Protecting Your Child's Health: Food, Sleep, and Wellness with Dr. Joel "Gator" Warsh

Dr. Joel Warsh, an integrative pediatrician, discusses his approach to parenting and the importance of balancing Western medicine with alternative practices. He emphasizes the need for parents to trust their instincts and make decisions that are best for their own families. Dr. Warsh also explores the concept of integrative parenting, which involves bringing together different philosophies and finding a personalized approach to parenting. He provides insights on topics such as sleep training, managing cold and flu, and the rise of chronic health conditions in children. Additionally, he highlights the impact of diet, toxins, and chemicals on children's health.

Book - Parenting at your Child's Pace:
https://www.amazon.ca/Parenting-Your-Childs-Pace-Pediatricians/dp/1454952490

Website: https://parentingatyourchildspace.com/

Instagram: http://instagram.com/drjoelgator/

Transcript

Welcome to another edition of the Super Daddy Club podcast. I'm your host Lendo. Today we have such a great pleasure to have Dr. Joel Warsh, integrative pediatrician, author and speaker. If I can give him a brief introduction here. Joel Warsh, AKA

Joel Gator of the popular Instagram is a board certified pediatrician in Los Angeles, California, who specializes in parenting, wellness and integrative medicine. He's the author of Parenting at Your Child's Base, the integrative pediatrician's guide to the first three years. He grew up in Toronto, Canada, shout out to Canada, and completed a master's degree in epidemiology before earning his medical degree from Thomas Jefferson Medical College.

He completed his pediatric medicine training at the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles and then worked in a private practice in Beverly Hills before founding his current practice in Studio City. Dr. Gator has published research in peer -reviewed journals on topics including childhood injuries, obesity, and physical activity. He has been featured in numerous documentaries, films, summits, podcasts, and articles. He's the founder of the parenting masterclass series, Raising Amazing Plus.

and the supplement line tiny root apothecary. I hope I said that properly. Perfect. Dr. Warsh, welcome to Super Daddy Club podcast.

joel (02:03.131)
You did. Yeah. It was good.

joel (02:11.067)
Thanks for having me on. I'm excited to chat.

Lendo (02:13.71)
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, I wanted to start with, I really appreciated in your book how even you as a pediatrician did not have such an easy goal with your first experience, well, with your experience of parenting at the very start, and up to a point of experiencing some degree of imposter syndrome. And I just wanted to know if you could just take us through your early years of parenting just before we get started here with the more formal stuff.

joel (02:43.451)
Yeah, definitely. That's a great question because, you know, for me, even with the book, one of the things I really wanted to do was to help parents to de -stress. And I feel like one of the questions that I get most often are things that parents seem to think, or I think it's a little funny, is that they're like, you know, it's a pediatrician. You must be ready to be a parent. It must be so easy to be a parent. And I always have to remind people, like, no, not really. I mean, I guess there's like a little advantage maybe to being a pediatrician. Of course, you know, some of the health stuff. But most of parenting, basically all of it, is not

Lendo (03:02.286)
You

joel (03:13.467)
medicine, right? It's parenting, it's being there, it's taking care of your kid, it's dealing with the sleep issues and the potty training and all the kid stuff, but being a pediatrician doesn't really prepare you that much for actually being a parent. And so for me, you know, I had all the same worries too, in terms of am I going to do this right? Am I going to screw this up? Am I going to, you know, be a great dad? Am I going to be a terrible dad? All the things that we think about, we want to make sure that we have the best, healthiest child. And so, yeah, I went through all of that too.

Lendo (03:37.262)
Mm -hmm.

joel (03:43.387)
as well, but I think what was really helpful to me is just continuing to remind myself that so many parents have done this before People have been parents forever. We have it in inside of us to do it and and I think that the the stress can become debilitating and so for me it was just you know, just reminding myself and this is what I try to do through the book is just remind parents that like we got this we can do it and and there's nothing that you really need to be a great parent like money doesn't make you a great parent you don't have to

be super wealthy. You want to be there, you love your child, you spend time. And the more you remind yourself that that's really what's truly important for your kids, the more for me it was really helpful and reminding me that, yeah, I'm going to do a great job and it's going to be great.

Lendo (04:26.209)
Thank you for that. And so when you came to your book, what was some of the things just with your understanding of the parenting landscape, what were the things that you wanted to make sure were different about your book when you wrote it or when you were building the concept behind it?

joel (04:40.475)
So one of the big differences for me is that a lot of the parenting books these days seem to be written by therapists, some moms, some other individuals, but mostly therapists. And they have a great perspective and there's a lot of wonderful books. But back, you know, maybe 50 years ago, most of the parenting books were written by pediatricians and doctors. And there was a health aspect to it. These days, it seems like doctors are writing more, you know, air quotes, like health books, you know, coughs, colds, runny noses, how to do your gut health, that kind of thing.

but not as much about in the parenting world. And I feel like there's such an important health piece that's missing from a lot of the parenting books. And especially for myself being an integrative pediatrician, I try to balance Western medicine with alternative practices. And so the same thing with parenting, I really try to have a balanced approach and a lot of the other books and people you see online, social media, they're very specific in their, guidelines for what you should do for any sort of question. Like, you know, do you.

Sleep train or not sleep train? Do you potty train at this age or at this age? Do you do baby led weaning or you do purees? Like there's one way to do it for most of them. And a lot of the times it's you run through and you get more stressed because you're not necessarily in line with all the things that they're saying. And so I really wanted to help parents think through these issues because every child is different. Every situation is different. Even if you have two kids, they're going to be very different. And we need to learn how to think through the problems and the issues that come up. And the reality is there isn't

one right way to do almost anything. And so for most of these questions that I get continuously at the office, I try to think through them and try to help parents think through them by going through the research and the data, talking about what's out there, the different options, and then how you synthesize that to come up with your own solution that's best for your own family. Because the reality is like for baby law weaning and pre -raise, there isn't a right answer. If you're super stressed about giving your kid chunks of food, then maybe that's not the right thing for you, even if there is some evidence for it. So it's important to trust your gut.

Lendo (06:31.63)
Mm -hmm.

Lendo (06:36.23)
And so while we're on a similar notary, parenting at your child's pace, can you just break that down? Because it does seem simple, but I know there's certainly more to it than meets the eye.

joel (06:51.291)
Yeah, in today's modern parenting world, we're so, we are very focused on other people and other families, especially with social media and seeing things online and comparing ourselves. And we, I think, need to be more mindful to focus back into our own family. I feel like in some ways it was easier to be a parent a hundred years ago because you had grandma around and maybe some cousins and you had a question and you're like, do I do?

When do I start feeding? And grandma says, we did it at six months. And that was it. Like you didn't have 10 ,000 opinions and you didn't have to look online and see someone who's doing it at four months that says it's the only way and the right way. So now we have a lot of comparison, especially with social media. You can be comparing yourself to something that's not even real. And I think it's important to focus back on our own family and our own kids and then parent them at our family's pace, at your child's pace, whatever the right thing for them is, as opposed to what other people tell you. I don't think that you shouldn't be aware.

Lendo (07:22.286)
Mm -hmm.

joel (07:48.283)
I think it's good to be informed, but it shouldn't stress you out. It should inform you to help you make the decisions that are right for your family. And that might be following the regular guidelines. That might mean taking in some information and doing what you think is correct. It doesn't follow all the guidelines. It just depends on the situation. But that, to me, is how you think through a lot of these issues by bringing all that information together and then doing what's right for you and not necessarily what the influencer says to do.

Lendo (08:14.702)
Mm -hmm, raising your child should not be as complicated as picking apples at a grocery store or something, you know. You spend some time in those lineups. But yeah, now you also mentioned about integrative medicine. What is that exactly and how does it differ from traditional medicine as well?

joel (08:34.779)
Integrative medicine combines modern Western medicine with alternative and holistic practices. So I'm not against Western medicine. I did all the regular pediatrics training, but I got a little bit frustrated with the regular system and treating everything with a medication all the time. And so I started learning about alternative medicine, natural medicine, so supplements, herbs, and other practices that are out there and trying to blend the best of both worlds together whenever it's reasonable. Sometimes they'll still use a medication, antibiotic, if we need it, or a steroid. That's fine.

But I just, you know, I try to minimize and integrative medicine doctors in general, try to minimize medications and try to use other things first when it's reasonable. And so that is the way that I try to practice in my office. And that's the way that I try to do things because I feel like we're so quick to give medications these days and medicines have side effects or potentially have side effects. And so we should only use them when we really need it. And I feel like in modern society, we're far too quick to jump to a pill.

these days when there are oftentimes other things you could try first.

Lendo (09:36.174)
Mm -hmm, mm -hmm. And you also did tie that concept into integrative parenting, which I've never heard those terms being used together before. And I just wanted to know if you can expand on that and just draw the connection for us.

joel (09:49.563)
Yeah. So for me, the kind of path was integrative medicine. So we did regular pediatrics, but got frustrated, integrative medicine. And then as a pediatrician, you start to realize that most of your job is actually parenting. It's not medicine. I mean, certainly, yeah, you like, you know, see colds and ear infections and things like that. But a lot of the questions you get, especially at the checkups are, I would say more parenting questions in terms of like behavior or, again, like toilet training, tantrums.

those kinds of things. And so to me, I kind of wanted to include that term as integrative parenting. So bringing together the different philosophies that are out there on parenting for any given question and trying to blend the best of all those worlds together to come up with a solution that's right for your family. So again, it's integrative parenting because you're bringing in the different aspects or the different philosophies that are out there and not kind of poo -pooing anything, but just

learning about them and then figuring out what makes sense for you.

Lendo (10:50.35)
Yeah, and that's a great way to deal with the information overload which you're describing there, right? Like just take what's good for you and leave what does not really apply. A great way to navigate all that. Now, can you, there's some areas where you had some guidelines that are proper to you or, sorry, some recommendations slightly different from guidelines. And I wanted to know if you could touch on the whole issue of toddler sleeping and kind of like training them to even just

could have been on their own without being rocked and things like that. Would you be able to shed a little bit of light on that from your perspective?

joel (11:26.363)
Yeah, definitely. So one of the bigger topics in parenting is always sleep, right? We don't get enough sleep. Kids don't seem to get enough sleep, especially when they're younger. But the question often comes up like, do I sleep train? Do I work on sleep or do I just kind of let it be? And there really is no answer to that. A lot of it is personal choice. There are a lot of people out there that are very anti -sleep training these days, but I've never actually met a parent who's done.

Lendo (11:32.11)
Mm -hmm.

joel (11:53.755)
sleep training and says, you know, I'm so upset that I did it. It's always like, I wish I did it nine months ago. So I think that the issue is that even the term like sleep training, as opposed to just teaching children to fall asleep, helping them fall asleep, helping them to be good sleepers. I mean, there are many ways to do it. You don't have to be super hardcore and throw them in another room and say, I'll see you in the morning. There is a lot of in -between there. And especially if it's really affecting them or really affecting you, then sometimes some learning and some training can be the right.

Lendo (12:15.854)
Hmm.

joel (12:22.619)
thing to do for your family. We live in a society and in society there are norms that we all follow. Like for a child, for example, we teach them to go to the bathroom in the toilet, right? They would just probably pee anywhere, but we teach them to go to the bathroom. So sometimes if we want our child to sleep, that might be more for us than really it is for them in terms of sleeping through the night. But some kids are just not that great falling asleep or going back to sleep or they wake up a lot. And so doing some work with them in terms of

Maybe walking in the room and making sure they're okay, but not feeding them You know these kind of things can help for them to self -soothe and go back to sleep and we're teaching them to self -soothe and most kids if you do that over a couple of days they will sleep much longer and And so this he was a you can't sleep dream But I've seen lots of kids and families that have and there's whole industry on it So you definitely can teach them to sleep better whether you should or should not I think that's the that's up for debate and that's gonna be a family decision But but at the end of the day

Lendo (13:16.238)
Mm -hmm.

joel (13:19.995)
For most parents, if they work on it a little bit, they tend to have a child who sleeps better and longer throughout the night so that they're more rested and then they're happier parents, in which case they can overall do a better job in their own minds because they're not as exhausted. So I'm not against sleep training. I think that it's fine if you want to do it. I think it's fine if you don't want to do it.

Lendo (13:39.342)
Mm -hmm. Very interesting. I always had this assumption in my head about sleep training or if you can just correct me if I'm wrong about it, but I always felt like there's gonna come a point where the body will have the need for more continuous periods of sleep, right? Where, for example, my child right now is about 21 months old and he's a lot more physically active. He's eating a lot more.

I'm thinking he's able to take in more food before bed. He's more tired. And so he doesn't, he almost doesn't want to be bothered. He doesn't, he's also getting a little too big for my arms, right? So I can't, he just gets uncomfortable and you just start wiggling around and wants me to put him down. So I almost felt like it's just, it's also somewhat part of a natural stage of growth that kids just require that much more sleep and they find ways to, you know, like wake up and just go right back to bed. Don't bother me.

I don't know your thoughts.

joel (14:37.627)
So as I agree, natural is not always the best, right? Oftentimes it is, but it's also, you know, some kids naturally are just not going to sleep and be the kid that's going to be running into your bed when they're still four or five. So it just depends. I think, yes, the answer to your question in general is yes, over time, they naturally will learn to do this on their own. Most kids do at some point. And there are definitely lots of kids that never sleep trained and sleep just great. So you don't have to sleep train. I think it's just, if you want something different right now.

than what they're doing, then sometimes it does involve some learning, some training, something, so that way they do it differently. And again, it's not that you have to do it. If you're happy with the way that sleep is going and you're okay with them getting up a couple of times a night, that's totally fine. And we all get up. I mean, we all get up multiple times in the night. That's how our sleep cycle goes. We just tend to go back to sleep and we don't remember it. But after we go through the sleep cycles, a lot of kids, well, generally kids, they're gonna be there sleep cycles two, three hours.

And so they'll wake up every couple of hours and then they'll be, they'll fuss and they'll go back to sleep. A child who learns to self -soothe just does it on their own. Whereas the other kids, you know, either wake up, they want to feed, they'll cry more until they get food. So a lot of times you have to stop giving them that food and then they stop wanting it. So then they, they sleep longer. But again, there are people that I've taken care of that could be four years old. They're still breastfeeding. They're still sleeping with their kids. You know, there's, there's different value sets that people have. So that's where your own family, your own values comes in. But.

I just speak to what is possible, I guess, like what you can do, and then you have to decide if that's something you want to do, because there are certainly families where they don't want to, and then I don't say you should. I just don't think parents feel bad if they want to, and they shouldn't feel like it won't work or won't happen. Usually it's pretty easy to do.

Lendo (16:09.966)
Hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Lendo (16:24.325)
The other thing that I was curious about was maybe some tips and advice on managing cold and flu from an integrative medicine approach. I kind of have some assumptions in my head, but please if you can enlighten us.

joel (16:38.955)
Yeah, well, the biggest part of it is really the lifestyle in general. So I think even before you have that cold or the flu, the best way to have a good defense system is to have a healthy body, right? And so if we're eating healthy, if we're getting good sleep, if we're keeping our stress low, if we're moving a lot, then our body is going to be functioning optimally. And that's going to give our body the best chance to heal quickly or even prevent the infection from happening.

But once you do get a cold or flu or things like that, then I think the big thing from a natural perspective is usually giving your body the supplements and the herbs that help with your immune support. So the most common things would be like vitamin D, vitamin C, elderberry, zinc, colloidal silver can be good. I mean, there's a lot of good herbs that actually have a lot of evidence that they can be supportive for many of these basic coughs, colds, flus. I mean, vitamin D has great evidence that it's really helpful for people with low vitamin D deficiency.

low vitamin D, almost every study have more serious complications for most illnesses. So I think if you go through the basics of immune support, then those can be easy things to start with. And other than that, I mean, rest. Like the basic stuff that grandma used to say, right? It's like, get some fluids, have your bone broth, have your chicken soup, have your water, take it easy. That's usually all that you really need to do.

and then just support your immune system and make sure when you're sick, please don't go doing strenuous exercise. That's not the time to do it. Don't eat a lot of sugar. Give your body the best nutrition that you possibly can so it doesn't have to deal with the chemicals and the preservatives while being sick too.

Lendo (18:19.47)
What does sugar do when, especially for a pediatric or young child, are they exposed to that much sugar or like, or is it just a natural sugar in the food sources as well? Like where is it, where are they getting exposed to sugar primarily at these early stages and how is it affecting them specifically, if I may ask?

joel (18:40.379)
So we're getting way too much sugar. I mean, most kids get more sugar in the first few years than we should get in our whole lives. And we're getting more than most adults ever did. So I'm not against, like sugar in and of itself is not bad. I mean, we need sugar for our body. So sugar is not the bad part. It's the sugar that we're getting and the amount that we're getting in general that's the problem. We're getting the processed sugars, not the natural sugars. And we're getting many, many grams instead of a couple of grams. We're getting tons. We're eating a lot of.

snacks and sugary foods and there's sugar in all of our meals and so you get way too much and just like almost anything if you have too much of anything then it becomes a problem and it overloads your pancreas and you know there are so many things that that come from from sugar overload and diabetes and you know other other things we have to get into all the specifics but the reality is that if you were eating sugar at home especially then we want to try to use natural sources like honey or maple syrup or coconut like these are

better versions of sugars. I'm not concerned if someone's eating fruit and they're getting sugar in their fruit. But if you're pouring a cup of sugar into your cake, that's where you're going to run into the issues, I think.

Lendo (19:46.51)
Thank you for that. Now, a great segue into the next question there of the rise in chronic health conditions in children. When I was doing a little bit of reading, I saw particularly in Canada, it was, I mean, the numbers are ranging globally, but in Canada, I saw the number of upwards of 22 % of children between zero and 18 experience some form of chronic health disease.

And it's still primarily asthma that I saw on top, but maybe obesity will be another one. I saw this lepidemia in there, which is basically obesity, if I'm not mistaken. But yeah, what is causing this rise? And of course it probably has to do with what we're eating, but please can you expand on what is causing this problem or what we can do about it?

joel (20:32.315)
Yeah. So first I would say, I would definitely agree. I mean, the rates of chronic disease are skyrocketing and it depends what study you look at, but I've seen anywhere from like 40 to 50 % of kids at this point have some sort of chronic condition. And the ones that you said, yeah, are very common. So allergies, asthma, ADHD, mental health concerns, autoimmune conditions, autism. I mean, there are just so many conditions that are going up and up and up. So it depends what you include when you call it chronic disease, but yeah, it's it's it, whatever the number is, it's way too high.

I think we can all agree that it doesn't really make any difference. It's just too high. So what is contributing to this? We don't know. I mean, that's the problem, right? We have theories and we can talk about that. But I'm very frustrated as a parent of a pediatrician that this is not like headline news and we're not doing, you know, spending billions of dollars of research to figure out like here are the top reasons why this is happening. And we don't really know. To me, I feel like the biggest contributors are the crappy food that we eat.

Lendo (21:01.838)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.

joel (21:29.627)
and too many toxins that we're exposed to. So I think that the food that we're getting, even in the best sense, oftentimes is not that great. There are chemicals sprayed on it. It's mass produced. They don't have the nutrients that they used to have because they're mass produced. They're not local. So they're being shipped all across the world before you eat it and they're losing some of their nutrient density. So that's one big problem. So we're not getting enough good in, and then we're getting too much bad in. So too many chemicals, whether that's in the food or just everything else in our air, in the water.

in their homes, whatever we're sprayed in, everything has chemicals these days, there's so many. And our bodies, our kids' bodies especially, just can't handle that load, I think. And at some point it just overflows and it's too much and it expresses itself in different ways depending on your genetics and your environment. So for some people that's diabetes, for other people that's autism, for other people that's an autoimmune condition, whatever.

Lendo (22:15.246)
Yeah.

joel (22:25.051)
rheumatoid arthritis. It could be all sorts of expressions, but I think that they're all different expressions of the same pathway. In general, of course there are conditions that are just genetic and there are other things out there, but I think in general this continual increase is much more environment than it is genetics.

Lendo (22:41.678)
Mm -hmm. You know, it's almost look at it as the plight of developed nations where I was speaking with one of my friends who's from China and he's explained to me how even for them, obesity is also starting to become a problem the more industrialized and developed they become. And so it's almost like just a gift and a curse almost of our societies today, really.

joel (23:07.195)
Yeah, I agree totally because you know sometimes the the criticism of some of the stuff that I say and I totally agree with it is if you look back in time I mean we're not like we're doing everything bad right people used to live till 40 so we definitely live longer so some of the stuff that we're doing is good there's no question but we're also seeing life expectancy go down again and we're seeing chronic disease rates rise so it comes back to balance right there are some things that we're doing better I mean we have great medicine and medications and that's great we have

sanitation, we have more access to calories and food. So that's all good, but we also have a world of convenience and excess. And so that brings other problems. And so we have to recalibrate, I think, at this point, seeing where we are and seeing that like, okay, well, we don't throw away all the modern medicine because we are much farther along in terms of infections and things like that. But we're seeing this rise in chronic disease and other conditions that we didn't have before. So the

Lendo (23:45.486)
Mm -hmm.

joel (24:03.963)
probably the better place for our health is somewhere in the middle. And we can keep some of this stuff, but move backwards in some of these other things and try to figure out, well, what's going on so we can move forward so our kids can be healthier. So yeah, I agree. I mean, there's something to be said about this modern society that there are some issues with the direction that we've gone with things. And so I am a big fan of taking stock of where we are and not being too arrogant and saying like, okay, yeah, we're good at some things, but maybe not everything. And so maybe there are some things we can.

Lendo (24:07.534)
Mm -hmm.

Lendo (24:32.302)
Mm -hmm.

joel (24:33.627)
Maybe some things our parents were doing better than we were doing, or there's some middle ground there.

Lendo (24:38.798)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And the other one is, I don't know if it dwells so much on the realm of theory, but we're starting to learn more about forever chemicals and their prevalence in society. And it seems to be a part regulatory issue, education and informing people about the presence of these things and how prevalent they are around us. But that was one that was very interesting because it also, they also lead to so many, to the rise of chronic.

condition or do it sort of disassociation in between these chemicals and the prevalence of chronic conditions and I wanted to know if you had any knowledge around forever chemicals or just anything you can teach us about that.

joel (25:18.683)
Yeah, so I agree. I mean, I think it's, again, there's just so many chemicals. And so it's so hard to keep up, right? I think that different ones get bad raps at certain times or they get more press, which is good. But the problem with all these chemicals and these companies is that they don't have to prove so much that they're safe. We have to prove, you know, after the fact, look, this is causing problems.

Lendo (25:24.942)
I'm sorry.

joel (25:42.651)
You guys can't do this. And then you fight them in the courts for like 20 years and then finally you win and then they're onto the next, they're onto the next chemical anyways. They've switched it. So it's like, yeah, you got glyphosate, right? And the weed killers, then you have the BPA and then forever chemicals or the PFAS. So yeah, I think it's a big problem. I mean, just by the name, you know, they're very strong chemicals, very strong bonds are very hard to break down. They live for, they don't get broken down for a very, very long time. So these are things that are quite common.

Lendo (25:48.238)
joel (26:10.042)
these days, and especially in like Teflon, no stick pans, oils and other products. So they're around and they're around because of those properties, right? They're around because they're water resistant and they're strong and things don't stick to them that well. So they have some good properties and they were originally made for like, you know, military, Navy, army, that kind of thing. But they've been used for other purposes. But how does that affect our health? I mean, the more that we look into these things, the more that we realize

Lendo (26:20.27)
Yeah.

joel (26:38.555)
how much of a problem they are. And that doesn't really take a rocket scientist to say if you get some forever chemicals in your body, then they're not going anywhere. It's probably not meant to be there. And so your body has to deal with that. And the more that builds up, I'm sure it's a problem. I mean, I would not doubt that at this point. And then you add that every other chemical. And then all the other chemicals we don't even know about. We just know about the ones we hear about. We know about the ones that get a PR team behind them. That's what we know. And there are thousands of other chemicals.

Lendo (26:49.998)
Yeah.

Lendo (26:58.798)
Literally.

joel (27:06.491)
And then there's like, there's the forever chemical, but it's like a little different. So then we don't get it. BPA. So this is BPA free, but then they have BP whatever other thing. And it's like, maybe. So we're always playing catch up. It's not easy. It's unfortunate.

Lendo (27:14.51)
Yeah.

Lendo (27:19.022)
No, it's not easy at all. Can you, throughout your social media, you sometimes express some of your frustration with, you know, medicine today, modern medicine. And I wanted to know if you could expand on that where, you know, even I have a bit of my frustrations too, but I'd like to know from your standpoint as a pediatrician, somebody who's been in the field, somebody who's had education and training and practice,

Can you tell us about some of your frustrations with medicine today as it's practice? And perhaps also some solutions that you foresee. Yeah.

joel (27:54.587)
Yeah.

joel (27:59.739)
Sure. Number one, I think medicine is very arrogant. I think that's a problem. I think we need to be more humble. I think that doctors have learned what they have learned and the world is changing so quickly and we need to be open to some of the other modalities that are out there. We need to be more open to working in teams. I think we need to be more open to understanding that medicine has been built on

Infections, you know, that's what it was really built for like figuring stuff out infections taking a finding a diagnosis treating it with a pill like that's what we're taught that's what we're trained in and there are other ways to go about things and and you're not gonna necessarily Solve most issues in a very short visit. You need a long time. You need to focus on You need to focus on the root cause you need to focus on people's lifestyle their diet their health. There's such a big portion of our health and the problems with our health that are

Lendo (28:44.494)
Mm -hmm.

joel (28:55.835)
outside of the modern medical paradigm. And I think that we need to recognize that, come together and work to help patients. Because again, doctors are not bad people, right? I don't like pediatricians. They're bad people. These are people that go into medicine to help kids. It's just that they're trained in a certain way, but the problems that we're seeing, a lot of them are not the stuff that we were really trained in. And we certainly weren't trained a lot in nutrition and exercise and sleep and these kinds of other things, but they're so vital and that needs to come back in. So I think we need a little bit more humility.

Lendo (29:08.206)
Mm -hmm.

joel (29:25.819)
and go back to the drawing boards and rethink how we run healthcare, I think it's not easy. I mean, it's a big system. It's obviously very complicated, but if we want people to be healthier, we have to prevent. If we want people to be healthier, we have to think long -term, and everything is very short -term in medicine, and everything is very much like quick visits, get you in, get you out, and that is not gonna get us to a better place long -term. So I don't know if there's any easy solutions, but I would say if it was up to me and there was a way

Lendo (29:33.742)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

joel (29:53.915)
to be done, then we would work in teams a little bit more. I think that would be a reasonable solution to it, just like you go to a dentist, right? And you go to the dentist and you don't even see your dentist for most of the visit, right? You go in there and there's the hygienist, they spend 30 minutes with you and they do all your cleaning and they talk to you. And then your dentist waltzes in and they, you know, boop, boop, boop, check your teeth, look at the x -ray, you're done, you're out of there. They work for 35 seconds. So I think that like, that is a model that could work because I don't think in any reasonable...

Any reasonable way in the short term that there's going to be enough doctors or there are enough doctors to spend an hour with each patient. Like that's not realistic. It's never going to happen. So I do think that if we worked in teams and you know, maybe we set up medicine in a way where you went in for your health visit and you had a half an hour with a nutritionist and 20 minutes with an exercise counselor and 15 minutes with the therapist, whatever it is, right? Like you go, you go there for two hours and then you get all your different practitioners and then you see your doctor. Like that to me is a system where you're really focused on.

Lendo (30:40.43)
Hmm hmm.

joel (30:51.227)
wellness and the doctor can be there to make sure that you don't have cancer or make sure that your ears are good or whatever it is. Because that's what they're trained in. I mean, we're not really trained in the other stuff. We don't have to learn it all. But that to me is a better system, but maybe not reasonable in the current climate. So I think that's something that could potentially be a way to move forward in the future or maybe using technology a little bit more could be helpful. I don't know. But we're not going in the right direction at the moment, that's for sure.

Lendo (30:58.574)
Mm -hmm.

Lendo (31:20.526)
Yeah, yeah. You know, I've seen one example of what you're talking about being implemented at a rather small scale. And for us, it was the utilization of paramedics in the non -emergent settings as an extent of the physician. So we had this program in Calgary with community care paramedics. And with this one here, it'll be the paramedics working in conjunction with the doctor. They establish a plan for said patient, but when the...

patient is being managed, is being managed from home by these paramedics. And instead of going in the house 20 minutes, bang, bang, boom, out of there, it's now sit there with them for the hour and deliver the medication, go get prescriptions and do so much. But that was one way of meeting, I mean, working, you know, bringing these two different teams together with different set of skills. And it was really, really helpful. And there's another place, I forgot my other example, but

It does have a lot of benefits. The other thing that it made me think about actually I remember now is when I would go for my physical, I'll get assessed by my family physician. And in my mind I'm like, well, yeah, I could probably use to go see, I'd like you to refer me to certain specialists in certain areas where he may not be a specialist in because their assessments are different. The way of approaching me are different. The way of.

providing the suggestion that they're gonna provide are gonna be different. And especially around ADHD, for example, which was my case. But yeah, I felt like my physical was very much limited to, okay, here's a basic assessment and then some blood works and then, okay, everything is fine, goodbye. But that has not told me anything about what I'm putting in my body and that's very important for my condition. I haven't learned anything about sleep, which is very important to my condition.

And I just wanted to know if you had any thoughts to that comment of mine there.

joel (33:19.899)
Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think that's, that's at the end of the day, working in teams and talking through all of these issues is the way of the future in theory, how we're going to get there. I don't know. Maybe, maybe it's going to be through some individualized stuff at home and then working with practitioners, but there's no simple solution. I mean, healthcare is very complicated and it has to work for the masses and anything that takes a very long time per person, it doesn't really work for the masses in this kind of model. So we're going to need to rethink it and

rethink our health if we want to prioritize it. I mean, I think at this point, the reality, honestly, is you have to take your health into your own hands. And that's where I focus on things. I mean, yes, there are some things we could do at the macro, you know, governmental policy level. If you want to go fight in Congress or whatever, go for it. But most people are not going to do that. They're going to worry about their own health and their own family. And that to me is where I focus my attention at the moment, because I do feel like we have a lot of power. Parents have a lot of power. Families have a lot of power. And we can...

We can take health into our own hands. We can make our children as resilient as possible. There's nothing magical or it's not neuroscience or neurosurgery. It's just basic stuff that we can do. And if we focus on some of those things, we're going to be healthier. They're going to be healthier and we're going to give them the best chance to have a resilient long life. And that, and that is where we start. I think if we start doing that, if families start being more conscious one at a time, then we're going to force companies to be more mindful. It's going to be a.

Lendo (34:42.958)
Mm -hmm.

joel (34:44.443)
It's going to be a snowball effect. It's going to get bigger and more. But in the short term, medicine is not changing. Health care is not going to change, not in any major sense. So it's up to us to be mindful of what we purchase, what we eat, what we do, how we sleep, making sure we get... If we do those things, we're going to get a very far away in terms of our health.

Lendo (35:01.838)
Thank you for that answer. I really appreciate that. I wanted to ask you about some pediatric controversies and parenting concerns. And you said that there's some areas where your advice may differ from mainstream. Would you be able to give us some specific example of some of these things here?

joel (35:21.403)
Yeah. so let's see. So we talked about sleep training already. co -sleeping, I think it's a big one. co -sleeping. So having a child sleeping in the bed with you, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommendations, of course, are to sleep on your own space, on your back. And that's to minimize sudden infant death syndrome. But where I think that those recommendations fall a little bit short is in, living in the real world where most parents actually do co -sleep. I mean that, that based on research that I've ever seen is the most lied.

Lendo (35:27.95)
Mm -hmm.

joel (35:51.195)
about topic and pediatric visits of all topics. I think like I've seen some studies 70, 90 % of parents co -sleep and I think most people do, right? So I think that the better guidelines to me would be to inform parents of sudden infant death syndrome, inform them of what the information is that is the safest, but then also talk about, well, if you are going to co -sleep because so many people do, here's how you do it the safest. And we do know that there are things that you can do to really minimize your risk of sudden infant death syndrome because most...

or the majority of sudden death syndrome happens when parents are the influence. So drinking, drugs, sedative medication, and then the other big category would be if you're on a couch or like a very soft surface. So we should be aware that if we are gonna go to sleep, you know, you don't wanna do it on a couch or a soft surface like a movable chair, and you don't wanna do that certainly if you've been drinking at night or something like that, because that will increase your risk significantly. So that to me is one big area where...

I think that their guidelines fall a little bit short and don't necessarily discuss what people are actually doing. So that's kind of one. Another big one could be screen time. American Academy of Pediatrics says zero screen time before two, which is great if you can do it. But in modern world, everybody's on their screens all the time. And I get parents sometimes that are worried. They're like, I had the TV on in the background and my kid was watching it. And now I'm super worried that I'm ruining their brain. And I don't want parents to be stressed about that.

Lendo (37:00.686)
Yeah.

joel (37:18.555)
I think that we don't want to give them a lot of screen time when they're little, but just because they look at a screen, it's not going to turn their brain too much. To me, the issue with screen time is just what they're not doing. So if you're plopping them in front of the screen and they're not getting exercise, you're not spending time with them, you're not reading with them, you're not teaching them, you're not exercising, like that's the problem with screens is what we're not doing. If you watch five minutes of a movie on a plane or you have to go to the bathroom and you pop them in front of something for a couple of minutes instead of them having a tantrum, that's...

to me is not worse. You can definitely learn things on a screen. I don't think that's the end of the world. I just think that we know that learning happens better in person. We can teach somebody better with an active conversation, but you can still learn on a screen. It's just not as good. But if you need a break or you need them to do something or they just happen to catch a screen, I don't think parents should be worried about that. I think that that's not realistic. We just minimize screens as much as possible for the first couple of years, I think is reasonable.

Lendo (37:49.006)
Mm -hmm.

Lendo (38:16.526)
Absolutely. Another area that seems to have some degree of controversy nowadays at least seems to be circumcision. What can you tell us about circumcision from your perspective and how parents should approach that question today?

joel (38:28.923)
Thank you.

joel (38:38.523)
Yeah, so the trend is moving away from circumcision. So it used to be that the majority of people, you know, boys were circumcised and now it's still the majority, but it's much lower. I think it's more like 60 -40 now. So the trend has been a little bit less and less over time in terms of circumcision. Medically speaking, there's not a lot of medical reasons to do it. So you...

You don't medically need to do a circumcision based on most of the research. There's a little bit decreased risk of a urine infection, but it's really slight, a little bit decrease of risk of just general skin infection. So there are potentially some medical reasons, but not enough to really recommend to do it for that reason. So to me, that again goes down to personal choice, whether you're doing it for a religious reason, whether you want to do it because that's the way that your dad has been. So you want it to be similar to them. You just want to do it or...

So I just tell parents, you know, it's kind of up to you and if you want to do it I think that's totally fine and reasonable and if you don't that's totally fine and reasonable there's gonna be lots of adults with both at this point. So it really I don't think it makes any difference or makes very minimal difference.

Lendo (39:45.902)
One of the things that I heard before, for example, in person, I don't think it should be too much of a significant factor, but it's, let's say the child may look at themselves differently if they're not circumcised and their father is circumcised. And I don't know if there's any validity to that or what are your thoughts on that if you've heard that?

joel (40:09.211)
Yeah, I think that's a big reason is that, you know, what dad does, they want that for their own child. Same for me as for them. So that goes back a lot of times it's cultural or religious, but not always. So I think that again, like it's still more prevalent. It's still more common to be cerebralized than not, but the trend has been slowly decreasing over time. So it's more, it's getting closer to 50 -50 at this point. So at the end of the day, it's going to be, you know, half the people do, half the people don't.

Lendo (40:15.278)
Mm -hmm.

joel (40:38.779)
decide if you want to or not. But medically speaking, there's not a medical recommendation to do it. It's just more of a, you can do it if you want to kind of thing.

Lendo (40:47.022)
Okay, cultural thing, thank you for that. Now, I wanted to segue a little bit into the conversation of social media and particularly fear mongering that occur for parents on social media. Are we talking about again, trying to meet unachievable, perfect standards here? What is that fear mongering component about when it comes to social media?

joel (41:09.851)
Yeah, I think that's part of it. And also with social media, there's attention. Like grabbing attention is the most important thing. So you have to have a headline. Whether it's the news or social media, there's a lot of fear -based media or posts these days to get your attention. So the headline, the story might have nothing to really do with the story, or you're going to do a catchy headline about, your kid's going to die if they don't do these things, or this is horrible. It's coming when really it's just normal.

that we see every year. So there's a lot of attention grabbing, a lot of fear mongering around topics which you don't necessarily need to be fearful of. And I always go back to, it is good to be informed. There's a difference. There's a difference to be informed of what's going on in the world, what's happening in your society or in your area, because sometimes there is good things to know. But the majority of what we see online, you don't need to be afraid of it. You don't even need to know about most of it. And so I think that we are in this constant stream of fear and division.

and anger and we're scrolling and we're seeing all these things trying to catch our attention and it makes you very nervous and stressed and parenting is stressful enough, you don't need extra. So I think we need to be very mindful that this is affecting us and affecting our mental health and try to minimize that stress as much as possible. And maybe, you know, if you are finding yourself scrolling a lot or feeling stressed out, then maybe you curate your feet a little bit better, get rid of some things, put in more, you know, puppies and...

jokes and inspirational quotes and whatever is that you like, you can curate your feed to have more of those kind of people and less and fewer of the crazy division, angry, hateful things that you might see. So you have a choice on your social media.

Lendo (42:34.318)
Mm -hmm.

Lendo (42:49.55)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay, one of the big areas where I just never fully got a consensus about was you don't see it as much today as you used to before, but children and face mask and whether we're wearing it or they're wearing it and particularly because it's how children learn to communicate with the facial expression. And that's where I see most of the arguments going where

joel (43:05.339)
Mm -hmm.

Lendo (43:16.974)
in peace with their ability to learn how to communicate because a lot of their communication is based on nonverbal cues, but that's integral to the early stages of development as well. And so I wanted to know if there's any research or anything like that that can help us just understand what's the better practice to do when it comes to that.

joel (43:42.331)
Yeah, I think most of the research at this point has shown that that practice did affect academics to some degree. It did affect reading and learning to some degree. I mean, you can certainly learn without seeing a mouth. I mean, people do. You know, you can learn to communicate. People are blind and they learn to communicate. So, you know, it's possible to do it. But I think we're meant to see faces and the reality of the positives and the negatives to me in terms of wearing a mask or.

Lendo (43:56.046)
Mm -hmm.

joel (44:08.923)
are pretty heavily on the negative in terms of that. I think everyone should do what they want to do and if it makes you feel comfortable, go for it. But I don't think there's a ton of benefit for a kid to wear a mask, especially like a surgical mask. They don't protect you from most of the things that you're hoping to protect them from anyways, or they don't do a great job. And so, you know, in the short term, if there's something that you're very concerned about, then, you know, go for it if you want to. But to me, I've never been a huge fan of it. They weren't built for viruses. You know, they're built more for...

for surgery and for protecting from bacteria and from spit and things like that. And you're also meant to wear them like once and throw them away as opposed to all the time. And, you know, kids are running around, they're playing, they're getting in the dirt. I mean, they're not keeping them clean in general. So they're not doing that anyway. So I don't think that's a good long -term solution for anything. I mean, we've got to get sick anyways every now and again. So to me, I was never a huge fan of that. And certainly, yes, I think it could affect their speaking and their learning a little bit.

Lendo (44:48.398)
yeah.

joel (45:04.251)
I would personally avoid it unless you have a good reason to wear it, which some people do.

Lendo (45:11.63)
Thank you for that answer, I really appreciate that. Now, I wanted to segue again, but when you said the realities of modern corporate America and what it means for our food and medicine, we've been touching bases, well, we've kind of been dabbling around this topic here for a little bit throughout the show here so far, but I wanted to know if you could dive deeper on what, yeah, corporate America and what it means for our food and medicine and where the trends are going.

joel (45:41.787)
Yeah, I think in a very, if you want to really just step back and look back at corporate America and big companies, the simplest way that I look at it is a company is made to make money, right? They're not here for your health. They're here to make more money. And their goal, like the CEO's goal is to make more money this quarter than last quarter. The company's job is to make more money this quarter than last quarter. And they don't really care how they get there. That's their job. And their job is not to do the right thing or their job is not to do

Lendo (45:54.606)
Yeah.

joel (46:11.163)
what's best for your health, it's to make the most money possible to make their shareholders happy. That's what they're supposed to do. So for us to think anything other than that is silly. It's silly on us. It's not on them to do the thing that's the healthiest. Their role is to make money. So we have to understand that and build society around that understanding what a corporation is going to do. And when you talk about food, they're not going to do the thing that's the healthiest. They're going to do the thing that's going to make them the most money. And so...

They're mass producing, they're doing things that are cheaper, they're finding ways to get the food to you at a cheaper pace, which means maybe they're spraying in more chemicals or not making it the right way or whatever it is. There's so many things that they do to get all this food, but they're not doing it in a way that is for your health. They're doing it in a way that's most convenient and cheapest. And that is true for most things in corporate America. And it doesn't mean that every business is bad or every person at business is bad. It's just that...

Lendo (46:52.462)
Mm -hmm.

joel (47:08.091)
That's what they do. And so if we think they're going to care about our health and then that we're just being silly, I think they're not like, there's still people. So I don't think that a lot of times they're like actively trying to harm you. I mean, every once in a while, maybe, but not in general, right? I think in general, they're trying to do the best product for the cheapest, but these companies are all getting so big now that it's just beyond controlling them at this point. Like they're just controlling society and they just do whatever they want and they do whatever makes them the most money.

Lendo (47:24.398)
Mm -hmm.

Lendo (47:36.718)
And that's where you're saying we need to take our health back into our own hands. It's our responsibility at the end of the day. Yeah. And if you could dive also deeper into the concept of food as medicine itself, I really love that line.

joel (47:51.082)
Definitely. It really is. You should get your nutrients, what your body is actually built from, from your food. You can get a supplement, you can get a multivitamin, but nothing replaces food. We are built of what we eat, literally. And so if you want to heal yourself, then you have to give yourself the nourishing food that lets your body do what it's supposed to do, which is heal and rest and digest. And if you don't do that, then at some point we're all getting inflamed and we're all getting sick.

And that's just a part of what it is. Food is medicine. It's more medicine than any other kind of medicine. You can give yourself a million pills, but you want to go the farthest in general, it's going to be change up your diet, change up your lifestyle. That's going to get you the most bang for your buck. Sometimes you need a medicine. That is fine, but that's not going to get you healthy. That's just going to treat something. It's not going to get it to the root cause of what the problem is in the first place.

Lendo (48:42.513)
You know, I read something about how taking vitamin supplements is not as effective as people, it's not making as much of a difference as people may think. It was kind of like counterintuitive to how we see these things. And my thinking was sometimes we're taking supplements, but we're not doing the exercise or we're taking supplements, but we're not doing the changes in diet. So even if the supplements were to be any effective,

they end up just being counter, they're not being counterbalanced properly. I just wanted to know your thoughts on that.

joel (49:19.163)
Yeah, I think supplements could have a role, but you shouldn't think of them as a replacement. To me, it's like, you need to get your nutrients from your food. If you're deficient in something, if you want to boost something up, if you're sick, if you want to improve, then yeah, you can take some vitamins to kind of boost things up. But they don't replace food. They're not real food. They're just synthetic replacements of some of those vitamins. So it's not that you can't take vitamin D, but it's better to get it from the sun. It's not that you can't get vitamin C, and that can't help you, but it's better to get it from an orange. It's like,

Our bodies are meant to get real food, not to get a synthetic supplement. And so I'm not opposed to having supplements, but I don't think you should focus on that with your health. You can do that also. But to me, let's get to the basic root, which is food.

Lendo (50:02.598)
Thank you for that. Thank you for that. Last question for me. You have a smoothie recipe. And I just wanted to know if you could tell us more about Dr. Gator's smoothie. And yeah, I mean, we've touched base on some areas of it here, but yeah, please.

joel (50:20.251)
Sure, so in the first chapter of the book, Parenting at Your Child's Pace, one of the things that we mentioned earlier was I wanted to talk about health and the root or the foundations of our health. And when you go and you watch a daytime TV show, they all have their magical smoothie that cures everything. So I kind of wanted to make fun of that a little bit and play on that. And it's not a real smoothie, it's a metaphorical smoothie, which is the Dr. Gator smoothie. So I start with a big scoop of the seeds being stress.

environment, exercise, stress, environment and toxins, exercise, diet and sleep. And these are the foundations of our health and mix in there some like nature, vitamin D, getting outside, family, love, community, happy, healthy home. Like these are the things that really are the roots and the foundations of our health, like our environment, our toxins, our stress, the food.

That is what makes us healthy. There's no magical smooth that cures everything. I like smoothies and they're great and you can have smoothies all you want, but there is no carrot celery smooth that's going to cure all your diseases. What is going to help you is to get to your roots and your foundations and focus on the little things. And that's going to give you the most bang for your buck. And that's going to help you with basically everything.

Lendo (51:33.005)
As you speak, I know that was the last question, but obesity, I just wanted to ask you if you can just expand on the problem of obesity itself. Okay, yeah, it's the food we eat, maybe the level of activity with children today, is it the screen time? Like what is going on with obesity today and what's your advice for parents as well, if you can.

joel (51:56.603)
Yeah, I think obesity is complicated and not complicated. I mean, it's certainly complicated because there's many factors, but in the day it's too many calories coming in and not enough calories going out, not enough exercise, too much eating the wrong foods. Yes, genetics does play a role in terms of how you process your food, but at the end of the day, you need to take those calories in. And just like you said, the food is not great that we're eating. We're getting way more calories in general than we really ever need. And we're not moving.

like we ever used to. I mean, we're sitting, we're watching screens, we're in cars, we're barely walking, we're barely moving for most kids. And so that it's just a buildup. It's a buildup over time. You eat a lot of food and with a lot of calories and maybe not the best calories and you don't process them as well. And you don't move as much. And it's an equation. I mean, whatever it is for you, that's your equation. If you take in more than you process out, then you're going to gain weight. And eventually that leads to overweight and obesity.

Lendo (52:52.59)
Thank you so much for that. Any final words, also where people can find your work and what's next for you here. Your book is releasing on August 6th. Please feel free to give it an additional shameless plug. But yeah, any additional words before we let you go here.

joel (53:01.819)
Mm -hmm.

joel (53:09.211)
Sure, well thanks for having me on. Yeah, the book is called Parenting at Your Child's Pace. It's available now everywhere. You can get books, or sold, it's pre -order right now. It comes available August 6th, like I said. And you can get it from Amazon everywhere, or you can go to the website, parentingatyourchildspace .com, grab it from there, or you can go to my Instagram, at Dr. Joel Gator, and grab it from there. And in terms of final words, I just want to remind parents that we can do it. Everybody feels like they can't do it, but it's in you.

to be able to do it and nobody totally feels ready, but you figure it out as you go and we do figure it out. So, trust in your inner parenting gut and you will figure it out as you go.

Lendo (53:49.294)
Thank you very much. Thank you for that. Well, here you have it folks. Thank you for listening. We'll certainly see you on the next one on the Super Daddy Club podcast. Thank you.

Beautiful.