The Power of Functional Medicine || Taking Control of Your Family’s Health with Dr. Liz Corcoran

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Welcome to the Real Life Real Kitchen podcast.

Real talk for curious mums reclaiming food, family and community.

I'm Zoe F. Willis, English, mother of many, mentor to mums.

And if you're reheating your tea again, this is your place.

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You don't need perfection to pull up a chair, just curiosity and the courage to ask, what if there's another way?

Hello everybody and welcome to the Real Life Real Kitchen podcast.

Today I have functional medicine doctor and psychiatrist Dr. Liz Corcoran who will be speaking and I've got all sorts of questions for her.

Dr. Liz has a passion for empowering people to restore their health through changing how they interact with the world.

Actually we can talk about that a bit later.

Differences between psychology and psychiatry.

And she's completed further education with the Institute of Functional Medicine and is a certified practitioner.

So Liz.

Hi Zoe, how are you?

That's a lot of qualifications.

How did you go from.

Actually, we'll take it back even further.

What was your initial calling to medicine?

What brought you to that and then from there to functional medicine?

That's an interesting question.

And I probably would say I am born nosy.

I'm just one of these people that kind of like want to know like, why do people do what they do do and why when they faced this circumstance, did that result happen?

So I kind of, it drove my learning in that direction.

I kind of always had a hunger for the sciences and an interest in the sciences and, and then that combined with my sort of, you know, interest in human nature and choices that people make because of their backgrounds, it kind of led me down that path and apparently I found out years later because I have someone special needs in my family.

This is something that happens to a lot of people that have special needs in the family.

They end up going into sort of caring professions, seeing doctoring.

So that was working in my favor to go down this path as well.

And then I think as well, like medicine's interesting because it's a kind of science that involves creativity because you have to think about you're not just going down kind of pathways to make diagnoses, you're also having to be creative because it's all kind of being proven out within a person.

That's just infinitely interesting and complex.

So that's kind of how I ended up in medicine as a career.

So that.

So the nosiness, I love that.

Was it born nosy?

I got, you know, it's so born trippy.

Have the teacher born nosy.

Yes, exactly.

It has gotten me in a lot of problems, Zoe, because I've ended up asking, what.

What are you doing and where are you going?

I've ended up on committees and meetings and boards and.

Yeah, yeah.

Nothing.

Nothing dangerous or criminal I should put out straight away.

Just, you know, ended up with more responsibilities in my plate that I probably needed.

But yes, being nosy is a good way to be.

Yes, yes, it certainly is.

And I think coming back to the medicine is also the way you described it is.

So my understanding is, although there's almost like a bit of an algorithm where somebody turns up and says, this is the affliction, and you kind of put things together, say, well, it's impetigo or lumbago.

Yes.

But then it's like, why has that happened?

How has that happened?

We now need to look at the whole person.

And so it actually becomes a much more complex tapestry.

It's not just a checklist that the leaping off point and then the creativity has to come in.

Is that sort of a fair.

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

There's.

The layers of the way a person will present with conditions is.

Is infinitely different, like, influenced by culture and belief and education and, you know, communication abilities.

And then.

So that's the complexity going outwards to.

To the world to.

To the people that are going to meet that person with the condition, the doctors and nurses.

But the thing that functional medicine taught me is also there's that complexity within that goes inward in terms of the way the biology can play out.

The core underlying triggers for this symptom and how it presents, it's so interesting and so different in each one of us.

So.

Yeah, having that, like, ability to move the pieces around in your mind and think about that person, hold them and hold them in mind and.

And be, you know, curious that you might not have the ultimate answer, that there's more you might need to learn.

I think all of that hopefully play towards being a good doctor and not a kind of rigid, an omnipotent one that we sometimes meet on the path.

Yes, yes.

How so with your medical training.

Born nosy.

Science helping people, then to psychiatry.

Why psychiatry?

Psychiatry?

I think probably because that I mentioned earlier about wondering why people do what they do and that element of, like, when you see someone with a heart attack that most of the Time they're going to turn up with chest pain, it might be in their arm, or it might be a little bit different if they also have diabetes or it was kind of limited in how, you know, the way diseases would present or conditions would present.

But what really interested me about psychiatry was the way in which all of the symptoms, so to speak, were filtered through the person's experience, their early history, their culture, all of that layered on top.

And it required much more unpicking for me as a clinician and a bit like doggedness to kind of unpack and figure it out with them, together with them.

And that really interested me.

It was much more of a kind of challenge, I think, as a kind of in the clinical space to work with people together.

And also like the fact that it does.

Throughout medicine in general and healthcare, there is an element in which the healing occurs through the relationship you have with the person.

And I think that's strongest seen within mental health presentations, because so much of the way the healing needs to occur is one within the trust, the rapport that's built.

But then also for many people that have had very fracturious early relationships and difficulties bonding and forming those relationships, the healing that can occur when you develop a good rapport can literally rewire people's brains and they begin to experience feeling safe and a lot of that stuff.

And from there, you see some of those signals going to the nervous system, telling the body to heal.

So that, like, the potential to create that safe space for the patient was so much more evident.

And also, we have more time with our patients.

We have a longer relationship with many of them.

It just, in so many ways, it just came easier to me.

And I can remember, like, going through those medical school years and getting to that psychiatry placement in year four, and.

And I was thinking, have I done the wrong thing?

Because it was really grueling.

There was a lot of memorization and a lot of.

I mean, a lot of very unhappy people within the medical profession.

A lot of people thinking, I've had it tough, so you're going to have it tough.

And me thinking, is this actually a viable career for me as a mom wanting to be a mother in the future?

And then I got to the psychiatry placement and just everything felt right.

Things came.

You know, I had.

I felt I had a natural ability to do some of the things I've just mentioned.

So it was just a matter of getting through the.

The remainder of my core medical training to be able to begin the psychiatric part.

But, yeah, so that I That I think I kind of overall summarizes how I ended up in psychiatry as a profession.

What is the difference between psychology and psychiatry?

Just briefly.

So for those of you guys who don't know, psychiatrists are medical doctors that have gone through the sort of core medical training like a surgeon or a physician would have.

So anyone who calls themselves a medical doctor has to go through five or sometimes four or six years of medical undergrad training.

So a psychiatrist then goes after doing their two years post qualification on the ward, doing the dog's body jobs we call the house officer years, they call them foundation years now one and two, doing a bit of everything, learning what it's like to be on a surgical ward and not doing surgery, but supporting the surgeons medical ward.

So psychiatrists begin their psychiatric career having amassed a lot of knowledge about the biology of the way the body works and also understanding broadly a lot of the chronic conditions and acute conditions.

So the short term and the long term conditions that people have.

And then beginning a psychiatric training program where they specialize in mental health conditions, some of which will link back to the bodily dysfunction.

So some of those bodily dysfunctions present with a mental health problem.

But also remembering when you're looking after patients who are mentally unwell, they also have a body that must be looked after.

So if you're looking after someone who has schizophrenia, you need to remember are they having their breast screening, are they making sure they don't have diabetes because they're, you know, having trouble with their weight and remembering that the person needs also medical care.

A psychologist is going to have a different career path and that would also include psychotherapists who have their own training schemes.

So most of them involve diplomas or degrees where they study in depth around the development of the human mind and developmental progression that humans go on from childhood to adulthood.

But often psychologists will go off and work in the research sector.

So they might work, do stuff around market research or educational psychology, working with people who have developmental disorders and things.

Some of them will do clinical training so that they can work in a setting one to one with patients on a weekly basis.

But psychiatrists might not, you know, might not have a training around therapy, but we to deliver therapy.

But we would understand it is a part of our toolkit to refer patients for therapy.

But obviously a lot of psychiatrists working predominantly with medication.

So it's about like your, you know, your path through the training and then also then what do you have in your school kit?

So only doctors would prescribe some nurse specialists and then the other allied mental health people would be doing therapeutic approaches and there's a variety of them now.

Yeah.

And I presume that you're also working, you'd be working as teams, so you'd be having meetings about.

Ideally.

Ideally.

Ideally, yes.

Ideally, yeah.

So having gone from psychiatry, functional medicine.

Okay, yes.

I'm just wondering how, what would be better for you to explain what functional medicine is or to talk about how you got there and then what it is.

I leave it over to you.

Okay.

So I suppose I would say I got to a point in my career where I had done my psychiatric training, I had done my postgraduate exams in psychiatry and, and obviously had been through my medical training and I felt like there was something missing.

We'd learned so much about like the physiology.

Right.

So the machinery inside the cells and the ways in which the cells then form these organ systems and how the organ systems work together.

But at one point in my, my early training, when we began to think about interventions and how do you rectify some of the things you see and when they go wrong?

We stepped solely into kind of a pharmaceutical only model model really.

And I knew that there was more to the picture because my dad, being an engineer and looking at my brother, has down syndrome.

It's a type of genetic condition.

He looked at down syndrome through that engineer's sort of mindset of thinking, well, how would you know if the body's a machine, what I put in, what can I change, what comes out and how his body works.

I had adopted that model of thinking about the body.

Well, surely the body, when it works well, it's what we're putting in and what comes out.

And knowing that actually genes can be influenced.

It's not all written in stone, you know, like if you have a disease gene, it doesn't mean you're necessarily going to have that disease yourself.

I was so keenly aware that there was something missing from my training and I began to sort of read and investigate other approaches and looked into nutrition and nutritional approaches and had a conversation with a Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, which I think some of you guys might know about from his podcast and being on BBC and talk to him about that, like Gap.

I was just going to say, what was the name?

It was a doctor in the house was a TV show about 10 years ago where he, he's a regular GP up in Manchester, I think, and for this BBC series, you can probably find it on YouTube.

It's fascinating.

He would go and live with a family for a week.

And so there'd be like these strange kind of symptoms that would, would he.

People would come into the doctor and say, this is the problem.

And then when he got to the house and saw how they were living, he was like, oh, if you change this, this, this and this and with, you know, if they were willing to make the changes, it was quite transformative, miraculous in some instances, some of the things that happened.

So I would, yeah, I'd recommend, I think it's doctor in the house, Rangan Chatterjee.

Definitely.

His podcast is fascinating.

I'll put that all in the show notes.

But how did you meet Rangan Chatterjee?

How did that happen?

I went to a talk that he was one of the panelists and it was a very famous researcher called Dale Bredesen who does work on Alzheimer's and mild cognitive impairment.

People with down syndrome have a high likelihood like 80 to 90% of developing Alzheimer's.

And one of the hats I wear is running a research charity for people with down syndrome.

So I wanted to learn what is the cutting edge approaches.

And he's one of the few researchers that's getting anywhere with improving people who have memory impairment, impairment.

And it was around multi approach, like multi sort of intervention approach.

Changing diet, changing sleep, you know, removing exposure to things that are triggering brain changes.

And Rangan was there and he was, I think he was the mc and I grabbed him in the, sort of in the break and said, you know, look, I am really interested in this.

I've got this other, you know, kind of thing that I do running this charity, this very focused on what are the things we can do to improve outcomes.

There's no magic drug.

And he said, well, look, I've gone and trained in something called functional medicine.

And he said, you know, you, you don't need to train again in nutrition because your undergrad training was great.

You've done anatomy and physiology and biochemistry.

But what we need is that top up training that gives us tools basically within our toolkit to begin to administer lifestyle medicine changes.

So to talk to people about diet approaches, it's not a one size fits all.

I mean, today I can give everybody list some takeaway tips.

But I would say to, you know, realize that nutritional and lifestyle medicine is precision medicine and it has got a sort of juggernaut of evidence now behind it that the majority of us doctors do not have time to read.

I would say, you know, that this is something that your average GP doesn't have time to read about.

If they dismiss it out of hand, forgive them because they're not Admitting that they haven't had time to read the thousands of papers that are coming out all the time.

It's something that I needed a guide to help implement because it's a complex, multi kind of system approach that if I've only been trained to prescribe.

How.

Do I work with patients when it's around behavior change and when it's around changing their diet and looking at sleep issues?

So I really was appreciative of that early steer towards functional medicine because it did give me a kind of way to fit this, an overlay onto my, you know, previous training and give me the confidence and skills to begin to pull those approaches into what I do with my patients now.

So I call myself a functional medicine and psychiat, Psych, you know, psychiatric doctor.

But I see a patients with a variety of different approaches, some of which may, they may be coming to me with some, some symptoms that are mental health, but it's different because if I was in an NHS clinic, I'm not going to ask them about their gut symptoms, I'm just going to be asking them about their mood.

And then once you start asking patients with mood issues, they've all got other symptoms.

But we've chopped the body into silos, so we're only just seeing people with their leg problem or their arm problem, you know, and actually the body, I talk about it when I, when I give talks is the body is not a series of soloists, it's an orchestra.

And it has to sound good together, it has to work good together.

And until it does, you're just doing whack a mole, right?

You're just suppressing symptoms here and there.

So the root cause approach is integral to functional medicine.

It's actually saying to begin to reverse disease processes you have to go to upstream.

So you have to look at what went wrong with the chain of things that happen within the body's systems, right, so those, we call them machineries.

But essentially it's to understand that the body has a number of core underlying functions that happen all the time.

And disease really only presents when these systems are deranged from, from early on.

The.

What feeds into the systems is, is what we eat and drink and our environment that we're surrounded by our stress, the things that we experience, all of those things feed into our genetics.

But actually it's not the be all and end all.

And I think that's the really important takeaway for people.

Particularly if you've been telling yourself this narrative that my family are always overweight.

It's always going to be that way.

It's actually, you know, you have a lot more control and autonomy than you ever realized.

A lot of that, you know, it's written in stone stuff is actually kind of junk science that's moved.

Moved out.

We're moving now towards a kind of precision medicine.

When we say n of 1, that means each person will be thought about uniquely.

Really?

Well, that will be wonderful.

Yes.

I was just thinking about the kind of the silo effect, you know, and what's.

What's happened in medicine and this.

So I'm just.

I'm just going off the cuff here and see what you think.

The thing is, if you are going to be honing the techniques of kind of doing surgery on a scapula or honing the interest in the sinus passages or something, that takes a certain sort of mind to be focused on that.

And would it be fair to say that possibly isn't the kind of temperament who does very well in a team?

Yes.

I mean, I'm gonna say, like your life's work is understanding how my muscle.

Muscle there works and knowing how.

Yeah, that's my life.

My life's work is this muscle.

Yeah.

You've got quite a focus, kind of a mind, which you need in.

In academia and research.

There needs to be like, this is what I love.

And I'm doing this every day.

And this didn't work.

This didn't work.

It's been 10 years of not working.

But there's something there and I love this muscle and off you go.

It takes a certain sort of mind, but they're not necessarily like a team player.

Whereas the body and health and it needs a team.

I. I had a very dear friend who was.

She had a heart condition.

Oh, gosh.

She died almost eight years ago.

Ten years ago while.

But I remember her saying how when she was in the hospital, she would have one set of specialists come to her, but then the nurse would come and say, what did the specialist say?

Let's say the heart specialist.

And then they go away.

And then you'd have the kind of whatever else specialist would come and say something to her and her mother and go away.

And the nurses would come.

What did they say?

And I remember saying, was there nobody overseeing your whole situation like there is in a house, like in.

Like on a telly in America?

Why not?

And it.

And she was a very complex case.

It was a lot going on.

And I'm sure medically very interesting, which nobody wants to be, frankly.

But I was really stunned by how There wasn't sort of a team, people saying, yeah, I'm a cardiologist, but I might be missing something here.

You, the bacteriologist, or you, the.

Whatever was necessary.

What do you think?

There didn't seem to be that team side of things.

So anyway, so I'm just throwing.

That's.

That's just a bit of a.

A thought that comes to mind.

Do you have any.

Yeah, I'm talking nonsense.

No, no, you're not.

Because when.

When.

When we're at, you know, functional medicine training events, and one of the things I'm involved in is the, you know, setting up and starting the British College of Functional Medicine.

So it's a.

It's a viable profession for doctors in this country.

The majority of us as a community are gps.

So it's people that have, like, ingrained in them that generalist mindset of thinking, like, of the whole.

There is handfuls of us within that that are specialists that have moved back, you know, have moved into functional medicine to begin using those tools.

So we have to, like, make ourselves zoom out and have to sort of think, you know, like, my first patient I saw, you know, I was, you know, going back to the beginning of looking in the ears and the eyes and doing all that stuff, this psychiatrist, you know, as soon as they can try to move away from physically examine people.

But, like, I had to, you know, get back into remembering how to do that again and realizing that actually, you know, it's.

It's so interesting.

It often mirrors the way the body works that you have to then, you know, the micro and the macro and thinking like, hey, if the gut bugs can work together, then maybe we can too.

You know, like thinking about that, that's actually in that.

In that sort of bringing everyone's reflections on the patient back together again, that we can put the patient back together again and how valuable someone at your friend's bedside would have been.

That would have actually made everyone talk to each other and hone their.

Their view of her, the complexity of her condition, but also hold her together in, you know, as a person, in dignity and worth as well, you know, and remind that.

Because doctors, we can be a little bit like, oh, this is very interesting, and forget that this is a person who's exposed, experiencing these symptoms.

You know, one of the things we do as functional medicine doctors is we do your timeline.

We sit down and we think about not only the.

The things that happen to you from a biochemical and a physiological thing point of view, but we also think about, well, okay, so that was when your grandma died and that was when your parents broke.

Like all of those things feed into the timeline.

And what you will see as a doctor is those can be significant, what we call points of change.

Where people went from being in what they would describe as a state of health to one of un, you know, unhealthy and beginning to feel the symptoms come forward.

You know, there is no divider.

It's not like, well, you know, this part of the person lost their loved one and that one just functioned as normal.

It is all, you know, we're in this soup, you know, like every part of them was exposed to the chemical, physiological.

And if you want to go into the psychological and spiritual stress of that event.

So you have to acknowledge that if you're going to actually begin to unpick what the patient then requires as their treatment plan.

Yeah, yeah, it's.

Isn't there that book the Body Knows the Score?

Yes, that's been written.

I can't remember.

It's a Dutch van der Vessel.

Yeah, something like that.

Oh yeah, Thunder vessel.

And he.

But yes, this idea of these terrible things can happen or huge life events, like a big move or something.

It doesn't even necessarily have to be a death or breakup or anything.

And your mind kind of goes into, well, I just have to crack on.

But the body is still like, yes, okay, getting dragged along.

And then it reaches a point where things, it manifests the stress, the anxiety, the upset, the disorder, the discomfort in various ways.

So question functional medicine.

Do you know where did it start?

What happened?

I sense a touch of the California woo about this.

How has it.

I could be wrong, could be wrong.

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The links in the show notes do.

You know, it's interesting because there's a saying like not, you know, everything is remixed and I think everything is, is essentially kind of being.

There's elements of this type of approach of integrating.

For me it's sometimes described as, you know, integrative alternative holistic medicine.

Like but for me I just see this as good medicine.

Like I said, an extension of understanding and restoring physiology.

And at the beginning that's where it was, was really thought about in some of the early thought leaders that began to implement this type of approach and began.

So Jeffrey Bland and others who began using the term functional medicine.

It's a little bit confusing because the term functional disorder is used within psychiatry to describe conditions where physical diseases can sometimes have their origin or root in a mental disorder.

So people can become.

Have a functional.

But actually in functional medicine, it's a term to describe the fact the core underlying dysfunctions with the systems of the body and at the heart of it also having the spiritual and psychological factors at play within each person.

So you think about that as well for each person.

It's been around for I think the fifth, since the 50s, these kind of ideas and around, yeah, physiology and this type of thing.

But really only got going in the sort of 80s and 90s when Jeffrey Bland began to sort of write some of these ideas down and begin to create what we work from something called a matrix, which is those core systems that the body has to do, like assimilation, which can be assimilation of foods or oxygen through lungs or through the skin.

The skin is a really important, you know, way that we can absorb things.

Elimination and detoxification, which happens not only through the liver but through the gut.

So there's the organs of the body perform multiple things, physiological functions.

Right.

So the way of dividing the body up based on organ systems wasn't quite as helpful in.

For the majority of us that have work as generalists, it's thinking about what are the underlying systems that, that the body needs to have working and then how do we intervene.

Now a lot of like the common holistic approaches that are very faddy are correct because they start a lot of them with the guts.

And that's why you'll see a lot of people that say just go gluten free, just do this.

A lot of these kind of like quick and fast approaches that do get traction and success are because they go to the assimilation node of the matrix.

It looks at the fact that for us to work well as a body, we have to be able to absorb the nutrition.

We have to remove things that are driving allergic and intolerance responses in our gut and we have to work on our gut microbiome.

So that is a big piece of the puzzle for a lot of patients I see is looking at gut health and what we're eating and drinking as a key way to begin to move things forward.

And it's often a place where I start because if I suspect that maybe there's deficiencies around maybe some of our B vitamins, things like that I'm not going to get those in if the gut is not functioning well.

So that's often a lot of places.

It'S not able to absorb.

There's no point in kind of taking the things because it can't.

Could you just give a layman's explanation of what the microbiome is?

Okay, so the microbiome is like a community, a village, a society that lives within you.

So within your gut you've got your large, your small and your large intestine.

Okay, the small intestine, the way it's been created, it has a huge surface area.

So there's folds and then there's folds on the folds.

So overall, someone said if you lay it out, it's like a tennis court.

So the reason why it's got this huge surface area is, is that you can absorb what you're eating and drinking through this large surface area.

So it's broken down into like, I suppose you think about those LEGO bricks that your kids play with into small LEGO bricks and then it hits this large surface area.

But the other element that exists between your food and that large surface area is a community of microbes.

Bacteria, fungi, viruses, all exist in a kind of symbiotic relationship within us.

Why do we have them there?

In part, it's probably because it helps us to tolerate the world.

Because in the world we're going to encounter bugs and all sorts of different compounds that we might not be able to break down, or maybe we don't have the genetic adaptations to encounter and to break down and clear.

But what happens with the community of bugs that live within us is they help to create like a bit of a dimmer switch between the outside world and our own immune system in our body.

So that's one function.

They have a sort of immune system function.

The other thing that they do is they actually break down some of our food and feed our gut lining.

So it's this crazy kind of amazing thing that there's this kind of economy that these microbes can feed our gut lining.

And actually we now know some of these compounds, like butyrate, protect us from bowel cancer.

They also can produce vitamins, so they can make things like K2, vitamin K2.

So there's probably other compounds that they produce that are protective.

And some of those compounds are then absorbed into our body and maybe go to our brain and are now believed to contribute towards a sense of well being, which is, you know, amazing.

These little tiny microbes are also telling us everything's fine, everything's Going to be fine.

They can also do things like, if you encountering, like this is a random one because it sticks in your memory, is if you're around radiation, some microbes can help you to eliminate radiation.

I'm not telling people to go into a nuclear reactor, but, like, there's something there that, if you believe in God, you know, for those of us that do, we feel that, like, this microbiome is like a kind of network of a cushion between us and our outside world that helps us to really tolerate things that change all the time.

You know, we may be a group of people that live in the Arctic and our genetic makeup is.

Copes with the challenges of the food we get in the Arctic and the environment.

But if we then have to move to a different temperate climate, you know, what is going to help us to, you know, face those challenges is the changes that happen in the gut, you know, society that lives within us.

So I suppose people talk about it like a second brain and all this kind of stuff, because it does make neurotransmitters.

There's.

I can, you know, just in a few minutes, that's a kind of, like, overview.

It's like a kind of cushion between us and the outside world that is extremely important.

And without it, we will be very, very unwell.

And in terms of science, we are just beginning to understand one, how it goes wrong when we're ill, and then also how can we use it to steer people's bodies back to full health.

Overall, it's a bit like a tanker.

You know, we make small incremental changes.

And also we're knowing that the influence that antibiotics have had on us has been huge.

It will take probably several generations to rectify some of the damages that's been done.

But the microbiome is.

I was just going to say, so what specifically have antibiotics done to the microbiome?

So if you think about what a good society looks like, the goods, a good society that functions well is.

Is actually very diverse.

I mean, people sometimes think about it in terms of a garden.

You can think about it.

A garden needs to have lots of different species, species who are able to tolerate lots of different challenges of weather and soil, things like that.

And it's the same if you think about it like a village within a society within.

It needs to have lots of different types of people, your people that are the thinkers, the people that are the farmers, the doers, the creators that make and produce things.

So what we've seen that's dropped off over in quite a large way is the diversity.

So the difference in the numbers of the species, the families within this society and the numbers of subfamilies that exist within this sort of, you know, picture within the gut.

So that's been a big thing.

The other thing that's influenced.

I'm so.

I mean, antibiotics is important.

The other thing to understand is medications, many medications that we use now on a regular basis do also influence the gut microbiome.

So a lot of people don't know.

Metformin, which is one of the largest prescribed drugs in the world ever, is used for type 2 diabetes.

Yeah, it's used for type 2 diabetes.

It's to help people to be able to get their diabetes under control and particularly if they're not willing or able to change their diet.

We can talk about that, say, because.

Type 2 diabetes, although it's.

It's chronic, it is reversible if changes are made, changes are made and, and activity and all of this sort of thing.

So.

So a lot of people are on that.

Yeah.

Wow.

Ah.

But is this something that is given automatically or it's like lifestyle changes or metformin or do people go or are people recommended, take the metformin just to take the edge off and then you can deal with the lifestyle?

I mean, what's the sort of wow.

I don't know.

I'd want as much of it sold as possible, I have to admit.

Yes, exactly.

If you're a shareholder, you're going to want to see, you know, that you're doing well.

So what happens?

Well, I mean, the answer to that question is as much as how many different GP consulting rooms there are right now seeing patients.

A lot of GPs are beginning to have the confidence and the words and the language to talk to people about lifestyle interventions.

As a first step, it's on the pathway for treating people that present with the.

With type 2 diabetes or the initial changes of type 2 diabetes lifestyle changes is there on the first step.

But like I said, a lot of us doctors just lack the confidence of how do we tell people it's not just five a day?

And that's all we were taught in medical school, I'll just eat five a day.

So because doctors are just human and if we don't understand or know about something, we, we have a bias or we avoid things that we don't have the confidence to implement or use, we go to the next step.

And the next step is going to be offering medications that are going to reduce the blood sugar levels.

So metformin is going to be One of them.

And coming back to the microbiome, the metformin is going to alter microbiome diversity and makeup as well.

So if people are already, maybe eating a bad diet gets them into a state where they have type 2 diabetes, that their microbiome's already being damaged from their diet and then you're going to throw in a medication that's going to further influence that.

You know, it's, there's things that we can do, but it's actually about being informed and helping our doctors to be informed.

So yeah, the microbiome is a huge, huge area.

I'm happy to come back and talk to your listeners again another time.

A bit more about eating for your microbiome and things like that.

Yeah, it's huge.

But it's so exciting and interesting and.

It'S also, I think the food element is massive because that is something that people can, you can take control of.

Coming back to this hypothetical shareholder of a pharmaceutical company, you're not going to make so much money out of carrot sticks or red meat.

Yeah.

So yes, whole foods, whole food diets.

Whereas within a family you can have some quite profound changes and making some quite simple changes within your, within your cooking can have huge effects.

Could you talk me through?

Because you're, you're, you don't just deal with adults, you're also dealing with children.

What are some of the kind of ailments that appear, sorry, old fashioned word ailments that come that present to you amongst the children that you're sort of able to, to see quite, I don't want to say quick fixes, but there are, there are ways to make things easier relatively quickly.

Right.

So when I start talking maybe with someone who's come with their child or you know, understanding a little bit about the culture within the home around food is really helpful to begin thinking a bit about that.

I think it's really helpful what you're doing, Zoe, because so many adults who are now raising their children themselves really didn't get a chance to learn a lot of the skills around how, you know, how do I set up and run a family home?

How do I feed my family?

What does it look like?

You know, there's a lack of confidence, there's a shame, there's an embarrassment.

You and I were talking a bit about this, how a lot of that stuff, you know, maybe we've, we've gone, we've book learned, you and me, we're book learners.

We then go and we go and order a book and then we're like it's a cookbook, but it doesn't tell me how to be a mom, a dad.

Like how do we actually practically do this and just really break it down?

And I think that's what I see when I'm talking to people is the pull between.

They're knowing there should be a better way.

There probably is a better way.

Maybe they have friends who they see do it differently.

They don't know how to make changes, how to shift the culture they have around.

Maybe they all get home, they all grab separate things, they're all putting maybe meals in the oven, separate things or you know, just reaching for quick and easy kind of oven things from the supermarket or jars or pasta.

Yeah, a lot of people's under.

That's the other thing is a lot of people's understanding about what a good and healthy diet is, is based on again, junk or old science, which is that food pyramid.

And I don't know.

You've had anyone talk.

Not yet.

Well, the bottom of the pyramid.

Yeah.

Filling up with carbs is like was the goal.

Okay.

And thinking, well, you know, as long as they're whole grain, right.

As long as they're brown carbs and that's, that's fine.

But the reality that we're now seeing after 10, 15, 20 years of following that food pyramid, which was funded by grain industry, is we're seeing all of us overweight with pancreases who cannot clear the amount of carbs that we're eating with type 2 diabetes either on its way or already well established within people in their 50s, 60s and 70s.

So we're seeing like the knock on effects of people thinking they're following a good diet of having that foundation of every meal being like all carbs.

Yeah.

Like so pasta, but brown pasta or bread, but brown bread.

You know it.

If you're going to eat grains, yes, whole grains are better.

But the, you know, the, the distribution on a plate should not be the majority being kind of grain based carbohydrates.

So I talk, start to talk.

Sorry, I was just going to say what's really, what must be quite challenging about that is when somebody comes to you and says, well, I'm eating well, I'm doing all the things I was told.

And then you have to say unlearn all that.

Yeah, unlearn that.

But then that means people have to go, but hang on, I trusted, who told me that.

I trusted the companies who said I was eating, you know, low fat yogurts.

Really good for me.

I trusted the companies and the government and, gosh, where's my tinfoil bonnet?

Where's my tinfoil bonnet?

But I trusted these people.

They told me this was what was best for my health and my family's health.

So that must, I don't know, to my mind, that be very challenging because not only are you having to say, make these changes because clearly you're not healthy, but actually you haven't been told the correct information.

Things have, you know, we know more now.

I mean, that must be.

And that's kind of the way I, yeah, I do try to kind of like go that way because honestly, you know, there's always going to be industry influence and even people will say, well, Dr. Liz, she just wants people to come and see her, please.

I, you know, I want you guys to look this up yourself.

You know, a lot of this is openly available information now, but, you know, to go towards more, I think the British association of Nutritional Therapists have a healthy plate, which is actually quite a healthy way to see it, which breaks down, what should a plate look like in terms of what, what you put on it, which would be like a third of like, you know, healthy proteins, healthy fats, and then veg, like just loads of veg.

And actually, you know, how the plate looks being colorful and involving lots of different types of fruits and vegetables, nuts and legumes, that kind of thing, and giving your body as much diversity of food to improve those diversity of those bugs as well, but not being afraid of, you know, fats, not being afraid of meats, but trying to get the best quality that you and your family can afford.

And I'm just thinking more creatively about things and avoiding things that are basically made to be extremely shelf stable for, for, you know, forever.

If it lasts forever, you shouldn't eat it because that's a bad sign.

Not.

There's things involved.

It's like, it's like, what did they do to the Egyptian mummies?

How is it that those bodies lasted so long?

Perfectly preserved.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly, yeah, yeah.

So essentially you're going for.

We're definitely going for the whole foods, fruit and veggie section.

Best quality meat that you can afford to make those changes and cook from scratch.

And when you talk about fats as well, I mean, I, I have to admit, I do love a bit of beef dripping or fried eggs in the morning with beef dripping.

Food of the gods.

Oh, amazing.

But are we talking olive oils?

What, what sort of.

I'm going to presume not margarines because they've been fiddled about.

Yeah.

So we don't look at like things that have been made in a kind of factory, you know, to be forced created.

So you know, we avoid seed oils and that kind of stuff in things like canola oil that you know, stuff that's very high in the wrong kind of omegas.

We want to be using like avocado oil and olive oil as you said, and animal based from goods, animals that have been raised, you know, in a, in a kind of healthy way as possible and you know, as I said, not being afraid of fats within foods like nuts and avocados themselves.

Fresh avocados and fish.

Getting your smash fish.

Right.

So your sardines, your mackerels, your anchovies, your salmon and your heron smash fish.

So look that I was just thinking.

Well, I don't know, I mean I'd be up for some roll mops and my anchovies sardines all together.

I mean I just, I just love that.

Yes.

I was learning the other day there is this, this wonderful stretch of the North Sea and the Baltic known as the herring belt.

Oh, okay.

This is right.

So this is why you have lots of kind of sturdy Dutch and Germans and Danes and Poles because of all the herring up there which they combine obviously beautifully with some fermented pickles.

And so it's just, I'm sure that is like perfection.

Just perfection.

Yeah.

So I try to like kind of change the culture like around eating as well as beginning to help people understand what food like a sort of attitude towards food that's more healthy, more towards nutrient density and around, you know, getting them to a point where they understand what is healthy.

Like what does a healthy plate look like, what foods are treat foods, what foods are, you know, the staple things that are going to make up a good diet.

And then, you know, often for a lot of people who see me by the point they've seen me, I do need to think about replacing deficiencies while we, you know, you know, kind of build that to that point.

But ideally we're not going to be needing to give tons of supplements because people who are eating this kind of diet are getting what they need from the foods.

Yep.

Well, two things.

I'm going to do a plug for my own blog and various bits products, digital products that I have, for example, some of my batch cooking recipes and things like that.

It's all whole food from scratch, really low gluten because a lot of the gluten today, a lot of the flours we have today have been so processed and they're not fermented like a sourdough.

It's not the bread of 50, 60, 70 years ago.

It's not the pasta of 50, 60, 70 years Ago, sadly.

So, yes.

So I've got things like dinner without the dread.

Two hours for two weeks of batch cooking.

I'll put the link below.

But everything is all sort of easy, whole food, virtuous.

But the second thing is, so if a family were to implement that change.

Okay.

Yes.

What would they see?

What would be the changes in children?

What's what mothers, what, what changes could happen if all of a sudden they're getting rid of no more the ready meals, bit more herring if you're feeling brave.

But essentially it's food.

Good, good food cooked from scratch, much more regularly.

What changes would they see?

Well, so first of all, you know, you're changing the culture around eating in your home, right?

So you're eating at the table, you're connecting, you're talking to each other.

And it's not to downplay like, yes, that's nice.

And you know, that's the way, you know, to eat.

If you eat food in an environment where you feel safe, where you're listening, you're chewing, you're enjoying your food, you're going to be eating in a kind of neurological state that is considered more towards safety.

So you're seeing better absorption of your food.

You're also seeing like people that are eating together or you know, feeding off of each other's neurological state.

So you're co regulating.

There's a lot of big language around this.

But there's a reason why we have been encouraging people to be, you know, around a table, eating communally in that way.

So first of all, you're changing that culture.

And then at the table you're modeling to the little ones, you're seeing the big ones eat the funny looking foods.

And you know, it's all being shown that actually this is how we eat as a family.

We have these, this is food.

It's not like little Johnny has to have his fingers and only brown foods.

No, everyone eats these foods.

Your family's great for that, Zoe.

You know, it's like a smorgasbord and everyone's trying and tasting different things and it's all actually being modeled for each other, which is wonderful.

I love that.

So what are we going to see, like granular detail in the people that are eating the food?

Well, hopefully you're going to start to see that if, say your child has been extremely short in vitamin D, they begin to see that being replaced by some of the foods they're eating.

Their concentration improves, maybe they have a better immune system or they're sleeping better because they're full after dinner.

They're actually eating foods that are leaving them in a state of not quick carb boost, but actually sustained energy to help them sleep right the way through the night, which is great for growth.

Right?

Because that's when our growth hormone is being released at night, overnight.

What else?

Gosh, thinking.

I mean, hair, teeth, I mean, it's everything.

Spots.

What about the spots?

Yeah, yeah, you know, like, yeah, because, you know, you have to present your microbiome with a variety of different foods if you want to see like, you know, skin's a real indicator of what's going on within.

So, you know, presenting the body with different things, improving the microbiome diversity and improving your immune system response, you're hopefully going to see a difference in people's or teenager skin clearing hormone.

For those US ladies that have, you know, issues with pcos, things like that, so, you know, beginning to make those changes, don't underestimate the difference it's going to make in your own biology and that of your family as well.

But, you know, it's just so many levels which functional medicine at the heart of it, we talk about food as information, connection, you know, you know, nutrition as well.

But it's like, it's so multifaceted.

I'm going to send you my healthy eating tips for children that you can share on this podcast.

The also the thing, it's another little freebie that I love to give when I do talks particularly aimed at families is my rainbow tick chart.

So this encourages kids to say look for those rainbow colors and see if you can get the family making sure every day of the week we're getting our purples, we're getting our yellows, oranges and greens.

And it really gets kids invested in this actual.

What goes into me is so, so important.

There's books that you can get.

We, I, you and I have looked at eating like a dinosaur.

There's also, there's a zoo in my poo.

There's a book all about there's a zoo in my poop, all about the microbiome.

So yeah, your kids might love learning about all that.

And you know, like, I'm not just saying it's just the boys, there's all little scientist girls out there too.

But like, kids love gross stuff and you know, by all means, interesting.

No, that's just.

That is fantastic.

And I think it's probably just one more observation to make.

We are living in not quite the death throes of a culture used to a quick fix, but people are realizing that sticking plasters and quick fixes do not work long term.

However, it can feel quite overwhelming to go from being in a state of, you know, the ready meals, there's eczema and one child and I haven't had a period for three months and I'm so stressed.

To go from that and looking at health and vitality, it feels huge.

But I think the thing to remember for the listeners is that it can just be small changes every week.

A small change.

It doesn't have to be all at once.

So, yeah, it could be just saying, do you know what we're having?

We're gonna, we'll get the table, we sit together for a meal.

Yes, it's ready meals this week, but next week, Monday, we'll have a cooked meal at the table.

Yeah.

Or maybe one element.

Yes, one element.

Maybe a ready meal and then one thing on the side, like, you know, a new side of a new veg or some sauerkraut or just begin to introduce, you know, you said it there.

We talk about shrinking the change.

Yeah.

So it's literally like break the note and get it down to the pennies.

Okay.

Particularly for our kids that are more intolerant, sensory wise.

When your nutrient deficiency, your taste buds are screwed up, things taste weird, smell weird.

You're going to have to like, really make it small, incremental changes.

Things look familiar, but they're beginning, you're beginning to blend in the new, the better choices bringing, you know, bringing them in.

Say, for example, mashed potatoes at my house, they're pink.

That's just the color they are.

That's because they're half sweet potato.

So, you know, adding stuff in so that it begins to kind of their mentality is that's just how it looks at, you know, that's, you know, the way.

That's the way we roll.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

And I think also having that, you know, this is what we do as a family.

This is what it's like in our home.

It means it gives children the confidence to go out in the world and say, I don't have to follow what everyone else is saying does that, you know, to have the confidence, say, I, this is where I come from.

This is what we do as a family.

You don't necessarily need to follow the herd.

Yeah, there's something in that.

I'm going to have to think about it.

There might be a blog post or just a 15 minute musing on that.

But there's something about that this is what we do as a family.

Family is a place of food safety, community and love.

Yes, sometimes there's a big old scary place that tells us some mad things.

But we know that family is.

Yeah.

And you can start the, the rainbow tick box is really helpful because it became a place where I could talk to my son about well, let's talk about like the red that's in a strawberry and the red that's in a Skittle and how does that look?

You know, and, and actually our, our, our, our hunting gathering wants the strawberry but actually can have the same draw to, to the, to the Skittle.

But then the sugar gets us wanting more and, and helping the kids to understand that like they're trying to.

People are trying to sell something and that might be why things are colored the way and thinking about the colors that they see in a supermarket.

You know, obviously they have to be at a developmental stage to have that conversation.

But I find children very receptive to understand that it might take time for them to develop the self control.

Maybe grownups are still working on that ourselves but you know, start to help them understand this.

Yeah, yeah.

Don't be afraid to have those conversations.

And there is free will there.

I mean I remember there was a family I spoke to years ago and there were various elements within the family amongst the children which she was well aware if there was a dietary element to it and she said I could implement these.

But actually I make the choice not to because there are other elements of family life that would be affected detrimentally.

So I'm choosing not, not to do that.

It's going to be too much for me.

And I have to admit I do have an admiration for that because she's, she, she knows that there are other options.

She knows there are alternatives and she knows she can always choose that if she so wishes.

And I have much more.

I have a lot of admiration for that in some ways rather than a kind of.

No, no, it's all nonsense.

I want the sticking plaster.

Give me the pill.

No, we have, we have a term for that and we call it the.

Well, they haven't.

She hasn't reached her nep.

So this for.

That's more for each individual that has chronic health is not enough pain.

And I think when we get to that point of change where the pain is, is so overwhelming that you, you're, you know, compelled forward to make the change, then that is different for everybody and for other people you have to leverage, you know, And I think it's not about guilt, it's actually just trying to unpack what's driving our choices.

Can I make a small incremental change and drawing on supports like yours, your stuff and people like myself for more complex kind of presentations, we're here to help and there's so much out there that's available as well.

So yeah, there we go.

One of the blessings of the Internet.

So.

So, yes, Liz, where can people find.

You so they can look me up?

I have a short link, I'll give it to you, Zoe, but it's BT B I t dot L Y backslash Dr. Liz Corcoran and you can find me through that show notes.

And yeah, I have an in person clinic and down in East Sussex or people can see me online.

So do just get in touch and yeah, very happy to help.

I have a free 15 minute phone call if people want to chat to me and see if it's a good fit because it.

Yeah, it's a big step.

You have to be ready.

Yeah, it's huge.

It's huge.

Liz, thank you so much and to all the listeners, if this is something that you have enjoyed and please do like it, share it, subscribe it.

If you're listening to this on Apple Podcasts, a review always helps.

Just a few words would be marvellous.

But yes, share it.

If you've got any kind of like minded mums out there or anyone else who would really benefit from this conversation, be wonderful.

All right, Bless you and thank you.

Liz, thank you for your time and goodbye everybody till next week.

Love the podcast and want to help keep the kettle on.

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