Speaker 1:
Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast, where Dr. Steven Gundry shares his groundbreaking research from over 25 years of treating patients with diet and lifestyle changes alone. Dr. Gundry and other wellness experts offer inspiring stories, the latest scientific advancements, and practical tips to empower you to take control of your health and live a long, happy life.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast. Did you know that in 2005 the New England Journal of Medicine predicted that for the first time in history, our kids are expected to have shorter lifespans than us, their parents? And believe it or not, since that time, the prediction has only gotten worse. One in two kids now has a chronic condition. Now we as adults think, “Well, chronic conditions are what adults get as they age,” but now children, one in two, have a chronic condition. So it’s really time to revolutionize the future of children’s health with pediatric, integrative, and functional medicine approaches, or what I call restorative medicine. And we’ve got to do it right now. And I’ve invited a special guest to discuss this epidemic and what we can do to reverse these dire statistics.
She’s Dr. Elisa Song, a gut microbiome champion like myself and a Stanford, NYU, UCSF-trained integrative pediatrician and pediatric functional medicine expert, author of the recent book, Healthy Kids, Happy Kids, An Integrative Pediatrician’s Guide to Whole Child Resilience, and most importantly, mom to two thriving kids. She lives and breathes what she preaches, folks, and I can’t wait for you to learn from her. So stay tuned to learn the two most important things that you could do to change the trajectory of your children’s health, how to read food labels like a gut hero, and the best tactics to regulate the nervous system of your kids via their vagus nerve. You’re not going to want to miss this one. We’ll be right back.
Dr. song, great to have you on the program. I’ve been so looking forward to this.
Dr. Elisa Song:
Well, I’m honored. This is really one of my most special days here.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Let’s dive right in. You, like I, have been saying for years that the gut microbiome, and in this specific case, the child’s gut microbiome, really holds the key to lifelong resilience. You’ve been practicing now for, what, almost 25 years. And this is something you actually were telling me you started to recognize during your residency in pediatrics.
Dr. Elisa Song:
Well, it’s interesting. I mean during residency… So I finished my residency at UCSF in 2000, and there really wasn’t much discussion on the gut microbiome. There wasn’t really much discussion on root causes, on how we could truly prevent chronic illness in kids. And at the time, I remember in my developmental pediatrics rotation, my attending said that if I saw a handful of kids with autism in my career, that that would be a lot. Fast-forward now and we are in this surge where it’s not just a matter of better diagnosis. And as we see and as parents listening know, our kids are not thriving in the way that they really should.
I mean, how many kids have clear, smooth, buttery baby soft skin? I mean, eczema is one in three to five kids, the rise in anaphylactic food allergies… I never had to write a prescription for EpiPens when I was a resident. I remember maybe one. And now one in 12 kids has life-threatening anaphylactic food allergies, and we have to recognize what’s going on, why this is changing for our kids, otherwise their future is not bright and the future of our grandkids is not bright.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Yeah, you’re right. I went to medical school in the dark ages in the seventies, and interestingly enough, we knew about autoimmune diseases, obviously, but they were so unusual that when we’d order the tests for autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis we called them funny tests because they were the last thing… We’d work our way through. “Oh, let’s order the funny tests…” Because it was so unusual. And now, of course, everything we see on TV every night is for an immunosuppressive drug that I used in heart transplants on babies and kids. But now everybody’s happy and smiling while their eczema is under control with an immunosuppressant drug.
Dr. Elisa Song:
That’s right. That’s right. And this phenomenon of autoimmunity, it’s in our kids and teenagers too.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Oh, yeah.
Dr. Elisa Song:
Right. I mean, there was a study that looked at different age ranges through the decades and the age group with the single fastest rise in ANA positivity rates, which is… For the audience, these are just general autoimmune markers, anti-nuclear antibody, were our 12 to 19 year olds, doubled since the eighties and tripled again since the nineties. So this is something that we need to wake up to.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Yeah, a large part of my practice… About 80% of my practice is autoimmune disease. And a huge part of that practice is kids and teenagers.
Dr. Elisa Song:
Unfortunately.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
And it’s just like, “What the heck?” And it’s real. So something’s gone wrong. So let’s get back. What got you, and me for that matter, interested in the gut? It’s like, “Well, wait a minute. What’s a heart surgeon doing interested in the gut?” Come on. What’s a pediatrician doing interested in the gut? Why look there?
Dr. Elisa Song:
Well, we really can’t ignore the science anymore that the gut microbiome, especially for infants and children, sets the stage for their future immune health, their future brain health, and even as adults, their future metabolic health and hormone health. So what we know is that the foundations really lie in how your baby’s microbiome develops even in those first precious few years of life. Then we want to know, how as parents, we can lay those foundations, whether they’re babies or even if they’re old, how to get back to those foundations so that we can either prevent or reverse any chronic illness that’s come along. I mean, we are seeing epidemic proportions of inflammatory diseases in children, so inflammatory and autoimmune.
And one of the studies that really was this, “Aha, oh my gosh, we can no longer close our eyes,” was a study of nearly 800,000 children, a military study. And they followed babies who were given antibiotics or antacid medications in the first six months of life and found that by the time they were four years of age, they had a significantly increased risk, sometimes double the risk of virtually every single allergic disease, whether it’s eczema or asthma or hay fever or anaphylactic food allergies. So understanding how those shifts occur, for better or for worse, can help us be more proactive as practitioners and parents.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Now, you’ve written about and I’ve written about that there’s this kind of golden window of opportunity in the first two years of life where changes in the microbiome are really going to have profound effects for a lifetime. Actually, I’ll go back to my training. Part of my training at the Medical College of Georgia, from kind of day one, we used to rotate through physician’s offices, even first year in medical school. And I’ll never forget, I was in a pediatrician’s office for several weeks and every kid… Mom would bring in the kid, of course, with a sore throat or an ear infection, and they’d take a throat swab and then the nurse would hand the mother a prescription for antibiotics and a decongestant.
And one of the first things out of my mouth was, “Well, wait a minute. You don’t have the culture back yet. The culture is probably not going to be accurate for Strep B or it’ll probably grow up strep. Why are you giving the mother antibiotics and a decongestant?” And the answer, which has stayed with me for this day, “If I don’t give the mother something to do, she will go down the street to my competitor and he will give her something to do. I’ve learned that the kid will get better by itself, but I’ve got to treat the mother.”
Dr. Elisa Song:
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean that is, I guess, the beauty and also the challenge of pediatrics. It’s not just this little kid patient in front of you. It’s really the whole family, even sometimes the grandparents who we have to really help support because some of the things that we are asking parents to do, to wait and watch, provide “supportive care” while their kids are sick, that’s tough. As parents, we want to do something when our kids are sick. And that’s where really using a more integrative approach gives us tools so that we don’t just sit there helpless and our only answer is not just antibiotics, which as you said, for the vast majority of kids are not going to be necessary because they have viral infections.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
And I love in your book that you literally got a huge section of treating the parent to do exactly that. You talk about, “Hey, guess what? Febrile seizures are, number one, really rare. And number two, usually don’t correlate with a super high temperature. And most kids…” You’re right, suppressing temperature is a really dumb idea. It’s a really good defense mechanism, particularly against bacteria.
Dr. Elisa Song:
Well, and that is so true. I mean, we have to recognize our body has a certain wisdom that… I mean, we evolved to create these normal inflammatory responses to fight off infections. And when we suppress that, I mean, some of the studies have shown that artificially suppressing fevers with ibuprofen or Tylenol, so acetaminophen, can actually make your kids stay sicker for longer and even increase their viral shedding from their nose. So what does that mean? It makes them more contagious.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Yeah.
Dr. Elisa Song:
Right? I mean, that’s the last thing we want when our kids are sick. And not to mention the depletion of glutathione caused by acetaminophen. And this one study was really eye-opening to me that… I used to recommend ibuprofen over acetaminophen because of the effects on glutathione depletion. But ibuprofen can actually disrupt the gut microbiome as much as antibiotics. And so really understanding if we need to use these medications to help our kids become more comfortable, not necessarily act normal, but become more comfortable, then we want to either support their glutathione stores or support their microbiomes if we’re going to give them ibuprofen.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
And you have a great story in your book about your two kids when there’s… And Bodhi is one of the names-
Dr. Elisa Song:
Bodhi is my little guy. Well, a big little guy now.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
But you said so, and maybe Bodhi sits there with 104 fever and flushed red, and he says, “Yeah, I feel okay.” And your other…
Dr. Steven Gundry:
…red. And he says, “Yeah, I feel okay.” And your other one, whose name I’ve forgotten.
Dr. Elisa Song:
Kenzie.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Kenzie is at 101 fever and is miserable and awful.
Dr. Elisa Song:
Yeah, it’s actually the opposite. So my daughter Kenzie, I mean, I will look at her and she’s chatting with me maybe a little subdued. Her cheeks are red. And I’ll take her temperature and be like, “Oh my gosh, you’re 104.5.” And yes, Bodie, my little Bodie Bear, is the one who low fever, is moaning and groaning like it’s the end of the world. And so different kids, different reactions, but it’s still their body’s response.
And what’s interesting is the behavior when we’re sick, it’s literally called sickness behavior. And we see it in animals too. What do you want to do when you’re sick? You want to be a couch potato. You’re grumpy. You want to be left alone. You don’t really want to eat a full meal. But that’s our way of preserving our energy so that we can fight the infection. And so for parents, a lot of parents, when they give the Tylenol or the Motrin, they’ll say, “Oh, now they’re acting normal.”
They’re jumping on the trampoline and they feel relieved. But I let them know that actually is not what we want. We want them to be couch potatoes and using all of their reserves to recover.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
In fact, I wrote about that, which book I wrote about it, I forgot, but there’s too many. But one of the interesting things about a fever of the flu, the flu, you feel you don’t want to move. It hurts to move. And that it’s actually not caused by the virus, but it’s our immune system saying, “Look, we need all hands on deck. We need all the energy for our immune cells. And the only way we’re going to get that is you don’t move and your muscles don’t use energy.”
You flip completely how this comes about. I’m going to tell one more fun story of how I got to learn. I did my pediatric heart surgery residency in London, England at Great Ormond Street. And after every one of our operations on the babies, the sisters, the nurses, would send the mothers to the grocery store to buy fresh yogurt. Seriously. And they would come back and they would feed our babies yogurt.
And as an American, I said, “Oh, how quaint. Isn’t that cute?” And I said, “What the heck?” Because they all did it. They said, “Mr. Gundry,” surgeons were called mister, “you have just killed off this child’s bacteria and we’re going to rebuild it.” And I’m going, “How quaint and cute.” This was 1985. They knew what I had done to these kids, and they were restoring these kids’ microbiome after I had wiped them out.
Dr. Elisa Song:
Yeah, which is so important because our microbiomes can get wiped out by so many different factors that are both insidious and just ever prevalent in our modern society. I mean, it’s fascinating when we think about restoring the microbiome against the onslaught of microbiome disruptors, so many people are like, “Oh, just throw in trillions of colonies of probiotic supplements.”
And it’s really that may be a part of the picture. It is not the most important piece of the picture. And as you said, fermented foods, I mean, fermented foods are this magic concoction of not just the probiotics, but all of those byproducts, those beneficial postbiotics in there that support your child’s immune system and their brain and their metabolic health.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
You mentioned you came luckily from a culture that was steeped in fermented foods. Did that help you adjust to the importance of fermented foods? Because I came from a culture where fermented foods really weren’t all… The closest I got was canned sauerkraut.
Dr. Elisa Song:
I mean, I did grow up eating kimchi, right? And kimchi is so interesting. I mean, there’s the Institute of Kimchi Research. I mean, I don’t know if that’s exactly what it’s called, but really there is an institute researching all of the amazing benefits of kimchi. And I remember during the H1N1 epidemic, which rocked all practitioners boats back then, and there was an in vitro study showing that kimchi could kill the H1N1 virus. It’s fascinating.
And then there’s another study that looked at looking at fermented foods, including things like kimchi, have found that fermented foods could reduce social anxiety in young women. And I have so many kids right now since the pandemic with so many social anxieties from having been isolated for so long. But if something like fermented foods could have such power, such influence over our immune systems and over our mental health, why not incorporate that into our diets?
I mean, a lot of people think of fermented foods as sauerkraut, kimchi pickles. And I love parents that think beyond that because I know even for my own kids, fermented foods are not their favorite just yet. But they do love kombucha. They’ll drink kefir, and we ferment fruit. So you can have fermented fruits, and I have a recipe in the book with a fermented blackberry lemonade.
Or you can ferment your fruits and make popsicles over the summer, put them into smoothies, use them as compote over whatever you’re eating over the weekend. I mean, I love thinking outside the savory fermented food box and really thinking more about how can we creatively get fermented foods because you can ferment just about any plant.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Right. Well, that brings up a really good question, and you spent a lot of time in the book about this and I think it’s really important, how in the world… You’re trying to protect your kids. I’ve got grandchildren now about your kid’s age. And how do you, number one, protect them from this onslaught of sugar, artificial dyes, artificial sweeteners, glyphosate?
I mean, we could go on and on, and you go on and on in the book, as do I in my books. How do you protect them, number one, and how do you get these less than flavorful compounds into them? And you talk about hiding it, sneaking it, gradually building up their tolerance to them. Take us through that because that’s a lot of your book.
Dr. Elisa Song:
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I’m a pediatrician and I’m a mom, and it has to be fun and memorable and practical if it’s going to stick. And so it’s not just about telling your kids, “Oh, you should do this because it’s good for you or good for your microbiome.” But I mean, the first foundation though is really teaching our kids. And I think that kids really of any age we can start talking about all of their trillions of tiny friends in their tummies or your gut buddies, as you call them.
I mean, talk to them about, well, we have this whole ecosystem inside of us. And even preschool kids learn about taking on Earth Day. We take of our world’s ecosystem by reducing, reusing, recycling, all the things. And if they know that there’s this whole ecosystem inside them whose job is to take care of us if we take care of them, it puts it in a different light for them.
And kids love that message, love understanding it’s not just about me eating and drinking and moving my body the way I want, it’s really about how I’m doing that, not just for me, but for my ecosystem. So educating and empowering kids, letting them know that they have this choice in front of them, making it relevant for them. Because at any age, kids have different motivations. And so I will tell you, for your teenagers, a big motivation is their skin.
And you start talking about the gut-skin connection and oh my gosh, did you know that the composition of microbes in your gut can actually affect your skin, whether or not you have breakouts? And so that is a big motivator. For my son, it’s about soccer. I mean, he wants to be fast and accurate. We talk about what foods are going to help him be strong and nourish his body, nourish his microbiome so he can help then make those informed decisions by himself.
Now, of course, sometimes they’re going to pick the Skittles and the whatever things, but they know, they understand. And when we’re thinking about really what factors nourish our microbiome, I call them our microbiome champions. And I also want to make it memorable. So it’s the three Fs, so fiber, fermented foods, and phytonutrients, which I know is not an F, but it sounds like an F, right?
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Close enough.
Dr. Elisa Song:
So when we think about that, well, how can we think about getting each of these in our whole gut rainbow of foods? And one of the things that I’ll talk with kids about and teens about is we’ll let them think, every time you eat something, how do you make that meal pop with plants on purpose? Add one more thing. What’s one more thing that you can add? Let’s say you’re having a salad and you have some romaine in there. We make a salad with romaine and bell peppers and carrots.
As we’re sitting there, well, gosh, is there one more thing we can add to make it pop? Oh, sure. Well, let’s go and get the sprouted pumpkin seeds in our cabinet. A lot of people have foods in their cupboard that they can easily add. So that’s one thing. And then the other thing that we can think about for our kids who are really more selective, a lot of parents have picky eaters, and it’s so frustrating and to even think about getting one little vegetable on their plate can seem daunting.
Well, there’s a big pearl that I’ve learned over the years as a pediatrician is oftentimes our pickiest eaters that is as a result of needing a little more zinc. So supplementing with a little zinc just temporarily can really increase their palate. In fact, I was just speaking with this mom yesterday and she said that she heard me on a podcast talking about zinc. And literally every symptom I was checking, these “sensory issues,” where tags bother them, loud sounds, the blender, the vacuum, they can’t roam when the kids are in the house, picky eating.
She said, “That was my daughter. I mean, I just checked off the list. And so I just bought this liquid zinc, started giving my daughter zinc. Within two months, she was eating five new foods.” Really we want to understand some of the deficiencies that may arise. And then it’s also talking about their microbiome is because the bugs in our gut can be friendly or not friendly.
And depending on the composition, they can dictate what foods we crave. I mean, they tell us, “I want this food, or I need this ultra processed thing, or I need all the sugar.” So simply by working on their guts, you can also reset what foods they’re actually more interested in.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
My upcoming book, The Gut-Brain Paradox, goes into that extensively. The gut microbiome literally tells your brain what they want to eat.
Dr. Elisa Song:
It’s fascinating.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
It’s a little scary for most people to think that…
Dr. Elisa Song:
It’s fascinating.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
It’s a little scary for most people to think that these little one cell organisms have that much power over our taste and addictions.
Dr. Elisa Song:
Yes, yes.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
And you talk a lot about the vagus nerve. And again, back in the dark ages, the vagus nerve was how the brain talked to the rest of the body and gave commands. And now of course we realize that for every one fiber from the brain down to the gut, there’s nine fibers heading up. And it’s literally the gut talking to the brain.
Dr. Elisa Song:
Yeah. Well, that is… It’s so key for parents to understand that, and I actually have a whole chapter on the vagus nerve. It’s called Breathe. And when we’re thinking about how do we optimize our children’s microbiomes, of course, we think about food because diet plays such a powerful role, but there’s also so many other ways we can improve your child’s gut microbiome independent of diet.
And so again, for our parents out there who have really, really picky eaters and it’s causing you more stress to think about changing their diet, well, let’s table that for now. Of course, we need to work on it, but there’s all these other things that we can do. And that’s why when I talk about the five things for microbiomagic, there are five things that we do every day that we can just shift things a little bit and do them like a gut hero.
And so, breathe, engaging our vagus nerve is one of them. And what’s fascinating is, for the listeners, heart rate variability is one marker for as… of course, you well know as a cardio specialist. And it’s one of our most important measures of current and future health, even for our children.
And there’s one study looking at children really optimizing, working on their vagus nerve, optimizing heart rate variability. And that was found to improve microbiome diversity and function independent of diet, which is fascinating.
So, all right, if food is going to be challenging, then let’s work on engaging your vagus nerve through belly breathing or diaphragmatic breathing, through walking in nature, through hugging and touching and kissing and letting the oxytocin flow. Mindfulness, meditation, yoga, and I don’t really even call it for kids’ mindfulness anymore or mind body medicine because that puts it into the kind of woo for a lot of people.
And I want people to know, and parents to know, and kids to know that this is one of the most important medicines I can prescribe for you, is working on your vagus nerve. So it’s really how do we really give our vagus nerve more muscles and do the vagus nerve work so that our bodies work better?
And even then when we’re talking about the vagus nerve, right, we’re thinking about the gut. And I let people know when you feel good after you meditate and you feel calm and relaxed, I love that for you. But that’s not why we really engage our vagus nerve. That is a beneficial side effect.
We work on our vagus nerve because it reduces chronic inflammation, it balances our blood sugar, it regulates our hormones, it improves our microbiome. All of these other ripple effects that have this added benefit that, “Oh, I feel great and calm when I’m doing it.”
Dr. Steven Gundry:
All right, I can hear some of our listeners right now with young kids, with their six-year-old ADHD boy saying, “Right, I’m going to have Johnny sit there and do mindful meditation and breath work. I can’t even get him to stop screaming and yelling and running around the room, bouncing off walls.” Well, let’s say you, doctor?
Dr. Elisa Song:
So there actually are some interesting wearables that can be used to help support kids in engaging their vagus nerve, improving heart rate variability.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Like taping their mouth shut? Or…
Dr. Elisa Song:
That might help the parents’ vagus nerve.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Exactly.
Dr. Elisa Song:
But then we really want to make it not a thing that we necessarily do for an hour, sitting there trying to engage. It’s the things that we do on a regular daily basis. And so when we breathe, you can see your kids when they’re getting amped up, they’re breathing in the shallow way, we are breathing in a shallow way, our shoulders are up to our ears.
And you can just take a moment and first learn how to center yourself because your kids are going to be keenly attuned even if you don’t say a word to how anxious you feel. And so if you learn how to slow your breath down…
And what’s fascinating is we can’t control really how our autonomic nervous system or our vagus nerve works, right? We can’t tell our heart beat faster or slower, but your breath is a direct line to your vagus nerve that we can control. So making it fun.
If you have a little kid, get a little pinwheel. That’s one of the best ways to slow the breathing down. “Can you blow in? It’s so hard and slow, and let’s time it. Let’s have a contest. Who can do it for 30 seconds?” And then they’re slowing looking at this pinwheel. I mean, that’s a way that you’re just slowing the breath down. Blowing bubbles is another way that you can do that.
So you’re not saying, “Oh, we’re going to work on your vagus nerve.” You’re just showing them, “Wow, did you notice when you… you can get 10 bubbles out? Oh, did you notice how much calmer your body feels right now?” So that’s one way. We’re just engaging in that everyday moment.
And another exercise I love, it’s called the five senses meditation, but in the book, I call it Stop, Look and Listen, because kids learn to cross the street that way. And so when we stop, we just say, “Hey, let’s do stop, look, and listen,” and you can be on your way to school.
And stopping means, “Oh, let’s just stop and just kind of sit here where we are. And we’re going to look, and looking means we use all of our five senses.” And I tell kids and parents to close their eyes first because our visual input is our strongest sense and it can cloud some of your other senses.
So let’s close our eyes and, “Oh wow, what do you notice now? What do you smell?” And if you’re outside, you might notice the smell of the fresh cut lawn. Or if it’s winter, you might notice someone’s chimney and just really stopping. And then, “What do you hear?” And ask them to notice the tiniest sound that you hear. “Do you now notice that little bird cheeping up in the tree that we hadn’t noticed before?” Same thing with taste and touch, and then finally opening your eyes.
And that can take all of one or two minutes, but you can let them know, “Oh my gosh, did you know? We just took a moment to slow your body down and slow your brain down so that you can now sit and focus more easily.”
And so giving them those sort of every day and, “Did you know can do that anytime you want to? Like, in school when you’re wiggling and really anxious or agitated, just stop and then look around with your senses. And when you listen after you open your eyes, you listen to how your body feels and how your brain feels.”
And that’s not saying, “Oh, we’re going to do yoga for half an hour or an hour,” right? It’s like, “Oh, let’s just take this moment.” It’s these little moments that we can take because those are the moments too that we as parents, we need to stop ourselves and take these moments to regulate our nervous systems throughout the day because kids’ heart rate variability has reduced over the decades. Same thing with adults. And so we need to improve.
I mean, that is one of the pieces of chronic disease right now. We are not able to effectively engage all of those amazing anti-inflammatory immune modulating benefits of our vagus nerve. And so no matter what’s going on with our health, that’s one of the most important things we can do.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
So we don’t have to take our kids to a goat yoga class?
Dr. Elisa Song:
Well, that’d be fun. I mean, why not do that, right? I mean, laughter, I mean, just laughing and dancing. I mean, all of those things really do support your vagus nerve. So I mean, the more joy you can have. I haven’t tried goat yoga myself. There is a farm actually in Half Moon Bay near where I live that I saw goat yoga sign the other day. So that’s a good reminder.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Okay. All right. Okay. You have some wonderful parts of the book about label reading and making graded choices of how… “Okay, this is definitely going to kill my kids. This won’t kill them quite as fast. This one is even better. And this one’s really good.”
And talk us through just… For instance, you mentioned different yogurts and the stuff that… And you hear a yogurt and you go, “Oh, that’s really good for me, and that’s… Oh, there’s probiotics and there’s post-biotic, that’s what I need to get my kid.” And Yoplait kid yogurt with colors in it.
Dr. Elisa Song:
Or the drinkable, the yogurts and all of that. Yeah.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
So take us through that.
Dr. Elisa Song:
Yeah, I love that you have yogurt as an example, because that is a food that a lot of people would think, “Oh, it’s healthy for you, has protein in it, has probiotics in it. And of course that’s a great way to start the day for my kids.”
And I really truly believe that if we teach our kids how to read food labels like a gut hero, that is one of the most important life skills that we can send them off into adulthood with.
And even our teenagers, I mean, my kids right now as young teens, they’re going out with their friends and making food choices. And if we teach them how to read those labels, instead of reaching for the Takis with all of the MSG and the artificial colors and choosing, let’s say, the Siete chips with minimal ingredients, better choice for them.
But let’s take the example of yogurt, because I made the same mistake too, even as a holistic pediatrician; I was buying the Greek yogurt full of protein, the whole milk Greek yogurt, that was vanilla. I thought, “Oh, that’s for sure better than the ones with the strawberry puree on top.”
I finally took my own advice and I looked at the label and I was floored at how much sugar was in that Greek yogurt. It was something like 28 grams of added sugar, actually more than the strawberry fruit puree, which still had too much. But I thought, “Oh my gosh, kids should not have more than 25 grams of added sugar in one day. And here I am sending my kids off to school with, well, over [inaudible 00:34:52]”-
Dr. Steven Gundry:
This healthy yogurt.
Dr. Elisa Song:
Yes. Now that was the organic vanilla Greek yogurt. Now, let’s take something like Yoplait and you look at the ingredients. So of course, number one, we have to look at the grams of added sugar because like I said, we don’t want our kids to have more than 25 grams in a day. I teach kids how to do that. And the 25 grams is very nebulous. So what does that mean? That’s about six teaspoons. Right? So six teaspoons.
So when they’re buying that whatever sports drink that has 60 grams of added sugar, oh my gosh, that’s 15 teaspoons you just had right there. So it makes it more concrete, but Yoplait, so it has the added sugar, but also then you have to go down to the ingredient panel. And it’s not enough to say, “Oh, don’t buy something with foods you don’t recognize.”
Because some of them are things like riboflavin or cobalamin, which are vitamins which aren’t technically terrible for you, although you have to question if a food is a whole food, why does that have to have the vitamins added back?
But there are a category of additives called emulsifiers, which are really problematic. I mean, there’s links between emulsifiers and increases in autoimmunity, directly triggering leaky gut.
Dr. Elisa Song:
… and increases in autoimmunity directly triggering leaky guts. And it’s not going to say emulsifier on the label. So I have a list for kids to not memorize, but just have in their minds. And then it’s easy to actually remember mono and diglycerides, carrageenan, xanthan gum. I mean, those are just some of them. And so when you look at things like Yoplait, it has the emulsifiers. In fact, some ready-to-feed liquid infant formulas have these emulsifiers at levels higher than what the FDA has recognized to be harmful for health. So we have to be savvy, even in foods that we’re trusting the food industry. I mean, how could they do this in a baby’s formula? But we know that baby and toddler and kid’s food have so many impurities, I mean, heavy metals, and it’s up to us as parents and consumers and really as practitioners to be educated and vote with our dollars in a really smart way.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
I want to touch finally, because you spend a lot of time in the book. We started with this, antibiotics. Come on, that’s all pediatricians are good for, giving kids the antibiotics when they walk through the door. Where do you stand on them?
Dr. Elisa Song:
Well, I mean that is also another whole chapter and it’s called What Every Parent and Practitioner Should Know About Antibiotics. And we have with antibiotics… I mean, we know antibiotics can be life-saving, antibiotics are really one of the most important public health inventions of the 20th century. But we’re no longer in the 20th century and we’re now in the 21st century where antibiotic resistance is quickly becoming a leading cause of death worldwide. So we need to understand the impact of inappropriate and excessive use of antibiotics. Now for children, especially when some studies show that up to 70% of antibiotic prescriptions written for children are inappropriately prescribed. It’s, yes, a public health concern, but it’s also the individual patient concern in front of you where knowing that even just one round of antibiotics can significantly increase the subsequent risk of developing anxiety or depression or mental health concerns. We know this in adults too. The more rounds of antibiotics, the higher the risk. And we certainly have our epidemic of teenage anxiety going on right now.
And so we need to understand when it’s appropriate to use antibiotics, which can be hard to do as a parent, but you really want to make sure that it is absolutely necessary, like you said. Is there a culture? Can we wait for the results to make sure it’s bacterial before we start the antibiotics? And when antibiotics are used, hopefully necessarily, we understand how to restore the microbiome. That’s really key because then we can mitigate, prevent some of the downstream effects of microbiome disruption that may not be immediate, they may show up years or decades down road, but the stage was set with those antibiotics.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
We talked about this off camera. How do you as a parent talk to the pediatrician about your desires versus perhaps the not so newly trained pediatrician’s desires? Is there a balance? How do you strike a balance?
Dr. Elisa Song:
Yeah, it is very tough because as more and more parents become enlightened, aware-
Dr. Steven Gundry:
With Dr. Google.
Dr. Elisa Song:
Or Dr. Google, yes. It’s really important to find a pediatrician who can partner with you and that can be challenging. I mean, fortunately there are more and more pediatricians who are really recognizing that how we’re practicing conventional pediatrics, it’s not helping our kids thrive for the long term, it’s not helping them become thriving adults, which is our goal as parents and as pediatricians. And I have the honor of really being able to teach a lot of pediatric practitioners who are coming to me saying, “I need this knowledge.” I mean, in fact, I had this one, I am head of A4M’s pediatric education, and at our last pediatric conference, a gentleman pediatrician who was in his 60s came to me just very distraught. And I thought, oh my gosh, what is he going to tell me? And so he came up to me and he said, “I can’t believe I didn’t know this sooner.”
And he was thinking back about all the patients that he’d seen, “And I wish I had known.” And I said, “You know what? You didn’t know them, but now you know and you can continue to help your patients moving forward.” But there still are too many pediatricians who are not yet enlightened and aware, which is, I mean, partly, I wrote the book for practitioners. Because I’ve had practitioners who one of the schools of nurse practitioners, doctorate of nurse practitioner degree, they’re now requiring my book as reading for all of their students, which is amazing. I mean, this is what we want. This has to become not the alternative medicine, but the conventional standard of care.
So as a parent though, especially when it comes to antibiotics, I mean, I have a list of six questions to ask before you start the antibiotics. But the number one question, and I would say this is for adults too, the number one question to ask is, “Hey doc, is this antibiotic really necessary?” And it seems like a silly question to ask, but some of the studies have found that doctors are twice as likely to prescribe an antibiotic, even if they think it’s not necessary because it’s a viral infection. They’re twice as likely to prescribe the antibiotics if they think that the patient wants one.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Oh, sure.
Dr. Elisa Song:
Right. And we know, I mean, I remember being in busy urgent cares where it’s like one patient every five minutes and that’s all you can think about doing. But if someone stops you and asks, then you know right away, okay, this is not one of those parents who has come to the ER or urgent care with the sole purpose of getting the prescription. Because there are some parents like that. But parents listening here, you’re not like that, I know that. I mean, you wanted to use antibiotics only when appropriate.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
All right. I think that’s a good place to sum up because, as you know, we have a audience question. So I’m going to give it to you first. This is from Brian J. Roth on Instagram. “With so many junk sugar-filled kid supplements on the market. How do I know what’s best for my kid to take? Do you have a list of essentials and perhaps kid-friendly flavors appreciated?” That’s a good question.
Dr. Elisa Song:
It’s a great question. And there’s a lot of junk on the market out there, especially when it comes to kid supplements. Because I’ve been on the hunt for a good kid’s multivitamin, I mean, I’m going to say for decades. I mean, there really isn’t one that I am completely enamored of because first, for a kid’s multi, you want to use evidence-based dosages and you want to use evidence-based ingredients. And we know how important choline is for brain development in kids. We know that we would like the methylated forms of folic acid and B12, not the synthetic forms. And so it’s a challenge. There’s not one multi that I’ve yet to really say, “Oh, this is the one.” But I do know with the explosion of gummies, we have got to look at how much sugar kids are getting in their multivitamins. Because I have some parents who are getting the gummy vitamin D and gummy vitamin C and a gummy probiotic and a gummy multivitamin and giving their kids this dish to start the day.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
And the gummy omega-3s?
Dr. Elisa Song:
Yes, the gummy omega-3s. And then all of a sudden when you look at one serving has maybe four or five grams of added sugar, that’s a teaspoon. You just gave your kid five teaspoons of sugar in their multi that’s actually supposed to support their health and you’re countering that with sugar. So really being aware of that. Now, when I think about what vitamins or supplements kids might need, of course, I would love it if they got their supplements, their nutrition from food. There’s really no way to support your gut microbiome, for instance, with a probiotic as well as you could do with fiber and fermented foods. Now I look at what kids are most likely to be deficient in and that’s probably the same for adults. So vitamin D, zinc, magnesium, and your omega-3s. I mean, those are really such common deficiencies or insufficiencies. So I typically recommend that kids get vitamin D supplementation. I’ve yet to find a kiddo where I’ve checked their blood levels and they’ve had optimal levels, not just normal, but optimal levels. Even kids who are in the middle of the summer, out playing all day long.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
You’re right.
Dr. Elisa Song:
So vitamin D and really high quality fish oil are typically really needed because most kids are not getting great sources of omega-3s. Probiotics is a big question. I get the question, “Oh, should my kid take a probiotic every day?” That’s probably one of the things that’s changed the most in my 20 years of practicing is I used to think, yeah, probably everyone could benefit from a probiotic every day. But now as microbiome testing has become even better, better, better, using things like shotgun metagenomics, we’re finding that taking probiotic supplements every day can actually start to overtake your normal beneficial flora.
And it’s not a one-size-fits-all, even for your microbiome. I mean, it has to be personalized. So I do use targeted probiotics for indications. So for instance, after antibiotics, of course you want to restore your microbiome and I think supplements are important there. If we’re working on the gut-brain axis, there are certain probiotics that are known to be, “Psychobiotics,” and help support optimal levels of serotonin and dopamine, which by the way are also postbiotics. And there are certain strains that have been found to really support immune health, reduce colds, fevers, flus, missed days of school and work when given in the winter time.
So there’s certainly a place for probiotic supplements. But the trillions of probiotics in our gut and the new strains that we’re constantly, I mean the last I’ve tried to look, I think we’ve identified maybe around 800 strains so far. I mean, it doesn’t make sense that just 11 strains in your probiotic would do it. Right?
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Yeah.
Dr. Elisa Song:
And so really using that fermented foods and then targeted.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. It is very frustrating to look at kids’ supplements and see the amount of sugar that these kids are getting. So buyer beware. And again, the take-home message is please learn how to read labels. You’ll not only save your life, but you get your kids off to a much better start. Well, thanks again for coming on. It’s a great book, lots of really good advice in this book. And good luck with it and thanks for doing it.
Dr. Elisa Song:
Oh, thanks for having me on. And thanks for all the work that you do. I mean, you’ve been this pioneer really paving the way for us to follow in your footsteps and really be brave enough to bring this information to the world.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Well, and yeah, your bravery is noted in the book. Because sadly most people, most practicing physicians don’t believe most of what you say in the book and what I say in the book. And Hippocrates knew this, we’re just slow learners. Come on.
Dr. Elisa Song:
Yeah, we’re getting there.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Yeah, we’re getting there.
Dr. Elisa Song:
Yeah.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Okay. But keep up the good work.
Dr. Elisa Song:
Thank you.
Speaker 1:
I hope you enjoyed this episode of The Dr. Gundry Podcast. If you did, please share this with family and friends. You never know how one of these health tips can completely transform someone’s life when you take the time to share it with them. There’s also The Dr. Gundry Podcast YouTube channel, where we have tens of thousands of free health insights that can help you and your loved ones live a long, vital life. Let’s do this to-
