As a holistic nutritionist, as well as a health and wellness coach, Heather Wolcott understands concerns about all-or-nothing lifestyles and dietary changes. Instead, Heather believes in promoting a well-rounded lifestyle — and understanding that nothing is forever. 

On this episode of Back Talk Doc, Dr. Sanjiv Lakhia and his guest, functional health coach Heather Wolcott, talk about nutrition and its effect on health, wellness, and even pain. Much of their discussion focuses around food elimination diets.

Heather understands that the term “elimination diet” can be daunting for some people. But, she says, this form of lifestyle change is really just a tool to identify food sensitivities and intolerances that can cause brain fog, joint pain, rashes, anxiety, bloating, and fatigue. 

As with all things in wellness and nutrition, the key is balance. Even elimination dieting doesn’t have to last forever, says Heather. For some people, it may only last a couple of weeks. 

Everyone is different, and no two paths to health are the same. But Dr. Lakhia and Heather have both observed that certain foods seem to cause more problems than others. 

Tune in to learn how you might be able to improve your lifestyle by simply cutting certain foods. 

💡 Featured Expert 💡

Name: Heather Wolcott

What she does: As a holistic nutritionist for more than 20 years, Heather has been helping clients improve their health and achieve their nutrition goals. She is a National Board Certified health and wellness coach and an ADAPT-Certified Functional Health Coach. 

Company: Heather Wolcott

Words of wisdom: “I love to really dial into nutrition because it's super complicated and complex when you get granular with it, but it doesn't have to be. I think people just need to be more educated.”

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Back Talk Doc is brought to you by Carolina Neurosurgery & Spine Associates, with offices in North and South Carolina. To learn more about Dr. Lakhia and treatment options for back and spine issues, go to backtalkdoc.com. To schedule an appointment with Carolina Neurosurgery & Spine Associates, you can call us at 1-800-344-6716 or visit our website at CNSA.com.

Welcome. You are listening to Back Talk Doc where you'll find answers to some of the most common questions about back pain and spine health, brought to you by Carolina Neurosurgery and Spine Associates, where cutting edge nationally recognized care is delivered through a compassionate approach. This podcast is for informational purposes only and not intended to be used as personalized medical advice. And now it's time to understand the cause of back pain and learn about options to get you back on track. Here's your Back Talk Doc, Dr. Sanjiv Lakhia.

Welcome back to the show. Today we're going to pivot back to one of my favorite topics, and that is nutrition and its role in your health, wellness, and even pain. And I welcome my longtime friend and functional health coach, Heather Wolcott to the show to help me do that. Heather, welcome on.

Hey, San. Thanks. I'm super excited to be here. This will be fun.

Guys, Heather and I go way, way back to grade school. I've known her a long time. And Heather, I've really enjoyed just kind of watching you from afar and through social media, both your personal and professional life. And friends, Heather is so passionate about fitness, about nutrition, health and wellness, and she's the perfect person to help break down the topic today is going to be a discussion around food elimination diets. I consider it to be my secret weapon against pain, but it can be complicated and I wanted to put out an episode so people can hear about it and understand it better. Heather, let me introduce you to everyone. She's been working 20 years now one-on-one with clients helping them with their health and nutrition goals as a holistic nutritionist. Now as a national board certified health and wellness coach and an ADAPT-Certified Functional Health Coach. She is a change agent. She loves to get people to realize their visions and their goals. Heather, you did your functional training through the Chris Kresser Institute, correct?

Yeah. Kresser is awesome. He's a great resource.

And for those who aren't familiar with Chris Kresser, he is a big name in the functional medicine space and we'll link to his information in the show notes. But I'm just curious, you started out really into fitness and nutrition. What made you want to get that extra training in the functional health coach space?

That's a good question. Working with people one-on-one as you do, Sanj, you love helping people, I love helping people. I was an educator, I was a school teacher. I loved helping kids, but that's a one to 30 ratio and when you start working one-on-one, you really can get into people's bio individualities. And so I love doing that with nutrition and fitness and I really look at the pillars of health. We cover a lot of things in our consultations, but it's a complicated industry. It's a complicated topic. And just working with people one-on-one, on what to eat, what not to eat and all these things, it's great. But what I think the root cause of their success really comes down to is their autonomy in changing their own behaviors. And so as a coach, I'm really not their nutrition expert when I'm wearing my coaching hat. When I'm wearing my coaching hat, I'm just that facilitator in the conversation that helps them maybe hear what they're saying or gives them space to verbally process what's kind of spinning in their head. And then together we help them move forward towards their goals.

The coaching component of it is really attractive because I don't have to data dump all the time. I get to sit back and let the client really realize that they have a lot of their own answers within them and they've just never had that opportunity to express them or to bounce them off of somebody. That's what really appealed to me in the coaching realm. And Kresser is a fantastic leader in functional health and his programs are awesome. And you're probably even aware that he has a practitioner training program as well. He works with people to become health coaches and then he also works with practitioners in functional health and just really root cause medicine. He's such a wealth of information and I knew doing anything through Kresser would be an awesome experience and I absolutely love pairing my nutrition information with the coaching process.

That's great. And I know we've talked before, but it's good to hear you outline that. In my integrative health training, we did modules several on motivational interviewing techniques and what you're talking about is really leading people to their own conclusions because certainly I think behavioral change is so much easier when an individual thinks of it themselves and really understands it intuitively versus being told what to do. Certainly there's a role for information and guidance, but it's always best when you merge those things together. That's awesome. I'm really glad you went that career route. But for today, food elimination diets. When I have patients who are struggling with pain or energy and sleep and we've tried a lot of things, one of the things I really like to do is pull out my materials on a comprehensive food elimination plan, but it can be very complicated. For those people who aren't familiar with food elimination diets, can you give them a 30,000-foot overview of what that is, what it looks like?

Yeah. And sometimes it sounds scary to people. I think they have to give up everything that they enjoy forever and that's not what it is at all. Elimination diets, they're just tools. They're tools to identify food sensitivities and intolerances. If you have a food allergy, probably already know about that. This is a little different. These are food sensitivities and intolerances and they just help reduce symptoms like brain fog, joint pain, rashes, anxiety, bloating, fatigue. It involves temporarily excluding food that may be problematic and trigger symptoms. And it can last two weeks, it can be 10 weeks. Everyone again is different. Some people notice a reduction in certain symptoms right away. It's super easy. Other people, it takes a little bit more time. Maybe it was several foods that were bothering them. And then what you do is you slowly introduce a food back alone. You'd only introduce three things back one at a time and just see if they're getting any of the same reactions that they had in the past.

That's a really nice simple description. You pull out common offenders and then you reintroduce them one at a time, and you track your symptoms and that gives you some information about the influence of food on your health. But like you and I have said before and talked before offline when we were growing up, this wasn't an issue. When we were in school, we weren't worried about everyone having peanut allergies and gluten sensitivities and dairy and corn and soy. I'd love to get your thoughts on why you think this has evolved in our culture today, why we have such a big issue, it seems, at least with food sensitivities.

Well, I mean we talked about this before. It's kind of sad. I really attribute it... It's a multimodal thing. You can't really ever pin one thing, it's a lot of things. But if you look at how quickly our environment has changed, you go back 30 years, 40 years ago when we were in grade school or maybe some of your patients, your listeners were grade school, elementary school, whatever. You're right, it wasn't that common. But from that time, and you fast-forward to where we are right now and our environment has changed so much, it's much more sterile. Kids are not outside as often as they used to be. Controversial as it is, vaccines have increased. We're seeing a lot more on the chart, on the schedule, and those are immune system challenges. Kids aren't playing in the dirt. Maybe not everyone has a garden like they used to have before. They weren't working with the animals.

And so you look at the chemicals that have been brought into our homes that didn't exist when we were kids just several decades ago. Our environment has almost evolved at a pace a lot faster than the human being has. And I use this phrase a lot, but a lot of these evolutions, they're not really linear. A lot of it's exponential. We just think, "We just keep adding and it's just a straight line," but it's not. You start compounding a lot of these factors and you just start seeing these problems and these food intolerance and sensitivities and allergies just exponentially increasing. The statistics are just off the chart when you look at them. You go into a school now and you can't have anything, you can't have nuts, you can't have this, it can't be this.

I mean, in my kid's school, you walk down the hallway and there's a sign outside the door that says what allergies they have inside that classroom. No dairy, no nuts or whatever. And that just wasn't our world 30 or 40 years ago. I would say a lot of it's environmental and you also have to look at glyphosate, what our crops are being sprayed with the increase in pesticides, herbicides, and glyphosate is in antibiotic, that's its MOA and it's going to disrupt the gut microbiome. It's just a lot of things compacting our immune health overall.

That's excellent. And I think we could back up a little bit. One of the reasons I would prescribe a food elimination diet is that I'm concerned about low grade inflammation, particularly within the gut and the GI tract. A food elimination diet, folks, is a way to calm the inflammation that's going on within your GI system, which we now know through explosive research about the role of the microbiome in health is so critical. I mean, there's so much data now growing every day about GI health and brain health, GI health and joint health and skin health. It's everything. That's why you can achieve some clinical success by eliminating foods that are causing or triggering or contributing to inflammation within your gastrointestinal symptom or system. And I agree with you. I feel like the why is there's not just one answer, but it really just comes down to a very overburdened, overloaded detoxification system in our body from synthetic insults, whatever they are. And that just wasn't the case when you and I were growing up.

The common ones on a food plan, a lot of people will see are gluten, dairy, soy, corn, peanut, egg, and I don't necessarily consider alcohol to be sensitivity, but alcohol's typically pulled off on these plans and we could probably spend an hour on each food. But I want to just talk about the two most common ones that are talked about and get your thoughts. Gluten.

Gluten's a really hard one, and it's actually kind of a sad one because I think, again, when we were kids, we just ate sandwiches and it wasn't a big deal. And just as our environment has changed pretty radically and quickly over several decades, so have our crops. The wheat that is being grown today, first of all, it's covered in glyphosate. I mean, glyphosate's just being pounded on it. There's a problem number one. And even if you're getting organic wheat, which has gluten in it, we have so much glyphosate in the system that it evaporates back up into the atmosphere, comes down in the rain, it goes downstream into the waters. I mean, it's just pervasive, it's everywhere. That's problematic. But we've just hybridized, we have non GMO, we have GMO, we have all of these different variations now of grains and seeds that they weren't really part of our diet decades ago, 30, 40, 50 years ago. I think that's part of the problem.

But you also have to look at, like I said, when it comes to these food sensitivities that we're developing is our microbiome is weaker, our digestive capabilities are weaker. And so anything that's even mildly offensive can create such an inflammatory response. But grains and seeds have anti nutrients in them, and that's a conversation I have with all of my clients, and it's something to consider. I have a lot of people that say, "Gluten doesn't really bother me. I can eat it. It's fine." And I could lean a little bit more to the side of you might not be feeling the problem, but I promise you it's not making you much healthier. I don't think it's strengthening your digestive tract. I don't think it's strengthening that because you have these compounds called lectins, and lectins are... they're enzyme inhibitors. And so what they do is they bind with carbohydrates and they also bind with some key minerals in the digestive process.

And this is how a plant keeps itself from being killed off because you have plants that want to reproduce, and unless they can reproduce their seed, they're out of existence. They have these plant defense chemicals and lectins are one of them. And so when we eat them, it's really trying to tell the organisms, "Don't eat me because I'm going to keep all these nutrients from getting into your system," but have our system can override that. We can eat it and not die like some little rodent or some insect might, but they're still problematic. And I'm sure you're familiar with Dr. David Perlmutter. I mean, he's written several books on the topic with Grain Brain. And I just see wheat and gluten as pretty problematic for most people.

And when I do have people take gluten out of their diet, I really have never had anybody say they feel worse like, "I feel so much worse not eating gluten." It's usually like, "Yeah, I'm not as puffy. I don't have brain fog." A lot of times it's the puffiness, which as we know, that's just inflammation. It's just their body is not as inflamed. It's a tough one.

That's really good. It's a tough one. And I'll probably give you a little space towards the end of this interview to come back to this idea of the lectins. But in terms of gluten, I think one point to make for people is that you do not have to have digestive symptoms to have issues with gluten. And I've seen gluten induced peripheral poly neuropathies certainly, migraines. Even if you say, "My bowels are great. I don't have any stomach pain or cramps, I'm fine." Maybe not. And that's why I would agree with Heather that it's very reasonable to consider a trial of pulling gluten out of the diet. Okay. Let's go into the second most common talked about, at least, from in my circle, and that's dairy. And I do have people pull the dairy out, particularly if they have getting a lot of congestion when they have milk based products. But it's a tricky one. I'd love to get your thoughts on dairy.

Dairy is one I'm really circling back on with a different outlook. When my kids were born, I got a 13 and a nine-year-old, we were dairy free. They had goat yogurt, goat cheese, I nursed them. We never did goat milk. That's really not that tasty unless it's raw. And I did home births. I had a naturopathic pediatrician and she was very against dairy, so we didn't do dairy. And my kids never had an ear infection. They never had [inaudible 00:14:30] throat. I mean, they just never really had anything. They never had allergies, they weren't snotty, they just never had that postnasal drip that never goes away, none of that. I really attributed a lot of it to them being dairy free. You fast-forward a little bit to where I am now, and Julie Presser did talk a lot about this in some of our classes. Dairy really has been around a long time, and I do believe that there are people who are... I mean, lactose intolerance is a real thing. I mean, you just know when you have it, you can't tolerate it, and that's a genetic thing.

But I do think more people could most likely tolerate dairy if they were paying attention to what they're eating, what else they're eating, and if they're eating it with gluten. I think dairy becomes more problematic in the presence of gluten and grains than it would be if it's just by itself or in a grain-free diet. One thing that gluten does is... or lectins do, is they interfere with the inversion of, like I said, some key minerals that that's calcium, iron, phosphorus, and zinc. Just keeping that in mind when you're eating your dairy with cereal. I mean, how do we have milk? It's milk with cereal, pasta and cheese. Dairy is very often paired with a glutenous grain or some kind of grain. And so I like to pose the question to my clients, "What if we pulled the grains out we kept the dairy in? Let's see how you feel."

Dairy has been around a long time when people were nomadic, you didn't plant a big farm and just stay there. You had to move around and your cattle moved with you and they were a food source. I mean, you have the milk, they'd make cheese, you could make dairy byproducts, but it was a more sustainable food source than crop rotations and crop plants, unless I drink milk and blood. I mean, that's their staple diet. I think dairy deserves a second look for people. It's high in protein, it's high in bioavailable fat soluble vitamins. It's a good source of calcium, a phosphorus, it's fermented. It's great for the microbiome, for the gut. There's been a lot of research on dairy's impact with diabetics and insulin factors, and it has actually a lower insulin response than some other foods. I think dairy shouldn't be completely called out as evil or as a total problem until other things have also been addressed.

And again, some people are just lactose intolerant, but I've worked with clients who when we've pulled out grains and some gluten or some other foods, they're having dairy again, a whey smoothie, maybe some yogurt, maybe some cheese with zero gastrointestinal problems, where before they couldn't tolerate it at all. I just think there's more going on than dairy being a problem by itself.

I really like how you've framed the topic and the conversation around dairy. I agree, there are some people who will say it's really inflammatory. If I have a patient who really clearly notices increased mucus production in their sinuses, digestive issues, skin issues when they have ice cream or dairy, then I think that's easy low hanging fruit to pull out, but I hate to say forever. It's such a cultural staple that it can be socially isolating to avoid it in all circumstances. You don't always have coconut ice cream available and these types of things. And I think long term, your goal and mine is to get people healthy enough that they can have these pleasures without having too much of a setback. Thanks for sharing that. Want to get your thoughts on the food elimination trial versus food sensitivity, blood testing. Do you ever have clients run any of those panels? They'll show you 500 foods and they'll give you lab reports and things?

Yeah. It's a mixed bag. I think both are beneficial and they're circumstantial. I think we often can tell when we have an intolerance, I don't know if you have to take a test to tell us that. Those tests can be expensive. I think sometimes people just know, "Dairy really bothers me or certain foods just don't sit well with me." An elimination diet can be a better first step. I would rather see someone just eliminate some foods for a few weeks and just see if they feel better. And then if there is something that's still persisting, and it might not be one of those foods. I mean, the weirdest foods can pop up on these things. Green beans, I think, is one of the most popular oddball foods that pops up on these food sensitivity tests. And people are like, "I haven't had a green bean in forever. What's the deal?" Sometimes they give you insight to foods that you don't think might be problematic for some reason, and you just eat them here and there. I've done a lot of them on myself in the past.

It can also make you a little crazy because all of a sudden you can get this list back of 25 things that you didn't think were a problem if there were a problem that day on that test and different, not all food sensitivity tests are created equal. There's a lot of deviations from what might be accurate. And it's also, "Did you eat that food recently?" I don't know. I'd rather go the elimination diet route first. And if someone really is having a lot of gut issues and is just really at a loss because it feels like everything's bothering them, then I think it's worth it to get some more insight. But you can't put all your eggs in that basket either.

I think I'm in the same camp as you. They're expensive, first of all. 300 bucks, give or take. Some are more. I mean, I've seen some panels near a thousand dollars. In my integrated fellowship we talked about this. And when you just look at the published data, I think there is a lack of clear evidence about the validity of the test. Although I'm really not definitive either way. I prefer not to use them, I'm not educated enough to know the nuances between them in terms of if they're not useful at all. I agree with you. I like to keep things simple. Start with the major things and then reintroduce. And I want to get your thoughts with your clients. Now, people listening to my podcast, I talk a lot about pain. Are there some common foods that you see can trigger joint pains for people?

I have to say the ones that I've seen just consistently are the ones you're going to assume, it's sugar and gluten. And sugar is not necessarily as evil as it's always portrayed. I mean, cane sugar isn't the devil. High fructose corn syrup is a completely different animal. But it's often processed, refined sugars, ultra processed sugars and gluten. Those are the ones that I see the most consistently. There's a lady I've worked with in her seventies, well, she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and she definitely has the symptomology for it, but then some doctors did some more investigating and I think it could possibly be Lyme that then triggered everything else. It's hard to say, but for sure sugar and gluten, just her joints, her hands would just ache, everything would aches. Those are the big ones. I have to say myself personally, I haven't seen... when it comes to pain, no, I've seen other symptoms alleviated from eliminating other foods. But pain, I would say really the sugar and gluten.

Very good. I would agree with that. And again, I like to keep it simple. Get rid of processed foods, reduce your amount of simple sugar in your diet, elevate your number of phytonutrients, and you're off to a good start.

I was going to say one thing, and I don't want to go down too much of a rabbit hole, but I think also gets overlooked, and this is coming at it from a different angle, and this is just maybe overall nutrition and what's bioavailable to us. But when people start going down, let's say it's more of a vegetarian based approach, what they're doing a lot of legumes and beans and rice and lentils and... let's say they're doing quinoa instead of pasta, so they swap out one thing for the next. Where there can also be a problem with that, and I'm sure you're aware of this as well, is that those have anti nutrients in them. They've got lectins, they've got phytates, phytic acid, which are binders, and those bind with some real key minerals, calcium, zinc, iron. And so when people are having maybe not so much pain, but they're still not feeling great from changing their diet and then they get a blood test done, you have to start looking at all these different pieces to the puzzle.

Sometimes I'm not a big advocate, I'm not a big proponent of a lot of beans, legumes, and those types of food. I just think they're more problematic than they're helpful when it comes to digestive issues. But they could be eating foods that they think are still healthy for them, but they're binding with these minerals, and so they're actually mineral deficient, which is going to obviously downstream going to cause more problems. Just always keeping that in mind too. You have to look at the bioavailability of the foods that you're eating to make sure you're getting maximum nutrition from them.

This is where I struggle, Heather. What you've talked about there with lectins and these anti nutrients, at some point you start to say, "Well, what can I eat?" Because there's large observational data that having legumes is very healthy, it lowers your blood sugar, increase your fiber intake, yada, yada, yada. But on an individual basis, I do wonder do if I observe in some of my patients who are vegan, vegetarian, if I see some increased numbers of symptoms, digestive issues, skin issues in particular, that's a challenge. And it's very, very hard to sort that out. Cook your beans, peel your veggies. I don't know. It brings me to, as we near the end, what do you think is a good foundational food plan for people who have, let's say, autoimmune joint pain or back pain or just want to feel better than they do currently?

I'm that one who doesn't go... I'm not really mainstream on this. I think if people are dealing with autoimmune issues and they're dealing with a lot of pain and a lot of inflammation, I would say that a heavy plant-based diet is not serving them well. And let's just frame this first from where we started talking. The whole plant-based plant forward thing, be more plant-based. Well, we are a plant-based country. Grains, corn, pasta, pizza, cookies, ice cream like that, those are plants. That's a plant-based diet, right We're eating a lot of plants. They're not necessarily serving us. And we have type two diabetes going up exponentially. I think we have to reframe some of what we call a plant-based diet. People think no green leafy vegetables and whatever. But when it comes to pain, inflammation, autoimmune issues, gut issues, I would really strongly, and this is what I do with my clients, I put them on a far more animal-based diet because if you look at all of the elimination diets, which there's so many of them, you've got FODMAP, AIP, there's the gaps, there's SCD, you have all these different ones.

The one food group that is consistent in all of those that never gets taken out in the... it never gets eliminated in the elimination diet is animal protein. It's very benign. It's very anti-inflammatory. And if you can structure a meal around healthy, clean animal protein, and I know that's controversial for some people for a lot of reasons, but I'm looking at physiology and the plants that are going to serve them better would be more fruits. Fruits are lower in these plant defense chemicals like lectins, phytic acid, oxalates, and the lectins, so they're very low in those. If you're doing more animal based... and I would even put some dairy in there and see how they do with the dairy when they've eliminated all of the grains and the starches and the processed grains and see how they do with that. And if that doesn't work, you can pull that out too. I love raw honey as a sweetener. It's just full of so many micronutrients.

And seasonal fruit is also non-sweet fruit. Olives, avocados, cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, those are nightshades. Now, that's a whole other conversation when you're looking at people with autoimmune issues. Sometimes you have to pull those out too. I would start there with people. Are you familiar with the plant paradox?

Oh, Gundry's book?

Well, Dr. Steven Gundry. In short, you just look at the plant kingdom, and what I always lead with my clients is if you eat the wrong plant, you're dead. You eat the wrong leaf, you eat the wrong mushroom, you eat the wrong something, you could be dead in a second, or you could be violently ill and sick. If you kill a big animal and eat nose to tail, you're probably going to thrive. You're probably going to do really, really well. What's the safer bet? I would go with the animal base option and that. I would say that plants' leave, the stems are a little bit more fallback survival food. You can't really build a strong body or survive a long time on eating just leaves. And when you look at where the concentration of these phytochemicals are, they're in plants that have to defend themselves from predators because everything on the planet's goal is to reproduce. That's why we're here. Animals, plants. Everything that's alive, the goal is for it to carry its seed onto the next.

Plants that are rooted into the ground, and this is the plant paradox, they can't bite you back. They can't bark and they can't run. They have to have a chemical reaction that when you eat it, you feel sick or you die so that other animals know, "Don't eat that plant." And so for some people with compromised immune systems, those plant defense chemicals react with them too. And it causes a lot of microbiome issues, a lot of gut issues, a lot of immune system issues. The plants that are less and the least offended are fruit. If you think about it, fruit is colorful, it's smells good, it's sweet, and it's seed bearing, which means it's saying, "Eat me, eat me, eat me. That way you can just poop my seeds all around and I can repopulate this whole area." Those foods are lower on that inflammatory response from phytochemicals. Does that make sense?

Oh, yeah. I thought I was going to wrap you up soon, but now apparently I'm going to have to keep you on for another hour. Listen, I think what you're referring to, I am familiar with this thought process. It's carnivore-ish.

It is carnivore-ish, but it's more animal based where I would still... I'm not saying all plants are bad, but for someone who has autoimmune issues, who is really struggling, I don't think putting them on a vegetarian diet's...

I think that's a great point. It never occurred to me that the unifying theme, the one food that's not taken out of all the elimination plans is meat. When you talk about that, are you referencing red meat specifically, or do you think poultry, turkey, fish from an inflammatory lens are okay, or it just depends on the quality?

Well, it's a couple things here. Again, the on rabbit hole too much, but when you're looking at what animals... what do they call? It's almost like they're... What's the word? Almost like up-leveling their nutrition, would be ruminant animals. They're going to be the more nutrient dense animals, which would be a red meat. It'd be like lamb, bison, beef, deer, venison. They're ruminant animals, they're eating grass. And what they take from the grass that they eat, they can actually create more amino acids from that. When you're looking at poultry and pork, which I'm not super big fans of, I'm not a big fan of pork from a nutrient perspective, but you have to look at what do those animals eat? And most poultry are eating a grain-based diet. They're eating a lot of seeds and a lot of grains, a lot of soy and a lot of corn, which is high in omega six.

And if we want to talk about inflammation and anti-inflammatory foods, I'm sure very well, omega six is not your friend. Linoleic acid is highly inflammatory. If you're eating a lot of poultry and primary source of animal-based protein, you have to take in consideration the fact that it's higher in linoleic acid than an omega six profile, and there's virtually no omega in there. That's something to consider. Where I start with my clients, if they like red meat, if they're open to it, then I would start with that. I would use more red meat because it's so nutrient dense and it's rich in iron, that is heme iron, which is bioavailable to us. And if they enjoy chicken and they like fish and they like pork. I mean, fish is fine. It's just that our waters are now becoming a problem. The oceans aren't super great. You've got microplastics and you've got mercury, and you've got heavy metals. And I mean that's like, "What the heck do you eat these days?" It really is a hard question.

No, I mean, poultry's not bad, turkey is not bad. But if you're an inflamed person with some digestive issues and an autoimmune disease, you might not want to increase your linoleic acid and your omega six probably eating a lot of poultry.

And the cedar oil. And probably clarify, I'm assuming when you're talking about red meat and beef, you're talking about grass fed, high quality, because otherwise... I mean, a lot of the red meat you're going to get, or chicken you're going to get a restaurant is probably going to be grain fed and carry through the inflammatory facet you're referring to.

Well, there's a lot of misconception around that. Yes, I would advocate grass fed, grass finished beef first, hands down if you have access to it. But I wouldn't want someone to go get some chicken because they think it's going to be better. The poultry industry is not a clean industry. Those birds are not fed well. When you look at cattle and you look at beef, and a lot of people don't understand this, all cattle are raised on grass, all of them. It comes down to the last 90 days before they're slaughtered. They either then go to a feed lot and are fattened up with corn and grains, or they are finished on grass. When you see something that says grass fed, all cows are grass fed. What you want to see is grass fed, grass finished. That's the number one. But if you were to go down and get something that was grass fed and still grain finished, the majority of that cow's life was eating an appropriate diet. It was eating a grass fed diet.

It might not be perfect, but I would still... if someone had asked me, "Well, does grain finished beef versus some chicken?" I would do the grain finished beef over poultry, in pretty much any given situation because it's eating a more animal appropriate diet.

Wow. I think this has been very thought-provoking. I think it's something that requires a lot more thought and consideration. To me, it's almost sad because it reflects the state of the food in this country and the fact that you can't just look at a food on the surface anymore. You have to ask a lot of questions. Where's it coming from? How is it produced? What's the effect of my body? Which certainly can be overwhelming for people, but I do think today you've given them a lot of good places to start. And if someone says, "Hey, listen, I need more guidance," maybe your guidance. You're taking clients from... you're situated in Tennessee, but you're able to see and handle clients virtually?

Yeah. I'm located locally in Nashville, just outside of Nashville, and I have clients across the US, so from Arizona to Georgia and Canada. Time zone challenges will often in scheduling when I've got people back to back. And then Arizona doesn't change time and other states do, it's like, "Oh, shoot." I still have some spots for some new nutrition clients and coaching clients as well.

Great. So how can people get ahold of you?

My website is very easy, it's heatherwolcott.com, that's W-O-L-C-O-T-T. So heatherwolcott.com. And then from there they can... my contact information is on there. They can reach out to me via email. My email is heather@heatherwolcott.com. And anyone who reaches out to me, Sanj, I would love to give them... I had a sleep webinar. That was really, really fun to do, and it's been really helpful for a lot of people. I'd love to gift anyone who reaches out to me and they would like that. I would love to give that to them. Or if you have any female clients. I also have a hormone webinar that I did on women's hormones. If anyone wants to reach out to me and have a conversation. I do free consults, 20 minute consults just to see if we're a good fit and if they're interested in working with me. I'd love to get that to anyone who reaches out.

Definitely. I'll probably be sending you some of my patients your way as well.

Yes, it does. And on socials, I'm Heather Johnson Wolcott, so I'm pretty active on Instagram and on Facebook. It's Heather Johnson Walcott. I would love to work with some of your patients and really dial in nutrition with them because it's super complicated and complex when you get granular with it. It doesn't have to be, and that's where I also like to just say it doesn't have to be that complicated. I think people just need to be more educated and understand that something you referred to earlier was there are a lot of observational studies and epidemiological studies on nutrition and on foods with beans and legumes. But that's the problem, is that they're observational epidemiological studies. Those are, when it comes to food it, you get a survey and you're asked, "What did you eat in the last 20 years? How many times did you eat eggs in the last year?"

And so what happens is there's something called healthy user bias. And so people who engage in healthy lifestyle behaviors, they exercise and they go to yoga classes and they eat salads. All these things that we have coined as healthy behaviors tend to report healthier reports, because eating red meat and eating more animal protein has been deemed bad habits. Those are bad, unhealthy foods. And so epidemiological research and studies are usually kind of garbage when it comes to nutrition. There are far fewer interventional studies, which you know those with RCTs and double-blind placebos, and there are fewer of those, but those are the studies you really want to get into. And those studies don't really support a lot of what the epidemiological studies will show when it comes to fiber and some other things. There's a lot to unpack. It's a conversation that needs to be one-on-one because everyone's coming to me with a different background and different knowledge and different experiences and different cultures and different goals. It's like, "Well, what are you trying to achieve?" There's lots of ways to skin a cat.

Awesome. I'll definitely put the links to your information in the show notes, and don't get your calendar too full. I definitely want to have you back on down the road and look at the other side of the coin, which is fitness. I know that that might even be more of your first love and passion maybe than nutrition, and I think you probably have a lot that you can share with people. We just did an episode on... it was Women's Health Month, and I interviewed my partner, Dr. Stephanie Plummer, who is really big into running races, and we talked about bone health, but I think you could probably bring even a more unique spin on fitness and make it really a great episode. We'll put that down for the future.

I could talk about it all the time. I can just talk, talk, talk. You just pick the topic and I'll just go.

Well, it's been awesome. Thank you so much for your time, and look forward to connecting again in the future.

Thank you so much for having me. It was a lot of fun.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Back Talk Doc, brought to you by Carolina Neurosurgery and Spine Associates with offices in North and South Carolina. If you'd like to learn more about Dr. Lakhia and treatment options for back issues, go to backtalkdoc.com. We look forward to having you join us for more insights about back pain and spine health on the next episode of Back Talk Doc. Additional information is also available at carolinaneurosurgery.com.