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Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.
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Hello, and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com, and I’m here today with a dear friend and incredible expert on children’s health. And we talk about the key to building resilience in kids from the inside out. I’m here with Dr. Elisa Song, who is a Stanford, NYU, and UCSF-trained integrative pediatrician, pediatric functional medical expert, and a mom of two herself. She’s also the best-selling author of Healthy Kids, Happy Kids, An Integrative Pediatrician’s Guide to Whole-Child Resilience. And she’s helped thousands of kids get to the root cause of their health concerns and thrive in body, mind, and spirit by integrating conventional pediatrics with functional medicine, homeopathy, acupuncture, herbal medicine, and essential oils. She has a tremendous amount of resources available online, and she herself is a wealth of knowledge as well. And we jump into many of these topics today, especially the topic of creating resilience in our kids, how to improve their gut health, and so much more. So let’s join Dr. Elisa Song. Lisa, welcome. Thanks so much for being here.
Dr. Song: Oh, thanks, Katie. I’ve been on here before and I’m so excited to be back.
Katie: Well, I’m very excited to have you back. I always learn so much from you. And I feel like I’m always sending people your way on Instagram when they have kids’ health related questions, because to me, you are one of the top experts out there and you do so much for so many families. And in this podcast, I’m really excited to go deep on the concept of building resilience in our kids, because I’ve talked about this a lot from an adult perspective. But I think actually, like everything, things are so much more powerful when we get to start them earlier in life. And I know that you have such a heart and a passion for really helping kids to have a super healthy foundation for their whole lives. Before we start jumping into the concept of resilience, though, I would love to just hear a little bit of your backstory of how you got into integrative pediatrics, because I feel like you are one of the few amazing voices in this field. And I would love to hear your journey through it.
Dr. Song: Oh, thanks, Katie. I’m honored. You know, my journey was not typical for many functional medicine integrated practitioners in that many have come to this field, sort of stepped out of the box of conventional medicine because of a health challenge maybe they faced or family members faced in conventional medicine just didn’t have all the answers. So, I mean, knock on wood, that wasn’t my story. You know, my story is really, you know, as a young kid, I mean, watching my mom, who is an OBGYN, very traditional, right? And I grew up with lots of antibiotics, very conventional medicine household, but then kind of married with, you know, living with my grandma who came over from Korea when we were babies to help raise us, my sisters and I. And we incorporated, we had herbal teas when we were sick. And it was just sort of a part of our, of course, you don’t have to choose either or, right?
And so when I went into medicine, sort of stumbled upon it because I was, not going to be a doctor, I was actually going to be a public health, you know, policy advocate and a lawyer and always kids, right? I always, I was going to go to Capitol Hill and lobby for kids’ rights, which I did for several summers, but then I realized I really want to work with kids. And when I went into medicine way back in the early 1990s, there wasn’t a lot of integrative medicine out there. It was actually called alternative medicine, I mean, if you’re, you know, older like me, there was a National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. And now we’ve moved much more towards integrative pediatrics, integrative medicine, because we know it’s really a melding of the best of all worlds. So I have been on this path since the beginning. And I’m so glad because I tell my husband, who’s my, you know, business partner and life partner, that I wouldn’t practice any other way. This is truly the way that we can help kids thrive.
Katie: Well, and like you, when I was younger, I thought I was going to help change things through policy and politics and lobbying. And I’m grateful my life took a turn as well. And I’m also so grateful for the resource that is your new book, because I feel like in a sense, this is the handbook that they joke about that doesn’t come with our kids for how to really give them a healthy start. And in it, you talk about something you call whole child resilience. And I love this concept because I feel like this, like you touched on, it unites the best of all the world and also gives parents really practical steps for helping build that resilience in their children. Can you define that term for us and talk about what you mean by whole child resilience?
Dr. Song: Yeah. And, you know, through the past several years of craziness, the term resilience has come up over and over again. And it’s really, it’s so especially true for our children. As parents, what, unfortunately, conventional pediatrics has done sort of inadvertently is really have in our minds the thing that we as parents want to run away from, the thing we’re trying to avoid in our children. We don’t want them to get sick. We don’t want them to get stressed. We don’t want them to X, Y and Z because we’re afraid of all the chronic health concerns that are out there.
What integrated pediatrics does is really take a look at how do we build that resilience in our kids. So whole child resilience, it doesn’t mean never getting sick, never getting stressed, never encountering any sort of environmental toxin. Of course, we want to minimize where we can. But recognizing that to live in our modern world and thrive, we need to build that resilience so that we can bounce back physically, immunologically, psychologically from any “hit that comes our way,” because there’s always going to be the next hit and bounce back completely and quickly, even stronger for the next time.
And there’s this concept called cellular resilience. In fact, there’s a paper called cellular resilience that I just love because the authors note in their paper, it doesn’t matter whether you fall. What matters most is whether you get back up again. I mean, that’s our lesson in life, right. And as parents, that’s what we teach our kids. But they know that as we, as our cells get back up again from any cellular hit, again, environmental toxin infection. I’m going to put psychological stress as a toxin there as well, any physiologic hit that our cells develop something called hormesis, which is a memory of how to encounter and recover from the next hit even better. So every time we recover, we build the foundation to be able to get stronger and stronger for the next one. So I love that concept for parents and for children because what that does is it makes us less afraid of every individual infection or stressor at school or, you know, friend drama, whatever it is. And knows that we can, if we have the foundations, we can have our kids truly thrive for the rest of their lives.
Katie: I love that reframe. And I talk about this a lot more in the context of adults of how the body is wired to want to thrive. That’s what it knows. That’s what it’s designed for. And so even if we have symptoms, it’s our body giving us a wonderful message to help. And it’s also our body working to heal. So I’ve learned to reframe symptoms as a good thing.
And I think you touched on something really important about the goal not being to never get sick. And I think, especially for kids, this is important to highlight because from my understanding, and I’m sure you can explain this better, there is a level of those things help our immune systems grow. And so it’s natural that kids would occasionally get sick as their immune systems are learning how to function in their environment. And so I think that’s just important for parents to hear, like, we’re not failing as parents if our kids get sick once in a while. This is actually a very important natural part of their immune system evolution. But is my understanding correct on that?
Dr. Song: Yeah, 1000%. You know, this is where for many families through the pandemic, especially in the early stages, when there was so much fear, and we really were so isolated, and our infants and our children were isolated, I had a lot of parents tell me, oh, my gosh, this is so great. It’s the first winter that my kid hasn’t gotten sick at all. Well, I had some concerns about that. And what we can see is some of that did play out that first winter, this is a couple of winters ago, when life really was “back to normal” for many kids. Back in school, you know, everything was opened up. We saw kids, and older kids than expected, really, you know, suffering from more severe RSV and influenza. And it was, you know, many more respiratory infections that we had thought, oh, are they going to come back? And of course, they never left, right? It’s just that we weren’t really exposed to them.
And, you know, a lot of conjecture is around the fact that our immune systems, our children’s immune systems just really didn’t get enough training. They were really in their infancy in their immune system, the tolerance of these infectious exposures. And we know, there was, if we think way back during a part of the pandemic, where there was this rare hepatitis that was infecting some children, young children and causing them to be hospitalized, even getting, you know, liver transplants. And this was around the world. And I was, I remember, I was kind of sitting there holding my breath, you know, waiting to see, is this going to become anything that we need to worry about as parents? Thankfully, it did not become widespread. But the theory now, the leading theory of why this happened to these young children is that there were two viruses, there was an adenovirus and a dependoparvovirus. It’s kind of a, I mean, it is what it is, right? It requires your immune system to have other infections to activate it. And so these very two, two very common viruses that most of us have had lots of exposures to, and we can build a little bit of immune tolerance, to these young children, having been sheltered from every single exposure in their early days of life, didn’t have that immune tolerance, didn’t have that immune exercise.
And so we really do need, you know, and I hear as, as parents, and I’m a parent too, I don’t want my kids sick all the time, but we need to understand that when they do get sick, this is an opportunity to support them with an integrated pediatric approach, help them recover, and then help them help their immune systems get a little more muscle for the next time.
Katie: That makes sense. And we’re going to get to record another episode that really goes into the weeds of specific ways to help in certain scenarios. But you also talked about a lot of these things tend to spike in the winter. And I have my own theories about that. But why is it that we typically see a lot of these common illnesses on the rise in the winter months?
Dr. Song: There’s so many different ideas out there. I think one of the biggest is that our kids just are not outdoors anymore. And so their vitamin D levels start to tank, which to be honest, I do as a pediatrician measure vitamin D levels, 25 hydroxy vitamin D levels, I’m guessing more frequently than almost any pediatrician out there who isn’t more integrative of knowing how important vitamin D is for immune health and brain health. So even in the middle of the summer, when kids are outside summer camp, getting that golden tan, they still, many, many of them still have either outright low, deficient, or insufficient levels of vitamin D. And of course, in the wintertime, in the northern hemisphere, where many listeners are right now, the sun’s rays are just not quite as strong in any month but the summer month to really get adequate skin conversions. So we start to drop. And our kids are also indoors more. So I think that’s part of it.
Indoors with the heat on, we all know how dry our skin gets and how dry our nasal passages get. And we need moisture in our nasal passages for those hairs in our nose, right? Those lovely nose hairs that really brush out they’re cilia, that help to brush out whatever is trying to get in, whether it’s dust or pollen or infections. And so I think that’s part of it. I think we are, unlike other cultures where in the wintertime, whether it’s rain or shine or snow, kids are outside, right, during recess. For us, we tend to hunker down when it’s raining outside. Our kids are indoors, you know, during the winter months when it’s too cold or when there’s too much snow. And so we’re also indoors. And we know, you know, indoors, sharing all of our germs, it’s just more likely that we’re going to get exposed to something and potentially get sick from it.
Katie: That makes sense. Okay. So back to the concept of building resilience, because this seems like a key concept for reducing the severity of things when we do get those hits, like you talked about, and also helping avoid the smaller ones. So what kind of, what would be some of the foundational ways that we can nurture that resilience in our kids?
Dr. Song: Well, I’ll tell you the number one way, and this is why I wrote my book because I want every parent and every kid to understand that the number one thing we can do to up-level our resilience in kids, whether it’s immunologically or psychologically, physiologically, is to nourish and build resilience in their gut microbiome. The gut microbiome really holds the key for lifelong wellness. From the inside out, whatever we want to call resilience and wellness in our kids, whatever picture we have of our kids thriving, guaranteed, we can trace a lot of that back to how can we build up gut microbiome resilience and really learn how to create what I call microbiome magic every single day so that we can go through the hits that our kids will inevitably encounter. And, you know, my kids are now 14 and 12, and, you know, they are encountering different kinds of microbiome hits than they were when they were younger, but we still need to, especially, need to build those foundations for our older kids.
Katie: So what are some of the ways that we can do that? What are some steps to help build our microbiome strength in kids? And I guess adults too, a lot of the same concepts would apply.
Dr. Song: Yeah, well, so at 100%, and I will say, especially for, you know, when we think about kids, and many people will be, you know, sort of more in the space of what about my young kids, my preschoolers, my toddlers, I will say with this emergency mental health that we have in kids of all ages, but especially our teenagers, we need to look at how their gut microbiome impacts what’s going on for our youth today, whether it’s from their gut brain or their gut immune system connection.
And so when we think about what can we do, what I want kids and parents to first think about are what are the biggest disruptors? What are the things that really are causing microbiome havoc, you know, for them? And one of the number one things is our surge in ultra-processed foods. And these ultra-processed foods, they contain food additives, and too much added sugar and non-nutritive sugar substitutes, both natural and artificial, and laden with glyphosate or herbicides that literally cause microbiome havoc, they distinctly and acutely disrupt the microbiome, cause something called gut dysbiosis, or an abnormal balance of the beneficial and the non-beneficial microorganisms in the gut, and can also contribute directly to leaky gut. So when we know that we can help our kids make smarter, more nourishing decisions for their gut microbiome.
Katie: That makes sense. And I love in the book that you talk about psychological stress and the link here as well, because like you said, this is something very much on the rise in very concerning numbers with our, especially our kid populations right now. And you mentioned the gut brain connection, but can you kind of delve into how those are connected and how psychological stress affects the gut and vice versa?
Dr. Song: Yeah, absolutely. So we just mentioned leaky gut. And when your gut becomes “leaky,” there are more spaces, the tight junctions between your small intestinal cells aren’t as tight. And that allows pathogens or larger particles of food or other toxins to enter your bloodstream at higher rates than they should. We also get this kind of double whammy where our small intestinal cells have these finger-like projections called villi that are responsible for absorbing our nutrients. So at the same time that these things that shouldn’t enter our bloodstream slip through those leaky gaps between our small intestinal cells, we also have our villi not absorbing nutrients as well. So we get this double whammy.
Now, why is that important for our kids’ gut-brain connections? Well, our microbiome is responsible for the vast majority of the neurotransmitters made in our body. So somewhere up to 80 to 90% of the serotonin, our feel-good, kind of relax, help us sleep neurotransmitter is made by our gut microbiome. Fifty percent of our dopamine. So if we’re worried about our attention and focus, 50% of our dopamine is made by our gut microbiome. Our microbiome, what makes GABA and B vitamins, these are all considered postbiotics that help support our brain and our immune system. And our metabolic syndrome, a symptom, I’m sorry, our brain and our metabolic systems.
Now, the other thing too, with sleep, we know that many, many people have sleep disruptions and over 400 times more melatonin is made by our gut than by our brain. So when we’re having “brain issues” and we’re looking towards mental health or sleep or stress or whatever it is, we need to look at, well, where is that stemming from? And when we look at that connection between the gut and the brain, which many listeners know it’s called the vagus nerve, right? It’s a two-way information superhighway. Well, 80 to 90% of the communication occurs from the gut to the brain, sort of informing our brain and our children’s brains, how they should feel, how they should think, how they should behave. So when we want to really understand how to optimize kids’ brains and mental health, we really need to look at their gut first.
Katie: Yeah, that was such a great explanation. And I love, I got an early release copy of the book and I was so excited. So full disclaimer about that. But you also devote a whole chapter to the vagus nerve. And I love this because I feel like we’re not talking enough about the vagus nerve and about nervous system health. So can you also explain how this connects to everything we’re talking about?
Dr. Song: Yeah. So the reason I devoted an entire chapter is to really impress upon parents, kids, practitioners, that this is one of the foundations for building resilience in kids. And it’s interesting because several friends and colleagues have noted, wow, you have a whole chapter on the vagus nerve. And yeah, I probably should have had 10, because it’s that important.
Because really and truly, one of the things that affects, I think that the two things that could really move the needle in our children’s health is number one, learning how to live in our ultra-processed food world and read food labels like a gut hero. So they’re choosing. And number two, how to regulate their nervous system. And so this is how this is related to the gut microbiome. It’s so interconnected. So we have our vagus nerve, but okay, what does that mean? Well, we know that a resilient gut microbiome is one of the best indicators of our health and our children’s health, both current and future. We also know that a resilient vagus nerve and when we optimize our vagus nerve, we have optimal heart rate variability. So a resilient vagus nerve and optimal heart rate variability is one of the best indicators for health, current and future. So and that’s why many people wear like I do my Oura Ring to kind of measure our heart rate variability.
So what we know about this two-way street, though, is that for some kids and for some parents changing the diet, right, to include more gut-nourishing foods or remove some gut-disrupting foods can be one of the most stressful things to think about. So when we improve heart rate variability in children, they don’t just experience improved emotions like joy, which is so great, right? But they also have improved gut microbiome diversity. And in this one particular study, they found that improvement regardless of diet. So that is huge, right? So I tell parents and I tell practitioners, okay, you cannot meditate yourself out of a standard American diet, right? There’s no way to meditate your way out of eating too much sugar and artificial colors and all of that. However, if diet is one of the hardest things to change, well, then work on the vagus nerve. For the most part, working on the vagus nerve, optimizing heart rate variability, that’s free. We can do that every day, right? And not only does that bring joy and beneficial emotions to our kids, when we do it with our kids, it improves our health and our vagus nerve and our microbiomes.
Katie: So what would be some tips on ways we can do that?
Dr. Song: So I’m all about things that you can do every day, right? And for a lot of folks, you know that meditation and mindfulness, yes, that can improve heart rate variability. That is one of the best ways to tone up, give our vagus nerve muscles. And, what I talk to kids about is really when they think about, you know, working out, right? What gets a workout every single day, multiple times a day? It’s our sympathetic nervous system, right? That part of our nervous system, our autonomic nervous system that goes into fight or flight, that has plenty of muscles, you know, in kids and adults, right? What doesn’t get enough practice, so it’s muscles are a little weaker, we need to practice throughout the day every day is our parasympathetic nervous system, which gets us into that rest, digest, and heal state, gets us practicing using our vagus nerve and optimizing heart rate variability. So it really is those things that we do every day to regulate our nervous system that I think make the biggest difference.
One of the easiest things to have kids and parents focus on is diaphragmatic breathing, right? Just belly breathing. There’s a super cute video with Elmo and rapper Common and singer Colbie Caillat on YouTube, that is really cute, really fun. And it introduces this idea of belly breathing, because when we breathe with our diaphragm, and as we inhale, we kind of inflate that balloon in our belly. Keeping our shoulders down. And as we exhale, we deflate that balloon, again, keeping our shoulders straight and even. We engage our vagus nerve. That’s been shown to improve heart rate variability. So I’m always looking in the literature too what actually can move the needle on improving heart rate variability. Diaphragmatic breathing, absolutely. So that’s why I open up the vagus nerve chapter with really how do we get into that belly breathing state? Because we should be doing that every single moment we breathe, right? With every breath. But invariably throughout the day, we start breathing with our shoulders and kind of hunching up our shoulders to our ears. And that’s not the way to engage our vagus nerve. So that simple thing, oh are your shoulders by your ears. Okay, let’s bring them down and practice breathing through our belly. Or if they’re stressed in class, or there’s been an argument with a friend or their sibling. So that’s one thing.
The second thing I love, I mean, I love all of these exercises you can do every day. But one thing that we want to help our children with is how to regulate their nervous system, how to stop and be present in the moment. That’s one thing that kids and adults, we have a really hard time doing because we’re always doing so much. And so it’s called the five senses meditation. I tell kids, I call it the stop, look, and listen because we’ve all, as we’ve learned to cross the street, we learned to stop, look, and listen before we cross, you know, for cars. And so the stop part is you just stop, have your kid, if you’re walking to school, I used to do this with Kenzie on our way to school. So you just stop, let’s stop and take that moment. Let’s allow ourselves to just have a moment to just regulate, calm, whatever words you want to use. And then we look and we look with all of our senses. But because we use our visual input the most, we close our eyes first. And then you notice, what are you smelling? You know, what are you hearing? What are you feeling on your skin? What do you taste in your mouth? And then finally open your eyes. And what do you see? And oftentimes you’re going to see the colors are brighter. Oh my gosh, it was that bird in that nest and all the different things that you didn’t notice before because you were rushing to school. And then we listen. So we take that moment to listen to how our body and our brains are feeling in that moment.
So if we can just take those mindful moments, and we don’t have to call them mindful moments. Again, call them whatever way you’d like. But taking that moment is one of the best ways for kids to learn how to stop and regulate even when they’re stressed as high schoolers or college kids or beyond.
Katie: I love that. And I know there are even, I’ll try to find that link to that video you mentioned, and there are some great guided ones that are just talked through as well. I know my younger kids have enjoyed those sometimes at night and it helps kind of downshift everybody into a more relaxed state. And that breathing, I think the simple things are so often overlooked because of their simplicity, but it really does make a big difference when you do it consistently and regularly. And I feel like kids even adapt faster. Like if they just make, like you said, a little bit of time each day, they do start to see changes. Even my older ones that track HRV, they really do start to see changes pretty rapidly because their bodies are still so responsive. So I’ll make sure some of those links are in the show notes as well. As another side, my high school kids are athletes and I’ve learned that that box breathing in between sets of tempo runs, for instance, or with their workouts really makes a difference in their recovery as well. If you want a chance to see it play out very rapidly in real time, it really does make a difference quickly.
I would love to also circle back to the gut microbiome a little bit more because you talk about in the book, creating microbiome magic with our kids. And I love your language because you make it very accessible to kids and connect the dots on how their bodies work in such an empowering way. But can you explain what you mean by microbiome magic and how to create that each day?
Dr. Song: Yeah. So just as I talk about whole child resilience, we need to think about whole gut resilience because we have, every day, our kids encounter every single day factors that can disrupt their gut microbiome. So the key isn’t to avoid all of those. And in reality, there’s honestly very little way that you can do that. You know, when your kids are toddlers and babies, you have a hundred percent control over what goes on their plate. But as your kids get older and they’re going out with their friends or having sleepovers, you have less control. And rather than stressing about, oh my gosh, they had the artificial blue thing, right? Knowing that when you build the foundations of whole gut resilience, even though microbiome can go back to a healthier state. Because here’s the thing, our microbiome, even after disruption, wants to go back to the state that it was in. So creating that foundation of a really, really optimal gut microbiome can set the foundations for optimal current mental, physical, and immune health, and also future health as well.
And when we think about psychological stress, I just want to go back to that because we’re going to, that is one of the factors, that breathing, engaging our vagus nerve. But when we think about leaky gut, psychological stress can trigger leaky gut and the release of zonulin within one hour. Okay. So within one hour, all of a sudden, here we go. We have this gut disruption. So, but the key is not to avoid that psychological stress. Yes, we want to minimize it, but it’s to give our tools these optimal ways to recover from that. So the same thing from our microbiome, knowing that our microbiomes are disrupted nearly every single day by these ultra-processed foods and psychological stress and environmental toxins. The things that we have to focus on, two things. First, we have to focus on what can we get in to nourish our gut microbiomes? This is very important. What do those hundreds of trillions of microorganisms and hopefully beneficial microorganisms need to grow and thrive? And if some of you have gardens, which many people started gardening during the pandemic, you know, you can’t just throw some tomato seeds on the ground and poof, all of a sudden have these beautiful tomato plants. You need the right soil to nourish those plants and those roots. You need the right amount of sunshine and the right amount of water and even the right amount of love. Talking to your plants helps.
So same thing with our microbiome, our microbiota more aptly, right? Those microorganisms in our gut, they need the right environment, the right nourishment, the right terrain. And so what they need, one easy way to remember this are the three Fs. So the first F is fiber. So fiber you get from plants. So fiber, 95% of Americans don’t get enough fiber. And the World Health Organization has recognized this fiber gap worldwide. So if on average, let’s say, you know, American kids maybe need 25 grams or maybe a little bit less of fiber during their day. Well, that seems like it shouldn’t be so hard to do because when we compare that to the Hadza people on Tanzania with some of the richest gut microbiome diversity in the world, they eat 100 to 150 grams of fiber in a day. So we really, we want to make sure that we’re eating these plants on purpose, right? Making meals pop just with a little bit more fiber every day.
The other thing, phytonutrients. So that’s not an F I know, but it’s sound like an F. So phytonutrients, color. So just as we have a fiber gap, 8 in 10 Americans have a gap in every single color of the rainbow of foods. And that is a problem for our microbiome. So we know that these phytonutrients contain antioxidants and immune and heart and brain healthy compounds, but they also act as prebiotic. And they also can interact with our microbiome to influence our epigenetics. Influence how our genes work for or against us. So we need to get more color in our diet.
And then fermented foods may actually be the biggest microbiome champion of all. So in one study at Stanford, they found that fermented foods won over fiber in increasing microbial diversity as opposed to fiber. Of course, fiber was still beneficial, but fiber seemed to improve gut function more than it did microbiome diversity. So get in your three Fs.
And then try to get out, keep out as much as you can those microbiome mischief makers. So this is where we look at the food additives. And there’s 3,000 food additives in the FDA’s list of everything added to food in the United States. That’s literally a list, right? And you can bet that many, many of those food additives to make our food look brighter, smell better, taste sweeter, saltier, fattier, last longer on the shelves, that many, many of them have been shown to directly cause gut dysbiosis and directly cause leaky gut. So the more we can keep our foods simple, real food ingredients, learn how to read those labels to keep out those microbiome mischief-making additives, the more resilient we can live and the more resilient our gut microbiomes will be.
Katie: And like we touched on already, I feel like the great news is kids respond so rapidly to these kind of changes. So you often will see them feel so much better very, very quickly, even faster than we do as adults when they start making these changes. But you touched on something. I’ve had a theory for a while that, you know, we hear in America that we are overfed and undernourished, but I’ve always thought maybe one of the reasons for these food cravings and the fact that we keep wanting to eat more and more food is these things you touched on that we’re not getting enough of these core things like phytonutrients and fiber. And I would even add protein to the list in a lot of age groups. We see that as a problem. And our bodies and their wisdom are craving more food simply because they need more nutrients. And it’s not that we actually need more calories. It’s that we need higher nutrient density in food.
So I made the shift a couple of years ago to even in myself, stop thinking about macros or calories or any of that and start thinking about what is the most micronutrient dense thing I can eat. If I’m going to eat meals anyway, how can I really maximize the nutrient density of those meals? And I find that that was a helpful switch for one, because I was focusing on a positive, not a negative and making choices based on increasing the good versus avoiding the bad. But I feel like kids love to get in on that game as well and understand what’s in their food. And they’re often so capable of understanding and making amazing choices when they’re given the right information to do that. And so I love that your book is a resource for both parents and kids in that journey.
Dr. Song: Yeah, I really, I want to point out, I mean, so many important things that you just said, because, you know, one of the first things that we have to do as parents and as grandparents or caretakers caring for our kids is shift our mindset away from the idea that, oh my gosh, how could you deprive your kids of X, Y, and Z? All their friends are eating X, Y, and Z. Well, you know, since when do we necessarily want all of our kids to be like every other kid, especially from a health standpoint, right? But at the same time, we have to understand that kids, just like adults, are going to be really susceptible to the peer pressure and the marketing and all of that. And so we want to have empathy and understanding.
And like you said, when we teach our kids why this is so important for what they want to accomplish, whether it’s to be a better athlete or, you know, a better student or to, you know, sleep better or not have as many worries or not get in trouble in classes as much as they do, when we show them how food and their microbiome impacts their goals, they are often our best, best resources in showing us, you know, hey, maybe that packaged food, we choose something different. I mean, I’ve taught third and fourth grade kids this six-week Healthy Belly, Happy You class where we went through what the microbiome is, how it affects their brains and their bodies and their immune systems and everything else, and then show them how to make fermented foods, how to look at added sugars, how to read food labels. Oh, my gosh. The parents were so excited because they would come back. They would email me and say, I cannot believe that Eliana actually tried a forkful of sauerkraut. She’s so picky, but she actually liked it. It wasn’t too bad, right?
Or, wow, Luca, he told me to put back this box of whatever it was because look at all the artificial flavors in it, right? We would never have looked at that before. And so kids really, we need to give them so much more credit for what they can understand and what they can do. And I remember, Katie, the first time I met you, I think – I don’t remember, I think Bodie was maybe four and Kenzie was six. I mean they were really little. And I remember you said, I never do anything for my kids that I know they can do for themselves, right? And that stuck with me because your little ones were doing their laundry from start to finish, right? And so ever since then, yeah. I mean, my kids, they cook almost all – not all the meals, but just today, running into this interview, they made their own breakfast. They packed their own lunch. They do their laundry from start to finish. We need to give our kids more credit, right? When they understand they can do and they can do it because they want to, not because we’re nagging them.
Katie: I love that so much. And yes, we’re very aligned on that. And like I said, I love the work that you’re doing. And especially this book, I think is such a valuable resource. And as we get to the end of our time for this episode, of course, you guys stay tuned. We’re going to do another episode all about practical tips for very specific things. But what would you highlight as a few key takeaways or starting points from this episode that parents can start with right now? And I would, of course, get the book on the list because it’s got so much more than we can cover in an interview. But what would be some good baby step starting points?
Dr. Song: So I think the first baby step is really understanding, embracing how powerful our gut microbiome is to shape our future in, I mean, yes, a negative way, but in such an amazing positive way. So when we understand how important our microbiome is, it becomes so much easier to make those microbiome nourishing choices for our kids and for ourselves. So I think that’s one thing just to arm yourself. Knowledge is definitely power here.
The second step, I would say, so when you’re buying something that’s packaged, just flip it over and look at the back of the box. We never look at the front of the box because that’s sort of, you know, we are not going to judge this book by its cover because that cover is meant to deceive us, right? So you turn it over. And one of the things that we can do is anything that says artificial, just put it back. Anything that has any colors in it, put it back. So if we just do those two things, I mean, yes, there’s a whole other laundry list of things. But if you just put back artificial and colors, that’s going to make a huge impact.
And I’ll share a really short story because it still makes me cry when I think about this. It’s this little boy who, I mean, he was six at the time. And he had sensory issues and trouble with peers and trouble in his own skin. And his moods and was aggressive. And his parents came to me because his occupational therapist was so astute and said, there’s something else going on here, right? It’s not just “sensory processing disorder.” But there’s something else going on. And so when we met, I mean, he was so just uncomfortable in his brain and his body. And it was really heartbreaking. And he couldn’t get along with any of his soccer friends or kids in his class. He was almost being kicked out of kindergarten. And so we went through a potential list of things. We could possibly do. And of course, the parents were so overwhelmed. And so I said, let’s just do one thing, right?
And just as a little backstory, he was so uncomfortable in his own skin, he wouldn’t let his mom kiss him. He would wipe the kisses off. He couldn’t stand any hugs, right? I mean, how heart-wrenching for a mom. And so I said, let’s do one thing. Let’s take out all the artificial dyes, artificial sweeteners, and flavors. Because he was having Gatorade after his sports practice. Just take out the artificial preservatives and the dyes from his diet. That’s it, right? We’ll take that one baby step, right? So they swapped out the Gatorade for hydration drinks that are so much better than what’s on the market right now that are marketed to kids. And we swapped some of his candies for some of the natural dye candies.
And within two weeks, she called me back. And she said, oh my gosh, I have to share this with you. For the first time that I can remember in a long time, he actually asked for a hug. And he didn’t wipe my kiss off. I mean, how just two weeks, two weeks, right? And we had a long way to go with him, but simple changes like that. I mean, I love what you said before that some of this may sound simplistic. Well, you know what? Sometimes the most profound changes are simple, but we have to get back to the basics. And that’s what I hope this book will do. Get back to the basics, get back to the foundations, because without the foundations, we can take a gazillion supplements. We can do a gazillion other things to try to biohack our way out of illness, but it’s not going to work as well.
Katie: Well, I love that. I love that story. It’s so profound and shows how rapidly kids can adapt and improve. And I know there’s so many more practical tips in your book. I’ll, of course, make sure it’s linked in the show notes for you guys listening on the go. But thank you so much for your time. Like I said, it’s always a true pleasure to get to chat with you. And I am so grateful for all the work that you do in the world and for your time today.
Dr. Song: Thank you.
Katie: And thank you for listening. And I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama podcast.
If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.
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