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From Reactive to Resilient Kids: Can Healing the Gut Be the Key to Eczema, Anxiety, and ADHD? | Dr. Elisa Song
00:23:24
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- [00:00]
A
Over 50% of kids has at least one chronic disease. Eczema, asthma, allergies, ADHD, behavioral concerns, anxiety. Every single one of those you can tie back to their microbiome. One mocha frappuccino might have 13 teaspoons of added sugar. Don't get that for your baby. And it's not just about eating bland, boring, organic, natural foods, right? Within one month, her mom wrote and said she's getting her daughter back.
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B
Dr. Elisa, thank you so much for being here with me today.
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A
Well, thanks for having me.
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B
So I want to get straight to the point because I know our kiddos are in serious distress in this day and age. And it's really daunting for both parents and practitioners to try to keep up with the shifting needs of our young ones. So in this epidemic of sensitivity where seems like all of our kids are more reactive than they were in previous generations, where do you as an expert on all this start?
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A
You know, I would like to say I would start before kids are born, right? Because the health of moms preconception, the health of dad's preconception really lays the groundwork for how healthy babies are going to be when they're born into this world, including and really importantly moms and dad's gut microbiomes. So I would love to have a program in place where all families had access to preconception care that included microbiome optimization, diet and lifestyle optimization, psychological well being, Right? Because I think that that would help to our babies to be more resilient in utero when they're exposed to all of our environmental toxicants that are out there and then even once they're born. But now, short of that, what we can do is just really make sure the babies have the best start in life by anchoring their gut microbiome as their gut immune system develops, their gut brain connection, their gut hormone connection, their gut metabolic health connection, I always anchor their health and how do we get, in those first thousand days, the best microbiome in life. Now some babies though are born without that chance, right? They're born of necessity by C section, exposed to antibiotics, maybe needing to formula feed. And we know that babies who are formula fed or born by C section or exposed to antibiotics, they have a different microbiome signature that occurs that puts them more at risk for later. Eczema, asthma, allergies, mental health concerns. Not all is lost, right? So if we understand that whether your kids have eczema or colic or behavioral concerns, we start looking at the gut, we can see well, where do things go? A little off and then how do we course correct.
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B
Yeah, I think that's really well said. I think back on my own childhood and it's like all the signs were there. Nothing amazing or exciting happened. I was formulated and I had a lot of ear infections as a kid, which meant a lot of amoxicillin and a very limited Costco packaged diet. As a kid.
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A
We were a traditional Korean household, you know, first generation immigrants, but still the lure of the American food. Right. And I remember when we got our first microwave and this was back in the 1970s. Right. And rice a roni was the thing. Right. That was the real American food. And so it's just fascinating how we kind of shifted from this really traditional way of eating fermented foods, kimchi, of course, you know, lots of vegetables and real foods, and shifted in our household to really eating a lot of processed foods. And the food has just gotten more and more processed and kids just have more and more easy access. And so it's making kids and teens and parents aware not to say you should never eat out of a package, but that eating out of a package, especially an ultra processed food package, is in large part contributing to this. Over 50% of kids who has at least one chronic disease. And so learning how to live in our modern world, take advantage of the conveniences, but then also know, hey, okay, let's step back and know where are the places that can move the needle in my health or my kids health and prioritize that.
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B
Okay? So when we're talking about, you know, what is happening for a kid as you're setting up your microbiome for success early in life. And of course we know that breastfeeding is, you know, a wonderful factor. But I think back to my childhood and like, oh, I was formula fed, oops, had those ear infections. So that oops meant a lot of amoxicillin.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Early antibiotics, of course, wasn't anything special, but there was that early issue setting up in the microbiome for the start, from the start for me. So how do you think about that, you know, in setting parents up for success?
- [04:45]
A
It's interesting to bring up the, the knowledge that babies who are my C section exposed to antibiotics formula fed, they are more at risk for developing conditions like eczema, asthma, allergies, even later on, adhd, behavioral concerns, anxiety. There was a recent study that came out that showed that three in four babies today, even vaginally birthed babies, are missing a very, very key bacteria called bifidobacteria. And bifidobacteria is what helps to train our kids immune systems help to train their brain development and their future hormones and their future metabolic health. And so we're seeing this now in so many babies, even if they're quote, set up in the right way. So I want all families to know that the time to really think about preparing your baby's gut microbiome is now. Never too late, it's never too early. Now when we think about what our kids are eating today though, even from the time they're little, all of these packaged ultra processed foods and the increase, the explosion in what our kids have access to and what we as parents have access to is so different than when we grew up. I mean, I grew up, yes, we had, you know, the skittles and the bazookas and I mean we had candy, right. We had soda and we had packaged foods. And it was such an amazing American thing, you know, to have these packaged foods. But now you go to the supermarket and I mean, the packaged foods take over the real foods, right? It's not even a matter of the artificial colors and the artificial preservatives. I have families in my practice as a holistic pediatrician who are already coming to me knowing that if it says artificial, they're gonna put it back. I would say one of the most insidious factors that really very few people are talking about is the number of the amount of added sugar that is getting into our kids diets, even from the time they're babies, that is completely shifting their microbiomes and their metabolic health and their brain health. And so we need to start talking about that.
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B
That's so important to share. I think people are like getting more literary about food dyes. Like it's a no red dye household, but kids are still struggling. So it's a great point, I think, about the pressure being put on parents. You know, this is a really hard world to navigate right now. And also take care of little ones and you've got these aisles of beautiful little pack pouches and they say all natural. So what are some of the less obvious culprits you haven't already named besides the, you know, the food dyes and the preservatives? What do parents need to be looking for to reduce their kids reactivity?
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A
Well, I teach parents and kids, it is very important to teach kids as well how to read food labels, be really, really savvy, how to read every food label. I teach them how to read food labels like a gut hero. Because I Want them to be able to point out and know when they're in middle school, when they're in high school, when they're in college, when they're making their own food choices. This is what I should get now. And it's not just about eating bland, you know, really boring organic natural foods, right? I mean, your kids are going to roll their eyes at you. It's about learning how to make these good, better swaps, right? So really being savvy consumers, that's what we want our kids to be. So anything that says artificial, most families are going to know. I mean, there's enough press right now. You put the artificial colors back, right? The added sugars, they need to look at the labels and understand how much added sugar kids should have. Babies 0 to 2 years of age should have 0 grams of added sugar. That means that yo baby number one pediatrician recommended organic yogurt, right? With 6 grams of protein of added sugar per serving. Don't get that for your baby. What can you do? Instead, get the whole fat, unflavored Greek yogurt. And if you want to put in some fruit puree, mash up some strawberries, some blueberries, some raspberries, whatever else you want in it, you get the natural sweetness of the fruit without the overpowering sweetness of the added sugar. So your kids develop a palette then for things that are naturally sweet, right? Now, one thing that I talk to kids and teens about that is really, I would say one of the most insidious ways that added sugar all of a sudden explodes in your diet and adult diets too, is sugar sweetened beverages, right? Number one culprit, because you go to Starbucks and you get that mocha frappuccino or you get that, you know, whatever, dragon fruit, kiwi boba tea, right? That's how my son says it's a healthier version, right? When you look at the grams of added sugar, right? One mocha frappuccino might have 55 grams of added sugar. For a lot of kids and parents, that doesn't mean anything. What is 55 grams, right? Well, 55 grams, that's about maybe 11, no, 13 teaspoons of added sugar. Know that a kid 2 to 18 years of age should have no more than about six teaspoons of added sugar in a day. That puts it into context, right? So I talk to kids, okay? Six teaspoons, right? You get that boba tea, the healthier one. That's still going to be about seven teaspoons of added sugar right there, right? So just Know, if you're going to have that thing, right? This is real life, too. You can't just say no, right? You just say, look, if you were going to choose that, first of all, get in touch with your body and your brain, right? Notice how that makes you feel. Does it make you feel stronger? Does it not? Right? Because you want to respect your body and love your body and brain and make the choices that serve you. And if you really still want that thing, have it. But then understand that you're kind of dipping into your sugar bank, right? And so that you want to surround that with just stronger, healthier, low or no sugar foods for the next couple of meals is how I view it.
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B
What kind of compliance do you get from parents and kids with that?
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A
It's always about the why, right? I always teach kids about their gut microbiomes. We call them the tiny little friends in their tummies when they're little. We call them your microbiota and your microbiome when they're in middle school and high school. One thing about humans is we love to learn more about ourselves, right? When you can tie in the microbiome with whatever is going on with them. And really, if they're coming into you with tummy aches or constipation or diarrhea, or they're coming in with anxiety or having trouble sleeping or wishing they didn't get in trouble at school so much, right? Or maybe they want to be a better athlete, run a faster mile, right? Have a more accurate goal shot. Or maybe they're a teen and they have horrible skin. Every single one of those you can tie back to their microbiome and let them know that there is this living ecosystem inside of us. The job of that ecosystem is to take care of us. But it can only do that if we take care of this ecosystem. I mean, kids in preschool learn how to reduce, reuse, recycle, and take care of the world and ecosystem around us. And we all know if we don't take care of our Earth pretty soon, it's not going to take care of us, right? That we need to put that same logic to our ecosystem, especially little kids. I mean, they take such ownership of this. They're like, I want to take care of my friends in my tummy. The happy hormones like serotonin or melatonin, that helps us feel, you know, calm and help us fall asleep. And so for kids, for teenagers talking about the microbiome skin connection, or kids who are always getting sick and missing birthday parties and missing, you know, this or this or that by Talking about how 80% of your immune system resides in your gut. So guess what? You want to stay healthy and make it to all those parties, you have to nourish your gut microbiome. I'm not going to say compliance is perfect because. Because even for adults, when is it ever perfect?
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B
Right?
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A
But when you understand the why, it makes it so much easier to follow the steps that I would love all kids and families to take. And it also helps to take the nagging away from the parents, because now kids have a reason to do it for themselves.
- [12:58]
B
Because you're a gut microbiome expert, and not just in general, but at each stage of life, you understand the species that we need to be looking for in stool samples. You know, and it's so much bigger than shotgun or so much bigger than culture testing. Right. You know, we really need to move beyond that limited paradigm at this point. So let's take a look at what you're really tracking in each stage at the microbiome level, when something has already gone wrong for a kid, when they're already coming in chronically ill, what are you looking for in the gut microbiome?
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A
Well, and this is so key because now we can look through a technology called shotgun metagenomic sequencing. We can look at all of the different microbes in your gut and not just know what's in there. We can know the relative amounts of each relative to the other organisms that are in there and also understand how they're functioning. Are they doing what we want them to do for us? Or if there are harmful bacteria, are they doing things that we don't want? Right. And this is really key, because once you understand that, you can have profound results for your kids with autoimmunity, for your kids with pcos, for your kids with ADHD or anxiety or really bad eczema or asthma or autoimmunity. Right. The same holds true for adults because your gut microbiome informs everything else that happens in your body. Many people have heard the saying that all diseases start in the gut. Credited, you know, with Hippocrates, right? Father of modern medicine. But There is a Dr. Alessio Fasano, who is a Harvard gastroenterologist who really put the idea of celiac disease and non gluten, non celiac gluten sensitivity on the map. And he's done a ton of research on the microbiome in kids and adults, and he is credited with saying, the gut is not like Las Vegas. Whatever happens in the gut doesn't stay in the gut. And that is really true. So when we're looking, if I have a kiddo who already has a health concern, I'll give you an example. I have a, a 10 year old who came to me diagnosed with ADHD, OCD, odd, probably has pans, pandas, right? Has PTSD from a traumatic experience at school. She was aggressive, violent at home, aggressive to her younger sister. I mean she was miserable because she did not, she didn't want to be this way, right? And her whole family was miserable. Walking on eggshells. Her palate was more and more limited. She ate maybe five foods. They had tried four different psychiatric medications. Too many side effects. She was losing weight. She actually stopped growing. Needed to see the endocrinologist because she just was stunted in her growth and she had too many emotional psychiatric side effects. They were just making her worse. So they came to me really desperate. Now what we did was a stool microbiome test, right? A very specific stool microbiome test. To look at this, the relative abundances of the different microbes, we found that she had not enough of the beneficial Akkermansia and Faecalibacterium. Some people have heard of Akkermansia because yes, it is responsible for making GLP1s, right? But in this case for her, it's a keystone species that helps create a healthy ecosystem. Faecali bacterium creates something called short chain fatty acids and many listeners have probably heard of butyrate, which is one of our master regulators of health, right? So she had hardly any of that. On the flip side, she had this category of gram negative bacteria, it's a fancy word called Enterobacteraceae that have what's called LPS on their outer membranes. Now when these bacteria, which she had really high numbers of several kinds of Enterobacteriaceae with high levels of lps. This LPS is really inflammatory. We know it's one of the underlying causative factors for mental health conditions, autoimmune conditions. Lipopolysaccharide specifically is lipopolysaccharide and when lipopolysaccharide is absorbed, it causes endotoxemia. And so we see this in autoimmunity and a whole host of conditions in kids and adults. So what we did was first I did really a deep dive talk with her on her microbiome at a 10 year old level. And I told her, look, it's really not her fault that all this is going on. Her gut balance is just off. And these are the gut bugs that Are helping to make all of those balance and calming brain chemicals for her, right? And so we need to live in community with those organisms to help her brain feel better. But what do they need? They need us to eat the right foods. Fiber, colorful fruits and vegetables, whole grains, legumes, fermented foods. And I said, do you think you might be willing to maybe expand your diet a little bit? And she just kind of thought about it. She didn't say anything, right. But I was just wanting to inform her. I said, well, let's go through these results. And I said, look, we have some choices to make. And we came up with a supplement plan. We used a supplement to mop up that lipopolysaccharide, that serum derived bovine immunoglobulin, right? We used herbs to get rid of that Enterobacteraceae and we added a prebiotic supplement to bring up her beneficial flora. How did it go that night? Okay. Mom texted me. Of course they hadn't started the supplements yet. But this 10 year old girl, right, she heard the message that she actually had the power, right, to make some changes to help herself. Nobody had ever told her that, right? It was just about throwing medications at her. Something's wrong with you, right? Like here's some medications, right? Nothing about like actually what I eat and how I live can impact, like I can actually change what's going on, right? So that night she was actually willing to have her mom put two little broccoli florets on her plate. I mean that was huge. And then two weeks later they had started the plan and the mom wrote and said, I can't believe. I mean we're just, we're finally feeling some hope. She's starting to smile a little bit. Her sister's, her younger sister was kind of exhaling just because she's not afraid that she's going to be beat up all the time, right? And within one month her mom wrote and said she's. She's getting her daughter back. Right?
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B
Wonderful.
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A
It doesn't have to take that long. And so here's the thing. On her gut microbiome test, right? What we, what we did was she did for herself by being willing to expand even just a little bit, her diet and also to really work on the. The vagus nerve piece. I mean I didn't mention that movie spoke about how breath work and just, you know, closing your eyes and visualizing and you know, doing. Going for a walk in nature, living beautiful Marin, right? That all of those things we don't do Them just to feel calm and good. We do them because they can actually help your microbiome independent of what you're eating. Right? So food was kind of stressful to think about eating. That's okay. That we just want to make sure that she's trying to do these other things because it's going to make a difference in her microbiome results. We saw her gut resilience score go from nothing to all the way in the green normal three months. Wow. Three months.
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B
Kids are so resilient.
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A
Kids are really resilient. But this is what we want for kids and adults, right? It's not about always having the perfect microbiome, and it's also not about avoiding every single hit or stress or to our microbiome. We just can't. Right. Even if you live in the cleanest, greenest house possible, you're gonna be exposed to microplastics, you're gonna be exposed to pfas and forever chemicals. You can minimize your exposure, but it's there, right? We're never going to get rid of psychological stress. Right. There may be times where we're not eating as clean as possible. You and I travel to. We're crossing time zones. That's a stress on our gut microbiome. Right? So the key is learning how to make your microbiome so resilient that even if it shifts a little bit to maybe not so healthy with all of these things, it bounces right back. That is the goal. And so this idea that kids are more sensitive now, it's true. Adults are more sensitive, right? I mean, we're more reactive to everything. But if our microbiomes are more resilient, I do see and I do believe that we can become less reactive and more stable and thriving in this world.
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B
So what message do you have for parents, your top advice for them? And what would you like to say directly to your pediatrician colleagues right now?
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A
So for parents, I just want them to know that it's never too late to restore their child's gut microbiome. It's never too late. A lot of parents who are listening right now, their kids already have an issue and they're already thinking, oh, my gosh, well, she had antibiotics when she was six months old. Or I did this or I did that, sit with that for a moment, and then we move on. Because there's always a way forward. And for practitioners, I know there are pediatric practitioners out there frustrated with how they're practicing, frustrated with not getting the results that they want, frustrated that they're not really helping their kids thrive in the way that they thought they would when they were in medical school. So it's not just about villainizing the physicians. They're out there and I want them to know that there is a way to learn this and to embody this and to incorporate this in their practices. And once they do, they're never gonna be able to practice another way.
- [22:39]
B
That's beautiful. Thanks so much for being here today.
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A
You're welcome.
- [22:43]
B
Thanks for spending this time with us today. I know these conversations can bring up a lot and I want you to have room to sit with what you learned and let it land in your own body. If you want more support or you're curious about the next step on your healing path, you can always connect with me. Find me on Instagram hedetoxnation and explore resources mentioned in this episode@detoxnation.com this conversation is shared for education and personal reflection and isn't medical advice. Please always work with your trusted healthcare providers for your care. I'm really glad you're here and I'll see you in the next episode.