A Parent's Guide to Vaccines & Obesity: Protecting Your Child in a Confusing World | Dr. Joel Gator

14:28Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:And like, yeah, we are better at diagnosing it. There's no question about it. We're certainly talking about it more. But there is no way that autism was anywhere near the numbers that we see them today. You just look around anywhere. You ask anybody who works with kids with autism. It is so much more prevalent and so much more severe than it was even just a few decades ago. There is no way you look around California and one in 12.5 adult males have autism. That's insane. Yes, we're better at diagnosing it. Yes, that's a small part of it. But something is happening. And the fact that we're not open to looking into everything, including vaccines, is absurd.

15:00Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:We need to look into everything. Some kids with autism do phenomenally well, and that's okay. But there are a lot of families where they have severe complications, and those severe complications are increasing. Something like 20 to 30 % of kids have severe autism, which is much higher than it used to be. And those families want help.

15:15Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Back to my question, though, do you think that vaccines cause autism?

15:19Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:That is the most important question. We don't know. That's the answer to the question. We don't know. There is nothing that has shocked me more in my probably entire life than looking into the autism research myself. When I went through training, we were told vaccines do not cause autism. The science is settled. We have tons of great research to prove at this point, you know, that's it. And that's all you think. You don't think to question it. Why would you think to question it when you're in training? And when you hear it on the media, it's like, oh, no, no, the science is settled. We know that it does not cause it to, it's been debunked.

15:52Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:And so that's a reasonable thing to think, like, why would people be lying to you? and then when you start to read other books and you start to look at the research yourself you realize that we haven't studied this question almost at all we we certainly have had some studies we've looked at the MMR we've looked at dimerisal which is the mercury component of

16:11Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:vaccines which they've taken that out which you've taken it out yeah so so that's not even a major

16:15Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:concern anymore but how can you say that we haven't studied all the vaccines MMR is just one vaccine we have not studied anything where it's vaccinated versus unvaccinated kids not one study exists on that with autism. We haven't looked at all the vaccines. We haven't done a prospective trial. We haven't looked at all the ingredients in there. So how can you say that vaccines don't cause autism? You can't say that they do, but you can't say that they don't. We have not done the best kind of research, the research that we need to tackle this topic. And to say that it's been debunked, but the science has settled is ridiculous.

16:46Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:It's so far from that.

16:47Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Is it just because of the amount of vaccines that they have or why, from your perspective haven't the studies been done?

16:55Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:I mean, there are only a few theories as to why it's not been done. One, because we were just telling people it was settled, so nobody did it. I don't know if that's true. There's been a major disincentive to do it because of people that do that research end up becoming called, you know, an anti-vaxxer, crazy quack, they get their careers destroyed. So there's been a major push in certainly some of the studies to call the people quacks and then destroy their careers and that happens so that might disincentivize people that's

17:24Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:not new i mean remember have you looked at this the past for example germ theory there was this guy that suggested that when a woman has a baby that you must wash your hands and he was completely ridiculed people told him he was crazy ended up in a mental institution i think he killed himself

17:40Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:at i don't know mid-40s yeah this is not new i mean anyone that that speaks out against the dominant narrative can certainly get a lot of pushback. But with vaccines, it seems more than that. I mean, it seems like there's some targeted attacks on individuals that have come out with studies. And so I think that's a big part of it. It's just really hard for me to believe. And this, again, is shocking that you can, it's pretty hard to do a prospective trial. I think it should be done, but it's harder. But it's not that hard to take big data sets and say, all right, how many kids are vaccinated? How many kids are unvaccinated?

18:11Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:What are their autism rates? what happened. You don't see that. That doesn't exist. You could go to Kaiser. You could get the data. You get in five minutes and you could post a study autism in kids that are vaccinated versus unvaccinated. I cannot believe that that stuff has never been looked at. So the only thing I can think of is either people were just so sure that there isn't a problem they didn't look or they did look and they didn't like what they found. So they didn't publish it. Those are the only two things that make sense to me. I mean, you have the vaccine safety data link, which has millions of kids and millions of reports.

18:38Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:They could go back and say, OK, all the kids in this vaccinated versus unvaccinated, what are the rates of chronic disease? What are the rates of autism, ADHD, autoimmune conditions? We don't have that research. Why? You would think if they want to discredit someone like Secretary Kennedy, that would be the easiest thing to do. You just pull that research, say 10 million kids, no difference in rates. So I don't know if just nobody did it or they looked and they didn't like what they found. But why it wasn't done? I don't know. It's crazy because I thought it was done. I think people would think that.

19:07Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:I mean, I'm very honest. I thought it was done until I did the research myself and realized it was never done. So I don't know how you could say that. And epidemiology, I mean, I have a master's in epidemiology. I have a pretty good understanding of how to look at the research. And when you say something has been debunked, or that the science is settled, you need very strong evidence to say that. We don't even have weak evidence to say that. It's insane.

19:29Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:The CDC vaccine conversation is going a bit bananas right now. Would you just bring us up to speed?

19:37Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:Yeah, it's hard to be up to speed because every day something else happens. But it seems like there is just so much back and forth right now between Secretary Kennedy and the new individuals that are in the organizations versus the individuals who have been in the CDC and NIH for a long time that really are pushing back.

19:57Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Okay, frame this just quickly for a listener who doesn't know what day and month that we're recording, and just bring us up to speed a little bit on the history of, you know, just briefly, what is happening within the CDC, where they are in terms of how long individuals have been there, and then they let them go, and just this whole situation.

20:16Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:Yeah, there's a lot. So we're in early September. And with Secretary Kennedy, he has fired the head of the CDC and multiple individuals who have been there for a long time, years, maybe decades for some of them, have left or resigned. Many people have, I guess, walked out or petitioned against him, have asked him to resign. The mainstream media seems very much against anything that he's doing and really wants to resign. Kennedy. Okay. So you have that. Within these organizations, there's just a lot of pressure and fighting against the decisions that he's making. There's a lot of concern that he is going to cause or is causing a major concern around vaccines in this country and going to pull vaccines or take them away from people.

21:02Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:And so there's this massive fighting with that. He also removed the ACIP committee. So that's the advisory committee on vaccines and replaced them with a bunch of other individuals.

21:11Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Are they qualified individuals? Can you highlight just for those of us that don't know what these committees are, why they're in place, and just what is the landscape and what's happening?

21:23Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:I would say across the board, the major concern that Secretary Kennedy has are a lot of the things that we have talked about, which is our health is going in the wrong direction. We had a very bad response, in his opinion and mine, to COVID, and we need change. and the individuals that have been there for a long time over oversaw all of this whether it's the CDC whether it's the advisory committees for immunizations whether it's National Institute of Health they have been very stuck in their ways they're looking at things in a certain way and he wants to bring in new individuals different perspectives and and so he's replacing it's within his purview to do it he can replace people that he thinks are going to do better or worse now I don't know each person I don't know whether they were good or not good I just know the outcomes and the outcomes were not good.

22:08Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:So having new individuals in there makes a lot of sense. Having a difference of opinion certainly makes a lot of sense. The individuals on the committees, they have experience too. They have different experience.

22:19Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Are they MD, PhDs? PhDs? It's a mixture.

22:22Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:So mostly MDs, but it's a mixture of different individuals in different positions. So they all have some experience in these topics. I mean, they wouldn't be there otherwise, but it's just different experience. The mainstream medicine wants someone who went to Stanford or Harvard or Yale and has been doing research for 50 years before they get on these committees. And I think a lot of individuals who are against that say, well, that's what kind of led us here. There's a very narrow lens that people have based on the specific science that they deem is the appropriate science, and they're not open-minded to some of the other discussions, other topics.

22:55Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:When it comes to vaccines, they're extremely pro-vaccine, and they're not open to having any discussions around concerns around vaccines. And I think Secretary Kennedy wants to have those discussions. He wants to open up the research. He wants there to be able to be discussions around possible concerns. And so that has everyone butting heads. Because if you're a mainstream physician or a mainstream individual at the CDC, vaccines are the best thing ever. And anybody who questions that is a crazy anti-vaxxer. And you're disrupting it and you're going to cause people's vaccines to go away, which is not what he stated he wants to do.

23:27Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:He wants to open up the research and science. So there's a lot of friction with the old and the new.

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24:15Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:In adults 40 plus, timeline has been shown to increase muscle strength and endurance and no change in activity. So whether you've been active resistance training your whole life or you're just getting started or you're not getting a lot of sleep and you've got a million requests, your muscles and your mitochondria need help. And they have just launched their low sugar, vegan, non-GMO, gluten-free gummies, which by the way, I am eating by the handfuls, which I shouldn't, but they taste delicious. Timeline is offering our community 20 % off your first order. Go to timelinenutrition.com slash dr lion and use the code dr lion to get 20 % off i recommend trying their starter pack with all three different formats and of course their gummies which are incredible now do you foresee this friction continuing to happen as they dismantle part of the would you say that they're dismantling the cdc i mean they're i suppose they're not they're just restructuring it with different individuals, would you say?

25:18Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:Correct. I think the friction has just begun. I think it's going to get far worse in the next few months. You're going to see many, many individuals either leave their positions or start to fight back the more that comes up, because we know where he's headed with some of this stuff. I mean, he has talked about what they're looking into at the advisory committees, like looking at the hepatitis B vaccine, looking into autism, and presumably some information is going to come out of what they're finding and that's going to create even more chaos because anything that he comes out with you either love it or you hate it it's kind of very two-sided right now do you think that that's more the physicians or um more the general population it's both i i think that the physicians mostly are pretty anti-secretary kennedy in general not all of them

26:08Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Do you think it's that they're anti-Kennedy or are they pro-science in a way that they are used to science being done?

26:17Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:Both. They're pretty anti-him no matter what he does because I think that they see him as an anti-vaxxer. That's what they've been taught and told. So it doesn't matter what he says. But I think in general they're very pro the way that things have always been done and the status quo. And anything that disrupts the status quo is a threat to them and everything that they do. so I certainly think that that's a part of it and that's a part of just mainstream where there's such a fracture right now between individuals that are very approving of what he's doing and you see that he's very popular amongst the people that he's popular with he's got a very high popularity rating even more than most most other people the latest polls so the people that love him love him the people that hate him hate him and there's not a lot of middle ground there just crazy to me because everything is very nuanced in in this and there does need to be a lot more discussions and I hope that that does happen but it seems like we're moving in the other direction where he seems to be digging his heels in more and the establishment seems to be digging in their heels more and there's a lot of back and forth and so yeah I think it's just it's just starting and there's going to probably be more people that leave more positions that are filled and whether that's good or bad is going to be something to see in a decade from now I think but again I go back to what we were doing wasn't working.

27:29Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:So I think that we need that friction. We need some big change. And I ultimately think the bad is going to be much less bad than people are worried about. And I think there's going to be a lot of good to come from this. And a lot of individuals who are digging their heels in eventually might hear some of this stuff and might say, oh, well, actually, that's not so bad. Oh, that's what the research shows. Like, for example, with autism, I know that if a doctor would read the actual literature themselves, they would never say again, the science is settled. That is not heard by them. They're not going to hear it from Kennedy, but if more research comes out, more people start talking about it, someone that they respect says something about it, it will slowly start to trickle in.

28:08Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:And then you might see, oh, maybe we should get more research and debt on that. It's not going to be so controversial to them at that point.

28:14Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:If that is the case, then perhaps there are a handful of studies that you've read that really have opened your eyes or changed your mind one way or the other. For the autism?

28:24Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:So it's the bulk, it's the majority of the studies that really have changed my mind. Because when you look at the reviews, when you look at what has been studied, it's very clear that it's not all the vaccines. So the only thing that would change my mind would be actually to see vaccinated versus unvaccinated studies and to actually see prospective trials moving forward to see what they found. We don't have that. So my mind has changed that we should not be saying vaccines don't cause autism or they do cause autism. my mind is very clear that we don't know. And that's the only thing that anybody should be saying.

28:54Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:And we should be open to looking.

28:56Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:How would a parent listening to you right now be able to navigate in the world, right? You have the American Medical Association, you have the CDC, and then you have these somewhat opposing voices like RFK saying one thing. how would a parent who wants to educate themselves and understand how do they make sense of it

29:21Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:i think the first step is just what you said is to get educated to some degree on the different concerns that are out there and what what the mainstream is talking about with vaccines and what the counterpoints are and i think you need to read multiple different books you need to look at different sources and that's one of the reasons why i wrote a book was to talk about a balanced perspective. But before my book, when people ask me these questions, like, well, you have to read more than one thing, you have to read something that's a CDC perspective, and then you have to read something that has an alternate perspective.

29:49Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:And then you have to start to form your opinion, you have to make decisions in the world. And we don't have all the information. So you have to make the best decisions with all the information that you do have, and go from there. And it's it's it's not easy, because we don't know the long term research on autism, we don't know the long term research on chronic disease, you have to make decision without that knowledge. And so you have to weigh the pros and the cons for yourself and decide what you feel makes the most sense. And you have to listen to whoever you feel like is trustworthy.

30:17Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:But there's got to be a standard, right? I mean, so for example, in nutrition science, I don't just look to anybody, I have to understand where they are credentialed, what their training has been, what has their views been, and how are they putting out information in the world? And do their peers respect them? And are they looking at the evidence or are they informed by something else? And there has to be a way. It's very challenging.

30:44Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:With vaccines is very challenging because the standard is the CDC schedule, right? So that is the standard. And if you want to go with the standard, then you follow what the research and scientists have said for all these years. But the counter argument is really just coming out now. I mean, it wasn't something that we could really discuss. There were a few books back in the day, like Dissolving Illusion is probably the most popular one from before. And then Turtles All the Way Down was another.

31:07Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:You mentioned that in your book.

31:09Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:Yeah. So those are popular books. But Turtles All the Way Down, I mean, again, the topic is so controversial. We don't even know who the author of Turtles All the Way Down is because they didn't put their name on it. It's anonymous authors. So this is not a topic that's been openly discussed until now. And for me, my main goal of the book is not to tell you what to do. It's to be able to have discussions like this.

31:28Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:But people might want to be told what to do.

31:30Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:They might want to be told what to do, but I don't think it's your job to be told what to do with vaccines. I don't think it's your job to be told what to do in medicine in general. It's our job to discuss and inform so that way people can make a decision that's best for them. If you want to be told what to do, the CDC schedule is what's telling you what to do. If you want to do anything outside of that, if you have become educated, you've listened to different individuals and you have hesitation, then those are the kinds of things you need to read to come up with a plan for yourself or to work with a doctor or practitioner that's open to an alternative schedule or working with patients that are unvaccinated.

32:04Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:I mean, not every doctor will do that. Most won't. But there certainly are practitioners out there that will work with you. But ultimately, again, it is personal choice. And the reason it's personal choice is because no one's ever studied anything else. So people say, okay, well, what alternative schedule should you do? It's something we have to come up with every patient because there's no study that says well if you do it this way it's going to be better or safer it doesn't exist they only studied the regular schedule and even at that they didn't really study it as a whole schedule so how are we supposed to give an opinion an educated opinion without research or data it's just it's just common sense you're using basically or your you know your personal beliefs and it's also how comfortable the person is doing the vaccines

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34:10Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:And you're in a unique position because most physicians have not done a master's in epidemiology. And I listen, you're amazing because I would probably fall asleep. Epidemiology is, I can't say it's the most exciting science, but it is really looking at big populations. And the point of epidemiology, if I'm not mistaken, is it helps frame a question. Correct.

34:33Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:But it helps to get data where you can use the information that you already have to make an assessment and to lead you to do better questions. Epidemiology research can be very helpful. You can look at a million people. You can look at risk factors for certain things. It can give you valuable information. It's not as good as a double-blind trial. It's not as good as following people prospectively because the problem with epidemiology is depending on how you set up the equations, you can change the results drastically. and and and and that is the big issue with the vaccine research is it's very set up in a way that there's a lot of bias and and you you you see this because people that are super pro vaccine always find something that's pro pro vaccine is their answer people that are very anti-vaccine always find what their research something that's very you know not good about vaccines and so it's really hard to know what's true because it depends how you you set up the data i mean this is rfk talked about this he was talking about recently about the study where vaccines and autism and the concerns of the thousand percent increase in kids having, you know, having concerns that were adjusted by the CDC and were changed and in a nefarious way.

35:43Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:And I don't know anyone's motivations, but the original research around 2000 did show a major increase in these concerns. But that was before it was adjusted, before they did their actual study. It was just the preliminary data. And then after it was adjusted, then there was no difference found in the two groups. So that, again, just shows you how profound the difference is depending on who's doing the research and how you adjust it. One thing that shows a thousand percent increase, the other one shows no increase. And so you don't know which one is right because it depends how you adjusted it.

36:15Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:If you adjust it in a different way, maybe you get a totally different answer. But if you're like, well, I got a thousand percent increase in autism. I must have done something wrong. Go find my friend. Oh, you didn't adjust for this. Okay, let's adjust for that. Now there's no difference. Okay, I guess I did it right now.

36:28Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Are there some people, if one in 12 males in California are getting diagnosed with autism, which again, that number is huge. Do you feel, and again, this is a bit of your, medicine is an art, right? There's the art and practice of medicine. And a really good doctor is able to take the data and then also see what is being shown to them by their patients. Do you think that there is some way to indicate, if at all, someone who is going to do well with a quote traditional vaccine schedule? Let me, let me tee this up for you. Many of the moms say at the park will say my son was fine until he hit five and then And he was vaccinated for measles.

37:19Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:And all of a sudden, he went nonverbal. Have you heard that story before?

37:24Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:Definitely.

37:24Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Many times. Okay. Help me understand that. And help me understand, are there some children that may be at risk for that additional, you know, robust immune response or whatever it is, if anything at all? Or maybe it is just happened to be that day.

37:44Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:Yeah, I mean, that is a wonderful question, and it's the right question. And to start with, the first thing to really talk about with that question is this story is happening thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of times where a parent goes in, feel like their kid is perfectly normal and growing healthy and everything's wonderful. And then the next day or the next week or a couple of weeks after they get a vaccine, everything changes. That's in their opinion. Those people are often called anti-vaxxers after they get upset. And that's so crazy to me because it's literally a parent who went in to get vaccines.

38:18Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:And there's no way that person's anti-vaxxed. This is their experience. This is what they think. They could be right or wrong. They could have got a vaccine this morning and had a heart attack this afternoon. It could have nothing to do with it. They were going to have a heart attack anyways. But when hundreds of thousands of parents have the same story, we ought to listen to that, take that data and try to figure out if there's some truth to that. And that's really frustrating that we're not listening to parents because that is the data that we need to start to figure this out. How do we know which kids are going to have a reaction or more likely?

38:46Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:We have to start looking into that data to figure out what makes you more susceptible. And that, again, has never been done. It's insane. Like, wouldn't it be amazing if we figured out that there were certain genetics or certain kids that were more susceptible or more likely to have a bad reaction and figure out who those kids are. So that way we can minimize giving those kids vaccines or giving them a specific schedule or space it out or whatever it is. That's gonna give people more confidence to vaccinate. And we're also gonna minimize reactions, which of course is what we want. And so as of right now, there is no exact way to know that.

39:19I would say things to watch for

39:22Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:would be the more susceptible kids. So some kids just get sick more. They seem to be a little bit more fragile.

39:26Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:What do they call their, are they called fragile? There's a name for them.

39:28Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:More fragile kids. Yeah. And if you had a vaccine, you had a bad reaction. I think that kid's certainly more high risk. If you had bad reactions to vaccines or people in your family had bad reactions to vaccines, then maybe there are some genetics. So I don't think for those individuals, it's not unreasonable to at least go slow for those kids to make sure they're not having reactions. Again, there's nothing wrong with that or anti-science or anti-vax about saying these kids seem like they're more vulnerable. Let's go slow with those kids and be extra cautious. What doctor wants to give a child a bad reaction or a chronic condition?

40:00Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:Nobody does. So it's not against science to just be more cautious, but we should study it.

40:05Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:For example, in your practice, do you think that there is a relationship to methylation? this idea that someone has an mthfr mutation would a child like that be more sensitive to a maybe not even the vaccine maybe the preservative in the vaccine because i'm sure in your practice you have a more integrative practice and there's probably things that might not be evidence-based but maybe evidence-informed in some capacity that you try to figure out would this be too much of a burden for this child or kind of a framework for parents to think about?

40:46Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:The issue with MTHFR is that there are so many people with mutations that it's hard to know how or if it might affect kids. I think certainly when that first, when the research first started coming out, people were very excited. Oh, this MTHFR, it's related to detoxification. It's great.

41:00Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:You're saying no.

41:01Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:I'm not saying no. I'm just saying we don't, we haven't done the research with MTHFR as it relates to vaccines specifically. There's a very little, little bit of it, but the body's so much more complex to say, oh, you have an MTHFR mutation, therefore you're gonna have a reaction to a vaccine. I think if you have a significant mutation, it's not unreasonable to go slow. But that again goes back to, well, that's what we should be studying. We should be studying MTHFR with vaccines and then many other mutations to see if we can find a pattern of, well, these are the 10 mutations that seem to put a kid more at risk.

41:32Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:These kids have a 50 % chance having a very severe reaction. And it's not just MTHFR. I think that's too simplistic. But I don't think it's unreasonable if you have a mutation to go slower. I think that's fine. But ultimately, you don't need that to go slower. It's just if you have concerns and you want to go slow, you can go slow. I don't think that's definitive of anything. I mean, I've seen people get the MTHFR test many times. It doesn't really seem to be that helpful clinically when it comes to vaccines. The reactions seem to be a little bit more, a little less simple than just doing a test like that.

42:04Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:But I would love if somebody would do that research over the next 10 years and really starts to get kids that have bad reactions and starts to figure out what their genetics are, because I think we could figure out that there are probably some mutations that leave you more susceptible to vaccines. Of course, like, why wouldn't it be?

42:19Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:I mean, that would make sense. Do you, have you studied or looked into any of those? Do you have any sense of what they could be or are you trying to formulate a plan?

42:32Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:Not yet because nobody studied it at all, right? I mean, there's very, very minimal research. I've talked to some people like they should go do this, but you have to acknowledge that vaccines can cause a problem before you're going to go study that there are things that you can do to help protect you from those problems, right? We have barely even acknowledged that vaccines cause issues or can lead to chronic disease. We have to establish that first. And I think if that's established, then there's going to be a bigger push for innovation in that space because you're going to see a lot more people hesitant.

43:01Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:And then I feel like the things that you could do to make people less hesitant are to actually test to figure out who is more susceptible and why. And then you can decrease that risk. Like maybe there's some supplements you could take. Maybe there's some herbs you could do. Maybe there's a genetic susceptibility. These are all things that are possible to give people confidence. We haven't done any of that yet or very minimal. And my office is like, okay, well, you could take some vitamin C. You could do some vitamin D. You could take things to support your immune system. But again, none of that's been studied at all when it comes to vaccines.

43:26Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:I've never seen any research on any of it. And that's really important research to do, but no one wants to do it because that would inherently mean that there could be a problem with vaccines. And we're only starting to even acknowledge that now. And there's a big war going on right now about all of that. So, you know, I think in a few years, it'll be a little bit more open to this stuff. But right now, it's just the beginning.

43:47Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Do you think that there is a relationship between vaccines and chronic disease for kids? I think there is.

43:53Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:Well, first, basically anybody that you ask that takes care of both vaccinated and unvaccinated kids has the same answer. They feel like the unvaccinated kids are generally healthier and more robust. That's what everybody says. Whether they're right or wrong, I don't know. I certainly, in my own experience, it feels like kids that have fewer vaccines seem to get sick less. I don't see them as much. They seem to have lower chronic disease rates. I don't have anything definitive. I don't have enough patients to do a big study like that, but that's just my experience of what I've seen. and many, many practitioners that take care of them, anyone that I've ever asked, says the same thing.

44:25Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:So I think that's true, but you have to weigh the risk of the disease versus everything else. And I think that that's an equation that requires a lot of nuanced conversation because it's not just so simple as you get fewer ear infections. Okay, fewer infections, but you die of measles. That's not good.

44:43Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Hydration isn't just about drinking Coke Zero or other sugar-free sweetened beverages like Red Bull. Now, I'm saying this for a friend. Or it's not even about drinking more water. It's about keeping the right balance of electrolytes and fluids. During life's most demanding season, like, I don't know, parenting, maybe pregnancy or postpartum, your body is going through massive changes. Blood volume increases, hormones shift, breastfeeding demands, you know, all those things. All of these life transitions, you probably need more and better hydration. and you need electrolytes like sodium, magnesium, and potassium.

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45:55Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:And right now, Element is offering a free sample pack with any purchase. That's eight flavors to try on the house. Go to drinklmnt.com slash dr. lion to claim yours. That's drinklmnt.com slash Dr. Lyon. Stay hydrated, stay strong, and as Goggins would say, stay hard. Speaking of dying of measles, you bring up a really good point. When I was in my husband's active duty and I was living in New York City in a, I don't know, 400 to 600 square foot apartment, pregnant and alone, and there had been a measles outbreak in a certain community and I was on the subway going, I don't know if I was going back and forth to Brooklyn, but frankly, I was a pregnant mom, totally afraid of getting measles because there was a measles outbreak in New York City.

46:51Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:Yeah, and it happens and we're seeing it more because there are more people that are unvaccinated, but there are always smaller outbreaks every single year. That's not new. There's a little more this year than there has been in previous years, but it's still not far from what we usually see. But this is the reality. I mean, there's a risk and a benefit to everything. And that is where I go back to again. We have to have nuanced conversations about it because it just seems like there's two extremes and nobody wants to talk about the reality of the world. It's like, oh, you just want kids to get a vaccine and get autism.

47:20Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:No, nobody wants to give kids any currencies.

47:23Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:And then everybody's like, oh, you just want kids to get polio and not be able to walk? Or, oh, you just want measles and die? No, nobody wants that. Two things can be true at once. you could want kids to have a decreased risk of infection and you can also want them to have a decreased risk of chronic disease and there's no reason why we can't study this because ultimately if vaccines are related to chronic disease in some way we need to figure that out we need to ask why if you were to find out after doing the proper study that hepatitis b increase your risk of asthma by 10 times you would want to know why you wouldn't say we shouldn't do hepatitis b vaccine anymore you would say, what's the reason why this is occurring?

48:02Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:Could we change hepatitis B? Maybe we can do it in a different manner so we don't have that risk. Nobody wants to increase our kid's risk of having asthma, but maybe there's an ingredient. Maybe the aluminum there is causing an issue. So maybe we could take that out or find a different adjuvant that doesn't increase that risk. We want to minimize infection, but also minimize chronic disease. And those two things can both be true. And that's why we have to be able to have a balanced conversation because there are more and more vaccines hitting the market and more and more vaccines getting put out there.

48:31Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:And if we don't have these conversations now, then what's to say there aren't going to be 50 or 60 or 100 vaccines in a couple of years for our kids. And just because we can make a vaccine doesn't mean we should. And just because we can protect against the disease doesn't mean we should do that because there can be too much of a good thing. And you could say, well, you know, five vaccines has a lot of benefit, but 40 vaccines actually causes more harm than good. Both those things could be or maybe 100 vaccines is fine. I don't know. But we should be able to talk about that because ultimately your goal is to decrease these illnesses.

49:04Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:You want kids to be healthier. And if you're making them less healthy overall, that's a problem. So we have to be able to talk about it. I'm not saying that they do, but I was saying we have to be able to ask those questions and discuss it and study it.

49:15Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:So the preservatives, so this theramisol, that from what I understand, has that been taken off the market?

49:21Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:It's been taken off now. So thimerosal is just such a crazy story. It's the mercury component that's in vaccines as a preservative. And it works very well as a preservative. It does decrease the risk for bacterial contamination, fungal contamination. That's why it was put in there. But it is a mercury. It's composed of a mercury in there. And it's insane because you go back to around 2000. At that time, somebody said, hey, wait a minute. There is more mercury in vaccines than we allow in food. Is that safe? And nobody studied this or thought about this before.

49:53Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Tell me about that. I was looking this up and there's a vaccine containing 0.01%. The Marisol contains approximately 25 micrograms of mercury per 0.5 ml dose. And that's roughly the same amount of mercury as a three ounce can of tuna.

50:13Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:Right. And so around that time, we were really starting to understand the risks of mercury. And we were concerned about, especially with fish, how much we were eating, especially in pregnancy. And there were a lot of recommendations coming out to minimize your amount of mercury. And then they said, oh, actually, there's more mercury in vaccines. Now, it's a different form of mercury, but it's more. So is that OK? Again, which is insane because no one asked that before, that you could just inject mercury and it's fine and we didn't think about safety. But they didn't. And they started, OK, well, we should probably study this.

50:43Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Did they really not think about safety?

50:45Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:Not really. I mean, they put it in there without having that answer, right? I mean, they probably thought about it a little bit, but it was a small amount. but then more mercury was added into more vaccines because more vaccines were added onto the market. So probably they thought a little bit about, I mean, think about the studies back then. They weren't done in the same way that we do them now, not necessarily as a double-blind control trial, not necessarily studying mercury specifically for safety. And even if they did, they were studying it as one vaccine and not in all of them. And as more and more vaccines hit the market in the late 80s and the 90s, now there are more mercury-containing vaccines that are being given to kids.

51:18Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:And then what is the cumulative effect?

51:20Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Not now. back then.

51:21Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:So back then there were just more and more vaccines hitting the market in the 90s. And so now you have, if you're doing, you know, one vaccine is 25 micrograms, but how about if you're getting six vaccines with that? Okay, now you have more mercury than we're recommending. Is that safe? And so they said, well, let's start studying this. They never found it officially to be a problem, but they decided out of abundance of caution, they would take it out just given the fact that everyone was so concerned about mercury. And so it was taken out of every vaccine in the early 2000s, but it was still in the multi-dose flu.

51:50Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:And that this year was part of the discussion, if you heard the word thimerosal for the first time, because it was still in the multi-dose flus. And Kennedy took that out. So it isn't in any vaccines anymore, or at least it's going to be phased out if it's still in any of them.

52:03Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:In your clinical practice, do you test for heavy metals?

52:07Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:Sometimes we do. It's not, I would say, as common for kids, but certainly sometimes people want to do it and they'll do the hair testing. It's hard to do testing on kids because they're kids and you don't necessarily want to get a lot of blood but if they're serious issues then certainly we'll do functional medicine testing or at least I'll send them to a practitioner that does a lot more functional testing and they can they can go through those because I think if you have a chronic condition then I think it's worth to look into things like metals and mold and other issues.

52:32Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:And lead is lead still routinely done?

52:34Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:So lead I mean it's in there but lead still routinely

52:37Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:tested just in kids in general just because there's so much lead still around. And have you and this is just a clinical practice question again asking for a friend myself because i have two little kids have you seen a child test positive for say lead or something that you were surprised about maybe an environmental exposure and you treat that and their behavior changes or their again now you are an epidemiologist uh one thing you know correlation doesn't mean causation. But have you seen that in clinical practice?

53:12Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:I have seen it. I mean, certainly you see it with lead. A lot of times with lead specifically, though, you're trying to catch it before. So you're testing it when they're nine months or a year old to see if there's any lead. So you're catching it really before you have symptoms. But if we do testing for older kids, sometimes we'll see things. Sometimes there's nutrients off. A lot of times vitamin D is super low. So that's something that's pretty common that you'll see. And then mold is the other big one for kids. I mean, it's not something we'll always test on the kids. I'll do it sometimes, but testing at the home is very common for families and they do find it, they do clean it up.

53:42Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:It does get much better. Is this from a behavior standpoint? What would be behavior, behavior commonly, um, vague, weird symptoms that just don't seem to go away. So oftentimes where these things are most helpful is for these chronic low grade issues that just don't seem to go away. And, you know, maybe multiple family members are having issues, lots of headaches, lots of stomach aches, very irritable. It's, it's these things that just are not very obvious to be anything. Sometimes it's behavior too, but oftentimes it's like, oh, they're just always sick. They can't seem to get over cold. Now they're having asthma exacerbations.

54:15Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:It's getting worse. They always have headaches. They always seem to have weird symptoms that you just can't point to anything. And then a year or two later, they're like, oh, we did mold testing. We found a lot of mold and we took it out and it seems like they're doing better. So that is something that you see or just any sort of environmental exposure. I think that's the other thing that people sometimes just don't realize and that does come up often if you talk to parents enough is figuring out, okay, where are you going? What are you doing? What are you exposed to? I've seen many times where a kid switches schools and they have bad rashes and they go to some other school and it gets better.

54:49Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:And, you know, it's probably something they were spraying at the school or they were at a park, a certain park. And then they realize after that, that park is being sprayed in whatever chemical and they're just, you know, playing on the grass and they maybe moved houses and it just goes away. So there are a lot of environmental exposures that we just don't think of. It's not always easy to point out, but oftentimes those vague, weird symptoms that just don't go away are from something that they're touching or doing. It's just, you have to be a detective to figure it out, which is not easy.

55:15Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:No, I absolutely agree with you. I think the environmental testing and environmental factors is the new frontier of medicine. And we're very far behind. They have environmental physicians. Those are great, environmental physicians, occupational physicians, But for the most part, these exposures are tremendous. They definitely impact our kids and adults. Yeah, we don't have great ways. There is no standardized treatment. It's really challenging.

55:45Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:I mean, I get asked this all the time. Like, OK, so with chronic disease, what is it? Why is it happening? And again, we don't know, which is devastating. We don't know why it's happening because we haven't done those studies. But common sense being common, it's our crappy food and it's the toxins that we're exposed to. And we just have not acknowledged that up until more recently that we're bombarded with chemicals and toxins all the time through our food and through our environment. And anybody who works even a little bit in an integrative space, you don't have to be the most integrative doctor.

56:13Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:But as soon as you start to just think about that, you see people getting better just by changing their environment, just by changing their food. It's not always the case, but those are the things that you see all the time improve things. And it's not always with specialized testing. when you can do it, you can do, you know, mold testing, you could do heavy metal testing, that doesn't always help. But what does help the most is being a detective and thinking, okay, what am I actually doing that could be leading to my chronic condition? And what could I do to change that? And oftentimes, if people even just think in that way, they figure it out, maybe take a year or two, but they figure it out.

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57:02Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:Piore's O3 Ultra Pure Fish Oil, which is third-party

57:06Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:tested and certified by both the Clean Label Project and IFOS, so you know what you're putting in your body. It is safe, pure, effective. It is tested for 200 contaminants, and Piore publishes all their results online. I've teamed up with Piori to get you an amazing offer, 20 % off site wide, even on already discounted subscriptions, which means you can save nearly a third off. All you have to do is go to Piori, P-U-O-R-I dot com slash Dr. Lyon and use the code Dr. Lyon at checkout. You mentioned childhood obesity, which we started off talking about. childhood obesity is absolutely on the rise.

57:52Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:How do you think as a pediatrician, we can avoid that?

57:56Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:We have to change our food. I mean, we have to change the food system. I would say as a parent, an individual level, it's really important that you have to take some responsibility to understand that. I love that you're saying that. Because ultimately, you're the one purchasing the food, especially when they're younger. And we have to be okay with buying real food and preparing that food more. We have to be preparing most of the food that they're eating. Yes, they're going to eat some other things at school and other places. I mean, hopefully you educate them over the years as to what's healthy and what's not.

58:27Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:But at least if you're feeding them at home, most of the time, giving them food to take, that's going to make a huge difference. And just acknowledging that it's like we're doing this. We didn't get obese all of a sudden just because our genetics changed in 50 years. Like that's not what's going on. Our food is so crappy. 70 % or so of the food we're eating is ultra processed. It's not real food. It's not the food that we're supposed to be eating. And, you know, I've been very fortunate to be involved in some of the Maha type stuff, which is great, you know, but it's all weird to me because I was talking about kids health well before Maha.

59:00Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:And I happened to be at the Kellogg's rally to support getting the dyes out. And so I got to know some of the people there. And so that really helped me to become, you know, somewhat involved. But I only care about kids health. I don't care about politics. It's really the whole thing's stupid and there shouldn't be it shouldn't be politics right like we should be just all fighting together yeah for for kids health it should be bipartisan and you know we are seeing that a little bit to some degree but but ultimately it's it's the choices that we're making and the food system that's it's so screwed up and it's great that we're fighting for dyes and

59:28Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:little things but ultimately that you said it little things dyes are honestly dyes are little things the bigger problem the bigger fish that we have to fry however you want to say it's the system. It's the ultra processed food. The question I'm so happy to hear you say that you feel that it's the parents responsibility. If a child is obese, or overweight, the question is whose responsibility is it?

59:51Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:It's the parents responsibility in the setting of a very difficult environment right now. So I think it's both. I think it is both. I think we need to take responsibility because ultimately you have the choices of what you're purchasing, and what you're doing. And I I understand, oh, the first thing that people say, oh, you know, single mom, can't afford it. I get that. I understand that there are specific situations, but we have to do the best that we can to support our kids within the financial means that we have. And the bigger problem, and the thing you should be saying back to something like that is not, oh, it's ableist to have healthy food.

1:00:21Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:No, no. Every kid deserves healthy, fresh food. How do we make that happen? How do we get healthy food to every kid? How do we get fresh, local produce back as the standard? and that is a systems issue right now on the individual level yes you have to do it but we also need to fight really hard to change the system it's not an easy thing yeah and if 74

1:00:41Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:percent of adults are either overweight or obese where do you think children learn from right

1:00:46Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:exactly and that's why i said the so the dyes thing for example it's great that we're talking about it i think it's not healthy for you ultimately if you have a ultra processed food with a red dye number 40 or you have it with a natural dye the food's still bad so ultimately that doesn't make a huge difference. But I think it's something that people galvanized around. And a lot more people are aware about reading labels and ingredients than before. So I think that's really, really, really helpful. And it's good to get those ingredients out. But that is not the fight that we need to have over the next three years.

1:01:15Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:It's not about individual things. It's about the system. It's about the farms, the food, the produce, like all of these things have to change so we can get healthier, fresh food locally that's not more expensive than the crappy food so we can start to change that system, change the incentives. That's a really hard thing to do. It's not simple, but ultimately we have to make that the easier choice for people. So that way we're going to get healthier. Because you say, look, whose responsibility is? It is the parents, but it's going to be a lot easier to be a parent if you could buy healthy food cheaper and that's what's available to you versus what's not available to you.

1:01:50Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Eggs, I hear what you're saying. I agree with you. And I would say when someone says that to me, that it's more expensive to eat healthy, I will give them an alternative. A dozen eggs might be$5, right?

1:02:03Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:Yeah. And there are so many things that you could do that are not more expensive. But the incentive in general in our environment right now is the ultra processed foods. That seems to be cheaper and easier to access. And a lot of people don't always have, they have access to eggs, but they don't have necessarily access to a lot of good fresh produce, they could go. And you do have almost everywhere you can drive, unless you're pretty rural, there is some access. But we need to make that much more available. You go to other countries and the local stores are not selling mostly processed foods, they're selling fresh stuff.

1:02:33Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:A lot more markets, a lot more farmer's market type things. We have to move back to that. And I think we could.

1:02:39Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:So there is the food component. And then I was at some of the data in terms of children being sedentary, children are sedentary on an average of seven plus hours a day. Yeah.

1:02:51Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:I mean, that's the whole other piece of the puzzle that we haven't tackled either. But that's the other piece. I mean, we're not moving. Kids are on screens seven plus hours a day on average. As a pediatrician, how much do you recommend? I mean, as little as possible, right? Other than I understand people have to do school work. So a lot of school work is on computers now. That is what it is. But I think other than that, as minimal as possible. I'm not someone that says zero screen time, because I think that's probably not practical and not the way our world works at this point. But if you are on seven plus hours, then what are you not doing?

1:03:20Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:You're not moving, you're not getting outside. So I think we have to shift that and really focus on especially those kids that are eight hours a day, 10 hours a day, we have to shift that back to one or two hours or homework plus very little. Other than that, we have to encourage and prioritize movement. You can't eat crappy food.

1:03:37Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Now, when you were growing up, was the homework done on an iPad?

1:03:40Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:No, it wasn't. So it doesn't have to be on a computer.

1:03:42Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:I think that ultimately we are doing what we've done in healthcare, which is, well, this is the way people are doing it, so we should all be doing it. I never used an iPad when I was in school. You never used an iPad. Why is that even something that is remotely feasible? It doesn't even make sense to me.

1:04:04Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. I think it's totally fine if we would move away from that as much as we can. And so we're encouraging. It's all about incentives and encouraging. I think if we start to make it a point, like, look, we're not doing our homework on screens because it's not good for you to be on screen so much. So here it is on paper. Those are the kind of things that it doesn't seem like it makes a difference, but it does because the encouragement, the messaging for the average kid makes a big difference. If you're on a computer for eight hours a day because you have to do all your homework on that, that's just what you think is normal.

1:04:33Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:And then, you know, you're on the computer, then, you know, the things over here, you scroll over to social media for a second, then it's been two hours, you go back.

1:04:40Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Have you heard of the daylight computer?

1:04:42Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:The daylight computer? I haven't heard of that, but I'm assuming it's like where you're focusing.

1:04:46Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:No, it actually looks like a Kindle almost, and there's no blue light, and you actually can't search, and it doesn't have all these distracting items that would pop up. And I'm hoping, again, I have no relationship with the company, but to me, if we're going for convenience, which it seems as if people love convenience, then if we're going to do that, perhaps we make it healthier and safer.

1:05:13Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:Yeah, I think that's the direction we need to go with phones and computers. And I've definitely seen a bunch of companies pop up in the last couple of years where they're taking away your access to the Internet. They're taking away, like, it's there for emergencies. It's there for just the specific things that you need to do. I think we have to move back because, again, it's the messaging. If we take phones out of schools, it's a message sent to kids, hey, this is not good for you. This is not good for your mental health. You're not paying attention. Be off your screens. We have to send that messaging clearly.

1:05:40Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:I want to circle back. I skipped over this. I want to circle back to this new discussion, which is GLP-1 use in children.

1:05:47Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:Yeah, that's insane. There's nothing else around it. I don't have any problem with people using a GLP-1. if they choose to, if it's a last resort. I think for somebody who is morbidly obese, who's very ill, then medications have their place. And potentially you've tried everything else. You just don't have that motivation. It could put you on a good path. Okay, I get that. But that is not what's happening with kids. And that's not happening with a lot of people that are using it. What is happening with kids? Well, it's something that is given, like any other medication. It's like, well, you have this issue.

1:06:18Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:So here's your medical solution. Here's your prescription. and and anything like that that's affecting your body in that way affecting your hormones affecting your liver affecting your kidneys affecting everything that's a big decision especially

1:06:31Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:on your mound for a long time are parents coming to you asking for glp ones for their kids not in

1:06:35Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:my office i've never been asked but um and i wouldn't do it either i mean i if they would would want to do it i'd send them to a specialist anyways but i would try real hard to convince them away from that um i especially as a kid that does not seem like a reasonable option for almost all kids especially younger kids like it's it's a quick it's a quick younger for me i don't know

1:06:58Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:under 15 under total i mean listen i i do not think that gop and i'm usually not someone who is a yes or no type of physician i don't think that things are typically black and white but GLP-1 use and again would there be a case where someone would use a GLP-1 in a child maybe if they are morbidly obese and the child can't move I don't know maybe but but but for the average child

1:07:25Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:but even for the like the extreme almost with kids it should almost never be needed and it absolutely should be something that's after every other thing has been done for a while including getting them an exercise therapist getting them a nutritionist getting them working with a therapist, whatever the reasons are, maybe the family needs counseling about food and what foods they're giving them. I mean, there, there are very few kids that are going to be so morbidly obese and also have the chronic conditions. Like for an adult, you could see that someone's really, really sick. I can understand you need it quick.

1:07:54Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:Usually for kids, even if they're morbidly obese, they're not so sick that you don't have time to work with them in a more natural way because you need to figure out why they're so morbidly obese and you need to adjust those things or else they're going to be on that. They're going to get off it. They're going to get morbidly obese again and you've completely affected their body when they're growing it's a quick fix and it's not right and again people okay well it's easy to give someone medication not everybody can get a nutritionist not everybody can get an exercise service yeah that's right that's a problem you should be able to get access to a nutritionist through your insurance or whatever it is as opposed to getting access to a medication the system is broken yeah and you if someone's morbidly obese and you're thinking you should give them medication we need a system that supports people in getting the other things so they can actually get healthy in the appropriate way well what do you think about bringing back the presidential fitness test yeah i mean i think that's was controversial without needing to be super controversial it's it's it's again why why do you think it was controversial i think it's controversial because you're bringing back something that has competition and and we've moved a little bit away from competition it seems like into you know more like everyone's accepted at participation trophies and this is kind of putting back um those things which i guess some people had i grew up in canada so i didn't necessarily have that I had something similar, but I get why anything that anybody does in the administration is going to be controversial right now.

1:09:09Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:But ultimately it's a message. It's a message that we care about health. We care about your fitness and we're going to take a stand. We're going to push you towards more fitness. Competition can bring strong feelings sometimes, especially if you're not doing very well in these things. But ultimately we need to, I think, get a little tougher in our schools to push people to become healthier, not to shame anybody, but to say like, we need to have some benchmarks we want to make sure everybody can do because we're not meeting them. Kids are super sick, super overweight, have all sorts of chronic conditions.

1:09:38Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:And that's a disaster. I mean, you talk about your family being involved in the military and services, and a lot of kids would never qualify because they're so overweight. They have so many complications. It's such a big problem, not from a, I mean, it's from a defense standpoint, I guess, but that's not my big thing as a pediatrician. It's like, if you're not healthy enough to do that like it says a statement about our our country i am shocked that the presidential fitness test was controversial and i'm going to tell you why the reality is we should have a

1:10:12Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:baseline how many push-ups can you do how many sit-ups what is your one mile run or your dash whatever it is your rope climb there is nothing wrong with competition the only way people get better is if you are challenged. There is someone that wins and there's someone that loses. And just because someone isn't number one doesn't mean that they didn't put forth effort or any of those things. And in terms of, we talk about obesity, we talk about chronic disease, we're talking about food dyes. If we were to take a step back, I would argue one of the biggest challenges that our country faces is comfort.

1:10:55Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:And comfort is absolutely killing people. The fact that the presidential fitness test, because some people win and some people don't, and people feel as if it's shaming, that is somewhat ridiculous. And no, does it suck to not be good at something? Yeah, it does. But guess how you get better?

1:11:17Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:The test and everything else. Look, we have clearly failed at public health in this country. We're the sickest Western country. Chronic disease rate, 75 % overall. What we're doing isn't working. So you can, I said this multiple times in a couple weeks, you can like or dislike Secretary Kennedy. You can like or dislike the new administration, what they're doing. But whatever was done before has absolutely failed in terms of our overall chronic health and chronic disease. So we have to do something different. We can debate and and quibble over presidential tests versus not presidential tests this policy that policy vaccines not vaccines you can quibble all those things and that is the right of everybody here and we should do that we should debate it to figure out what the best way forward is no i think we should do

1:12:02Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:presidential fitness testing sure everybody fine but i don't care you can have that opinion and

1:12:07Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:someone can disagree with you but the fact that we are not making changes is ridiculous we have to make all sorts of changes we have to move in a different direction and some of those things are going to be right and some of them are going to be wrong. But what's definitely wrong is what we've been doing.

1:12:20Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Yeah. I, you know, frankly, I also, in our company, we have physical fitness standards, by the way. Having standards makes sense.

1:12:27Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:I don't have any problem with that, but I have a problem with looking at our health where we are. We want to get better. We have to have some major changes and that's going to cause a little bit of turmoil in the interim. It's okay. But we need it. What, what are some safe workouts for kids? Safe workouts for kids? I think, you know, know using your own body weight exercising so we want to be consistent I don't think for the younger kids in general the research shows you want to use a lot of heavy weight but I think using your body weight or low weights and repetition is usually the best way to go and that's what most individuals that I've ever spoke to that work in the fitness industry say for kids I mean you want them to be moving ideally something fun right I think the best thing is if it's not a workout per se for kids but something they enjoy doing so there's a sport an activity class whatever it is that can get them moving in a way that they love so it's consistent.

1:13:15Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Is there one sport that you like to see kids participating in? Anything right now.

1:13:20Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:Literally anything that gets them moving. I mean even a few minutes a day makes a huge difference. Every site I've ever seen sites that even a few minutes of moderate to vigorous activity makes a huge difference. Most kids aren't even doing that. So I want to move the needle. I think everyone needs to move the needle forward in terms of what they're doing. But something that keeps you moving like you know soccer is great. Whatever it is but

1:13:40Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:I don't care right now I think just something yeah there was a huge push against resistance training when I say resistance training whether it's body weight or picking up weights because there was a lot of conversation around it affecting growth plates and that is not accurate in the data there is no reason why kids shouldn't be able to lift weights you know we're not talking about one rep max but move now when you are young so that you can move later and you know our kids exercise it's not necessarily quote structured exercise but my son who's four is training for the SEAL teams he's hilarious he's doing two a days he is sprinting we have one of those woodway treadmills I mean he's doing it all on his own he gets up and he might do three sprint intervals and then go jump in the cold plunge for, I don't know, three seconds.

1:14:32Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:That's amazing. And kids are so resilient and they can do amazing things if you give them a chance to. Yeah. But there's such a wide range of what we're seeing, but almost all of it's not good. So to me, you know, it's like which sport, which activity? I don't care. Get them moving. Whatever they're willing to do, the ultimate of the discussion is get off a screen and go do something outside. Even if it's just going to play outside, going to the playground, playing in nature. I mean, these things are amazing. And that's all they need.

1:15:00Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Yep. And there is some data that suggests that the healthier and stronger, and this obviously makes sense, a child is, when they're younger, the more likely that they're going to be healthier as an adult.

1:15:11Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:Yeah. I've seen many studies that show that now, where your health and your level of health carries over into adulthood. And it's a very significant predictor. Yes.

1:15:18Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:If you are young, physically active, building musculature, priming the body for muscle health, then your likelihood of having cardiometabolic disease is less there's a whole host of other problems that are lower if you start early and think about it we always talk about kids as if i don't know it's a weird way of framing it as if there's something different but we're not raising children we're raising adults we're raising humans to contribute to society yeah and you're setting

1:15:51Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:their, you know, you're setting what they're doing. You're setting their habits. And for a kid that's creating healthy habits, they're much more likely to do that later. I mean, you don't even need data for that. So obviously, if you're exercising, you're much more likely to do it when you're older. If your priority is cooking food and getting healthy food, you're much more likely to do it because you're even aware of it. Most people aren't even aware of these things today. I mean, we're getting more aware of it, but clearly we're not aware of it because we have this obesity epidemic and it's not changing.

1:16:17Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:So. Well, hopefully it will be changing. Hopefully it's changing. The conversation is changing right now. So I think that's the first step.

1:16:24Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Now devices. You have, again, you've been in clinical practice for 10 years. You've seen an increase in device use. Oh yeah. What are some of the biggest relationships? For example, increased screen time, mental health problems, increased screen time, decrease attention and learning. Have you seen relationships between device use and health outcomes or learning outcomes?

1:16:46Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:Yeah, I mean, I think that the research is very clear at this point that it affects all those health. I mean, everything, right? You have the physical and then you have the mental. But we're really at the point now where it's so clear, especially with the mental, that a lot of school systems are taking phones out because the data is drastic. Like you're seeing 50, 75 % drops in depression rates and anxiety and trips to the principal's office. so there's a massive mental health component but of course also a physical component obesity diabetes um everything because you're just you're sedentary it's a big part of life so yeah when you

1:17:20Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:counsel your you obviously counsel patients and they always come in with a parent right because they're they're young yeah um what are some evidence-based recommendations that you give them for nutrition or environment or screen time as someone who is listening to this with the goal of how do we keep our kids safe and healthy?

1:17:43Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:For food, and usually with the younger kids, I'll talk about the most important things for food would be for parents if they're not doing it. I mean, it's hard for my office because I already have health conscious people to some degree coming in. They're self-selecting, but either way, I still talk about it because it's important. So reading labels is the number one thing. Like we have to be aware that we have to read every single label all the time from now on it just has to be part of your every day where you're going in the store and you're buying something with a label ideally you're buying things that don't really have labels but if you're buying anything you need to look at the ingredients and just start to become aware you don't need a phd in chemistry to know that some long words probably not good for you is there one chemical or preservative that you have concerns about i mean there are many but anything that that we any long i mean sugar it's a huge problem today we eat way more

1:18:26Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:sugar than we ever should you mean i shouldn't have given my kids cake this morning i mean if we do it i'm saying they did not eat cake i'm not against like any sugar i mean obviously that

1:18:35Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:so sugar in and of itself is not bad for you i mean we need it for our brain it's just the amount of sugar and the type of sugar that we're eating i'm not concerned about they're eating fruit because they're about all the added processed sugars that we're eating in mass that's way more than we ever need way more than anybody should be eating in a lifetime they're eating

1:18:50Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:in a year now i mean but there isn't one thing that you say okay well this is in the label that's out um i mean i don't have one yeah i don't know that i ever get that specific with

1:18:59Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:people because I think it's more about becoming a savvy, a savvy customer and just being aware that what everything you buy from food or from products, you should read the label, try to buy things with as few ingredients as possible and try to make as much as you can. I mean, to me, that that's the goal is not like an ingredient versus another ingredient, but it's making the actual food, the ingredients, like buying actual things and preparing it yourself. That's going to get you a long way. And that, that to me is a big part of, of that.

1:19:24Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:We were filming yesterday and in In order to film, we really try to, well, we don't really try. We always look at the data prior to making statements. And in 2023, over 55 % of the food budget was spent on food outside of the home. It was either food at restaurants or delivery.

1:19:43Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:Yeah, I saw that too. That's crazy. It's insane. And I mean, every number you look at when it comes to food is just insane. I mean, just the 70 % ultra processed foods or whatever number is around there. Now, that's insane. It should be zero, but it's not going to be zero. That's not the reality of our country. But you could certainly decrease that to 25%. Most of the food that we should be eating should be real food, not ultra-processed food.

1:20:06Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:When you counsel your patients on nutrition, is there a certain carbohydrate target? Do you have certain targets that you try to shoot for, for macronutrients?

1:20:14Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:Not usually for kids. Sometimes people will ask me that, and I just really try to shift away from being, especially for the young kids. I think you need to have variety. I think you want to focus on real food. being so specific doesn't help most people. It just makes them more nervous, especially when it comes to kids. I think you can do that if you want to, but I aim to move away from a lot of the starchy carbs, the white carbs, a lot of bread and pasta, and move towards fruits and veggies and proteins and healthy fats. And I think if you do that, then you're most of the way there. And I think for most kids will do just fine.

1:20:45Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:But the rainbow. So supplements, I'm okay with supplements, but I always want you to get through food if possible. So that's what I always tell people. I mean, I'm okay. We have them in the office. If you want to do multivitamin, you want to do vitamin D or omegas. I think that's all reasonable because we're just so deficient in our food these days and most people are not getting outside enough. But ideally we should be getting it all from food and you shouldn't need a supplement. If you want to do a few of them, I think that's okay. But again, it's with kids. It's hard because you want a kid to be on like 60 supplements and taking a whole bunch of things.

1:21:14Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:Most kids won't do that and they taste terrible anyways. So if your kid's sick all the time and has issues, maybe then I would focus my time on trying to buy more fresh produce than I would on giving them a bunch of supplements. I think supplements only get you so far. It's fine if you want to add to it, but ultimately the food is what matters to me.

1:21:33Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:What about, so in terms of if you were to strategize and prioritize, it sounds to me that it's really the fresh fruits and vegetables that kids are missing, if I'm hearing you and understanding you, versus say protein and fat they seem to be getting enough of. Am I understanding you correctly?

1:21:51Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:I think we get more than enough protein. You never really see anybody with protein deficiency. The fats you can have better versus not as good, but ultimately it's this fresh food. But I think it's even more just not eating the ultra processed prepackaged foods. It's eating actual food. There's a big difference between a prepackaged chicken nugget and when you make it yourself. So I think it's not that they're not getting protein. It's are we getting good, healthy, like where are those chickens from? Right. I think that that's a big difference. Like how did the chicken live? What was it? What was it injected with?

1:22:23Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:What did it eat? I think that all adds up if you get a better protein versus not if you can. And again, these are things that not everybody can always afford or don't always have access to. But to me, these are the most important things. And if we are focusing on how do we get more real, fresh food, that is where you're going to get your better nutrients. A lot of our food gets shipped from all over the world. It's pretty crappy. Even the good stuff is pretty crappy. It's like it was picked early, sprayed in a bunch of stuff, shipped across the world, sits in the store for a couple days, sprayed again multiple times, then you eat it.

1:22:53Dr. Joel Gator Warsh:And that's the best case scenario. That's still like the real bananas that we get. It's like it's not even the processed food. So we need as much from our local farmers as we can get. The food is totally different. I mean, I'm sure you know. Anywhere you go, if you eat food that's freshly picked, it tastes totally different. It's a completely different food half the time. You're like, oh, that's what it's supposed to taste like? You don't realize that until you start buying mostly from farms where you know where the food's coming from, that it tastes different.

1:23:19Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Dr. Joel Warsh, thank you so much for coming on. Really, it has been eye-opening. You feel very passionate about this, and I know that this comes from seeing patients for over 10 years and training and having two little kids. you're very brave and it's important to be able to speak your truth and i'm just i'm grateful for you coming on i love your book between a shot and a hard place i strongly recommend that people go ahead and learn for themselves and read it thank you thank you so much thank you for having me