926: Detox, Epigenetics, and Biohacking from a Traditional Chinese Medicine Perspective With Ashley Beckman

Katie: Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama. com and this episode is with Dr. Ashley Beckman. And it’s all about things like detox, epigenetics, and biohacking, but through the lens of Traditional Chinese Medicine, which I was excited to learn about this myself because it’s not something I had a deep understanding of and I was excited to learn from her.

And certainly, she did not disappoint in this conversation. Her work integrates things like traditional Chinese medicine with the best of conventional medicine. And I feel like she has a broad knowledge on this, and I definitely got some awesome key takeaways on this with things like how emotions relate to different organ systems within the body, how Chinese medicine looks at the elements and the different types of constitutions people can have, how they might look differently at something like skin problems or lung problems and where that actually originates as well as ways to support the liver that maybe often get overlooked in Western medicine.

So I definitely learned a lot. I think you will too. Let’s join Dr. Ashley Beckman. Ashley welcome. Thank you so much for being here.

Ashley: Thank you. It’s my pleasure.

Katie: Well I’m very excited to learn from you today. We’re actually going to get to do two episodes together. I have a feeling our second episode will be especially relevant to some people listening because we’re going to go deep on healing from mold exposure. So you guys stay tuned for that conversation, especially if it is relevant to you. But in this episode, I’m really excited to sort of establish a foundation and some background on a topic I don’t actually personally know as much about, but am really excited to learn about, which is through the lens of Traditional Chinese medicine, learning things like maybe the foundational health principles that are very beneficial, as well as things like detox and biohacking.

It seems like as someone who grew up in the West, I don’t have that same lens, but the little bit I’ve gotten to learn and hear about that, I feel like it’s such a fascinating sort of realm that I’m really excited to learn more about. So I know this is a really broad topic, but maybe to jump in, can you kind of walk us through perhaps some of the differences in foundation or mindset that, between more of the Western view of things and Traditional Chinese Medicine?

Ashley: Sure. So even kind of on the biohacking side of it, right? It seems to be a lot more severe, right? We’re stacking so many different things and modalities, but in Chinese Medicine, it’s really all about constitution. So that is adjusting to the bioindividuality of the person. And this is especially important for women versus men even because a lot of the times, you know, people are cold plunging and doing very aggressive sauna and aggressive exercises, HIIT all kinds of things that if you don’t have the proper constitution to handle that, it’s going to tank your adrenal glands and thyroid hormones and energy. So this is especially important for women. But again, when you look at this through the Chinese Medicine lens, you could still have men that fall into this category, right? If you’re deficient and tired, a lot of these things that people are doing need to be adjusted.

So that could be the time frame of what you’re doing. It could be in the time of day because in Chinese Medicine, we look at things through an organ clock. So this will come up right when if you’re talking to someone and they say every night at 3 a. m. I wake up.  This is the most common time to wake up. This points us to the liver being out of balance. So then what we have to do is look. If someone is very stressed, if they’re drinking alcohol before bed, or what are they doing that is stressing and impacting the liver. Because in Chinese medicine, that’s what we’re going to look at. So if you wake up at a certain time, we look at the clock. And again we look at things so differently. For food and supplements and herbs, we’re looking at the taste and temperature of the herb, which and even in Western nutrition, we don’t do. So like, for example, we think of if you have a cold or a cough, you might use honey and ginger and lemon, but we differentiate.

Ginger is very warming. So it would be somebody who has a cold, but they are more on the cold side. If you have a fever, you would use something more like peppermint, which is cooling. So again, it’s very cool to me in Chinese Medicine that we make these differentiations between even just temperature of herbs. And, and then again, we have this whole thought and whole process of looking at food and supplements and herbs in a completely different way, and then even of what organ they go to.

Katie: That’s so fascinating, and it seems like there’s also sometimes an emotional component as well, and I know we’ll hopefully get to that a little bit later on, but I would love to understand more about the constitution side, and like, what are examples of some of the different ones, and like, I don’t know. I’d love to figure out like which one I am. How might someone figure out what their constitution is within Chinese medicine?

Ashley: Sure. So, we look at things in terms of elements. So, there’s fire, earth, water, metal, and wood. And then those pertain to different organ pairs. So, a lot of women, and again, this is pretty broad, but you might tend to be more earth oriented, which we might be more nurturing, tend to maybe gain weight, maybe be a little bit more lethargic. And that is a very different constitution and set of foods and herbs that we need versus somebody who, you know, there’s some people, and this can be women too, that are very fire and they’re just very skinny. They just have the highest metabolism. They basically just burn through nutrients and food and they always need more. That’s kind of the opposite of the earth element. So again, we’re also going to have little aspects of each of the five elements within us. And again, one thing that’s very great or very interesting to me is we look at this in terms of the season too. So we’re about to be heading into spring. That is the liver and gallbladder correlation. And this is when it’s the optimal time to detox because those detox organs of the liver and gallbladder are in their prime time. So this is our, like the best time to do a detox you’re coming out of winter. Which is this time that should be very much of like gathering your energy and being a little bit more conservative, eating more root vegetables, grounding things. And again, in Chinese medicine, I love this, we look at the organs. We look at the food that pertains to that season. And then we look at the emotions too. So like you were saying, a lot of these different seasons and organs, there’s always an emotional component.

And so you can’t really separate a disease or imbalance in your system without looking at the emotions.

Katie: Well, and two things stood out to me on what you just said that I love. One is it seems like they take much more into account nature and the kind of cycle of the seasons and the cycle of maybe light. And I feel like that often doesn’t enter the mainstream conversation in Western medicine, but seems like is so important.

And I would guess like most people, if we pay attention, we notice we feel different, sleep different, act different in the winter versus the summer. We maybe like, want different foods, which makes sense cause different foods would be available at those times. We want to sleep at different times. You know, we might feel more energetic or less.

I know I feel like I joke a lot I’m like solar powered. So the more sunshine I get, the more alert and happy I am. So the winter, I feel like I’m more tired or whatever it may be. And it seems like that’s just like built into the Chinese Medicine perspective and not as much in the West. Though I feel like we are starting to catch up with at least understanding the importance of light.

But you mentioned the emotions and this is a part where I feel like Western medicine still has not caught up and we think of those as entirely separate. Whereas, I’ve shared my personal story before, but that was actually such a vital piece for me, actually, was it wasn’t until I addressed the inner side, the emotions, and understood that being a very real part of my health, that all of the physical stuff sort of was able to fall into place, so I would love to hear how TCM looks at the emotions or maybe even uses that connection to understand like, if this emotion is happening, what might that mean? Or how might we pinpoint?

Ashley: Sure. So for one example, I’ll use would be like if you have a child that has asthma. So a lot of the times this is worse in the fall, which the fall is the season of the lungs. And so you can take it to the season, but you can even take it to the organ clock. So I think, I mean, you have kids, right?

So, you know, this. Basically all the coughs get much worse between 3 to 5 a.m.  If anyone’s ever woken up with their little one when they’ve had croup or things like that, it often manifests at that time. And that’s also the time when most asthma attacks occur. And that’s the lung time just every single day. So to me it’s really fascinating and the emotions that are associated with the lungs, they’re called the containers of grief and sadness. So they’re repressed emotions that someone hasn’t dealt with. And so if anyone has lung issues or skin issues, which is kind of the organ pair, I always have to look at, is there some sort of emotional component? But how does it pertain to grief and sadness? And so for little kiddos, we look at, of course, their life, but sometimes what’s happening, what happened to the mom when she was pregnant, right? Because that can set up a really big foundation for the kids and their health.

But again, it’s really important too, for example, the biggest one we see all the time would be the liver. So the liver encompasses issues from anger, resentment, depression, and irritability. So when the liver is congested, then we aren’t able to break down hormones very well. That could manifest for someone as PMS. But again, just that irritability or depression, and anger, we have to look at the liver and help clean up the liver and then see what’s in their day to day world, you know, toxin wise or personal care, things like that, that maybe is contributing. And then if they’re moving their body enough, because the liver needs movement to feel good.

Katie: That’s so fascinating. I would love to go deeper on that because I know we’re seeing statistics, for instance, we’ve got a massive rise in non alcoholic fatty liver disease. It seems like even on a collective scale, our livers are more stressed right now. I can see like the parallels with emotions, of course, how that could connect, but I’m curious to hear more about how, like, are there general things we can all do to be aware of and support our livers? Like I feel like this may be something that doesn’t even cross a lot of people’s mind to do, but seemingly the liver is connected to so much that maybe even just becoming aware of that and making little habit adjustments could seem like it could have a huge ROI.

Ashley: For sure. So a few things that are, you know, just kind of like a no brainer would be if somebody, they need to look at their alcohol consumption. So if someone is drinking alcohol or regularly, there are a lot of people that do drink very regularly, and they use it as a mechanism to calm down, but it actually further stresses their system. So another thing is that people aren’t always aware that sugar has such an impact on the liver, and it’s more just because it’s causing cellular stress. The other thing is in Chinese medicine, all of the foods that are green or sour are what support and help cleanse the liver and the gallbladder gently.

So for some people taking digestive bitters helps the gallbladder. Making sure that they’re not consuming a lot of fried foods and things like that. Because what happens is a lot of times people get gallbladder issues. Again, in Chinese theory, it’s because the liver has become so congested and the gallbladder is kind of the overflow container for the liver. So once you start to get gallbladder issues you really have to work on the gallbladder, but the liver especially. The other thing is again, movement. So making sure that we’re moving more because in general basically people are often at their desks and then now we’re just on our devices constantly with notifications. So this goes a little bit more with nervous system. But our bodies were not designed to process so many alerts just all day long and then to not be moving.

And especially what you touched on, you know, we’re not in alignment with sunshine and waking up and seeing the sun the first thing. Most of us or most people hop right into their work day or make sure there’s not things they have to do before hopping into the morning routine with kids too. And so it’s just this stressful system that we’re in every day. And again, the liver does not like that, right? So it’s very important we look at these kind of personalities of the organs too. And the liver is all about structure, movement, and then again, just kind of order. So for some people, that’s really good, but because of our life and things are just thrown at you constantly, we’re kind of yanking ourselves out of like a really nice cohesive day that is structured.

Katie: That makes sense. I love that. It’s such a different way to look at it, but I love that it takes into account like lifestyle factors seemingly a lot more and even that like emotional component or our connection with nature component, which to me seems so intuitive, but also seemingly so easy to overlook in the modern world.

What about, when I hear Chinese medicine, my association in my head often goes to herbs and seemingly like in Traditional Chinese Medicine, there’s a much better understanding of use of herbs than we have in a lot of the Western world. Is my perception of that correct? And if so, like how in Chinese medicine does someone go about figuring out which herbs might be most beneficial for them?

Ashley: Sure, it is. So one thing that is great is Traditional Chinese Medicine is its own entire form of medicine. So  we use it for a lot of lifestyle practices. It usually encompasses acupuncture, herbs, food for nutrition, movement practices, like Tai Chi or Qigong. And it basically is very much herb focused, but a lot of people might just stick to acupuncture or if you were going to get herbs and take them, I would say it’s very important to go to a practitioner so that you can get the right formula for you. And then again, I’m a stickler for herbs that are not contaminated. So a lot of the Traditional Chinese Herbs, if they’re not tested, then a lot of them have a lot of contaminants that we don’t want people to take. So making sure that you’re using really good companies. And Chinese medicine doesn’t use as many single herbs.

We work in formulas and they’re very much crafted from these traditional formulas that have been around for thousands of years. And that’s what’s really fascinating is, to me, is a lot of these herbs and properties they’ve known for so long and then now we’ve been able to do testing on the herbs and acupuncture points and they do what they say.

It’s amazing to me that this has been around for so long and then now we have the capability to basically check and see do these things actually impact the liver or the gallbladder?  Like schisandra is an amazing herb. It’s something that is so beneficial for the liver and for stress. And these things are coming out a little bit.

As you know, there’s always a popular herb and they’re all Chinese ancient herbs. So it’s very cool because they’re getting popular. But to us, you know, they’re ancient and they’re ancient wisdom that’s been around for centuries.

Katie: Yeah, what’s old is new again, but it’s exciting like to your point to see modern research backing up what seemingly other cultures have known and understood at a deep level for, you know, thousands of years. It’s funny that some of us need science to like, understand where there’s always been more intuitive wisdom around.

I’d love to circle back to the biohacking component a little bit too. And you touched on how we might evaluate things like overuse of sauna or cold plunging differently if we understood it through a traditional Chinese lens and especially those differences between men and women and how, you know, in science, we’re finally understanding that women are not just small men. But I would love to know more about the Traditional Chinese Medicine understanding of that and how if we had that lens through which to evaluate what might you consider differently?

Like, would we be cold plunging less? Would we be saunaing differently? Would we be exercising differently or viewing biohacks in a different way?

Ashley: For sure. And that’s a great question and something I’m really passionate about because I love looking at, you know, genetics and optimization. And again, I do it through the Chinese medicine lens and it is different. So, right. I basically tailor these practices to my clients based on their functional medicine labs, their lab values again for stress and hormones where they are in their cycle even.

So we’ll go back to that. So, right. So I’m a huge fan of sauna, but again, some people can’t sweat that much and they need to adjust the temperature. So all of the studies, as you know, are basically done on men. And so unfortunately we kind of get information that is really not accurate for women. And especially depending on where you are in your lifetime of reproduction, perimenopause, menopause, those vital essences, your sweat and your blood and things like that, we want to conserve them actually. So in Chinese medicine, they’ve used sauna and cold plunge and movement, and a lot of these practices are part of Chinese medicine and a bunch of other cultures.

So we just need to adjust them to  especially the females and again, even where they are in their cycle. And again, if they’re, you know still in the middle of having kids… postpartum you have to be very careful. It takes a couple of years to replenish after having a child. Oh, and you’ll think this is very interesting I think. In Chinese medicine we say with every child you give away half of your chi. So when you had your second child, you only had half as much to begin with. So for women and moms it’s really a lot more about nourishment and rebuilding because you’re not starting with the same amount of chi as you had in your first pregnancy. So a lot of the practices that we have are so aggressive, right? Like HIIT training and cold plunging. They’re very shocking to our system. And a lot of women just honestly, it’s too much. They talk about hormetic stress and good stress, but when you’re stacking all these things, for most women, it’s too much.

And that’s why I love tracking that too with labs to see, is this a little bit too aggressive for this particular constitution for this client?

Katie: Amazing. Well, I will make sure that is linked in the show notes so people can find you. And, I followed you and I’m excited to keep learning from you as well. And I will get to have you back for another episode, which I look forward to.

And thank you for listening. And I hope you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama podcast.