Understand Your Chronic Disease: A Holistic View

Introduction to Laura Frontiero 0:00

Reversing heart disease Naturally Summit 2.0 and for the first time we couldn't get it last year. We go this year. One of the most dynamic I think the only nurse we're interviewing. And when you talk about health care, how can you not have at least one, if not a large number of nurses interviewed? But we got this time and I'm very happy and very proud. You're going to enjoy it. Take out your notepads, take out your pens. We got Laura Frontiero from San Diego, founder and CEO of Bio-Radiant Health, Bio- Radiant Health six online functional medicine Health Summits.

I've been very honored to be on two of our health summits. They're wildly popular because she is such a dynamic leader. She actually takes care of patients. She has gone from hospital nursing to nurse practitioner to now functional medicine leader, and you'll see in a minute why she is known as the Energy Lady, so she'll tell us where you can find her. LauraFrontiero.com It's a beautiful website. It's been all over, great resources and great program she has. You may want to pick her up and work with her and her team, but I always thank you, Laura, for being here.

You're a busy lady. It is so my pleasure. And wow, what an introduction. Well, you deserve it. You know, you have my complete and utter appreciation for what you do. And I know you work very hard and you really are an authority. So nobody leave their screen right now. So I know your practice, which is a real practice. You work with group patients who work with one on one, patients who work with VIP kind of coaching patients. But you sort of have moved from, you know, Western to functional medicine.

So why is that such a heavy focus? And tell us a little bit, you know, any time you can throw in heart disease,

Why Functional Medicine Focuses on Prevention 2:00

go for it. Well, my whole focus is about preventing chronic inflammatory diseases, heart disease being one of the big ones. Right. When we think of that chronic disease bucket, we think of cancer, we think of neurodegenerative disorders, we think of heart disease. And of course, who doesn't have a family member where heart disease is at near and dear to your heart? So I watched my own dad go through, you know, triple bypass surgery, have his have that clot off and end up having stents and have those clot off and end up having stents again.

And, you know, we've seen it all with him. And it's so funny. There was a time, many years after his surgeries that I actually listen to you on a podcast. It was one of the I was deep in the Western medicine world. I was not a functional medicine expert yet. And I remember hearing you talk about what could be done alternatively to help prevent procedures in people with heart disease. And I can remember just thinking, if my family only knew that, then what a difference this could have made for my dad.

So, you know, I shifted teams, I moved from Western medicine and moved to functional medicine. And I, you know, haven't prescribed anything in a long time. I haven't met in the Western world now for a while, but it's been because I just really have a passion for prevention and helping people prevent chronic disease. And ironically, I worked in a preventive medicine department for Kaiser Permanente, which of course, is one of the it is the biggest HMO in America. And prevention from a Western perspective and prevention from a functional perspective is, you know, Joel are not the same thing.

Absolutely. How have you found the you know, you were in the trenches of nursing, hospital nursing. How have you found the functional medicine model to fit with this passion for identifying and reversing inflammatory diseases to work better? I mean, you do a lot of things different. Just pick out one or two. I mean, I do everything different, right? So in the Western world, we do a lot of screening tests, right? So we do screening mammograms, we do screening colonoscopies, we do screening prostate PSA tests.

We do all these screening tests and we call it preventive medicine. In your insurance plan. It's called your prevention. Right? Right. But really, what we're doing is we're looking for early disease with these tests. They aren't actually preventive at all. They are early detection tests. There is no such thing as a breast cancer that's gone as a as a breast cancer prevention from a mammogram. You have a mammogram and either you have breast cancer or you don't. We're not going to do anything different to prevent it from a mammogram.

So once I realize this and I went into the functional medicine space and saw that, wow, we actually do some things that are preventive over here. My eyes were opened and so what we do so much differently. I don't really recall learning much about nutrition through nursing school, nurse practitioner school, or through any of the continuing education that I did for, you know, 25 years in that space. The way that we look at nutrition here in functional medicine, we didn't emphasize, you know, mitochondrial cellular health, we didn't emphasize gut health.

We didn't emphasize the impact of environmental toxicants on the body that leads to chronic disease. So, yeah, to say things we do to to say we do things different over here, we absolutely do. And I know that I'm preaching to the choir to you, because this is exactly what you do differently in your practice is keep people out of the operating room because you're focusing on all these things well. So you just go deep. It's a lot of testing. It's a lot of questions. It's a lot of history taking and exposure.

I know people are always surprised when I ask them, by any chance, did you ever work in a chemical factory, ever visit China for six months, ever,

The Four Root Cause Buckets 6:00

you know, live on a farm and got sprayed by airplanes going overhead and doing crop dusting? And I said, that's weird, you ask that, but a matter of fact. And then surprisingly, the answers come out and then, you know, go track that down. Crazy, crazy. And, you know, I want to I want to say from a from a cardiovascular heart disease prevention. When I worked in the preventive model, we checked cholesterol, we checked blood pressure, we checked blood sugar. We prescribed the drugs for those things.

And we said, come back in a year, you know, eat low sodium, walk, exercise, and come back in a year. And let's see how you're doing. And people came back worse and worse every year with and we re increasing the drugs every year. Absolutely. And we never really fix that root cause when you can once in a while I get frustrated. You must do that. I root cause doesn't show up. But boy most of the time it's l I think sleep is by far, you know, so widely overlooked as a source of inflammation and disease.

So tell me about when you're looking with this topic, root causes of chronic inflammatory health conditions. You know, what are some of those root causes are often missed and you've talked about it, but, you know, just talk about maybe four of them. I think you've got something you call your four main buckets. Yeah, I do. And I and as I as I get into talking about that, I want to kind of dispel, dispel a myth that so this is a you know, this is a summit that is going to be watched by many people who understand something about integrative medicine.

Right. And functional medicine. There may be newbies here and we certainly are so happy you're here learning this. And for those of you who have been in the functional medicine space and integrative space for a while, whether you're a consumer of health care or you're a practitioner, I found in my functional medicine training that I was taught in the beginning that to look for root causes like thyroid problems, like hormone dysregulation, like leaky gut, like adrenal problems. And so I focused on those things for a long time as root causes of chronic disease and, you know, symptoms.

And then as I went on and on with my practice and kept learning, I learned that there was actually a missing piece. There was a deeper root cause, that there was something causing what I would call those middle stream problems, like adrenals, thyroid, you know, a blood sugar dysregulation, a gut dysfunction. I would call that a middle stream problem. And underneath that were four buckets, a problems. And so once I started focusing on those four buckets of problems, that's when everything changed for my practice, for my patients, for my business, for my family, for myself.

Because you first you do it on yourself and then you start doing it on everybody else, you know, in love. And then you start bringing it to your family and realize, Oh, this is really where it's at. So if you're going to write anything down on this talk, these are the four things you want to write down. And as you're looking for practitioners, these are the things, the questions you want to ask, too. So first thing, bucket number one is chronic hidden infections. Now, when we think of infections in the body, a lot of people's mind goes to gut health like, oh, bacteria or parasites. Yes.

And there's fungus and, you know, there's viruses in the body. But I want you to think beyond that, because we get chronic hidden infections in our sinuses, in our tonsils and lymphatic system, in our gallbladder, in our liver, in our lungs, in the cracks and crevices and crypts and places that are hard to get to. Infections like to be there. And this will perpetuate in the mouth as well. This will perpetuate and and worsen inflammation. And when you think of the cascade of what gets us to heart disease, inflammation is underneath that, among other things.

And so these infections are perpetuating that. The second bucket is environmental toxicants, and that is a big bucket with a lot of sub buckets, let's just put it that way. So there's mold mycotoxins, there's heavy metals, radioactive elements like like radon uranium, which are, by the way, heavy metals. They're just the heaviest of heavy metals. There are all of the pesticides and herbicides that sprayed on our food. There's the body products and skin products you're using that are full of endocrine disrupting phthalates and parabens.

For example, there are the products that you're using to clean your home that are full of toxins and disruptors. There's the forever chemicals, the PFOS and PFOA that are in our cookware and in sports gear and sprayed on anything that needs to be, you know, water resistant and retardant and then we have, gosh, I'm not leaving anything out. The environmental toxin bucket is so big, I can just keep going and going. I mean, so you get my drift. We are exposed to toxins at a higher rate than ever in human history right now.

And in my practice, I'm seeing people sicker and sicker. I'm seeing people move towards chronic disease faster and faster. And I truly believe that it's a toxin overwhelm. And then the third bucket would be nutrient deficiencies. Now I'm going to say something that people may not realize here. I think most people are aware that farming practices have changed and our soil might not be as nutrient rich. So the vegetables that are grown in that soil may not have the nutrients. And, you know, we may not always pick the best food.

You might be eating processed food or you might not be eating diversity of food. So that will cause nutrient deficient seed. But I'm going to give you two more reasons. You can have nutrient deficiencies that people don't realize. And it's those first two buckets that I explain. So bucket number one is infections. Think about infections, skimming off the top. They're taking your good nutrients from you before it can even get to your cells and your mitochondria and support your body. And the second thing is environmental toxicants.

So they block receptors on your cells where nutrients get in from the bloodstream or the extracellular space in through the cell. And if that receptor is blocked and the nutrient can't get in, then you can't utilize the nutrient and you have a nutrient deficiency. So the first two buckets are part of the cause of the third bucket nutrient deficiencies. And then the fourth bucket would be chronic stress and unresolved traumas in someone's life. So we know without a doubt that trauma has a biological imprint on the body.

We know that there is a biology of trauma. This has been well proven in research. I mean, just think of the ACS studies, which was actually the primary researcher on that. Vincent Valenti was a Kaiser Permanente doctor, and he proved that people with adverse childhood events had more chronic health conditions. And, you know, these are traumas. Adverse childhood events are traumas with a big T. So these are things like sexual abuse, physical abuse, mental abuse, verbal abuse. Maybe you've been a victim of a crime or you've witnessed something horrific and disturbing.

These are all traumas that come into the body

Testing for Toxins and Hidden Infections 13:00

and then the stress of our daily life. And I think stress is at an all time high. We see higher rates of suicide, we see higher rates of domestic violence. We see people disagreeing. The country is divided. The world is divided. I mean, stress is everywhere. And this has an imprint on our body as well. So those are the big four buckets. Yeah. Wow. That was hopeful. Everybody took some good notes and because that was some powerful and very, very helpful stuff. And again, you can test for the bucket of hidden infections, you can test for the bucket of environmental toxins and nutrient deficiencies.

And probably you need to take a good history and be compassionate to explore stress and trauma. But those are, I think, completely overlooked in the standard of medicine. So you're not going to find anything there. There's a wonderful book by a friend, Darren Nolan, that came out in 2023 called Fatal Inconveniences and you can read a whole book about all the toxins in your house and then strategies, how to move them out because they are guide just the issue of fertility in the United States and dropping some counts.

And just one little microcosm of something that's really, really a serious problem, actually. So, Joel, this is so funny you say that. So in my programs, when we start moving the toxins out of the body, particularly the metals and the glyphosate and the pesticides, people in their forties start getting pregnant because they didn't think they ever could. And now all of a sudden, so that phase of the detox is like the baby maker phase. So we tell people, if you don't want to be pregnant, make sure that you're making sure you don't get pregnant.

And they don't believe me. And then they get pregnant. The saying you will you test them first for, you know, use a vibrant health or one of the. Absolute I love the love the vibrant total tax burden. It is easy to understand tests for 88 different mold, metals and environmental toxins. It is simplistic and powerful and it really is a test. No one is sure. But to understand this, it's a test for what you're excreting. It tests what's coming out. So until your body is safe to release toxins, they will be missed.

And so when we do that test, we actually slowly provoke people over about a four week period of time in a very gentle, nourishing way that helps get their drainage pathways open, helps support their gut health, helps their body feel safe to really stop, to release toxins. Then we do that test and we see far more toxins than if we just did it from the first minute I met someone. But yes, I love that tests. Great. Well, it's funny, I this is just the way people are. People find my email. I'm sure people find your email.

And just before I logged on to have this wonderful conversation with you, I get a random email. My grandchildren were grinding their teeth and banging their heads on the wall. Their doctor suggested it could be parasites and treated them for it. They don't grind their teeth and bang their heads in the wall. I am so happy for you. I don't know why you chose me to tell this one story. Well, those are the kind of stories we hear all the time in our community because. Yes, that's right. That is amazing that they shared that with you. It was.

Like it was like the. Parasite guy. No. I'm so happy. The parasite hard thing has not really evolved. Obviously, we're probably overlooking a source of chronic inflammation, you know, and about food allergy has recently risen in the cardiovascular field as something that's not negligible and may be actually very important. Well, when people listening are looking for a functional medicine protocol to prevent the root causes of inflammation you're talking about to solve the root causes. Talk a little bit about that solid foundation for solving some of these bucket problems.

This is one of those things, too, that I you know,

Drainage, Detox, and Healing Foundations 17:00

when I very first started working in the functional medicine space, I kind of did what I learned from the AFM and from various people I studied with. And then and then I started digging deeper and I found out about by a regulatory medicine which hails from Germany and Switzerland. You can think of it kind of like the grandparent of American functional medicine. And there is a little bit of a of it advanced theory. There are different theories which say it's advanced. It's actually is pretty basic, but it is train theory that we need to change the terrain in the body in order to solve in order to bring the immune system back online, in order to bring the mitochondria back online, in order to bring the gut back online, in order to bring all the systems back online so that your body can basically solve its own problems because there is an intelligence inside of you and you can solve your health problems with just a little bit of the right support.

And so what I recommend everyone looks for is first and foremost, number one, make sure that whoever you're working with is supporting mitochondrial energy production because you need more ATP energy in order to heal. You even need ATP energy to sleep. If you have insomnia, you can't fall asleep, you can't stay asleep. Chances are your mitochondria aren't working very well, among other things. But you do need energy for your body to actually go through the process of falling asleep. So the first thing we do with our clients is we bake in mitochondrial energy support into anything we're doing so that their cells are supported so they can have the energy to heal.

The second thing that's critical is that before you start moving infections out of the gut, before you start moving toxins out of the body, you must support the drainage pathways. So and this is a concept that I think is missed quite a bit, but your body, your drainage pathways all funnel to one place. They all funnel to the bowels. So I want you to think about where toxins go and where toxins move through your body. And they move through your liver, most of them. And that liver funnels straight to your bowels.

Now, your kidneys. We don't want all your toxins going through your kidneys because your kidneys, your urine should be pretty pure coming out. We don't want to burden the kidneys with tons of toxins. We want those toxins to go through the liver. We want them to go through the bowels and out. So you want to support all drainage pathways. So that's your lymphatics, your fascia, your skin, your kidneys, your lungs, your liver, all organs funnel to drop toxins through the bowels. And so, first and foremost, you've got to poop every day.

I will not allow anyone in my community to start clearing parasites, to start massive and clearing bacteria, to start taking the toxin protocol until we can get them pooping. Because if I can't get you pooping every day, that stuff's going to back up. As soon as we start moving it out of the cells and you're going to hate me, you'll feel so lousy. It's called a Horkheimer reaction. You'll feel sick. You feel like you got hit by a train and you say, I'm never taking these supplements again. In fact, I'm never working with that person again.

They made me sicker than I've ever been in my life. So just make sure people are supporting those drainage pathways. Then and only then do you really start moving pathogens out of the gut do you start moving toxins out. And I really like to do a good month to two of gut restoring before I even start doing heavy hitting detox. It's a myth that a detox is a two week juice cleanse or is something that is short term. Detoxification is a long process for most people. The sicker you are. If you have heart disease right now, then chances are you've got more detox to do than somebody without heart disease.

So be be kind to yourself know that slow wins the race and know that your detox process could take you six months. 18 months. So 12 months, 18 months. It's different for every person depending on what you've been exposed to, your genetics, how consistent you are. So many factors influence this. Wow, wah, wah, wow. You really lay it out so clearly and eloquently and really exciting that people are listening right now and they're frustrated with their health and they're looking and not all of them been exposed to somebody as eloquent as you in the functional medicine space so.

let just spend a few more minutes about the relationship between toxins and infections and optimal health. And you've already touched on mitochondrial energy, but it does take us a little further down that path because, you know, you you go to a cardiologist, you're not hearing about toxins maybe other than quit smoking. No, you're not. And if we have time, I'll share my dad's story, the conclusion of my dad's story as well. But so, again, we go back to that terrain theory and and back to the concept that your body is so intelligent and I'm going to share with you something that may blow your mind.

So viewers may or may not have heard of this, but there is a symbiotic relationship between your infections, your parasites, your bacteria, your fungus and your immune system and the toxins that are in your body.

Toxins, Infections, and the Immune System Dance 22:00

And basically, it goes like this Your immune system will actually invite infections to hang out and thrive in order to solve a more dangerous problem in your body. And that more dangerous problem could be something like heavy metals or radioactive elements. The most dangerous, lethal things on earth. Heavy metals for your for your brain and your heart is no good. And so basically your immune system says, Hey, you parasites, hey, you fungus, you're totally annoying you. Cause all these problems, you have all these symptoms, you make me tired, you make me foggy, you make me bloated.

You you cause all these issues inside of my GI tract. But you're actually not as annoying or troublesome or dangerous as the heavy metals and the radioactive elements that I've been exposed to through my drinking water and the air that I'm breathing and the food that I'm eating and the amalgams in my mouth. And so I really need you to just stick it out here with me and work on absorbing those for me and make them less toxic for me. So your immune system invites them and they stay with you. And so now you've got infections that are feeding on toxins.

Your body's trying to keep those toxins off your brain and your heart. And now you feel awful. And I call this middle aged deficiency syndrome because this kind of hits in middle age where you're foggy, you're bloated, your energy's low, your skin looks bad, your your skin and your skin is, you know, inflamed. Your joints might ache, you might have migraine headaches, you may be starting to collect chronic disease conditions or or prescription. So maybe you've got an autoimmune disorder or maybe you have high blood pressure.

Maybe if my cholesterol, maybe you have diabetes and maybe you have IBS or something worse like Crohn's or colitis. So all this is, you know, impacting your body. Your body cannot clear the infections because the toxins are there and the toxins are worse. So you're on this hamster wheel. And so what do you have to do about it? You actually have to do what I call a tango. You have to dance with your immune system. The infections and the toxins, and you have to do a removal of infections and toxins in a very systematic, smart way that doesn't make you feel more sick or drop your immune system or make those toxins go into your brain or heart where you don't want them to be.

Oh, wow, that's really an interesting kind of way to close it out. So an interesting dance going on, an interesting tango that determines whether we wake up in the morning and feel good and avoid chronic diseases, including heart disease, or whether we, as my grandmother say, sleep around and we're tired and life is open. So that's really quite remarkable. Tell audience and everybody will get this to where do they find you. So you can find me at laurafrontiero.com

Where to Find Laura Frontiero 25:00

You can find me on Instagram @laura.frontiero So, you know, to also go to bioradianthealth.com and there's tons of information there to support your health journey. Is bio radiant have a hash or no just. One word. Bio-radiant health And anybody writing that down as well, you'll see it on the summit material. But I pronounce it Frontiero because there is an I before the E, so I'm giving it a good spin there. I want to make sure people find you online. Well, thank you so much. And you've done so much to upgrade the health of, you know, tens of thousands of people.

And you're so good at it that I'm proud to know you. Thank you. Likewise, sir. Thanks for having me here. And I enjoy all the time that we get to spend together in the health space. You're a you're a gift to the world here. And I wish we had you when my dad was diagnosed with heart disease. And I will say that I think soon after people are watching this summit. You have a summit yourself with DrTalks and Hidden Illness. What's a title? Well, I don't know. Mine launches in February. When? Oh, are.

And I got this for you. I'm before you. But we always have something going on. Always something good. All right. Well, we'll certainly promote the heck out of your summit, which I was very proud to be included. And so thank you.