Lung Detox Secrets for Healing Chronic Illness and Boosting Vitality With Christa Orecchio

Introduction and Guest Background 0:00

Hi, and welcome to the Thyroid Pharmacists Healing Conversations podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Isabella Wentz, I am so excited to have you here today with me. We're going to be talking about lung rejuvenation, healing allergies, asthma, post-COVID wildfires, mold, so much more. Today I have one of my favorite people, special guest, nutritionist, Krista Orecchio. Welcome Krita, glad to see you. Thank you, friend, I'm happy to be here. I want to share a little bit about Krista. For those of you that might not know her, she's been a longtime collaborator of mine and she is a clinical and holistic nutritionist for 18 years now.

She helps individuals use food as medicine to heal from the root cause and specializes in digestive and hormonal health with her cutting edge online programs. she and her team have taken tens of thousands through her paid programs with astounding success and have had the privilege to help millions more in a meaningful way with their free content. Krista is also the bestselling author of How to Conceive Naturally and Have a Healthy Pregnancy After 30, Assault After Speaker, and the host of three health and wellness TV shows.

I'm so glad to have you here. I always like to ask everybody that comes on my show, just to get a little bit of context and perspective, how did you get started in food as medicine? Yeah, it's kind of twofold. So the clinical answer is I had the worst case of Candida that I think anyone's ever seen. no one could help me. It really kind of took down my high school years. I would be tired, I'd come home after school when everyone else was doing sports and I just want to eat carbs and candy and pretzels and those kinds of things.

They had trouble sleeping, they had insomnia and constipation and it just didn't feel great. Probably really low cellular energy, it would never have understood that at that time. And I affectionately say, and I'm from New Jersey and my dad was in the pharmaceutical business, that I was raised on pizza, pasta and antibiotics. And nobody knew to repopulate gut health or address gut-health. So that's kind of how I lost maybe 10 years of high-quality life. I went on this kind-of crusade to figure out, okay, what is this?

And all the doctors told me I am healthy and normal and that doesn't exist. Maybe in my culture it exists, but it doesn't. And finally figured out a process to systematically overcome it. That was super inspiring for me. In my 20s, after college, I took a year off to backpack the world to find myself. I really wanted to help contribute to peace, and I was going to go back and get a master's in peace and conflict resolution. and ended up taking a life-changing workshop by Patrick Holford, who runs the Brain Bio Institute in the UK, called Optimal Nutrition for the Mind.

And it blew me away. I mean, he's bringing catatonic schizophrenics back with mass doses of niacin. Can food and nutrition do this? And I changed everything about my own health and my nutrition and had this profoundly different experience of life. on all levels. And I thought, oh, I'm not good. This is how you contribute peace and conflict resolution within the individual first and help them feel good in their bodies, help themselves actualize. That's how we contribute to the world. It was the confluence of those things that came together.

I said, this is my life's work. This is so beautiful. You've helped so many people and you've worked with people on gut health, on adrenal health and this has been largely my focus too. I'm a trained pharmacist. My eyes really started opening up from a mental health perspective as well when I was on clinical rotations and I saw high dose nutrients used for schizophrenia and other kinds of mental health disorders. When I got diagnosed with Hashimoto's, I was sort of like, is there anything that I can do to make myself feel better?

And of course, i was thankfully able to get myself into remission, partially with nutrition and food as medicine and functional medicine.

Krista's Food-as-Medicine Origin Story 4:17

And once I sort of woke up to it doesn't have to be this way, it's not just medications that treat things, I really started to open my eyes to other health conditions. My mom has asthma and she's had it since I was a teenager. I had this lovely cat named Frisbee and all of a sudden my mom became super allergic to cats and Frasbee. And we had to put Frisbee in a home, she literally went to a nursing home and she provided so much joy to the nursing-home residents, right? And my mom had needed to take a lot of different medications to keep her asthma in check.

And so once I started making some lifestyle changes for myself, I started working with my mom on utilizing some of those same lifestyle changes. And holy cow, her asthma improved. Now, my husband's family has a history of asthma and we have it on my side of the family. So I'm just really, really grateful that you are focusing on lung health because I have been looking for books. I've been Looking for resources out there for asthma, and lung Health and Pretty much, you know, all I've done is just utilized some of the same things I would do for Hashimoto's for asthma and they seem to help.

But I really am excited to speak to you about some other things that you've uncovered lately. Well, yeah, your arresting the inflammatory process, right? And that's going to affect all aspects of health and 42 million people in the US struggle with asthma. And we don't really need to. And I mean, we've got asthma, allergies, post-COVID lung disease, so many different things like wildfires. All of these things really impact our lung health. And it doesn't have to be permanent, right? So can we talk about that?

Is it possible to improve lung-health and function? Yes, it's 100% possible, but it is necessary for every human that breathes because of what is happening. This is just modern day living, right? And so you mentioned, you know, there's this, we've got, obvious, the obvious if you smoke or you're an ex-smoker. But that doesn't just mean tobacco. It also means hemp. Like you have to do a lung rejuvenation program. Stopping smoking isn't enough for the lungs to just self-heal and cleanse from the damage.

Yeah. And I mean, all of the vaping these days too, a lot of times people think that's safer than smoking, but that can lead to lung disease as well. I'm mean it's like, people don't see the harm in it because there's no like actual... Secondhand smoke. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's really important. We've got our air quality and I'm saying now it's both indoor and outdoor air-quality, right? Because we think about all the things in our house that has flame retardant on it and all of the furniture and what's in formaldehyde and our carpets and couches.

I mean, hopefully we're buying organic pajamas for our littles because there's flame retardant in them, if not, right? And this is half their life. They're sleeping in and breathing that in. And just not to mention where we'll have just viruses and mold and bacteria just floating around within the house. And I mean, I know you have a Jasper, air filter and cooking is I'm sure you guys see when you cook, like you start to see that come up. It's like we're just exposed to so much, you know, within our homes.

And we've been on quite the rodeo with mold. You have I have you've helped me recently. Thank you so It's insidious and it's in so many different buildings and structures and Airbnbs. The more dysregulated your nervous system is, the more compromised your immune system, is the most this is going to really stack up. Mold is just such an insideous problem that many people will just feel like 50% of themselves, 30% for years and never know it. So that's just the number one thing we would want everyone to get to test for, right?

And then the outdoor air quality has unfortunately become less than ideal. And you mentioned wildfires and then, the LA fires are just something completely on the next level because they're not wild fires, you are burning up chemicals, your burning buildings. It's not just a forest fire. You are so many electronics and plastics and carcinogenic chemicals just Oh, blanketing that city. We won't know the effects of what people were breathing in there for probably a decade. And this is so important for everyone and anyone exposed to do a long rejuvenation program.

Because no part of the body isolates, right? The lungs affect five primary other systems in the whole body health. And then what else with air pollution? I mean, I'm passionate about soil health, but that brings up herbicides and pesticides. And a lot of healthy people, people watching your podcast, we're not, you and I, right? You tested me actually for glyphosate like last year and it was in my urine. I'm not consuming foods or beverages with glyphasate. Where is this coming from? you eat all organic.

You eat better than I do. Like you come to my house and hide all of my non-organic things. Love it. Except for Halloween, except for halloween this year. What was I going to say? Oh, so yeah, it's in our urine. And so these herbicides, like like when we moved here, we were I was taking Austin, my son, for horseback riding lessons way out in Hudson Bend. Right. You can't get away from it. And right before that, you know, we moved from California and we're on the beach. My dog, my son and I and a plane, a helicopter comes out of nowhere, literally 200 feet above our heads.

There's dumping chemicals into the lagoon. Everyone's like running. It was felt like Armageddon. We're running off the Beach. Like, what are you doing? Seeing people spraying on. The freeways. I mean, So I'm passionate about it. It's cancer-causing, it's found in kids, they're spraying it in parks, and we're breathing it, if you're running around the park through your feet.

Why Lung Health Matters 10:51

There's metals coming down through the air, through chemical trails, there's just so much that we are contending with, nanoplastics. Those are coming in through the air and it's just like there's microplastics and then there are nanoplastics and micro plastics are under 5 micrometers, nanoplastics under 1 micrometer and so there is a lot that we are contending with but natural medicine, natural health, all of these remedies, there almost nothing that it can't handle. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much for getting into all of that.

I know from my experience and working with people with asthma, things like salicylate toxicity, sometimes we can detox it with glycine and that can help heal asthma and people get rid of their asthma symptoms, dairy elimination, cleaning up the personal care routine or just like some of the cleaning products, you know, all the bleaches and all of harsh chemicals that we use for cleaning. That's a really helpful thing for people with breathing issues, asthma, protozoal infections, certain ones, parasitic infections.

All of these can set off the immune system. They can contribute to asthma breathing. There's glutathione. We can do especially inhaled glutothione or N-acetylcysteine. These are all things that can be very helpful for lung health. So I think a lot of people have heard of some of the things that I just mentioned, but I was hoping we can get deeper into salicylates, what they are. Yeah, they're organic, salicylates are organic compounds, and they can dramatically affect the inflammatory process within the nasal passages, within sinuses.

And so I think a lot of people don't know that foods that we generally think are healthy can be high in salicylates, and so dried fruits. And I don' know if this helped your mom or Michael, but it's like really getting rid of the dried fruit for a while. That means from raisins to dates to prunes to apricots and some foods people conceive as really healthy, plums and strawberries and apples. Bay leaves, tomatoes, cucumbers can be high in salicylates and so really kind of, if you have asthma, taking a look at that list of foods and then maybe choosing others for a while while you're healing.

And I don't know if ever tried this, but I've had great success with 1 eighth of a teaspoon of Himalayan pink salt under the tongue before bed. to help really mitigate asthmatic symptoms and like over time within six weeks, you know, they're like 50% reduction and then also using a salt inhaler to decrease the mucus membranes. I love that. with the salt actually in Poland, they would send people with asthma to spend time in salt mines to really get that lung healing and asthma healing. And they will also be helpful for healing skin issues, all kinds of allergic issues.

I know I just went to a place like that recently. So they try to like recreate that environment and they have spas where it's made out of salt and there's so much. You're almost like on a beach of Salt and you're sitting in a room and inhaling that really great salt. Did you go to the Austin salt room? I did. I love it. We're going to be there next week. He liked it? Yeah. It was very relaxing. That I thought we went there for a day date with my husband once. Oh, I really enjoyed it I think you can do play dates though.

It's very regulating for kids too, right? Oh, absolutely. Any kids with asthma and eczema, this is like a really great place to take them for playdates. You know, one thing I did learn the hard way myself is I sort of induced asthma in myself and I've had a family history of it. So it's always been on my radar and all of a sudden I turn 40 and i'm having all these issues with breathing. And what I had been doing prior to that is I sprained my foot and I was rubbing peppermint essential oils and all kinds of, you know, natural salicylates.

And I ended up having like salicellate toxicity. I feel like people oftentimes they might know aspirins to saliculate, but there's like natural substances. Right, and you think you can't go wrong. It's so good. And of course, you would put that together, being such a root cause person. So yeah, right. Peppermint tea is high in salicylates. If you're using peppermin essential oil, yeah. Coffee? Oh, it's high in salicylates, wine, beer. You can really overdo it. One of the tests I really like is the organic acid test because that can tell us our saliculate levels.

If that's something that somebody might be wondering about, typically if they have like nasal polyps or if have aspirin allergies, that might something relevant for some people. That's wonderful. Now we've covered a lot of different causes, but we haven't covered them all, have we? Yeah, there's so many of them. So we covered indoor air pollution, outdoor air, pollution herbicides and pesticides, antibiotics, as you know, they can be life saving, but also we have to do our due diligence and a lot of times the Antibiotics will have lingering effects, you know, where we didn't get everything from the lungs, we're not able to have a healthy lung microbiome after we take them.

And then a history of infections, conversely, especially bronchitis and pneumonia are going to leave like in gut thrive as we are clearing out the gut microbiomes. And we're finding through all these tissues and these linings and the lining, we are getting these entrenched species. And so the lungs are really not that much different where these lingering infections, yes, they go away and we get better, but why do they come back? Why do the lung become our weak spot? And it's because we have these entrance species that we've never actually fully turned over to like heal the lining and the integrity of the lungs and to rejuvenate cell function.

And it's not like within the gut, it is the mucosal lining, like here it s the, um, It's the alveoli, the lung sacs that provide the gaseous exchange that we want to make sure and help them do the best that they can.

Salicylates, Mold, and Environmental Triggers 17:18

Yeah, so I'm thinking, okay, what else is going to be affecting the lungs? COVID has become kind of a primary one, long haul COVID. And we're finding when we do some testing, you'll have just the latent infection. And so that, again, is to, if you have long-haul COVID, or you've had COVID more than one time, and like many of us have at this point, to really rejuvenate the lungs is going to be a huge thing to do. What about repressed emotions? Thank you. So the lungs store grief. And in our lung rejuvenation program, we have a grief component, and we did a beta of this last year.

We're using five different homeopathy blends to be able to help release stored emotion and emotional trauma. This is something you and I have talked about a lot. you know, just personally. And so I just don't think, the more I've dove into emotional trauma, unexpressed emotional, trauma in my own life and grief and just reading books, like the Grief Recovery Handbook, in the West, we are not taught how to grief. We are just taught to set it and forget it. So a lot of us have all these stacked up things that we've never grieved, small and large.

And that can be stored in the lungs. And sometimes men, more than women, I can speak to my dad with a history of bronchitis or pneumonia. It's like the lung is that genetic weak spot. Definitely a lot of men of that generation aren't able to process, feel emotions, or even know how to. So that's something that is really important. Our emotions affect our health just tremendously. Yeah, interestingly, I remember seeing a study that was done in women who had gone through abusive marriages, and many of them actually had higher rates of asthma.

And it's just our body, you know, it just we can't put one part of us in a vacuum. You can, yeah. Or, even if it is not asthma, trouble breathing. So when I think about our beta, we had people trouble-breathing upon exertion to shallow breathing or, you know, maybe the lungs just become the weak spot. You get that chronic cough that lasts a month. For me, when i was going through a similar situation after an abusive marriage, and in a very stressful custody court hearing for a year. And I started to get this cough that wouldn't go away.

This was before COVID and then COVID comes. We can't separate the mind from the body, from emotions, and from our experiences. Yeah, yeah. I'm so sorry that you went through that and I feel like a lot of people can relate to that. Yeah. And I think as long as we're willing to be open and vulnerable and share and heal from it, then we use it as compost to help others. one kind of random thing and it's sort of related not necessarily on the same page but I had this chronic cough and I didn't know what was causing it.

I ended up figuring out it was food sensitivities after a while that went away and then I got into functional medicine and i was working on a documentary project many many years ago and with somebody that I was working with, but I trying to be very polite, I tried to very nice, and just not really expressing my frustrations or expressing challenges. And I developed a chronic cough. We're repressing. Whenever we repress our feelings, our anger, emotions, it's so good that we're talking about this and bringing it up.

Especially as women, too. Right? We need to speak our truth. And set boundaries with kindness, but set the boundaries, right? And I remember you going through that. And remember the health challenges that came for both of you from that, stress is connected to so much. So much! Yeah, yeah, absolutely. functional medicine testing and food sensitivity testing, nothing came up until I started really speaking my truth and getting it out there. And I think that's very relevant for women with thyroid issues too.

Absolutely. I love it. So that should be a whole podcast in and of itself. Yeah, we could really get into so many different things. We're going to come back to the lungs a little bit because I feel like when you don't have great lung function, when your not breathing well, this could impact your whole system. Of course. Can we get in to some of the consequences of lung functions? Well, poor lung function affects every part of our bodies. It's breathing, but primarily, of course, it's going to affect the brain, right?

If you're not oxygenating the brains, there are studies that show to early onset Alzheimer's, dementia, cognitive impairment, hippocampal impairment primarily. So the hippo camp is the memory center of the and just a higher increase in neuroinflammation. I mean, I will tell you I experienced that firsthand and you know, when I went through, just I could never understand with all the people that I've worked with who've had mold, the level of mold that i had and from breathing it in the Level of neuro inflammation, i told you i thought i was getting early dementia, was like lost in a grocery store and like what that can do right with when you're inhaling things.

So it absolutely cannot be underestimated the power of the lungs to affect the brain and on a really kind of minimal scale which still completely affects our functioning is brain fog, right? It's going to create brainfog and it's It's impairing, which we'll talk about, it's impaired mitochondrial function, and carnitine is excellent for that. But it also affects the heart tremendously, so if the lungs aren't healthy, that can lead to early heart failure, to a whole number of diseases, because you're forcing the hearts to work so much harder and pump so hard to get oxygen throughout your body.

And it's just like anything, like you can't separate the human body. If anyone on the team, whether you're playing baseball or soccer, if anyone is running with a broken leg or batting with broken arm, it is going to affect everybody else on team and they're going have to work harder to make up for that. And of course, the immune system, right? Because if we're going to be breathing in and we are taking in the lungs, their job is to defend against these pathogens that we bring in. And if they can't handle it, now the system has to come in, and work much harder than it otherwise would have to work.

the muscles, right? They're not able to convert energy. So of course we're going to get muscle weakness and we are not going feel great and were not gonna have a ton of energy so it's just it affects really just every aspect of our health and also detoxification. There are only three ways to detox through the lungs, through skin and through And in this day and age, you know, we have to be eliminating 2.2 pounds of toxins every day. And most of us are not doing that through the bowels. Most of are sitting in a sauna on a regular basis.

But breathing is something that's available to everyone that you can do. It's easy and it's free. Honestly, just making deep breathing part of your daily routine is life-changing. I just started my regimen. Today was my third day in row. getting up at 6 AM to do sun cells and then two different breathing exercises. That's amazing. Interestingly, a while back, I learned about using deep breathing for autoimmune disease and Hashimoto's. And I've had a few people, including health care practitioners, that utilized just breath work and breathing and just really focusing in on their lungs to get Hashimoto's into remission.

I just find that fascinating how the body's just so connected. Yeah. Well, and also for mold, I think when I was healing from mold you recommended some someone for me and I'll say the neuroinflammation like brings up all these sort of traumas and it's the way it affects your breathing creates all this anxiety. And so I would one thing that moved the needle is I will go to transformational breath class three times a week. finally start to feel some sense of regulation, you know, after that. So I can see where it affects everything and autoimmunity, especially because it's not that we're attacking ourselves or bodies attacking itself, the body is speaking to us like it needs support.

It needs release. it Needs parasympathetic dominance. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about parasympathetic dominance? Yeah, so when we're talking about our nervous system and we always hear about fight or flight, a lot of times I think it's really important we don't hear, about freeze or fawn. Yes. And when you have trauma and a lots of us with unhealed trauma, I'm just diving really deep into it now, like you tend to live in the world. It's like this coding cloud bubble over the world you live in for years where your natural response is, do I fight this?

Do I flight this, Do i freeze and I just go through functional freeze going through the motions but my body's there and my mind isn't?

Emotions, Trauma, and the Lungs 26:48

Or do i fawn, which could be like people pleasing, right? And any one of those states, a lot of times we don't think it because we're like, oh, I'm just relaxed, but you're not, you are in functional freeze, is you're in sympathetic dominance that fight or flight and that is doing damage to the nervous system, to myelin sheath, that protective coating over our nerves. Now you are not converting your food into fuel. You're making your adrenals go over time and the adenals and thyroid we know are a team.

So now it's like, okay, let's shut down metabolic processes, right? Because we're in fight or flight and you end up with all number of diseases and disorders and from infertility to thyroid problems to horrible perimenopause symptoms or menopausal symptoms. You know, you really name it. And I think that the name of the game to live a healthy life is to get yourself into parasympathetic dominance, which is rest, digest and heal where, so what? I have 50 emails. I'm not being chased by a lion, and the body doesn't know the difference.

So really being able to convert your food into fuel and instead of having to load up on an infinite amount of supplements and constantly chasing your tail and running the lab work. It's like, let your body heal itself. Give it the food that it needs to easily convert into fuel, right? Because we know that if we're living in sympathetic dominance, we are going to shut down the gut. Like the nervous system is the foundation of the house. Then we start to go into fight or flight, then the enteric nervous systems.

and the gut starts to wave its red flag and whatever we're eating is going to sit like a rock in our stomach. And so we really need to focus on eating low inflammatory metabolic foods, which means that foods that easily convert antifuel without the body having to work too hard to use them. They shut off the stress response and I like to basically start people out with the right amount of proteins, carbs and fats, typically a 50-25- 25 if they're in super sympathetic dominance, to shut of that cascade of 60 different types of adrenaline and cortisol, which that will damage the brain more than anything else, right?

The prefrontal cortex, executive function, the amygdala, it'll increase it. The longer we live in fight or flight, The bigger our amygdola gets. the longer We live and fight our flight the smaller our memory center the hippocampus gets and then eventually damages the pre frontal cortex responsible for executive function. So I'm passionate, definitely passionate about this topic. And yeah, and then you want to feed the thyroid without the thyroid having to do anything, right? There's so many different places we could get into.

Everything that you shared has been so powerful and so life changing. I really appreciate you. When I went through my own struggles with adrenal dysfunction and crashing, I had only heard about like fight or flight, right? And that whole functional freeze, that is pretty much when you look at the symptoms, they overlap with hypothyroidism so much. It's all of that fatigue and poor decision making and brain fog and everything seems like a struggle. Yeah. And just existing is hard. I know that feeling well and depression and just the whole number of things.

I think trauma wasn't a huge conversation in our industry when we started and it really is becoming now. And I love Gabor Maté's work and Peter Levine's And I've recently worked with somatic experiencing and I really can't recommend it highly enough. It's like healing trauma guided by the body and there's the book, The Body Keeps Score. And so what we're storing every time we go into that functional freeze is when anything happens that is a shock feeling. that the body and the mind cannot integrate in the moment.

You'll get shocked and stored for later and you start stacking up those experiences without unpacking them and then it leads to functional freeze. It's interesting. My husband and I were just having a conversation the other day and when I lived in Boulder many years ago, A couple of things that I started doing were EMDR and neurofeedback just to really rebalance my nervous system because I feel like a lot of us that have autoimmune disease or go through that, a lots of are in that sympathetic dominant state and we kind of just burn ourselves out.

And I had met a healer who talked about this and she was mentioning, oh, well, you focus on all this nutrition, but I find a of people with autoimmunity, they have so much trauma. and the conversations they have with themselves aren't so kind. And it was interesting from my perspective going through a lot of the trauma work, it helped me to become more grounded and it really helped in life. For example, I would be less reactive if somebody said something insulting to me or that I perceived as insulting or if I did something That I thought I should be embarrassed by like that would really hold me back for for days or sometimes weeks I would beat myself up over it or just feel terrible about myself.

And it was like this whole external thing that trauma work and neurofeedback helped me with. but then hearing my husband's perspective was like you know you really transformed as a person and I was able to like really look up to you when we he's a little bit older than me and i was not the most mature person when, we met so I think I, was 22 and he was you, know 25 and, he talked about how that just really, transformed me, and made me a much better partner and a you. Know a very grounded mother and able, to show up in the world in a totally different way for the people that I love and the People in my life, where I hadn't really noticed that.

I just knew that, I felt better, right? I didn't realize how much my own trauma was affecting everybody else around me. And I think when I saw this quote, and it's like, when we don't heal what wounded us, we bleed on everybody And I'm going through just a deep dive of that, as you know, in my personal life. And it's like, yeah, if we don't heal, we bleed on everyone else. Or the saying, hurt people hurt, but we're completely not self-aware to that. But then conversely, one of my yoga, I have deep roots in yoga.

Paramahansa Yogananda, who brought yoga to the West, he says, heal yourself and you heal thousands. Because your energy, your vibration, and I have so much respect for you for doing that and so respect how you walk your talk. Like you said with autoimmune disease, it's the conversation of neuroplasticity as well. And so when you say the way that we talk to ourselves, right, that this is a whole nother podcast, but this internal family systems from childhood. This is, you know, this where cognitive behavioral therapy can help.

And we need to create new neural pathways in the brain. We need start to change that internal dialogue. But also when you've been running in a loop for however many decades, you're changing now. So doing the neurofeedback is changing so much. And thank you, let me borrow your neurooptimal machine, which I can speak to whenever I would, with the mold, get stuck in this loop. It was just fear and panic in the middle of the night. Then I'd do the neuroptimals and then all of a sudden I start going back into parasympathetic dominance and I could fall back asleep and feel calm again.

It truly is rude cause. It's changed the way that we think and dial down trauma and not live from it. I mean, I think about everything going on in the world and really like it's all just a projection of what's happening inside of us. And you look at anything from criminals to mental institutions, and I'm looking at this and like, it is all trauma, right? It's trauma. So we need to be helping everybody to understand that and to dial it down within themselves. We have a completely different world.

It should be covered on all insurance panels and free, Yeah, absolutely. I feel like there are things, you know, we can get into the insurance world and how how not helpful it is, right? Insurance companies have brought me trauma just to being a member of their plans for a lot of the issues they've given me. I mean, I think the CEO of United, what happened there, people get really upset that they have to decide these life or death situations. It's really difficult. But I think it's these conversations like we're having, I find, yes, you have your insurance and you your conventional medicine treatments that are covered by insurance.

And you know what? I do not want any homeopathy if I'm in a car accident. Please don't give me any homeopathy. Take me to the emergency room. If I need to have an arm stitched back on, please do not give any supplements. It can change biology in a matter of seconds in the way that our field can't do. We need both. we just need a better bridge with respect that goes both ways. Absolutely. And I feel like that's where what you do really comes into play for, you know, maybe people that have gone to their doctors and that said,

How Poor Lung Function Affects the Whole Body 36:38

hey, I have asthma. Is there anything else I can do? And they're like, here's your inhaler. Or they might have lung disease or exposure and they just don't get a lot of resources. They're not getting support or then you're going to breathe in the cortical steroids. You're gonna be on that for a long term. What is that going do to your immune system? What's that gonna do your adrenals over time, right? And so it's like we just want to stop robbing Peter to pay Paul. Yeah, I agree. So what are some of the things that people can do from a holistic standpoint, when they're in that I think that space of that's oftentimes ignored and you know we're having these conversations to help people empower themselves so they could take charge of their own health because they are not going to They're not going to go to a 15 minute appointment with a primary care doctor.

Their primary doctor is not gonna talk to them about any of these ways to really help themselves when they have chronic health conditions. Urgent care, yes, that can be very, very helpful. You're having an asthma attack or you're just really in an emergency situation. Yes, conventional medicine can help you out. But what do we do and who are the people that I feel like can be helped the most by these recommendations. Okay, so I can speak to our beta where we really wanted to help people with chronic lung issues.

So we've got asthma, we got wheezing, a history of mold, long-haul COVID, history bronchitis, the history pneumonia, just general lungs are the weak spot, grief, and a lot of sleep issues, 70% of our Beta groups started sleeping better, 88% had more energy after rejuvenating their lungs. And definitely, you know, long COVID or if you've been exposed. And so I think especially if your a firefighter, right? You've got to do this once a year or you're constantly exposed like that. Farmers, unfortunately, it's just being proactive, just like you would do a gut cleanse, like a soup cleanse.

Like doing a lung cleanse and a long rejuvenation is going to really start with this gentle overturning of the cellular process to start to cleanse. And you mentioned glutathione and nebulizing glutothione is great. So we're really working, I found, obviously at the genetic level, you get the most benefit. And so we're working with herbs and under the threshold and maybe you use lungwort, which is just beautiful, huge studies on lungwart and asthma of how it can work. And when you combine that with DNA factors and RNA factors, now you're changing gene expression at the same time.

It's teaching a man how to fish instead of giving a mana fish. So it's root cause healing. From everybody we've surveyed, You know, a hundred percent of people coughing and wheezing is better, long haul COVID symptoms are better there. Their asthma is, you know what, and this is four months after and we're still tracking them, right? Because now we are training and gently overturning what's happening within the lungs. and improving that cellular integrity and then adding in things that will boost mitochondria, right?

And so adding the CoQ10 and the L-carnitine and using foods that are going to suspend the inflammatory process, but also that is high in vitamin A and vitamin E and potassium and things are that really start to improve lung function and lung quality and, and you know, post biotics and do this whole, the systematic process that now overturns it and trains it, but not just through, right? So we're using these really like small batch, high quality herbs under the threshold. And we're not just cleansing and then we are not rejuvenating, but you're using really specific breathing techniques, like that's going to be important.

And self-care, I love Ayurveda. I've just started my Panchakarma, have to share that with you. But they use super nasi oil. It's an oil to coat and heal the lining inside the nose and also will help with sleep. Like I use it before I fly so that I won't, you know, without a mask, if people are sick you're not going to be breathing it in. Two drops of that at night. You know we're just doing Different self-care processes and castor oil packs can be helpful, deep breathing. And then I'm going to add in more like targeted grief work, like maybe like an EFT, emotional freedom technique or something.

50% of people who had stuck grief had improvement. I like good with a 50%. I'd like to see it higher and it wasn't an enormous focus. So you're really starting to blend all of these things together. You're blending in herbal formulas and vitamins and minerals, and we're going to enhance ATP. We're gonna help with cellular apoptosis, a programmed cell death. Help the body to start to know how to do that better is gonna be really important. I love that. I'm looking at the stats that you sent me. And so I, you know, I had chronic cough for years and I was at that point where I ready to cut off my head to get rid of the chronic.

Yeah. Can't function anymore. You have a hundred percent success rate in your beta group with chronic off.

Parasympathetic Healing and Nervous System Regulation 42:38

Like I so wish you would have had this program many years ago and it took me like three years to try to figure out on my own. Me too. Well, longer. It started with the grief in 2019. Every time I'd get sick and then mold, it's like, I'm going to cough. I swear, not sick anymore. And so there's so many people struggling with that. Yeah, and I am grateful Dr. Jack Tips, who you know, is my clinical partner in this work and in his program. He's just brilliant. we partnered on rejuvenating the gut microbiome with astounding success and this is just kind of the next evolution and I you know it used to be where I'm like oh I think it's enough because if you can re-juvinate the Gut Microbiome it is going to replicate it to the other six microbiomes and it absolutely not enough anymore.

You know you have to focus on the lung-gut access like no one's really talking so much about that, but the lungs too, they're also not going to replicate to other parts. So it's a kind of a concentrated microbiome. It's their own microbiomes in the lung and the sinuses. What I learned about mold exposure, mold You can live in a moldy home and you can leave, but the mold can colonize your sinuses. It could colonized your lungs and can become the Mold Factory and keep yourself sick. One big red flag I see for people with mold exposure and sometimes dairy sensitivity is sinus issues.

In your beta, you had 62% of people who had sinus challenges before the program and 80% had improvement or resolution. Yeah, that's pretty impressive. Well, you know, we did talk about the salicytes and like going low inflammation. And I think the super nasia oil and the breathing really helps. But when you're you kind of systematically taking these, there's maybe like 25 different under the threshold herbs when RNA and DNA factors. And then we're adding in homeopathy for stuck grief or for shock, or we are adding that in too.

It's all really working well and it's like shrinking up those mucosal membranes. Of course, the diueno dairy increases the mccosals membrane. So yeah, sinuses, we still want to work on that more, but unhealed pathogens, you know, I have found that let's say you've had strep a number of times in your childhood that you didn't complete the immune cycle necessarily. And so that can be a cause of chronic sinusitis. So I have to say, as a pharmacist, I was always very skeptical of a homeopathy. And it was just always like, ah, don't know, are these just sugar pills?

Yeah, they taste like sugar. They taste sugar, pills. I look like Sugar Pills, right? And then it took my son having croup and his pediatrician gave him a Homeopathic remedy and he goes, this works better than steroids. And it did. And I'm like, these are tiny little white like sugar pills. But I feel like if you have the right remedy for the wrong symptom, it actually does work. I was very skeptical about this for a long time. Can you speak more to homeopathy in your experience with it? I love homeapathy and you should do a whole show on that.

It's so an interview of some brilliant homeopath that I mean, and I'm going to butcher it because I am not a homeopath, but if they were to say it's kind of like that micro dose and they hate when you compare it to a vaccine, right, because it is not, it it like giving something. So, for example, hyper mental activity that prevents sleep. The remedy is cafe accrued at where they take like a microscopic amount like that actually comes from coffee. So it's like you're treating the issue with the cause.

It's a really fascinating. And that's when you are working like systematically and I've been using homeopathy since my son was born. I mean, but lead him for bug bites and all of that holistic first aid and arnica and aconite for a shock. You know, they like I remember when Dimitri was over for Austin's fifth birthday party and he bonked his head in the kitchen island. You're like, I got the arnica. And the aconite. I'm like okay, he's shocked from that experience. So I can't love it anymore. One of my best friends, Willow Buckley, is a brilliant homeopath, as is Jack, and we co-authored our book together.

And during my labor and delivery, she's giving me homeopathy and afterwards to help with so many things. And you can't take so much things when you're pregnant, right? But you CAN take homeoapathy for almost anything. When Austin had 104 fever last week, I was like, I don't know if I'm super prepared for this interview. He was sickoing, you know, and I am using Ferrum Fos and it helped to break the fever. It's just so powerful. So fascinating. There's so many different healing modalities out there.

And I love how you pull on quite a few of them inside of the program. You've got herbs, nutrition, homeopathy, breath work, trauma work. A lot of times people expect like one pill for every ill, and that's what, you know, pharmaceutical industry is based on, but it's really not that simple. Like if you have a condition that developed, like a chronic health condition, there's probably a lot different contributing factors that led you to develop that. And I love that you go through a lots of them.

So I'm familiar with using NAC and glutathione. I think a lotta people are aware that these are great for lung health. What are your other go-tos that perhaps you can share with us? Well, we mentioned longwort. I love it so much. It goes back to the Middle Ages and its official plant name is Pulmonaria officinalis, right? And they named it that because the actual leaf looks like a diseased lung. And I feel like nature is always giving us the clues. When we think back, there's a 16th century physician who coined the doctrine of signatures, which means nature's giving us the clues.

So something looks is how it interacts in the body, like a walnut's high in omega-3s and omega 3 fatty acids support the brain. Avocado looks like the uterus. It supports reproductive health. I also love lotus root. We're using that within the program and it resembles the bronchioles of the lungs, right? And it supports lung integrity. tomatoes, the chambers of the heart, grapefruit, and the tissues of breasts to clear out the lymphatic system there. So we love using Longwort and Golden Seal, which I've been working with for so long now.

I really love it because it's not one of those super heavy hitters. It's a fantastic and very gentle antimicrobial, it's from the berberine family and great in staph and in strep and these factors that contribute to colds and flus and just really helpful for lung health. And then, you know, post-biotic molecules, those are helping the metabolic processes where I'm talking about your amino acids and your neurotransmitters,

Holistic Lung Rejuvenation Strategies 50:18

right? So things that are going to be supportive, L-tryptophan, we're not thinking that those, and that they're actually going work off of the live bacteria. We hear of prebiotics, We here of probiotics, like postbiotics are gonna continue doing the job. like long afterwards, right? It's like we have the good bacteria in our probiotics. We have prebiotics that will then feed the bacteria. But then what is this whole idea of postbiotic to contribute to the longevity of the healing over time? And I think we're getting a lot more lasting effects.

Time will tell, you know, we've just tracked for four months now because of the use of post-biotics. And then, of course, the things that are really helping with mitochondrial support from CoQ10 to PQQ is great and great for brain health. and an L-carnitine, acetyl L carnitene, which we talked about. So these are all things that are going to be really helpful and supportive. And like you mentioned, NAC and then general anti-inflammatory is like your bromelain, right? That's going be helpful as a proteolytic in an anti inflammation.

Baswellia is huge and I'm sure you've worked with that as just a general, very powerful, like as powerful as NSAIDs if you're going to take Advil or something like that. BasWellia's amazing. Amazing anti-inflammatory works for ulcerative colitis. It can help with shrinking thyroid nodules. amazing how many of these things have so many benefits. I didn't know a lot of them could be used for lung health. Yeah, yeah. And when you're using them systematically, and that's where we're reusing the lung tissue factors, the DNA and the RNA factors the long tissue, factors and then you are combining that specifically, you know, with these herbs.

We're excited. I mean, I sent you the results. We are excited at the result we're getting and that was just from beta, right? So now you can improve and this is what we do. Then we improve upon it and test it again and do it another time. And then of course, you know, food is medicine is going to be really important. And that's keeping that, I'd say, your paleo-esque gluten-free and just gluten free and dairy free, and nightshade free. It's almost like a pale autoimmune specifically tailored to the lungs to help your body so it doesn't have to rely on supplements after the first four weeks.

Or some people need to repeat. We're repeating some now to see what kind of results we're getting. To your point, we've been doing these things for decades. And so do you think you'd be completely healed in a month? Maybe not. You know, and maybe it's going to be something you do once a year or something like to really get some traction, may need to repeat it. We're doing that with about 20% of our beta group right now. and so that they can start to take over, let food as medicine takeover, like eat your broccoli sprouts because they're going to train your liver to produce more glutathione, right?

And so these types of things and to help eating foods that are higher in potassium that will help support, you know, reduce fluid retention. It's just taking the burden off of other aspects so the lungs can have a chance to truly thrive. And another part is you are what you digest, right? Yeah, so that's the group of the 4X, the pancreatin, and the Group of Concentrated Pancreatic Enzymes, which they're going to... So I'm talking about amylase, I am talking lipase. I talk about protease where they are going bind to water molecules and then help you to digest more of your food so it can go towards helping.

all aspects of your body. I didn't realize that, but I feel like I'm thinking about some of the labs that I've seen in people with breathing issues, and they do tend to have low elastase, which can correlate with pancreatic enzyme deficiency. And so I hadn't realized there was such a big connection between lung function and pancreatic enzyme efficiency, Yeah, isn't it interesting, all of the pathways, which then helps with sleep. I'll say I took an uncoated pancreatic enzyme with duodenum faithfully for four months to just improve my sleep so much because of way that it improved my digestive processes and lowered the inflammation process.

And so I think that that's also something that can just be really helpful for people is to do that once a year. And that makes so much sense when we're fat malabsorbing, then we have a harder time to fasting. And when you're sleeping, you are supposed to be fasting because you aren't eating, right? And so your body can't properly utilize fats when your deficient in pancreatic enzymes. So that is fascinating. How do we learn more about you and your work? You can find me at KristaOrecchio.com or Instagram or YouTube.

I have a private health club at ChristasHealthClub. And then our lung program is LungRejuve. I love that. And you're also providing a guide for our community that we're going to put in the show notes. Can you tell us more about that? Yeah, this is written by Jack Tips, my clinical partner. I mean, he is just a research maniac. He has hundreds of papers, maybe thousands, probably thousands at this point of 30, 40 years he's put together. This is an eight page article on nanoplastics. You will get a super deep dive.

There are 48 studies. that have put this paper together on nanoplastics, what they are, where they, are how to overcome their toxicity. I'm so excited about your program and I can't wait to dive into it. We can all do it together. That would be really great. respiratory issues. And I'm like, I feel like I could really use a lung rejuvenation. I am in this process right now where I go through like a liver reset every year and just support my detox pathways. Then I'll kind of get into like bone broth.

You know, i'm into the bone broth right. Now. So I m just really working on my gut health. you did the Bone Broth fast, right? The last time we were together, you're doing a bone breath fast. i have so much respect to you take care of your health, You really walk your talk and You're always focused on whatever it needs to be, whether it's digestion or trauma or brain health or anything, your immune system. And I feel like we all need to do that because life comes at you fast, right? We have all of these seasons in life.

You and I have both moved a couple of times in the last few years, and that can be very stressful on our adrenals. So I spend a lot of time in that mode of, let's get into the parasympathetic. Let's focus on my adornals, not as much time like working out. And now this is a new season, so I'm like, all right, I've got to get. my fitness on board. And I feel like we also need to take care of our body, whether that's like, we're going to do a season of brain health, or we are going do season liver support.

I love that you've created a lung program that we can all benefit from. I so appreciate you and how you show up in the world and all you do to help others heal.

Homeopathy, Herbs, and Program Results 57:58

You are such an inspiration to me and I just love you. Thank you for being you, and thank you being my friend and for such a beautiful healer in this world, the work that you have and the passion that I love you so much and all of that right back at you. I couldn't have any more respect for you or be more grateful to have you as a good friend. Thank you for taking time out of your busy day. Before I let you go, I wanted to ask you just a couple of rapid fire questions. What do you wish more people knew about food as medicine?

The power of it. the power of it. It's just so incredible how much power we have and you've heard this so many times to help ourselves, to heal ourselves or to hurt ourselves with what's at the end of our fork, you know, really with every bite and I've been doing food as medicine before food is medicine was a thing, right? And so it's like we've both seen our moms, like I saw my mom heal from systemic lupus, which was, you know, incurable and unheard of and just there's so many things. I think the next question is like, what are these inc durable diseases that can be cured with it?

As I was even researching before this is a disease of the lungs is bronchitis. is an inflammatory disease of the lungs where you have the walls they widen and they expand like through inflammation and if you're going to go to a pulmonologist you know they're gonna say yeah I'm sorry this is just here you go you got this this was just something you to deal with forever but food is medicine mixed with herbal remedies mixed these different things you that we're doing Yes, can heal it. And I think we've been doing this long enough where we have seen so many things.

You know, I've had people do proteolytic enzymes and castor oil packs on the breasts and then they go back to their doctor and their benign tumor is gone and they're like, how? Right? Or same thing, fibroids, as long as they are like a golf ball or smaller, right? You can dissolve those and process them out through the bowels. So it's just like really thinking through these things before we start cutting and poking and prodding and medicating. Thank you so much for joining Thyroid Pharmacists Healing Conversations.

I hope this conversation has been truly healing for you and will continue to serve you on your healing journey. Until next time.