Beth Lambert
Appearances
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
The gut bacteria are so profoundly important for every function in our body from making neurotransmitters to regulating the immune system to determining whether we're reactive to our environment or not. And they help us detoxify. So I learned that my kids had imbalances in gut bacteria and I dove right into their gut
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
What we did by doing that is we created a whole market, a whole new market of infants who could receive reflux medications. Reflux medications totally disrupt the microbiome. They change the pH of your gastrointestinal tract by suppressing the acid that's produced. So think about all those ways I've just mentioned that are talking about just the microbiome.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
And again, that's over multiple generations that's happened. Now, layer on top of that, this is where that whole total load concept comes in. Layer on top of that, your number one detox concept tool besides your skin protecting you from the world is your microbiome. Your microbiome actually helps you demethylate things like mercury, it helps you excrete toxins out of your body.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
So when you mess with your microbiome, and you screw up that balance of what's normally in there, you don't have your normal defenses to get the toxins out of your body. So what happens those toxins that are going in all those pesticides, the glyphosate,
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
The chemicals in our, the BHT and the food colorants that they're trying to get out of Fruit Loops right now, all of those chemicals that we are exposed to on a daily basis, we're going to retain them in our fatty tissues, in our liver, in our brain. So what are we seeing with our kids? We're seeing this profound epidemic of neurobehavioral and neurodevelopmental conditions.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
Their brains are being impacted by the toxic load and not having the microbiome to protect them and I am to protect them. And it's multifactorial. what's causing these conditions in our kids, but there are big baddies.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
And also, if you take an antibiotic before you take a vaccine, you're going to have a negative impact from that vaccine because you just wiped out your immune system and your immune system cannot mount the response it needs to. So it's the synergy. It's the cumulative. It is these things working in concert together.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
And these kids just don't have the resilience to be able to tolerate that total load of stressors And they just end up with myriad symptoms and ultimately diagnoses as a result.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
but kind of became a little bit nerdy and obsessed by it because it's so cool what these microorganisms do for our body and how much it's within our control because a big part of our microbiome, it can be regulated by the food that goes in every day. And as a parent, even if you're not super resourced, you can to some degree control how that microbiome shapes up by food and through food.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
So I would say our family was eating pretty standard, healthy American diet. So like I thought that was, you know, you ate whole wheat products and, you know, we ate organic, some of our stuff, but not maybe everything. We ate maybe a lot of pasta in our house, which I thought was healthy because that was sort of an idea, a narrative that's out there.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
And, you know, my kids eat fruits and vegetables, but I found that the standard American diet There's the ultra processed version of the standard American diet. And even the healthy version of the standard American diet is not what human beings evolved to eat over millennia. So, you know, the human body has evolved. If you think about going back to our ancestral roots,
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
Eating more hunter gatherer type foods, right? Like eating things that had been maybe processed in traditional time honored ways, whether that's a soaking or sprouting or things like that. So we in the modern world do not eat the way our ancestors do. And our body pays the price. The microbiome has changed as a result of it.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
So that was my first big heavy move was like, we're just changing our diet. So I started following a lot of Western price type teaching, which is basically just getting into alignment with the way ancestral habits for preparing food for the types of food you eat. And we stopped eating all things like seed oils and refined sugars and a lot of grains.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
We dropped a lot of grains out and we started eating a lot of fermented foods. So that was one really powerful change. or I should even say empowering experience for me because I could control this every single day with breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And I saw results immediately.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
You know, within a few weeks, I saw behaviors, for instance, tantruming, mood dysregulation, all come back into balance. I saw skin symptoms go away. I saw the gastrointestinal symptoms go away. I mean, things like constipation all of a sudden became normalized because food can have that impact on your body.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
And I wouldn't say that was the only thing that we did, but that was certainly the cornerstone.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
house anything that wasn't natural out of the house laundry detergent toothpaste shampoos like all the products the stuff and things that we think are normal like I remember being a kid in like a teenager and I now see it for what it was I was like captured by the commercials I remember going into a CVS and like looking at all the products like the beauty products and the cosmetics like on the CVS
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
counters. And I was like, just Oh, I want that. And I want that. And there's almost this like, dopamine hit walking in there, because that's how you were influenced when we see things on. I mean, now it's on TikTok. But for me, it was on TV. And that is our culture, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
That is so American is that we want the shiny things, the smelly things, the things that are pretty, and we fill our environment with these synthetic products. But those synthetic products are almost always toxic. They almost always have some kind of endocrine disrupting chemicals or maybe even heavy metals that we don't even know about, like in our cosmetics.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
And these are things that are very easy to change out. So that's one thing we did with our family. We just detoxified. We detoxified our life. And then the last, I think, major piece about what we did to turn my family's health around was to just start paying attention to nature. Like I grew up in New Hampshire, like a total woods kid. Like I love being outside. That was sort of my route.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
So that's easy for me to always go back to. But I really started paying attention to things like circadian rhythms and going to sleep or, you know, turning the lights down when it gets dark out and getting up with the morning sunlight and really paying attention to the importance of sleep.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
And those are things that in the modern world, we don't really do that often just because, again, it's not culturally normal to do that. It's culturally normal to turn on the lights on it. You know, as soon as the sun goes down and we stay up till midnight and, you know, we don't pay attention to nature, nor do we surround ourselves by it.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
So I really made an effort to get my kids outside more barefoot in the sun with no sunscreen. I actually really feel like those were important parts of their healing journey. And they, you know, it's sort of baked into who we are.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
I think it's such an important fundamental part of healing to just connect to nature, whether that's in your environment, whether that's in your food, whether it's in your rhythms or just sort of your outlook. Like we need to be connected to nature to be healthy humans.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
I have a couple of answers to that question. First of all, this epidemic is multigenerational. It's not just like all of a sudden these kids are weaker than we were and we could handle toxins and they can't. The cumulative amount of toxins are exposed to is way more than we were. I mean, just think about something like glyphosate.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
glyphosate wasn't around when we were little, like it wasn't on every single industrial agricultural crop. Now it's in everything. And I'm sure you've probably followed moms across America and they're doing all this testing or GMO, GMO science or testing things like baby formula and, you know, average things on the shelf, like hummus and all these things, pasta. It's It's in everything.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
And glyphosate disrupts your gut bacteria in a big way. So that would be one tiny example of what's different from like the types of pesticides or the types of chemicals we were exposed to as kids. But I think, and I have a research study called CHIRP that backs this up. So one of the studies we've done It's called Child Health Inventory for Resilience and Prevention.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
It's the longest environmental health survey that parents fill out to assess what is in and around their child's environment. What was their family health history? What is their birth history like? It's basically an inventory of how... any particular child is living in the modern world. So we've been running that study since 2018 and collecting data.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
And so you asked, what are the things, what's different? And some of the things that come up in that data, you see signal and noise, right? Because this is a massive survey. So we want to know everything. And what comes up with the most signal, the single biggest impactor is antibiotics and the cumulative exposure to antibiotics. So again, going back to multi-generational, think about your...
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
great grandmother or grandmother who might have been the first generation of humans on the planet to have antibiotics, the sulfa drugs that came out in the 1930s. And those were miracle drugs. People were like, you had tuberculosis and you were going to die. You had this magic pill. And all of a sudden you are restored to health and you get to go on and live your life.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
So that's actually a foundation, I think, of why we have such capture with our mindset about pharmaceuticals, because we've had that experience deep in our culture. That first generation of humans in the Western industrial world started taking antibiotics for everything. Shortly following that, you start seeing the rise of food allergies. Food allergies didn't exist before the 19th century.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
It didn't exist in the 19th century. It was the 20th century when you first started seeing food allergies, life-threatening food allergies. And then if you think about your grandmother, great grandmother who had her antibiotics, then she passed her disrupted microflora from her microbiome was all messed up by those antibiotics that got passed on to your mother and your mother who might have had
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
one, two, three, four, five rounds of antibiotics, then passes that on to me. And then that passes on from me to my child. So you have multiple generations of humans who are transferring a microbiome that has been irrevocably damaged by antibiotics. So lots of us have that in our experience.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
I've done talks in a large room and asked everybody in the room who's had an antibiotic to raise their hand. There's nobody in the room that hasn't raised their antibiotic. I mean, raised their antibiotic, raised their hand. There is nobody who doesn't raise their hand. Everybody has had an antibiotic. But it's not just antibiotics that disrupt the microbiome.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
And again, I think the microbiome disruption is one of the main reasons why I have so many sick kids today, because it is the seed of our health. But there are so many other classes of medications that came out in the 60s, 70s and 80s that also disrupt the microbiome. So that would include birth control pills.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
80% of women in the United States have been on birth control pills at one point or another. What did the birth control pills do? There are hormone and steroid medication and there are other classes like asthma, medications are steroid and medications that affect your gut bacteria. It basically causes certain types of microorganisms to thrive.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
A lot of the like more fungal type overgrowth can happen when you're on birth control pills. And it really suppresses some of the better, more beneficial microorganisms in your gut. So again, that is then passed along generation to generation, because when a baby is born, the baby receives the mom's microbiome when it's a vaginal birth. The other class of medications would be reflux medications.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
And those ones took off in the 90s. Like all of a sudden, boom, out of nowhere, like I was saying before, every baby was put on reflux meds. And I actually was on, I used to work in healthcare consulting
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
And I worked on a project once where my job was to find families that would be willing to test a reflux medication in their infants, newborns, zero to six months, because there wasn't patent protection or approval for that particular reflux medication.
Dhru Purohit Show
How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy
So I was literally looking for parents whose kids who didn't have reflux, but would be willing to trial, you know, just so they could try it to make sure it was safe. That was to extend the patent life. That was to give patent protection to the pharmaceutical company so that they can continue to make the higher prices on their drug.