listenN:  Today in episode 20, I’m talking with David Nelson, an integrationist in planetary health, entrepreneurism and science. David is also a student of naturopathic medicine and the perfect person to have an engaging conversation with around the future of naturopathic medicine, the importance of the mind, body connection and why understanding nature and lifestyle as medicine is vital to our wellbeing and our planets.

Well, hello David. Welcome to listenN.

David Nelson:  Thanks Brian. Nice to be here and thank you for the invitation. I’m looking forward to it actually. I’m really excited.

listenN:  Yeah, I’m a, I’ve been looking forward to this conversation for quite a while, but I thought I would start out by maybe just, you know, how the two of us got together and that was a mutual, a friend, associate, you know, Alan Logan. And, I was looking at the email that he sent out to introduce the two of us. And I thought, well, that’s a nice jumping off point. So let me just read it out to you to remind you, and he said, you know, in his email he said, Brian, me is very familiar with the North American integrative medical landscape and ultra familiar with how media shapes culture. He understands the ways in which mainstream media have turned on the naturopathic medicine community or lifestyle or profession.

And then he, you know, he goes on to say, I think what would make a fascinating discussion if someone like David, who has invested, hundreds of thousands of dollars. I know that hurts, in an advanced degree, but what is that degree really worth? How would hold up in value is an ND degree today destined to the urban taxi medallion plummeting in value, you know, mostly overnight due to cultural shifts and disruptive technology. You know, our medical doctors and more established allied healthcare providers taking the best of naturopathic medicine and appropriating in it saying, you know, that famous thing where they always go, we knew this all along, you know, and then this is where I thought it was a good jumping off point. He goes, you know, or can the profession be salvaged? And I thought salvage was an interesting word. So you know, you take someone like me who’s, you know, a lay person when it comes to this, but I’ve got lots of personal experience. I’ve got some professional experience dealing with the profession and then someone like yourself who is more active in the evolution of the profession of natural health. And so, what does salvaging even mean? I know that’s a big question, but let’s just dive in.

David Nelson:  Yeah. So that’s actually fairly easy to explain. And that is that, the car that we’ve been using as the vehicle of naturopathic medicine hasn’t had its oil changed or its wheel bearings changed in 30 years. And so some naturopathic physicians may argue with that, but the fact remains that we have not kept pace with the current pace of research nor on boarded new explanations for things that we were doing right. For the wrong reasons.

listenN:  Right. Okay.

David Nelson:  Right. So in, in science, impermanence is a key here. So, so many things keep changing over time. And what we have to do is in science, what you’re looking to do is to always pursue best evidence, new understandings. You’re, you’re trying to expand the world of knowledge. And then that’s what RCTs do. Like randomized controlled trials and scientific literature kind of directs you. It says, okay, Hey, look in all these variables, all the couple of these static and then see where this takes you. And that’s how we get discoveries. That’s how we figure stuff out.

listenN:  Right. And so why do you think the naturopathic profession, I don’t want to say avoided, but let’s just say they didn’t dive into that sort of approach to proof?

David Nelson:  So again, this is something that I’m actually currently addressing. I had a big meeting with a group that I’m working with called the Naturopathic Alliance. And what the Naturopathic Alliance is looking to do is bring the nature-pathic profession that now you’ll notice me use two different ways of, of saying naturopathic or nature-pathic north of the border. It’s naturopathic, south of the border. It’s nature-pathic. So I try to use them interchangeably just so that people who might be listening south of the border will feel happy to, well, that’s not just a Canadian accent here.

listenN:  That’s interesting because I never knew that.

Yeah. And I actually don’t mind the US pronunciation because it’s nature oh pathic right. I like that better cause it’s identifying nature, which should be one of our core philosophies is nature’s healer.

And I think where we’ll end up today and hopefully in the future is will become much clearer in that and they’ll start to, you know, so, so using a word like nature in the name of it is so powerful.

David Nelson:  Yeah. So just a little background on me just so that your listeners can understand the reason I can speak to these questions.

So being 45 years old. I sent myself back to school when I was 40 in 2014 to do the academic pursuit of a first professional degree, which is a doctor of naturopathy is what you would be bestowed upon you in the province of Ontario. It’s considered a first professional degree. And so that’s a full time four year program. While that was going on in between my late second year, third year and fourth year was my stepdad was diagnosed and eventually passed away from prostate cancer unfortunately. So I had to take a two year sabbatical. So I’m looking to wrap things up this year in 2020. And so I have been an older adult student inside of the naturopathic educational paradigm. And I come from a lifetime of wellness before this where I worked as a wellness coach and a personal trainer in a number of different things.

So I’ve seen lifestyle medicine at work. I’ve seen nature as therapy, I’ve seen the mind body connection, I’ve seen the, the importance of therapeutic encounters and these are all core pursuits and principles of naturopathic medicine. But unfortunately in some ways it’s, it’s lost its way where we use archaic and alternative physiology to explain things that are really well known now in science. And I’ll give you a kind of a good example just so that your reader can kind of move along with us here. It’s that we use things like morbid matter. We use that terminology when really that is just a metaphor to explain something that they didn’t understand a hundred years ago when they were looking at natural remedies. So now we need to upgrade our terminology in the profession itself to find the alliances of integration. So working in the greater conventional medical paradigm at large, we do need to do those things.

listenN:  So hang on a second, morbid matter?

David Nelson:  Morbid matter. There’s other ones like emunctories and stuff where, you know, these, it’s almost like Brian, to be honest with you, it’s very much like talking about the four fundamental forces of the universe, which we used to think were earth, fire, water and air, right? Or the four fundamental humors, like blood, bile, phlegm. And there was black bile, yellow bile I believe. And so 2,000 years later, a 1,000 years later, or a 100 years later, we don’t use those anymore unless we’re speaking metaphorically. Because we know that we’re not just comprised of black bile or yellow bile, right? Right. Blood of course we are. But now we know that blood is actually a composition of other things like albumin and plasma proteins and hemoglobin and stuff like that. So when we investigate, we find that there’s more to the story. And I think that one of the things in naturopathic medicine they got right was systems thinking how all things are interconnected. And related, but they haven’t upgraded their absolute scientific explanation, even though it’s known now, like dysbiosis, we can say dysbiosis in the gut and now we’re starting to understand what that means, the perturbation of the colonies that are in the gut in terms of the microbiome. So we just need to upgrade our language.

listenN:  So this is an interesting thing for me because I’m a little bit older than you. And, I started my journey down the natural health route, like so many other people through illness and through an un diagnosed illness that kept me bouncing from medical doctor to medical doctor. I’d come back from a year traveling in Europe, Northern Africa and the Middle East, during a university break. And, they couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. And they got to the point where I had one medical profession professional, I think he was a tropical disease specialist. Say to me, if you come back into my office once more, I will send you to a psychiatrist. And the thing that happens when you’re young and healthy and you become unhealthy is you remember what it’s like to be healthy. So you know, the light switch has been turned off. Like you’re fully aware that I don’t feel the way I used to.

I think with age we kind of slowly start to not feel as well. Right. But when you’re young you go from vibrant to not vibrant, you know, and I kept explaining, no, there’s something going on. But anyways, long story short, I ended up in the naturopathic world looking for a solution, which I eventually found, and it was a candida yeast before candida yeast was a household name. Right? Well at that time I was looking at, and this is in British Columbia, where they were arresting doctors who were treating people naturally and taking away their license. And I was going, I see in the future some, some people coming along who bridge this gap. And that is what I just heard you describe.

David Nelson:  That’s exactly what we’re trying to do.

listenN:  Yeah it’s not like the way they did things was wrong. It’s not the way that science is doing things is wrong. It’s that the two have to come together and take the best from both. And they need people who can, who can stand in the middle of that bridge and go, we’ll take this, it fits in over here. And so that’s what I just heard you describe. Am I right?

David Nelson:  Yeah, you’re 100% right. And if will, you know, I think, I think most of your listeners will know what dovetailing is. So dovetailing would be a method or technique that a carpenter would use to put two pieces of wood together in a way where it would be very hard to take them apart again. So drawers get this, dovetail those things together. Well, this is what integration is. It’s dovetailing. So you want to take two things that look like they’re perpendicular to each other that don’t have anything to do with each other, but they have an intersection point. Frans Johansson in his book, the Medici Effect, also talks about this. And so what integration looks to do in the upgrade in naturopathic medicine, if I can put it that way, is looking for those integration opportunities. And what that means is this, we’ve been doing a lot right in the profession in terms of the way to activate wellness in a person through a really good quality therapeutic encounter through diet and lifestyle modification, sleep hygiene, and things like mind body medicine, what we think affects our biological realities as Mo Gawdat. says who was a Google engineer who lost his son and he’s like, it’s not what the world gives you, it’s what you think about what the world gives you. And that’s the mind body connection. And we see that with placebo studies, how people, you can give 12.5% of the population something and say this will do nothing for you, although others. So if you say it like this, there is no active pharmaceutical or active ingredient in this at all. But one out of eight people find spontaneous benefit from taking it. One out of eight people will get spontaneous benefit from taking nothing. So to your point, I just want to make this really clear. There was just an article that was published in JAMA about the hidden big elephant in the room in medicine and conventional medicine in that it is all in your head, but we treated everyone from the neck down in medicine and didn’t bring the brain’s perception of the external environment into focus.

And now that we’re doing that, we can see the brain as executive control over things like the immune system, executive control over our ability to feel well. And then the other part in the positive psychology piece, how we can spontaneously induce new emotional states and propagate those emotional states into our biology. It’s pretty, pretty amazing stuff. But you have to keep learning to know it. And this is where I think one of the things in naturopathic medicine that has become a little lost is people just keep doing what they’ve always done, but they haven’t sought understandings outside of what they think they know.

listenN:  But I almost want to say like, you know, going back to my point about the bridge or the people like yourself who have been put on this planet at this point in time to do exactly what you’re doing, is that they were all working in isolation. Like they were afraid. You know, like you had the, you know, I mean, I know specifically, people that I know that were in the naturopathic profession, you know, you know, who are just getting out of it now. So they’ve been in it for the long haul their whole lives. Who, you know were, you know, their business were threatened to be closed down, you know, so you’re not going to go out and share, Hey, here’s what I’ve learned. I’ve taken 10 patients who have this problem. I’ve given them this and they’ve gotten better. You just use the word of mouth of those patients to bring you more patients and you hide under your rock, so to speak. And so that, that to me is exciting like that, that you can say out loud to the world, we need to actually acknowledge that this stuff is even there.

David Nelson:  Yeah, absolutely. And I think that you’ve really just, it’s very interesting actually to me that you just said that and, and I’ll tell you why because on the call on Monday, I came up with two words to describe the state of the profession of naturopathic medicine as it exists today. And here it is alone together.

And where we want to go is together together. That’s the movement we’re trying to make right now. And the big piece is now just keep in mind, there are still jurisdictions in the United States where naturopathic or nature pathic medicine is considered illegal. It is akin to witchcraft in a place like Tennessee for example. And so that would be a blue law that’s on the book. No one is looking to enforce that, but it’s still there. It’s still codified.

listenN:  Yeah. You still have it in the back of your mind going, yup. I can’t freely practice my profession, educate people on my profession without the fear of somebody bringing that law back up.

David Nelson:  And I just want you to know, there’s, there’s one thing I just want to really mention right now, so we just get it out as a talking point and it’s something called the, the fallacy of relative privation.

Now let me explain what it means because people are going to immediately begin to defend naturopathic medicine. Yeah. Well, naturopathic medicine might have something wrong with it. Look at conventional medicine that’s called the fallacy of relative privation where it’s a distractor by saying, of course we have warts, but this profession has warts too. Well, really what I want to say is like, I’m just worried about our warts. I’m not actually worried about the warts in conventional medicine right now. And I don’t want that to be a distractor, which gives us almost like an excuse to keep doing what we’re doing because other things are broken in other domains. It’s time to fix what we’re doing. Well, I mean, yeah, the science is mature, right? It’s mature. So for example, our good friend, our mutual friend, Alan Logan, if there’s one thing that’s going to come out in the medical literature in 2019 and 2020 it is this, the microbiome in your gut is, if not important, the most important thing for your mental health. Okay. Alan wrote that paper in 2003 in Medical Hypotheses, the journal, and he said, I’ll paraphrase, is dysbiosis a contributor to major depressive disorder? And just think that’s 16 to 17 years ago, right? So naturopathic medicine brings something really important to the table, but we have to continue to go with the evidence to help us understand what we think we know.

listenN:  Right you know, to go back to the, you know, years and years ago, I mean, in a previous episode, I was talking with Stewart Brown from Genuine Health, right. You know, which is, you know, Sam Gracie, his business partner, who was the inventor of greens plus. And the whole concept with the invention of greens plus was to help adolescent youth who had, you know, whether they were called mental illnesses at that time or not, but they had difficulty, you know, grounding themselves in, in society. And so he found that through proper nutrition he was able to affect it. So that’s even, you know, you take Alan and you know, 17 years ago and then you go another 20 years before that you have Sam, you have Sam who’s going, yeah, there’s something to this. And so you know, exactly. So if, and this is what excites me, is I go, okay, well that’s happened in the last, let’s say 40 years. Fast forward 40 years, right? Wow.

David Nelson:  If you want to fast forward 40 years, I’m going to prognosticate if naturopathic medicine is salvaged, to go back to your original point there, they will be the leaders in four domains. I think leaders now, you know what, I’m not going to use the word leaders. I’m going to use the word co companions. So we’re all going to be there collaborating on this, not where one has a higher key advantage over another. So I think this is ultimately a collaborative pursuit. Here are the four domains or pillars of excellence. Number one, nature as medicine or nature is medicine. And what I mean by that is getting out into nature increases things like empathy and awe and helps to fortify and reverse biodiversity losses. Okay. This is a huge thing for climate change. So that’s one, number two,

listenN:  Sorry, biodiversity losses. Explain that?

David Nelson:  I’m really glad you’re, you’re actually dialing down on that. So just ask your, you know, viewers or viewers, listeners, all of you, listeners listening right now, I’m going to ask you a couple questions. Have you seen or heard more songbirds in the past five years? More or less? Have you seen more or less monarch butterflies? Have you seen more or less fireflies? These are the three big pieces whereas species in animals where people are like, yeah, actually I haven’t seen that many. I saw one monarch butterfly last year, just one. Last year, my mum lives out in the country and 15 years ago her backyard was filled with fireflies. I think I saw eight last year, maybe seven or something like that. And the whole summer. Where are they? Well, I just read an ecological report yesterday that global firefly populations are in the tank.

We don’t know where they are. A 5 billion birds, billion Canadian birds have been lost in the last 10 years. 2006 to 16 so we’ve got to ask ourselves some really tough questions about if nature is medicine, and I’ll give you a good example. Japan, 77 States sponsor Shinrin-Yoku Forest, they do forest bathing as part of their medical paradigm. And so just one really quick example would be in a cancer patient, most cancers respond well if you have high levels of natural killer cells, that’ll go and gobble up the cancer. Right? So interesting study in Japan, they found that just smelling the scent of pine and the very specific molecule list called a phytoncide. So just smelling this phytoncide in the air increases natural killer cell production. So then you can have an outcome to increase quality of life and to shorten the length of time you have cancer by just smelling the smell of pine in a forest.

I’m assuming it also has something to do with the beauty of the forest, the calmness you feel, your immune system getting activated properly, all that evolutionary matrix that helps to increase your homeostasis. But these things are real. And University of British Columbia, just through Matilda van den Bosch, one of the profs, they’re just minted. The world’s first nature is medicine for public health textbook and published by Oxford University Press. I’ve read the whole thing cover to cover. Alan actually has a chapter. Alan Logan has a chapter in there that he helped coauthor absolutely brilliant. They’re prescribing nature in Scotland. They’re prescribing nature as medicine in Southern California. They’re prescribing nature as medicine in Australia. They have kids spending all day outside at outdoor schools in Finland and in Hong Kong. And when you start to look at the outcome data, I want to move outside.

listenN:  Yeah, no, I know. Well you know, it’s interesting. I’ll get you back to your list, but you know, I grew up in Lynn Valley, which is in North Vancouver, in British Columbia. And it’s right up like we were a three minute walk to be completely lost in the mountains from my house. You know, we had black bears that would walk down the street and you know, and stuff like, but I used to always tell people, cause they would say to me like, we know, don’t you miss it and you know, that sort of thing. I said, well you know the interesting thing is, is that like, I feel like I’m full of it. It’s like something that happens when you meditate. Like when you meditate, you feel like you’re filling up some sort of resource that then helps you go into a stressful environment and stay calm and relaxed. Well, I felt up until recently, you know, through my thirties and forties, that those, you know, 25 years that I spent in that environment, I was full of that nature, had whatever gave I had no idea what it gave me. I just felt like, you know, I’m doing all right cause I had that.

David Nelson:  And what’s interesting about that is what you’re really talking about. So I’ll have a paper coming out with a group of authors sometime this year on allostatic load as a proxy for the erosion of resiliency. Let me explain what that means. allostatic load is all the things in your environment that creates stress signals. And that can be noise pollution. It can be visual pollution, it can be bad food, it can be a stressful marriage, a stressful job, stressful traffic sitting in traffic, always being inundated, always on your phone, whatever it is, all the things that chip away at your vitality. That’s allostatic load. Okay? So what happens is that you decrease when you have high allostatic load, you decrease your ability to be resilient. And what that means is the straw that breaks the camel’s back becomes more common and more common and more common and more common.

Not uncommon. So you always feel a little defeated. You always feel a little behind the eight ball. You always feel a little fatigued, a little tired. And I think that the point that you’re making is that nature then becomes true emotional and biochemical treatment for the allostatic load of the natural world and the world that we live in, the allostatic load of the modern world. And we have to go out into nature to remember to teach our brains what calm looks like again, that’s what meditation is doing. So really what you’re doing is you’re not, your foot is not mashed into the floor running red line in your car. You’re cruising along on a Sunday afternoon drive. That’s why you still feel full, right? You’re not red lining, you’re enjoying.

listenN:  And part of it is because I can go back to there in my mind, like I can go back to standing beside, you know, like, cause when you’re in a rain forest, you know, you’re standing on a floor of just, you know, pine needles and moss and whatever. So even that cushioning feeling of standing on a floor like that, I can go back in my memory to that and it can make me feel, feel better about it. So I just want to dive back into that number one and back into the bio diversity because you said if we go out into nature, and again, I’m paraphrasing cause it’s been a bit since you said this, we will help biodiversity decline. Is that what you said? So explain to me how do we help? I understand. I don’t hear as many birds. I don’t see as many butterflies, but explain that to our listeners.

David Nelson:  I would love to because this is, I’m also a senior fellow with the inVivo Planetary Health Network and the inVivo Planetary Health Network is the largest planetary health think tank in the world. Our next symposium and convention is at the university of Amsterdam in June, 2020, where I’ll be speaking on how to transfer knowledge between domains in, in science. And so what we’re looking at there is what the F is going on to be honest with you.

That’s what we’re looking at. And it turns out that climate change and biodiversity losses are about human behavior, right? So this is exactly what we’re addressing when we see catastrophic losses in the insect population.Why is the question, and it’s, it’s consumerism, it’s capitalism. It’s the idea of the continual consumption platform that capitalism is currently built on. And what we need to do is find a way for self-care that doesn’t engage capitalism at the level it’s currently engaging capitalism. That’s one. And number two, we have to realize we’re not alone here. I, you know, for me a lot of people like we’re not alone in the universe. Hey, let’s dial that back for a second. We’re not alone on earth. We’re living with a whole bunch of other people here at people, species living organisms, things we take ultimately for granted. And just think about the fact that if we can’t have plants anymore cause there’s no insects to cross-pollinate, we have no what’s called oxygen.

And I think some of us might need something on a pretty regular basis.

listenN:  I know the thing that freaks me out is this whole, I mean it fascinates me and it freaks me out. But this whole concept of creating like robotic bees. Yeah. Right. You know, and, and, and I mean, yes, yes, let’s do that. Right. But not at the extent of going well. So we can just ignore the problem that’s going on with the bees.

David Nelson:  And the question, of course, Brian, you’re asking the right question. It’s like, what kind of world do we want to live in, in 20 years, 30 years, 40 years? See, this is my contention and I shared this with Jeff Bland, Jeff Bland. And if your listeners want to know who Jeff Bland is, Jeff has a PhD in biochemistry and he started the Institute for Functional Medicine in 1984 and he’s one of the biggest thinking minds in the health and wellness space really in the world. And he’s the one that’s bringing systems thinking and thinking the exposome to the world. And systems biology, that’s his big piece. How to make medicine work so that it increases vitality. And so when Jeff and I were talking, I made the, I said, Jeff, you know, I just have this suspicion like all the linear solutions are gone. All the low hanging fruits has been picked and all the new solutions are all the solutions we must engage in now are poly solutions. They have a lot of moving parts and it’s not just one thing. If you’ve got your finger on something, something else is moving. And so that’s how we have to approach it. This is non-linear solution sets. That’s what we have to start looking at now. So we have to get out of this like A equals B and get it and get into like A could be effecting B, C, D, E, F, F could be effecting G and then H is involved in a, in a, in a way. But we need large groups of people to do that. And we have to collaborate. That’s the secret. We’ve got to collaborate. Get rid of the silos.

listenN:  Well, you know, you’re taking me back to a time when I knew this person that worked for Environment Canada and they were in Ottawa and they were at a dinner party with all of these politicians and very wealthy people. And somebody asked and you know, in the whole table could hear, what are you working on? And at that point in time, they were working on, some sort of worm, and again, I’m, I don’t remember the details, but it was some sort of worm that was being affected by the runoff from airports, from the de-icing solution that was going into the lake. And it was killing these worms. And apparently one of the people at the table was like, Oh, that’s been that bill or that funding has been, you know, and we’re not going to fund that because who would spend $50,000 to save a stupid worm?

And this environmentalist was going like, you don’t understand, like this worm is at the bottom of a food chain that affects like 10 other species and you won’t spend $50,000 to help us protect all of this. Just because you’re looking at it from this narrow scope of it’s a worm, who cares about this worm?

David Nelson:  Do you want to know why that is? In North America? We have a prescriptive mindset versus a preventative mindset. Other places have a preventative mindset as opposed to an ultimately prescriptive mindset.

listenN:  Right. And so explain that to me a little bit because I think what you’re saying, and this might lead to us never getting back to number two, but, but for me it’s like, you know, it’s that whole concept of do you address the symptom or do you go to the root cause? Well, the root causes a lot more work. So let’s just deal with the symptoms. So prescription is the symptom, correct?

David Nelson:  Here’s, here’s the thing about the paradox. Both are necessary. You need prescription and you need prevention, right? So the problem is, is the balance of the weight or the amount of resources that we give, either one. So if you can imagine, if your listeners can imagine a scale that a scale they use to use to weigh money against gold, like or something that where it’s like a balance.

Not a digital scale, one of those old school scale. So you put something over here and it moves the scale in this direction. Now you need to put something over here. Well, what we’ve done is prescription has been 80% 90% of what we’ve given people in medicine. Oh, you have high blood pressure, you need an ACE inhibitor. Oh, you have diabetes, you need an SGLT2 agonist or something like that. Or you need Metformin. Well, listen, whatever happened to nutrition, exercise, sleep, the importance of social networks, the importance of mindfulness and getting outside. There’s your prevention. What that means is that I’m not going to be able to control the fact that everyone in the world is never going to get high blood pressure if they just do these things. But what I can do in prevention is keep your vitality and your health for as long as possible at the highest level possible.

That’s what we’re looking to do with prevention. And then when you need prescription, we have it for you too. Right? That’s important. Like, listen, I’m not the type of person when I get a headache and I’m going to be like, no, I’m going to do no. Sometimes I take an Advil, sometimes I take ibuprofen because it works and I need to go back to work that day and whatever. But I grade in balance how I do that to dovetail into my wellness lifestyle at large, which is ultimately preventative.

listenN:  Right. That’s great. So we’ll get back to your list number two.

David Nelson:  Yeah, number two. So number one, nature is healer in nature is medicine. And a number two is the power of the therapeutic encounter.

listenN:  Okay. Explain.

David Nelson:  So many times seeing, when I was seeing patients as part of my internship at the naturopathic college, after an hour, I can’t even count on one hand, two hands, three hands, four hands.

How many people would say to me, wow, I feel better just after talking to you. That’s called narrative medicine. So when you look in the scientific literature about what just happened, they’re talking about what is wrong with you and feeling heard for the first time in your life at that level in a medical visit is therapy, biological, biochemical, real therapy in and of itself. That’s the power of the therapeutic encounter. So if you talk to most MDs who have, okay, so let’s just talk about MDs for a really quick second. Male MDs commit suicide at a rate of 4 times the general population. Female MD’s commit suicide at the rate of 2.5 times the general population. And physician burnout is at an all time highest tract in the United States. Okay? So I’ve U S numbers and it’s at the rate of at least 56%.

That’s over, over one out of every two docs in the U S would be burnt out. And when you look at what burnt-out means, there’s one thing about burnout that is ultimately concerning to me for a physician. The first thing is you just don’t have the same amount of energy every morning. So you get up always feeling a little bit behind the eight ball. But the other part of burnout that’s ultimately concerning to me is the apathy. And that’s one of the things physicians report. They feel more apathetic. So if you’re apathetic, which means you don’t engage in the emotional state of that patient and you don’t hold space for them in a manner that’s loving in a sense, you’ve lost part of the therapeutic encounter. And so one of the things that naturopathic doctors still do is they do 60 to 90 minute appointments where the patient is allowed to tell the complete lived experience, how they got to now. How’d you get to now? And sometimes it is the fact that at 12 years old you were sexually assaulted and you carried that trauma with you your entire life. And now your biological realities affected the way your brain processes, emotional states has been affected and you need to talk about it and it is in your head, but it’s in your head effecting the rest of your body.

listenN:  Yeah, no it’s, and I mean, and that’s the whole thing where I know in the States right now they’re having the big debate around, you know, healthcare for all and that sort of thing. But you know, one of the side effects that we have in Canada is, you know, because or in Ontario for example, where, you know, you have the government health insurance, which only pays the doctor so much per patient visit. So in order to make a decent living, they have to cram in, you know, and, and we’ve all experienced that where you go in to see the doctor and you wait longer in his waiting room or her waiting room than they do seeing you. And they’ll walk in and 10 minutes later they are, if you’re lucky, they’ve spent 10 minutes with you.

David Nelson:  Well, you know what’s interesting about that is that you’re right, the amount of time that you get to talk about your problem, you just literally identify it and then it’s treated. So it’s like I have shoulder pain. Great, you have a rotator cuff tear, here’s your treatment out you go. That’s it. But what’s interesting is did you read the report recently on the average hospital wait times in the province of Ontario? What hospitals, how the highest rate. So Southwest Ontario does find itself on the list. The average wait time here was eighteen and a half hours. Wow. So what that says to me is that either a, there are too many people seeking medical attention that might do better somewhere other than the emergency room, but we don’t have outlets for that yet. Right. It’s coming with clinics and nurse practitioners being able to have a greater scope and they can take some of the burden off and naturopathic doctors. But a lot of the things are fee for service. So what that means is that I’m going to take the path of least resistance for my pocket book, which is the emergency room. Cause I know I can always be seen for free.

listenN:  Yeah. Well I’ve had two experiences of that where my son broke his arm quite seriously, like right in half kind of thing when he was quite young and we sat on a very cold February day, because they were moving him from one area into being where he was going to be treated. And people just kept coming in the emergency door and they would go in and he just sat in the hall. And it was a horrific experience. But the people coming in were just all people that were of an elderly age. And, when I was out in Vancouver, I have a nephew who has a very serious down syndrome issue and is in and out of the hospital a ton. And my sister’s, they’re trying to get him admitted into a bad because he’s not doing well. He’s got a feeding tube and all sorts of stuff. Like, it’s quite, he’s a very courageous man who’s, who’s lived a very difficult life. But anyways, every bed is taken up with somebody who’s like 80 plus. Right? And so we’ve got this aging population that is predominantly suffering from a lot of the same types of problems that don’t need to be in an emergency room.

David Nelson:  I would agree 100%. I mean, I think David K. Foot in 19 at least 98 and 99 wrote the book Boom, Bust and Echo and Boom, Bust and Echo 2008 talked about so to, for your, so your listeners understand when he’s talking about cohorts or demographics, it’s like you draw a line around people born between certain years and count how many people are in that group. And so in Canada, the first baby boomer turns 65 and 2000 and will turn 65 until literally 20. Like this year, 2020 to 2025 there’s a little gray area to determine, you know what that cohort really is. Do you know how many people that is in Canada? Brian? It’s one third, one third, the Canadian. So that’s the post-world war II population, boom and all that other stuff. So we’re going to be dealing with that and we’re going to need a different way to manage that resource drain on the healthcare system. When I say drain, it’s not that people are draining it, it’s just that most people, like a lot of people, one third of the population is aging. Obviously they’re going to require more medical services. They just fall more. Absolutely. And of course if you fall in your heart, you want to go to emergency room. Absolutely. It makes sense. And that’s the best place for you if you have a broken bone. Right.

listenN:  So is there a number three on the list?

David Nelson:  So number one nature is healer. Number two, the power of the therapeutic encounter. Like honestly sitting across from someone looking in their eyes and having that conversations is healing. Number three, recognizing the importance of the mind, body connection, thoughts are things they create biological reality. So let me, let me tell you this in the way that I like to explain it to people. I’m trained in two things like, so naturopathic medicine is what I’ll graduate from at the end of this year. I’ve also been trained in lifestyle medicine and active lifestyles and culinary coaching at Harvard under the tutelage of Dr. Eddie Phillips and Dr. Ronny Pollack. And then I’ve studied mind body medicine also at Harvard under Dr. Herbert Benson and a few other people there. And so I can tell you Manoj Bhasin is a big data scientist at Harvard.

And when he got up and did his lecture on, hypertension and the inflammasome, this is what he told us, said, I’m standing up here with goosebumps. We’ve been waiting about 30 years to be able to, we suspect it, but here it is in black and white or rather green and red. And he put up 427 genes which have been shown to increase or decrease inflammation. So inflammation is not one thing, right? Like it’s 427 at least now inter the interrelationship between these genes to increase inflammation. And he said, I have goosebumps because I’m going to show you something. So he showed us day one of the clinical trial, about 80% of the inflammasome is turned on by the end of the trial. Eight weeks later, about 80% is turned off. And he said, what’s the difference? Meditation 20 to 30 minutes a day for eight weeks every single day.

And he said, now we can measure the genes in your body, the genes response to meditation. They were also, so in the study they did the year before in the transcriptome, which is what genes code for proteins and are transcribed, what proteins elevate hypertension risk. And they were also able to show with 20 to 30 minutes a day of meditation, they could lower at least 20 basis points for hypertension with no drug interventions. So when you know the science, the locus coeruleus in the back of the brain is influenced by the amygdala or your fear or stress response. It starts to produce more noradrenaline which is or norepinephrine, which is what it’s called. Now most people know adrenaline, but it’s actually called epinephrine and then norepinephrine and norepinephrine increases blood pressure. And so if you calm down the amygdala, the locus coeruleus gets calmed down.

You don’t produce as much norepinephrine and your blood pressure goes down. And we know we’re more stressed today than we were 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, right?

listenN:  Yeah, absolutely.

David Nelson:  Yeah. So that is the importance of the mind, body connection. It’s not what the world gives us as what we think about what the world gives us. So changing our worldview and our mindset is the way forward there. And that’s another reason why number two is important, the therapeutic encounter, we need to talk it out to change your worldview. It’s not just going to happen spontaneously, right? It’s a collaborative approach to, that’s why it’s called the therapeutic encounter. It’s two people that are working on some new information and then you can challenge that mind, body paradigm, that mind, body medicine view worldview.

listenN:  Well, and I mean, it’s going to take time because it took time for us to get where we are now. Where you go see a doctor, they give you a prescription, you go to the pharmacy, you get it, you take it, you, you know, I’m healthy now. Like that was trained that absolutely, you know, and a pill for every ill, right. It’s totally trained.

David Nelson:  But the thing about mental health, which you and I both know is, is you know, at a pandemic epidemic level here, anxiety and depression, at the very least, what is the one linear molecule that’s going to cure everybody’s mental health issues? No, it’s not treating the root cause. Treating the root causes everything. And that’s what Felice Jacka is trying to talk about down in Australia. She has the Good Food, Good Mood Institute, and there’s the birth of nutritional psychiatry. What you eat changes, how you feel. One of my patients who is also co currently seeing a psychiatrist, and, that psychiatrists just told her, you need, we’re stopping all your meds, everything, everything.

I’m taking you all off it. And we’re going to do nutritional psychiatry that’s here in Ontario. People are starting to know what you eat matters and it changes how you think. Yeah.

listenN:  Well I mean it’s gotten to the point with you know, the types of foods and the, and what, what’s, what’s been happening with the food system and the processing and the ultra-processing that it’s actually a quicker end result. Meaning like, you know, years ago you might eat something and it took you forever to learn that that was what was affecting you. Now it’s like, no, every time I eat that, yeah, it’s like instant headache or instant migraine or whatever they’re suffering from or depression or et cetera. It’s a, Oh, that’s, that’s great. Now is there a number four?

David Nelson:  There is a number four. So here’s the number four. So I’ll just summarize them really quick. Nature as medicine, the power of the therapeutic encounter, the importance of understanding the mind, body connection. And then the last one is lifestyle is the medicine, right? That’s the thing. What you eat. So we’re bringing it full circle. Now what you eat, how you move, and whether or not you sleep like a log or not, that’s lifestyle all plays a role in how well you feel on a regular basis, otherwise known as your vitality. How vital do you feel? Do you wake up in the morning and you’re like, Oh my gosh, I cannot wait to put my feet on the floor and get going because I am imbued, filled, bursting with energy? Or do you crack one eye look at your phone and say, holy smokes, I hope I programed the coffee maker. Right? So, and when we, and Maya Angelou here, when we know better, we do better. And that’s where I’m going on an educational crusade to let people know, Hey, a pill for every ill has been oversold. And B, you need to take personal responsibility and here are four domains that you can work in and this will increase the quality of your life.

listenN:  Right. So let me play, you know, the devil I hate the same, but the devil’s advocate here. Or just the other side of an equation. So that all sounds great. Right? Lifestyle is the cure, et cetera, et cetera. Well, lifestyle is a hard thing to affect. Right. So, so are we looking at a, I guess what I’m trying to say is like, do we need the accident to happen before we look for the cure?

David Nelson:  100% You’re absolutely correct Brian.

listenN:  So we have required to become ill…

David Nelson:  It’s the age group. Yes. That’s the, so the 25 year olds aren’t waiting for the accident. They’re actually engaged in the wellness lifestyle now before and 50 year olds are waiting until their HS CRP levels, which is a marker for cardiovascular inflammation that could potentially lead to a heart attack. Now when that goes about five, they come in and see me. Right. But it’s not like these, it’s a lot of men, men are part of the problem. Brian, they take, they take action too late.

listenN:  Yes. Well we’re not needed after we procreated. Right. So maybe, maybe that’s nature. Just getting rid of us. Okay. That’s fascinating. Okay. So the younger generations. Got it. So, okay, I’m going to go back to what I was saying and just so to set this up. Okay. Like I, what I was inferring was the fact that, you know, we’re going to eat, drink, do what we want, stress ourselves out until something breaks. And then I’ll look at my lifestyle cause I now have an impetus. So what’s the impetus for a 20, 25 year old then if they’re still healthy and vital and they haven’t, right broken. Or are they breaking younger now?

David Nelson:  They’re breaking younger now. Brian, thanks for bringing that up. And they’re actually seeing two things simultaneously. Number one, the declining, failing health of their parents or the meds that their parents are taking in the internet now. And YouTube become the great equalizer for good or ill. You can go find out a lot of stuff. You can get educated if you know where to look and sort the information out. So that means you need to use another fundamental skill set that should be taught in elementary, in high school. And it’s critical appraisal. How to weigh evidence in the post truth world and I think you’ll see that coming into curriculum, but what the 25 year olds have noted are two really, really, really important things. The first one is, yeah, I don’t want to end up like my parents.

Okay. And think about the parents’ idea of a prescriptive mindset when the world breaks down due to climate change. We’ll fix it after the fact. The 25 year olds are like, let’s get this fixed now. Let’s get on the ball. Let’s get rolling. Let’s get X. Like let’s and what they understand and here’s the key piece, Brian, I’ll bring it full circle. From a planetary health perspective, when you want to avoid climate change, you start to eat healthier and worry and pursue collaborative frameworks of organic food, biodiversity, all those other things because you know that that plays a role in every, it’s the interconnectedness of all things that these 25 year olds know. Now, don’t count the millennial generation out. Actually. They’re the ones that are going to be able to make an ineffectively, make some change here. I have a lot of friends that are 25 cause you know, that’s the demographic in school and I’m encouraged by the change makers that I talk to really am.

listenN:  Yeah. Okay. Well that’s nice to know then. Yeah, you know like as Greta Thunberg says, you know, you don’t look to us to save you, but we are looking to them to save us.

David Nelson:  Absolutely. And I think really what we’re talking, but as challenge our worldview, I want my worldview challenge. You know, David Epstein just wrote a new book called Range and he talks about the rise of the integrationist in there, which I feel like I’m part of and I’m, one of the things that he said about integrationists that’s different, I think than other domains is that he said integrationists fundamentally, foundationally in the core of their soul want their notions to be falsified. And I am like that. If I have a worldview that’s not right, I want to be challenged. I want to know the truth, even if it’s uncomfortable. Yeah. I really do. If I say a statement like ketogenic diets are the best, fastest way to lose weight, I am not going to stick by that statement in the face of new evidence. Right. I have to be flexible. So I’m going to quote Wayne Dyer here, be open to everything and attached to nothing. And that’s the way live every single day because then I’m always using best evidence. My friends sometimes say, Oh Dave, you flip flop. You’re on this, you’re on that. No, no, no. I’m just pursuing truth. Yeah. And over time I’m going to integrate it into a, I’m going to synthesize it and, and make something new out of it. And then I’ll communicate that to people. But really I’m looking for the interconnectedness of all things. What are the opportunities for collaboration? That’s actually where we need to go as human beings. We’re to, you know, what’s in it for me? The decisions I make now, yes, I have to make decisions about me. Like what’s in it for me. I recognize that, but I find myself a lot of times saying, what’s in it for us? Right. How can the sample by what we are doing, how can we live better lives? And I don’t just mean me in this, you know, the team that I work with, I don’t mean me and a bunch of people in Canada. I mean like the world, like really this has become a global piece

listenN:  It has. And I think that the thing that I’ve always done is I’ve always said to people, there’s two things I tell people, especially young people, you know, you’ve got a 16 year old, I go, are you smarter than when you were 13 and they go, of course I am. And I go, well then why do you think you’re not going to be smarter when you’re 19 or wiser? So therefore of course, if somebody has lived on this earth for a 100 years, they’re going to be wiser than somebody who’s 20 years old. So maybe listen to that person. And then the other thing that I always will say is I go, we used to think the world was flat. And that wasn’t because we were stupid. That was because we were smart and we figured out the world was flat at that time.

David Nelson:  That’s correct.

listenN:  And we believed that until we believe something new. And so when all of these new kinds of things come along, I’m like, I’m open to hear about it until it’s proven wrong. Absolutely. But I’m still going to listen to go. There may be something in this until you know it, it solidifies itself. And normally over time I have found my experience is that you know that there’s that saying of, you know, you read a book and you take what you need and you leave the rest. Right? Like you don’t, especially the self-help books, right? You can’t do everything in a self-help book. So you read a self-help book, you take a few things that resonate with you and you leave the rest. Well, I find the same thing as happening with as we evolve. It’s like there’s all this information that comes into, you know, our consciousness. You take what fits and what is true and then you leave the rest. But you’ll never get to those true bits if you just shut the door and go, well that’s crazy.

David Nelson:  I just find it so interesting as human beings. So, this actually has a kind of a new area of science called psychoneuroimmunology or the ways we’re starting to understand why we make decisions and how we, what our thoughts are. What’s really interesting about what you’re talking about is that we often take paths of least resistance in the brain. That’s called the default mode operation. Right? And so what’s interesting about that is that we get caught in the loops of habits where they take their not cognitively expensive, there not emotionally expensive, and we just do them because we’ve always done it that way. What’s a difficult work is challenging paradigms and seeing things new and creating new habits. And this is why I’m going to say to you all the things that I talked about, nature as medicine, the power, the therapeutic encounter, understanding the importance of mind, body medicine and worldviews and things like lifestyle is medicine.

They’re very simple to explain but not easy to engage in because they’re behavioral, they’re habit forming or they’re, they’re related to habits. And they talk about the daily routines and rituals of our lives. And oftentimes Brian, to be honest with you, they’re mundane but there is magic in the mundane and those are the rituals and behaviors that we need to seed our children with. Imagine that if all schools adopted meditation in kindergarten and that was a way that schools educated children to be able to participate in emotional regulation. Well this is a paradigm shifting thing, but cognitively and emotionally expensive, you have to challenge the paradigm. People are going to think it’s weird, but the science suggests that it’s something we is an absolute necessity in a classroom.

listenN:  Yeah. Well, I mean I just, I laugh at that on one level cause I go like, you know, if you were to go to a, you know, your traditional school right now and say, Hey, you know, we’re going to do some meditation. You’d have to convince the teachers that you weren’t crazy little alone the kids absolutely you’d have to fight with the principals and the parent council,

David Nelson:  You know, they say, you know, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear or when the opportunity is there, the solution will come or something like that. And I’m seeing that now be the behavior in classrooms is difficult for teachers to manage. They need help and there is a lot of emotional dysregulation that’s taking place and there’s a whole bunch of reasons for that. It’s beyond the scope of this, you know, potential podcast here. But what I will tell you is that one of the, I don’t like using the word shortcuts cause I actually don’t, I think the long way is the shortcut in a lot of life taking the shortcut is way more expensive than just doing it.

Right. But a potential shortcut in school would be the application of meditation as early as possible throughout all the grades. And nothing to do with spirituality. This has nothing to do with religion. This is the, this is a technique very much like a bicep curl where you would curl a weight and you would increase the, the strength and the volume of your bicep. This is doing, but the reverse of a bicep curl for your amygdala in your brain. It’s letting it be calm so it doesn’t fire up every single time something happens and you’re like, Oh, that’s a threat. That’s a threat. That’s a threat. That’s a threat. As opposed to like, Oh, okay. Yeah. That’s what meditation does. It makes us more resilient.

listenN:  Yeah. As I said earlier, you know, when I meditate, I actually feel the benefit later in the day. I’ll be in a situation where I’m feeling anxiety or I’ll feel the opportunity to be stressed and I’ll kind of go like, I, you know, you started out this conversation about the about the car and it needed its oil change and wheels change. Like to me, I think of it as a car full of gas. It’s like, it’s okay. My tank’s full of gas. Like I can make it through this moment because this morning I spent 20 minutes meditating.

David Nelson:  Absolutely. Brian, you know, it’s like never stopping to fuel up. Like you’re running your car at red light and then the gas tanks getting close to zero and you mash it more in the floor instead of being like, ah, maybe I need to reduce my speed here, conserve energy and pull into a refueling station. Or screw it, give me another like extra, extra, extra, extra, extra large coffee with 450 milligrams of caffeine.

listenN:  Well, the thing that I find interesting about meditation is that it’s one of those things that you, you have to experience it to understand the value in it. And you know, it’s like yoga, right? Like most guys in yoga, like they’re like, Oh my wife goes to yoga but I’m not going to yoga. And it’s like, no, if you’ve ever tried it, yeah. You know, you’re going to realize the benefits of it and then you’re not going to see it as this male, female thing or this thing that you don’t want to do. Cause you’re human beings. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s the same thing with meditation. Like meditation is for survival and everybody should learn how to do it. And I think that’s amazing advice. Yeah. So we’ve been talking about, wow, we talked about a lot of stuff.

David Nelson:  You know what’s funny about how we talked about it, we really talked about naturopathic medicine in the context of the emerging understanding of integration and all of those pieces that need to work together in order to have, you know, an express vitality and a human being and it’s a naturopathic medicine salvageable to kind of bring it all back around. I don’t know if you were going to ask me that question or not, but was the answers. Yeah, I think that it is. I think that there’s a good core group of people that want to see this done. They want to see it done right.

Right now we have, you know, people in this group that are profs at major universities that are also naturopathic doctors that want critical appraisal to be front and center that allow us a compass on how to move forward. It gives us a bit of direction on where we should be looking and really bright minds that want the world to be a better place. So is it salvageable ultimately, but we have to collaborate and we have to open up our minds to new explanations for things we’ve already been doing. And that’s the key. So it’s really expanding our understanding of things we thought we knew.

listenN:  Right, exactly. That’s a great way to sum it up. And you know, it when you take the integrationists and you think of like, well there’s the specialist, which is kind of what allopathic medicine has been. It’s very much been focusing on the specialist side of things and we’re now learning that the integrationist is the key. It’s like in a scientific way, they’re proving that this is the key to the evolution of knowledge.

David Nelson:  It is. It is the key. You know, I was speaking to the top pediatrician in Australia, and he just did a paper showing the rise in preeclampsia risk has to do actually with the amount of fiber in your diet and it has to do with maternal cord blood acetate levels. And I remember, I remember him asking, we spoke together at a conference and I remember him asking me, just tapping me on the shoulder. And he goes, by the way, what do you do anyways? Which is what he asked me, right? Because you know, and I said, actually I’m an integrationist. It’s like, what do you mean by that? Like did you just make that title up? And I said, actually I did just make it up, but it is based on, on a background of this.

And I explained it to him and he put his hand on my shoulder, look me in the eye in a very solemn moment and said, you’re the most important person in the room. Because he said, we need people to help us get out of our own paradigms and see what other people are doing. Cause he said, we get very focused on this thing. So he said, I spent the last X studying maternal cord, blood acetate level blood levels, like only, and I need to know how that, you know, integrates into the people’s world experience. So, I’m starting to feel a little bit more at home with this integrationist role that I kind of am calling myself.

listenN:  Well, and I mean, I think the beauty of, of that whole journey is it’s a life journey. It’s a life journey, you know? And I, you know, years ago I had somebody call me up as a lot of young people will do when you’re in the creative field and they’ll, they’ll look at your title and your position and they’ll think, Hey, I want to be you one day. And I didn’t get there anywhere in a way that was remotely linear. And they would call me up and they’d say like, you know, I’d love to, I’d love you to give me advice on how I can become you. And I’d be like, well, it’s, you know, like you are, you’ve already started on a different path because you went to art school. I never went to art school. Right. I got a business degree in commerce and international finance and ended up, you know, doing creative stuff in an ad agency. Like there’s, you know, everybody is going to get to their journey or to their destination through their own journey.

And so, you know, you’d almost feel embarrassed that you couldn’t help this person out because it’s like, ah, I mean you just got to follow your gut and follow your dreams and be open and keep learning. And so I think that now we’re starting to see that, you know, if you, I mean, that’s becoming, that’s almost becoming the badge of honor when they go, you know, on my drive out here, they were talking to the woman who is just, she’s, you know, like her, she’s become a film director of a really popular film. And, and it’s like she got there in this weird way and they’re celebrating it as opposed to going like, Oh, you must be a hack because you were a taxi driver and now you’re, you know, you’re this, it’s like now they go like, Oh, I understand as a taxi driver, you’ve talked to tons of human beings and you know a lot about society and therefore I can see how you would end up one day being something else.

Right? Yeah. So anyways, I just think it’s interesting how we’re starting to celebrate that at the exact same time that science is proving that that’s, that’s the key to the evolution of mankind and our knowledge, right?

David Nelson:  Yeah. And history and, and, and talking about how we got to now I think are really important. I think that, you know, just to follow up with two points to follow up with what you’re saying to cement your argument. The first one would be education as taught in the past was a very linear approach where it said, if you want this job, these are the antecedent prerequisite requirements of understanding here’s the school that you need to do in order to do this job. And what’s really interesting as I find in at least my profession in planetary health, all the great scientists also do three or four other things really, really well. They either paint well, they’re either, you know, they do something else and that’s just the way that their brains work. And what’s really interesting is that I like you don’t have a linear path. I like you didn’t, you know, start out thinking, Oh, I’m going to open some stores and have employees and write these articles and go to naturopathic school and do this and do that. I was a computer scientist back in 1994 because I was good at math, but I never ever felt at home. And just to wrap the whole thing. Bring it all full circle the Super Bowl is last weekend, right Patrick? Mahomes 24 years old, seven minutes and 13 seconds left in the fourth quarter down by 10 points.

Has one of the greatest Super Bowl comebacks in history and almost made it look effortless. So here’s the interesting thing about him. Did he go first over on the draft? No. Did people kind of say, Oh no, no, no. He’s not a specialist as a quarterback. Absolutely. They said that. But it turned out that his ability, see the whole field came from basketball. His ability to come from behind came from baseball because you’re always fighting negative odds in baseball. It’s always about all the balls. You didn’t hit all the bases you didn’t get on. Right. So coming back is something that was just baked into his generalist approach to athletics that finds its expression in football as a quarterback. It’s the multiplicity of our experiences that give us the most durability and the greatest performances.

listenN:  Wow. Yeah, that’s a nice way to sum it up. If people are interested in, you know, getting in touch with you, reading some of your stuff, like how can people out there in the world connect with David.

David Nelson:  So I am on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and so my Instagram is at wellnessreimagined, same as Facebook. And then Twitter is at wellreimagined, because they had a character limit. I take the N E S S off of wellness so it was just wellreimagined. Either one of those three places would be how people can get in touch with me and I’m just about to launch a new website called wellnessreimagine dot global because I want to make it a portal for people that they can understand how collaboration, synergies and working together provides us the greatest opportunity to save the planet and each other in the future.

listenN:  It’s fantastic. We’ll keep up the good fight.

David Nelson:  Thank you very much. It was a pleasure meeting you Brian.

listenN:  Nice to spend time with you too. Thanks David. Cheers.

listenN:  So if you liked this episode and you liked the content of this episode and you’d like to know a bit more, I would recommend that you check out episode 10 which was with Alan C. Logan and we talked about our brains on food, the microbiome and nutritional justice. David and I both reference Alan in the beginning of this episode is the person who brought the two of us together and the episode with Alan is just packed with just as much interesting information. And then also in episode 8 with joy McCarthy and Stewart Brown, you’ll find another episode on holistic nutrition. And that episode, if you haven’t heard it, is so important to listen to because it gives you some really tangible information on how to improve your nutrition and the nutrition of your kids. Alright, take care.

listenN:  Well that’s another episode of listenN. Thanks for being. Please subscribe, leave comments or head on over to our website at listenNpod dot com that’s listen with two N’s, pod dot com where you’ll find episode notes, links to anything that we talked about in this episode, and you can connect with us about being a guest on listenN.