
The Factors Shaping Your Baby’s Gut Microbiome

CEO of Detox Nation

CEO and Co-founder of GMO Science
The Factors Shaping Your Baby’s Gut Microbiome
Michelle Perro, MD, DHom
Full Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome 0:00
Welcome back to Reversing Chronic Gut Conditions. I'm your host, Sinclair Kennally. And todayI am joined by a very special guest, Dr. Michelle Perro, who's an MD. and a veteran pediatrician with over four decades of experience in pediatric emergency medicine and integrative health. However, you may know her best for her health advocacy work for children. And she is quite the guiding light. And I love her brand of activism, which is so inviting and warm and helping us all welcoming us into the deeper science behind what's working and what's not working for our children today.
We're going to really focus on the infant experience and the infant microbiome today and really zoom in there. Although she can really speak to any number of topics as as the comprehensive expert that she is. So you're in for a treat and welcome. Dr. Michelle. Sinclair. Thank you. And I'm just thrilled to be here with you. Thank you. Wonderful. So woo. It's going to be hard to discipline ourselves today, but let's let's start with the baby microbiome and let's let's start from the beginning, the role of the parents in the stewardship and inheritance of the microbiome itself for the child at the beginning.
Yes, absolutely. This is the major role for mom. And mom is the steward of the baby's microbiome and that microbiome of mom through the passage of the baby to the vaginal canal is how the baby inherits the microbiome. It's both through her anal flora. Don't be grossed out, folks. And the vaginal flora and that acquisition of Baby is what sets up the baby's thymus, the baby's immune system. The baby is not sterile in utero. The placenta is not sterile, and the fetus, prior to becoming a baby, is not sterile.
And then so that baby actually has an immune system to in utero. People may not know that and the placenta has a microbiome anyway.
How Babies Inherit the Microbiome 2:00
Talks to the innate immune system b the thymus which sets up that key part of the baby's immune system called the innate immunity. And then there is the adaptive. So that is the beginning. Now understand that that plays a role through contact your parent siblings, the family dog licking baby's face. It all plays a role in establishing a robust microbiome. Now, why is that so important to set up from the beginning like this? What what downstream effects could we see from a healthy, robust microbiome for the infant?
Yes. So that microbiome is responsible for setting up the future of the immune system of the baby and what that immune system will look like. While it's protecting that infant whose immune system is not robust till about at least after six weeks from invaders, because the whole world, there's microbes everywhere on your desk, on your keyboard, on your hands. We don't have to ever sanitize people. Hold on. No hand sanitizer. So this is important for establishing future immunity as well as detoxification.
You need certain microbes in that milieu that alter, for example, the age of the poop and the change in the age of the poop. That simple thing can keep pathogens out. And that's why babies need a lot of a certain type of microbe called Bifidobacteria. There's a name, people are familiar with it. It's in yogurt, but it's also the main organism in babies. Babies and Grown-Ups don't look alike in terms of the microbiome, while they should it. So when we think about like you, I mean, you mentioned it right away.
And so, of course, my brain goes right to what about mom's microbiome and her terrain as she is, you know, growing baby in utero? How what are the factors impacting infant microbiome health today? I'm thinking about like those herbicides, the pesticides that you've devoted so much care and research into understanding. So, mom, we what we like to do as a pre-pregnancy clean up for mom and and dad whenever possible. If that's not possible, we don't detox during pregnancy, but you can certainly fortify the microbiome and you can do that through oral probiotics, vaginal probiotics.
And the biggest one, of course, dietary. You must eat organic, regenerative foods because the number one pesticide being sprayed in herbicide, glyphosate based herbicides roundup is an antibiotic. It trimmed ously affects the microbiome and it kills off the beneficial bacteria lactobacilli and bifida and promotes pathologic like salmonella and clostridia. What people may not know is that in the autism pandemic that we are seeing globally, children on the spectrum, for example, throw little pediatrics in here for you have a predominance of Clostridium species and no doubt that is part and do in relationship to the glyphosate poisoning chronic daily poisoning of parents and children and the dogs.
It's in their food, too. Yeah, that's a great point. So so you just said a couple of really important things here. I want to unpack further. You mentioned organic regenerative food. What do you mean by regenerative? So in the past, when I was first going on this journey, it wasn't until the early 2000's that I kind of got a hammer on the head and woke up to this whole thing, threw a bunch of moms in my community stomping a spray here in my county. So that's how I stepped in. I wasn't born with this knowledge.
It was a serendipitous tap on the shoulder, you know. Thank you very much. So so that's how I entered into it. And what was the question again Sinclair? What my focusing on? Regenerative food what that mean to you when you say organic and regenerative is is that there are two separate things. What do moms and dads need to know? So organic. When we first started organic food, that just simply meant that they weren't using chemical inputs, no herbicides, fungicides, insecticides. Those three things are is known as pesticides.
But we now know that you can grow organic food without chemical inputs and the soil is nutritionally bereft of any nutrition. And there are brands where there is no nutrition, nutritive value in the plant because the soil has been decimated. So what we want to focus now is we've taken it up a notch. Regen Organic 2023 is that the soil has to be regenerated with the healthy soil microbiome and the soil microbiome and our gut microbiome are synonymous. You need certain beneficial microbes in the soil to produce robust plants.
There's a microbiome, the rhizomes that are in the soil. And I am not a plant biologist. Sinclair. I grew up in Manhattan. Okay, let me be clear. So this there was a lot of learning that had to be done to go on here.
Pesticides, Soil Health, and Regenerative Food 7:00
But so now I'm telling parents, get to know your farmer farmer's markets. Really become a citizen scientists of what you're feeding your family. We spend so much time in the kitchen cooking and prepping. Let's not lose the food quality and or, of course, growing your own. Everybody can grow the smallest apartment in Boston. You can have growing herbs on your kitchen window, even in the winter. So this is what I'm saying is we have to get back to the land, not this monoculture farming. And it behooves us to teach every student how to grow food.
It should be in the school curricula. So this is what I mean by that. That's really helpful. Thanks for unpacking that. So we often referred to it like soil poverty, you know, and in passing. And could you walk us through the steps if food is commercially grown in these mono crops, but these heavy pesticides and herbicides, what happens from there to the soil to the nutrition content of the food to Mom's microbiome and then baby's microbiome? Yeah. So before GMO's were introduced in the nineties genetically modified organisms.
And the only reason why they were introduced is so you can spray these genetically modified crops and they wouldn't die. So prior to the introduction of GMO crops, which are corn, soy, canola, there is now zucchini, arctic apples and potatoes, papaya, alfalfa, cotton. The list is long of genetically modified foods, and now they're sprayed with appeal. We can talk about that, too. So the list is long, I think. What appeal? Yeah. What appeal? It's my latest craze. So? So now. So we introduce GMO so farmers can spray not just priorto planting to get rid of the wheats, but they can spray all during prior, during and post crop production.
And so the levels of pesticides are so much higher and and so what they also do is they're spraying these crops and using the pesticides as crop desiccants drying out the crop so they can come to harvest quicker. So foods particularly like that, what vegetarians eat like oats, wheat, wheat and legumes are super high in glyphosate based herbicides. Roundup There are there are over 800 glyphosate based herbicides, but many people know the name Roundup Monsanto now Bayer so that that is sprayed. But glyphosate, as I mentioned prior is an antibiotic.
It's also a metal key. Later, it was a pipe cleaner. It was the it's clean pipe. That's how they discovered it was an herbicide because it was cleaning pipes and they saw all the herbs around it die. It binds the metals that you need to run your body. There are organic metals that we need to run brain function, for example, like magnesium, zinc, copper, cobalt, manganese, glyphosate loves manganese. You need manganese for nervous system function and a whole bunch of other things lactobacilli and your gut need manganese.
So it affects us, it affects our microbiome. So these metals are collated, they're bound, they're not available to run our biology, our physiology. So our children, ourselves, we do not have enough nutrition because it's been taken out by these chemical inputs. And we can't run our own physiology, particularly with the metals. In addition, Dr. Sarah Lini from France, I believe it was 2015 or 2016, showed in a study that those pesticides are also contained and needed with heavy metals like arsenic, lead, cadmium and mercury in the pesticides.
So we are getting an extra dose of heavy metals and the beneficial ones are being bound up. So now we're eating these plants who now have nutritional nutritionally bereft and they have a form of plant aids. Their immune systems are taken out and they are nutrient poor and that's what we're eating. There's still standing, but barely. And we're eating those and we're still hungry because our body saying, hey, didn't get enough nutrition that we are overfed, we keep eating but undernourished because we are nutritionally poor.
Does that makes did I answer your question? Yeah. This is, I think, the perfect way to describe and briefly encapsulate the process here. So let's take that further down the road. What does that do to mom and baby in utero and how does that set up baby in for efficacy? So whatever mom is eating is what baby is eating in utero. So mommy's babies eat. A lot of women think, Oh, I'm pregnant, I could eat whatever I want and I can gain what I want. So they come off their diets. I've seen this. I've been taking care of moms and babies for 40 years.
I've seen it and eating food, that's less than ideal. Sodas, chips. Oh, my God. Like, oh, I can eat whatever I want. Oh, no, stop. Now. The time where you have to be extra careful what you're eating because what you're eating gets right through the placenta. The placenta is not a barrier. Everything moms exposed to, babies exposed to in utero. Additionally, moms who have heavy metals, mercury, lead, cadmium, etc. offload particularly in the firstborn, their own heavy metals. So those babies get an extra heavy dose.
Specially if moms didn't do anything for detoxification, they may not have heard this. No shame, no blame game. We talked about that, Sinclair. We don't blame or shame people. We did it. No, now we know. So now we can try and fix it. So all those nutrients affect babe. So, like, for example, if mom is nutritionally deficient in the vitamins that help methyl eight, for example, folate, methyl folate, baby won't get enough. It's a water soluble vitamins. And that baby could be born with some neurologic defects like spinal bifida.
So they add folic they add folic acid to the prenatal vitamins. It's the wrong form. Right? It's not even the right form. And like the idea, wrong, wrong formulation, folks get it right. This is not rocket science. It has to be a certain format. It's called methyl folate, methyl B-12. So, Mark, and that's why I do recommend prenatal vitamins. You know, 40 years ago I said, really, if mom eat well, why does she need prenatal now? Oh, oh, oh, different. And mom needs lots of antioxidants to help her from all the environmental toxicants she's exposed to.
So a diet food first, diet rich in antioxidants, polyphenols, lots of colors, eat the rainbow, lots of veg, healthy protein grass fed grass, finished meats if you eat meat also, but also will need some extraneous supplements. That's what I do recommend now. Yes. So have you listed every supplement you would recommend for mom or babies in utero or do you want to cover any other basis? They're based on this herbicide pesticide situation. Yeah. So what I try and do because then you would need like a Ph.D.
in nutritional science for a mom, you know, there's so much going on. Moms go to other. Fields like that to moms right now, and it's like. Oh my God. So if they take a an organic prenatal vitamin, A clean prenatal vitamin, the many are of a base from foods like mega foods or innate response. I have no stock in any of these supplements, by the way. I like the food based supplements and take their prenatal, make sure it's clean, I should say non-GMO, organic when possible. So mom prenatal. And you'll see in the really good ones, they won't have folic acid, I'll say folate in the form of methyl folate.
So good multivitamin with minerals for mom and a really super healthy diet. It's the time to really clean up the diet and really stress
Pregnancy Nutrition and Prenatal Support 15:00
organic farm to table farm fresh food really make food and cooking a priority. Whole Foods eating out, drop down. Don't do the drive thru. Don't do the take out burrito. Sorry folks I like. I like eating out too, but I rarely do it these days because the food quality, even if it tastes good, it's not organic unless the restaurant or takeout says it is. And even I live in a crunchy particle of yet very few organic restaurants. Very few. It's shocking. Yeah, it's. That's really true. Worse, we're still trying to recapture our market demand and our our awareness of this and support farmers in getting out of their their trap.
What the conventional foods, huh? Yes. Let's be honest. Do it. Guys. We're on the way. We really are a this is so much more well-understood now. And that's why we get to, like, dove into the specifics together, right? Yes. So I'm thinking about my journey as a chronic illness person. And I started out in mental health. You probably don't know my story, but I got too sick to continue in my practice to shut it down. And we went on a journey after I ended up in the hospital and became Mystery Patient X and I was so sick that I wrote goodbye letters many times, well defined diagnosis.
But really, when you look at it, nothing that happened to me was all that unusual for the American public today. And it started with me being the oldest child. Mom played with Mercury as a kid. They'd break thermometers and play with it in the street. Yeah, I mean, it was the fifties, man, you know? And, you know, she had a lot of environmental toxin exposure growing up in the L.A. smog back then and flipping houses in the seventies as a go getter and stripping lead paint herself. So, you know, give her so much credit for that and then trying to feed me, you know, she couldn't breastfeed.
So I went on formula super early and like just a couple of weeks in. And then I grew up on Costco food, candy, snacks, you know, I mean, that's great. Now you have unfortunately and that your story is the story. It's the American story of not being breastfed. The C-section, baby, we can talk about why that's a problem. We can talk about not being breast fed while that why that's a problem. And then the heavy metal exposures, indeed, that's a problem. All this causes gut issues, which then causes subsequent brain issues because there's a gut brain axis and those microbes in your gut make chemicals in addition to neurotransmitters, the chemicals that run your brain like serotonin.
That's the calming neurotransmitter GABA calming transmitter. They're made in the gut, go up the enteric nervous system through the vagus nerve and affect brain function. And many people with mental illness, anxiety, depression, ADHD, neurotic issues. Others have gut issues. Children on the spectrum. On the spectrum, 90% of them have gut issues. I think is even 100% for myself in my own practice. So this is what we've set up our current children. When I first wrote that book, What's Making Our Kids Sick?
54% of American children have a chronic disease. I think I saw the last stat was 63%. I think it's more like 75%. Yeah. And because sick is the new normal. So children have allergies, asthma, obesity, name it, anxiety, mental health is is not cut off here at the neck. Mental health and physical health are related people, you know, depression. These are all the common eating disorders, gender dysphoria, you name it. A lot of it is related to this gut brain microbiome axis. So you tell me where you want to dig in.
Sinclair It's all important and I am sorry for your journey, but your journey allows you here to educate other people's journeys. So thank you for what you're doing. Oh, I appreciate you saying that. I'm really at peace with it now. It certainly was an absolute living hell at the time for many, many years. But, you know, it deepens your character. And I learned the hard way that no white coat is coming to save me and I'm going to have to take it and learn this myself, just like everybody listening to the summit.
And I really view every one of these interviews as a love letter to, you know, people who are in the position that I was in. And this is absolutely how we heal. We pick up these gems from trusted experts like yourself and put the pieces together and put one foot in front of the other. That's right. Now we have our own white horse. It's exactly so I would love to for you to speak to the vaginal birth versus cesarean and then absolutely. Let's dove into breastfeeding versus formula issues or. You know, births go awry.
And, you know, again, the no shame thing and about 32% of American births, a C-section. We're not the highest in the world, by the way, Australia is. I thought we were by far, but we're not. But we're close. So when the baby's born via caesarean, they don't acquire that vaginal flora for mom unless some smart ob gyn or midwife feeds from mom's vaginal flora, the baby's nose and mouth. But that that seeding we call it seeding is not often done. People call it gross. I'm like, gross, the baby's born under the vagina.
What are you talking about? It's. Please take a cloth and see the baby's mouth and nose. We could circumvent so many problems. So anyway, the baby looks like the surgical suite, or the obstetrician or the midwife who's ever there in the suite with them comes out. But if mom nurses, this is why breastfeeding is so important for so many reasons. It's so important the baby's microbiome. Within about three months will revert to a breastfed baby vaginal birth looking microbiome. Within the first three years of life, children's microbiomes can flex, meaning they can be altered. They can acquire new bugs.
After three years, the microbiome gets pretty set. We might have a fudge factor of about 20%, but for some of us, we can't ever change that microbiome. If you take probiotics or eat fermented foods, they often die off after a couple of weeks. So that's why we need to constantly ingest probiotics as adults in the form of either a supplement and or fermented foods. I'm a big fan if you can tolerate fermented foods. So the baby's microbiome and the breast milk changes this breast milk. There is a conversation between baby and mother.
There's retrograde flow from the baby's mouth and baby tells mom through microbes what they need. Mom, this is so smart, chats it up, sends it back. What baby needs in the breastmilk now, magical. It's magic. Now there's something in breast milk called human milk oligosaccharides.
Birth Method, Breastfeeding, and Infant Gut Health 22:00
There are these substances in breast milk that are meant not for baby, but for baby's microbiome. The bit that, oh, eat those human milk oligosaccharides is some women have 200. God bless them, some average is 50 but in formula they now you can buy stuff to add one oh human milk oligosaccharides they're starting to put some in galactose oligosaccharides fructose oligosaccharides in formula but it's still not breast milk. Now, listen, there's no ideal world, Sinclair. And occasionally we cannot nurse, we adopt.
There's issues. I get it. But the best you can do for a baby is organic formula or make your own nourishing traditions. Weston Price You can make your own. I couldn't. I worked too hard. And when my child, my my son stopped nursing at five months, he went on protest. It's a long story. He decided he wasn't nursing anymore. Happens to me to pediatrician. This was 30 years ago and I got organic formula. I didn't know about adding probiotics back then. And a healthy baby fat for baby brain didn't know that.
But now I tell parents and in the VHA adding probiotics add in vitamin D, vitamin D, three K to for your baby. So we need to sometimes even supplement breast milk. I mean, a formula that's organic. They're breast fed babies that need to be supplemented. It just depends on mom's health and the baby's health. Case by case, there's no one formula. Yeah. Yeah. I really appreciate you saying that. And I hope that we can continue to spread the word about the value of breastfeeding wherever possible. And if you're having difficulties with that, speak with a lactation consultant, because that might be the latch.
There's so much more that you can do today that we know now than we did even ten years ago. Absolutely. And you know, and there is no shame in needing some help. Even gorillas need videos to watch how to nurse their babies when they're when they're in captivity, they're taught how to nurse babies. It's not intuitive how, like, you just stick the baby on there and let them go to town. There's all sorts of sorts of things that that you could just name it some assistance with, especially if you're a new mom.
Ask a mom who's had more than one kid. They have one here, one here. One is. You learn there's a process. All this stuff here we're learning. So it's not an intuitive intelligence. We need to learn how to do these things from each other. That's a really lovely way to to enlighten this topic, because they know it's so hard for parents. If you're listening, it's because you care. And of course, you want to see your child do well. And of course, you want to know that you did everything you could. And you know, you don't want your kid end up like me, not I was on a lot of antibiotics between two and four for ear infections and just decimated my gut microbiome.
I was basically felt unwell. And a lot of that as soon as you hear that, you know, the chronic ear infections I know this is a sidebar and I don't want to go into specifics, but the chronic ear infection cause dairy sensitivities. Absolutely. And you can test for it or just pull them off dairy, see what happens. But so many parents are resistant. No, got milk. The milk industry created that that you must have milk. Babies after a certain point don't need milk. They need calcium. But if they're eating, they can get calcium from other foods.
Almonds have a ton of calcium. So the salmon, there are lots of foods with calcium, so. Right, so they don't need to drink. Tyler Cowen Milk is for baby cows, so you don't have to drink milk. So if a child has a lot of infections, pull off dairy and see how it goes and give them a little bit of almond butter. They have lots of lots of calcium in their. So we're if if somebody has had a less than ideal experience maybe non vaginal birth and didn't know to take those steps you know, to do the swabbing or we went onto formula too early and it was not organic, it was not ideal or not probiotics.
What might, what issues might show up for daily life and what can we do about them. Good questions and Claire, you know, we we got to work together as a team here. This is good. So what often shows up is eczema. Eczema is an inflammatory skin inflammation of kids. It tends to affect their elbows, their cheeks. You'll see behind their legs, on their chins. It's super itchy. The skin gets scaly. The babies can't sleep at night because of the itch factor. It gets inflamed. It can get infected. 60% of infants now may have eczema.
Eczema is an expression of a gut issue manifest in the skin, so slathering it with steroid cream will make it feel better. But drives a problem deeper. You're just suppressing the issue. You're not getting to the root cause. Root cosmetic is medicine, holistic health, which is a gut issue. You have to take them off dairy and sometimes gluten, too, to resolve the eczema. You can do food testing. There are different labs, so we can do food testing. I like U.S. biotech. No, no stock in the company because we do a fingerstick from the baby on a little card and it's not wicked expensive.
Insurance doesn't cover any of these tests by the way. And you can see if there are intolerances to foods, there are food allergies, they're food intolerances. But that's another conversation. Eczema, constipation, one third of American children have constipation. The baby's now pooping or making big like hard pellets. Formula fed babies often are constipated and so that tells me the gut's not working right. I am doctor poopy diaper. I love all poop. I want to see the poop. And babies have a very specific poop.
It should be yellowish, seedy, soft, not foul smelling. That's breastfed poop. When you switch to formula, they become harder, darker and color more adult like not more nap, no more baby poo and they can smell not so good and often they'll be pellets and those are babies who are struggling. And we have to get on those babies ready to see what are the triggers causing the constipation. If babies can't poop, they can detox and they will be uncomfortable and they will not sleep well. So babies not sleeping well, parents not sleeping well.
The whole family goes to pot, right? So eczema, constipation, you'll see reflux in babies where food comes up. We'll see what else those are. The most common ones are gut related. You might start to see the ear infections starting around as young as four months. You'll start to see chronic fluid in the ears, lots of nasal congestion. And those are all the early signs cradle cap that that white coating on the scalp what looks like babies have that like like a little bathing cap on no way no that's not good get rid of that.
And the way we get rid of it is we take the scales off. We correct the diet. So, so much of what we're doing is dietary correction. And we shouldn't have all these gluten and dairy sensitivities. We have chronically poisoned our children in the food supply. The parents are unknowingly if you're eating out, if you're not eating organic, you're eating GMOs and pesticides. GMOs aren't healthy either. I talk about pesticides, but GMOs aren't good either. Neither one. Can you explain that a little bit further, like we talked briefly earlier on, what GMOs are and now there are more and more GMO crops.
But why aren't they good? Yes. So when they do this genetic engineering, when they engineer the gene to produce a certain trait, they say it's an exact science, but it's not exact, actually. And this this newly formed product has that it creates creates genetic disturbances or untoward side effects down the line. So we know there are only about three human studies on GMOs. There are not a lot, which is shocking because we're now we're all eating them for 25 years. All of us are eating them because they can even if you're fully organic, which I don't know anyone who is, they can cross contaminate organic fields, organic crop next to a nano again a crop cross-contamination, the USDA says 5 to 9%.
So we're all getting some. So the estimates have been shown to cause oxidative stress, oxidative stress, that's why you need antioxidants in your diet or supplement is a is a cancerous precursor. They also reduce gluten. Thiamin glutathione iron is the master antioxidant in your body. You need good with iron if you can't take little cation. I recommend take an AC. It's been a savior for so many people during COVID and a AC and acetyl cysteine. Which cysteine is one of the three amino acids that makes up glue to fail the master antioxidant.
As we age, our glue diet goes down.
Signs of Gut Imbalance in Children 31:00
Babies have a lot of glue that they're selling so to children. And that's another reason why they may have done so well during COVID. Let's go to Diane. And it also increases the production of certain amines called poly amines, which we have in our body. Some are important. If it gets too many, it could be cancerous like a cadaver. In a future scene, they have these weird names, cadaver in pictures. Those are probably means all made by GMOs. Last but not least, there's an insect, a genetically modified insecticide called BTD and BT corn, so that when insects eat this beauty, their stomachs explode.
It said it wouldn't happen to us because our stomach acid would break down the BT corn. Well, I can't even tell you how many people are on antacids or Prilosec and they're super high in their stomach so they don't break it down. And in one study out of Montreal, they found the b t circulating in moms and fetuses not broken down human effects on looked at what we do now from the work of doctor of a microbiologist Kiran Krishnan who owns Microbiome Labs, who I adore and I do write for them. By the way, I write articles for Microbiome Labs because I love them.
He did a study looking at Roundup, and Roundup was way more toxic than glyphosate alone because these herbicides do not just have glyphosate, which is toxic, but you have the inert proprietary secrets. And the main one in Roundup, for example, is a surfactant called Poea. Those surfactant are detergents. Detergents break down fats like cell membranes. That's where fats leave your nervous system. That's where fats live. Your brain is highly fatty. They can break that down. Glyphosate enters the cells and does more damage.
And that's what Kiran Krishnan found in a in a shame muddle muddle study that he published about a year ago with the head of genetics in the UK named Dr. Michael Antonio and Robyn Mismatch. People should know if they want to look at this stuff that I'm not just talking you know a poo here that we have really good science to back up what we're saying poop is a pediatric word just. Of course. Everybody knows poop. So this is so these are some of the problems with how we've poisoned our food supply.
And I would be remiss and Claire, I have to get on this. I have to talk about it all the time. A paper came out in 2020 which showed how glyphosate causes autism now correlated caused. And I thought when that paper came out, it showed the mechanism and how it happens. And I said, Oh my God, you see, here it is. We'll stop using glyphosate. No at amped up now either them up because of herbicide resistance we're using more toxic formulations like dicamba 240 So what I say is America does not love her children.
We have not pulled out the poisons out of our food. They're eating it everywhere in school lunches. Look at moms across America school lunch study. And so this is my cry. And we can talk about the Bill of Rights. Yeah, let's do that. Let's do that right now. So what is the Bill of Rights that you referring to? So my own passion for the care of our children got me. I would say some are crazed. During COVID, I was a little crazed, and what I was crazy about was the narrative being pushed on our kids.
We weren't talking nutrition. We weren't talking vitamin C, we weren't talking sunlight. We didn't talk about Vitamin D, we didn't talk about supplements in the microbiome. None of these things were talked about improving our children's health. What we talked about was a narrative based on a vaccine, and that was it. And I found that to be to say faulty would be a less than powerful word than what I might use in private. Sinclair But I digress. So I, from my work with children, I create, I wrote it's global but it's it's basically an environmental children's bill of Rights because I and I wrote six principles at the time.
I added one since I've lectured on it, I wrote about it. It's on GMO science dot org. It's I wrote about this because our kids are not being protected now by regulatory agencies, not by government, not by schools, not by the CDC, not by anyone. So I wrote these Bill of Rights, and I mean, they're simple, grown and straightforward. I can tell if you'd like I can go into it or not. But I think our children globally, whether whatever color or whatever income, are not being protected and they are under assault.
And I think it behooves everybody who's watching your program everywhere to step up on behalf of our kids. That is my call to action today. I completely agree with you. It's we have a choice right now and we have way more control than we think we do. And it may not be our fault that we got here, but it is our responsibility to fix it. And that was yes. I give you an example, because people may say, oh, impossible, what can I do? I can't do anything right. Oh, Costco, one of the the biggest buyer of organics in the US was using appeal, that protective toxic coating that they spray on fruits and veggies, which you should not eat if you see the appeal label run, don't eat it.
We could talk about if you want. And so they we sent an email yesterday the new MDS, moms docs and scientists and Costco stopped using it because of consumer pressure. We got an email back. We sent it yesterday and got it back last night. Oh, my God. One email. They said we did stop using it because of consumer pressure. So when you go to Costco, which is a way for families to buy affordable organics,you should not see that Apeel Bill Gate funded program on your avocado or apple or whatever you're buying.
The nutrition of the fruit in the vegetable is often in the peel. You don't want to take the peel off. You want to eat the peel potato, peel, apple peel, orange peel, super nutritious. Well, to ask you to unpack this a little bit for people, because some people may not have heard about appeal. And I got our team put together some research on this and shared on Instagram. We got attacked for doing it and it was very interesting to watch. Could you please, from a scientific perspective,share your concern about apeel and why we want parents to avoid it.
So they want to keep fruits and veggies from spoiling on the shelf longer. So they said, hey, we'll put this protective monoglycerides diglycerides which are fats coating on it.
GMO Risks, Glyphosate, and the Children's Bill of Rights 38:00
What could go wrong? Right. Well, it sounds sounds great. You put this nice coating on it. The nutrition, apparently, according to apeel, doesn't go down the nutritive value of the apple or the avocado, whatever they're spraying with this protective coat, it survives transport longer so you can get some apples from Chile or whatever, 8000 miles away from wherever you living. Don't do it. And so what? Oh, wait, wait a minute. In order to create these fats when they're process in your body, they go from mono to dye to triglycerides.
They make triglycerides which are not so healthy. Fats, number one. Number two, they make a substance called things called Diacylglycerol. I think that's the name of it. This Diacylglycerol which can increase insulin levels and oh, by the way, may be a carcinogen. Huh. But they didn't tell you that. And they have to use an extraction process using solvents and heavy metals to to create this coating. Whenever you see hexane being used and then using baby formula, that's a solvent. And they found heavy metals cadmium, arsenic, lead, mercury in this process in the appeal.
So there are heavy metals in this protective coating. So what are we doing? Yes, it does mean you have to shop more frequently for your fruits and vegetables. In other countries, they go every day to buy fresh fruit and veggies. Maybe we don't have time to go to every day. But every three days after a plant is harvested, the nutrition and nutritional content goes down by 30%. So you want to eat your fruits and veggies as fresh as you pick them, or from your garden or your window box or wherever you growing it.
So you try to do that and not transported 8000 miles with a toxic coating on it. And that's what apeel says. I have sources for this information and I have about six different references on the toxicity of apeel. So I say, don't eat it. It's great. I would love to know where people can find that information from you so they can share it with their schools. And you know what we're going to do today? We're doing a podcast, the new MDS episode ten. We're talking about fake food frenzy and on YouTube and Facebook Channel, we're going to put the resources of all this information.
And I'm actually writing an article literally as we speak about fake food. Fake food frenzies call the phony chicken, the phony burgers, the apeel coatings. It's all going to be in there and my favorite is that impossible burger Oh, I ripped on that right now. That's really bad. It's a bad one. Don't eat it. Yeah. for, you know, Mitchell and star restaurants are serving it and that's great for them. Don't spend $30 for that. GMO soy burger with the glyphosate don't do it yeah. Thank you so much for mentioning that it's I really want to ask you to impact that but go watch Dr. Michelle's podcast on this so that you can learn details.
Yeah. So I know we have to wrap and I just it's so hard to because you're such an, a resource and an advocate for parents and kiddos. And I'm thinking about the children that have come through our practice and how much higher they are,and glyphosate and oversizing pesticides and their parents. I think their labs are shocking, especially if the family is plant based, if they're eating only vegetarian or vegan and it's it's those grains, it's those legumes that are heavily, heavily sprayed and parents realize how quick it adds up.
So let's recap a couple of positive action steps for parents for maybe pre-conception in utero, and then in one positive step. Whenever you can switch your diet and whatever you can do, it's progress, not perfection.
Apeel, Fake Food, and Practical Family Action Steps 42:00
So start making changes if you don't have the finances to dump your pantry steps. And mostly that the most important thing are your meats fruits and veggies your eggs make. That is an and fat real fat in your diet, not seed oils, but real fats, whether it's coconut oil, olive oil butter. And so number one, number two is if you are suffering and if your child is suffering with any gut brain disturbances, you have to remove gluten, dairy, take it out. And there are so many great substitutes. Now take it out for a while, see how they do.
I don't like to give kids digestive enzymes to help them break it down because that's like there's a problem. Let's give a green I don't like. You got to shift the diet and get them on a lower and anti-inflammatory even may just be temporary include fermented foods in your child's diet and in yourself. Drink some apple cider vinegar, two tablespoons in glass of water every day and you can put it on your child's salad and salad dressing. Apple cider vinegar with the mother. Mrs. Bragg's Costco has an organic brand, but it's not as good as Mrs.
Bragg's is, in my opinion. But it has a cedar factor in it, and it's one of the microbes that will break down glyphosate. So I make sure that I try and drink a little bit of that every day. Apple cider vinegar is super healthy. It's you can put it on your skin. It's antifungals and antibacterial. You can wash your veggies in it with a little bit of water. You can do it like a veggie wash because there are the clean 15 dirty dozen by Environmental Working Group. I say buy all organic, but if you can't, you can go to EWG and look at their list, put it in your phone, take a snapshot and so I say that I say don't drink tap water, but don't buy the plastic PBA, PBB, PVC water.
Get a basic carbon filter. You don't need to get a whole reverse osmosis system in your house, but you need filtered water. But you want to make sure you're drinking, eating a mineral dense diet. So you want to eat a lot of foods that are high in minerals, and often the nuts and seeds are high in minerals. Assuming your kid doesn't have a nut allergy, hopefully not. But I know. So I recommend that. And if you're thinking about conceiving right on beautiful. If you can prep up at least six months before clean up mom and dad made safe my friend Amy Siff she has a great pre-pregnancy clean out booklet, it's like 80 pages in there.
I love that goop I have. I advice for those guys. I think they're spot on as another resource where parents can find non toxic products so clean up their your water your your clean up, be internal media clean up the external year you know and it's a journey because many of us, me were not taught this. So now we're teaching parents to teach it to their children. So if you already have kids three, eight, 12 years old, bring them on the journey with you. It's a family adventure. Get those kids eating meals together.
One of the most important thing you did for you to do as a family and get the kids in the kitchen cooking with you. Kids should know how to cook, grow food, and clean up. Kids need to go run and do their homework. They need to do chores, get them cleaning up their own mess. It doesn't have to be perfect. I was one of those moms who didn't want to mess in my kitchen. Oh, I let that go now. I would do it a little bit different. I don't know what I was thinking. Yeah, there could be a mess in the kitchen, but I'm saying this is how we start the journey of changing our lives.
And it's possible at any step or wherever you are. Light green, medium green, dark green, whatever. Wherever you are on the ecosphere, you can begin. It's so beautiful. Thank you for spreading your message of hope and for looking out for our little ones and for being so loving to the parents. Just trying to navigate along the way. It's hard. Did we say that it was hard? We met. This is a couple days ago. I think you need a Ph.D. to read a food label by the way, on those codes. Number nine is organic.
If you see the number nine on those food codes, nine, organic. Good one. That's a great last step. Thank you so much for your time. Absolutely.
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