much for joining us today. I'm Honey Rinusella, and this is MAPS. As we heal tomorrow's future, we appreciate you joining on the journey. We'll see you next time.