The Root of The Matter

Empowering Family Wellness: Personalized Health, Nutrition, and Natural Oral Care with Katie Wells

• Dr. Rachaele Carver, D.M.D. Board-Certified, Biologic, Naturopathic Dentist • Season 2 • Episode 19

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Join us as we sit down with Katie Wells, the charismatic founder of Wellness Mama, to unpack her transformative health journey. Driven by the shocking realization that chronic diseases might shorten the life expectancy of the next generation, Katie shares how her experiences, including her own battle with Hashimoto's disease, led her to explore the profound impacts of diet and lifestyle. Discover how she views the body as a unique "chemistry lab," advocating for personalized health approaches that move beyond conventional medical prescriptions.

Our conversation ventures into the art of balancing motherhood with professional ambitions, offering practical strategies for moms to tackle the chaos of daily life. Katie shares her insights on implementing lifestyle changes one step at a time and the importance of involving family members in decision-making. By drawing parallels between managing a household and running a business, she reveals how intentional management and systems can alleviate stress, leading to a more fulfilling life.

In this enlightening episode, we also explore the significance of empowering children and promoting family wellness through independence and responsibility. Katie discusses the intricate connection between oral health and overall wellness, emphasizing the body's natural healing processes. From the benefits of nutrient-dense foods and spending time outdoors to the creation of her https://wellnesse.com/ line of natural oral care products, Katie offers invaluable guidance for families seeking to enhance their well-being.

To learn more about holistic dentistry, check out Dr. Carver's website:

http://carverfamilydentistry.com

To contact Dr. Carver directly, email her at drcarver@carverfamilydentistry.com.

Want to talk with someone at Dr. Carver's office?  Call her practice: 413-663-7372

Reverse Gum Disease In 6 Weeks! With Dr. Rachaele Carver Online Course!

Learn more about here: https://reversegumdiseaseinsixweeks.info/optinpage




Disclaimer: This podcast is for educational purposes only. Information discussed is not intended for diagnosis, curing, or prevention of any disease and is not intended to replace advice given by a licensed healthcare practitioner. Before using any products mentioned or attempting methods discussed, please speak with a licensed healthcare provider. This podcast disclaims responsibility from any possible adverse reactions associated with products or methods discussed. Opinions from guests are their own, and this podcast does not condone or endorse opinions made by guests. We do not provide guarantees about the guests' qualifications or credibility. This podcast and its guests may have direct or indirect financial interests associated with products mentioned.

Dr. Carver:

Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Root of the Matter. I'm your host, dr Rachel Carver, and I am very excited today to have somebody I've been following for probably over 10 years and I was very excited. She's a very busy lady. This is Katie Wells, who is founder of Wellness Mama and creator of wellnesscom. So we'll give you all those good links at the end and there's so much more to her, but you get to go to her website after this and just look at all the amazing content.

Dr. Carver:

She was actually named one of the top 100 most influential people in health and wellness, so that's quite an accolade. That's awesome Congratulations and one of the reasons I wanted Katie on. She's a big proponent in oral health. She has some great products. She has tons of blogs about how she was able to reverse some decay. She's also a mom of six, so one thing I'm really hoping that she's going to share with us today is how does she make it all work? So many of us know we should eat this and we should exercise and we should, but we have crazy busy lives. So how can somebody with six children run this amazing business and do all the we actually had to? This is like our third attempt because she's so busy. She's also a doula. I don't know how you have time to help with that, with all the other stuff you're doing. But welcome, katie, and tell us a little bit about your story and how you got into health and wellness to begin with.

Katie Wells:

Oh, thank you so much for having me and yes, it's been quite the ride to finally get to have this conversation. I'm glad we finally get to connect and I'll give you the short version and then elaborate on any direction. That's helpful. But basically, when my first son was born, two things lined up perfectly that led to this journey that's now become Wellness Mama. The first was that at his six-week follow-up appointment, I was sitting in the doctor's office and I was waiting for the doctor, as one often does. And I read and I believe it was Time Magazine that for the first time in two centuries, the current generation of American children would have a shorter life expectancy than their parents. And this article went on to detail the rise of chronic disease that we're seeing play out, of course, in society the rise in heart disease and cancers and autoimmunity and diabetes. And just holding this perfect baby, I decided in that moment that wasn't what I wanted for him or for any child, that our children deserved better, and I had no idea how. But I wanted to be part of helping to reverse that trend.

Katie Wells:

So, with the background in journalism, I started turning to the research side and, serendipitously, at the same time, I was starting to experience some strange health symptoms which ended up becoming quite the journey of its own, through many doctors and specialists, being told at first that my labs were normal and those are all normal postpartum things. At first my labs were normal and those are all normal postpartum things, and it taking many years and many doctors to finally get the word Hashimoto's given to me, and then many years beyond that to release that word and no longer have it. But those two things lined up perfectly, both the motivation of my own health struggles and understanding what our kids' generation is going to face. And looking back. It's funny because until I started researching it I had never considered really that our diet and our lifestyle impacted us beyond the things we hear about in the mainstream the calories and macros and if you gain weight or not. And it was like I discovered this whole additional level of research in this whole new world that it's funny to think now. I had never considered I think of a quote from my friend JJ that our body is not a bank account, it's a chemistry lab and I just started to finally understand the chemistry of that.

Katie Wells:

And now we even have layers beyond that of understanding genetics and epigenetics and how those factors come into play, and I think that's been one of my lessons the last few years especially is that health really is so individual and often in the medical world you hear things get dismissed if they're not double-blind, placebo-controlled studies. But what I've realized is if you're doing an n of one study and the n is you, that's actually the most valuable research you can ever do, and I believe now that every doctor and expert and practitioner out there, they have found, hopefully, what works for them and we can something. There's always something to learn from every single person we meet, but the important thing to learn is the framework and the method, not the exact prescriptive plan, because it's so different for each of us. But I think when we can gain that little bit of insight from everything we're exposed to and do the work of becoming our own end of one study, that's where the magic happens.

Dr. Carver:

I absolutely love that you just said this was right before this, I was filming my week one for my new course of how to reverse gum disease and I said exactly that right, we're going to give a framework of diet and all these habits, but I'm trying to train everybody with this podcast, too is to create the awareness, is to create something where you feel like you can be your own best doctor, because, as you said, nobody knows your body like you do, right, and we're always trying to pigeonhole people into this specific hole. You have these symptoms, so you have that. We're going to label you with this, or you don't fit those symptoms, so that can't be happening to you. Right, and unfortunately, that's the framework of the conventional medical system today. So that's I love how you said that we have to. Yeah, we get the framework, we can get all the information, but then you have to be your own little chemistry lab, right? You have to experiment on yourself, figuring out what works best for you. And I think that's especially tricky when we talk about diet, right, because we have there's the paleo and the keto and the carnivore, and there's some people who are just adamant about one way has to work for everybody. But we all know that that's not true and that can be challenging.

Dr. Carver:

When you have a family of my family's four, you have a family of eight, right, and that's why I was like one of my favorite things of Katie's those of you who are watching on YouTube my wellness mama cookbook. I think this is 10 years old. You can see I've got food stains all over it. All my little thing and we actually made one of our favorite recipes is her Mongolian beef. So I love. She's saying they love the chicken fajitas too. My kids love to go out to eat. When you're eating in a restaurant they're using bad oils, you don't know where the chicken's coming from, and my kids are super picky because they've grown up with a mom who's so on them about food all the time and all they want to do is eat the junky takeout food. So when I made your first time and it was and it's in a crock pot, so I love that for all those of us who are so busy, row it in the morning and boom, when you get home it's done and my kids love it. And even that, my younger daughter now decides she hates all beef but she loves Mongolian beef made with the coconut oils and everything, and it's actually very fast and easy to make too.

Dr. Carver:

So I've been following Katie for a very long time because she does such good work. So tell us how does it work? You obviously understand we're all a little different. When you have such a big family, how do you balance your working with a job and then being able to cook these healthy meals? Is it doing the prep work ahead of time? Like, maybe you can give us some pointers about how we can? Everything that we learn right in a podcast or reading or whatever, how can we more easily institute it into our family lives?

Katie Wells:

I love that question and also just to echo briefly something that you said. People are probably tired of hearing me say this on my podcast at this point, but anytime I get the chance, I remind people that at the end of the day, we are each our own primary health care providers and it sounds like you said something very similar in what you were recording, and I just think that's an important mindset shift to start from, because when we're in the driver's seat of our own health, then we have the ability to affect change in our own health. We have the ability to change the factors that are going to have the biggest ROI for us when it comes to our own health and, as moms, to our family's health, and until they're able to take that responsibility, we are their primary health care provider. And that doesn't mean we don't work with practitioners, who can be really important partners on that journey. But at the end of the day, that ownership has to stay with us in order for us to see positive change. And I think you just touched on what really is the impactful part of health changes, which is the application. How do you actually make the changes? Because, like you said, a lot of us know all the things we should be doing and we're shooting all over ourselves and then as moms, we feel guilty when we don't do all the things we know we should be doing. I think, as a little bit of an aside anytime in life we see the word should show up over and over. That's a great place to examine, because that's often telling us something where we have resistance or we have something inner going on that we can work on.

Katie Wells:

But I think the practicality side is an important point, especially for moms, because we're the ones often in the driver of all of actually implementing all of those changes and keeping up with the emotional labor of making sure those things happen. And I think there is a multi-prong approach to this. Like you said, we're not we're in no lack of information. We are certainly in the era where all information is available at our fingertips, to the point that I think that now becomes the difficult hurdle to overcome because we have so much information thrown at us all day long. I know for me in the beginning one thing that was really helpful was only letting myself focus on one thing at a time until that became a habit. I think often we can burn out and let go of everything when we try to do a complete life change overnight, and that's counterproductive long-term. So I would say, as you learn, make a list of all the things you eventually want to implement in your life, but only let yourself do one at a time that keeps the motivation strong, because then you have more things to look forward to that you're going to add in but you don't get overwhelmed in the short term.

Katie Wells:

I also think when we're talking about our family situation, getting our family involved in a way that lets them have choice as well is really important, because often the emotional exhaustion will come from if we feel like we're fighting not just all of the things we're facing in our environment, but all of the people in our environment in actually implementing those changes. So I think with kids it's important to trust that they are incredibly capable of understanding things and give them the respect of explaining and giving them education around it and, as much as possible, letting them be involved in the choice and moving in that direction. With spouses and partners. It's a little more complicated because they are adults and I know early on when I was learning this, my husband at the time was not on board with some of this stuff and I had to learn that he was an infinite autonomous being, just like my children were, and an adult, and all I could do was make the changes myself and respect his ability to his choice to do that or not. And over time, to his credit, he did come around on a lot of those things. But I think had I doubled down and made that the hill I was willing to die on, it would have probably taken him actually longer to get there on his own because it wouldn't have been his choice. And then I think we get to the point of the practical implementation, and moms, I believe, are some of the busiest people on the planet. I also believe that moms are an absolute force of nature with incredible power to reverse those trends that I talked about in the beginning, because we control the large majority of purchasing power, we also are the ones hands-on making the meals and we're the ones educating the next generation. So we have tremendous power there. But our limited resource is our time, and so I know that's where many moms where the exhaustion happens or the overwhelm or the mom guilt. And so I think it's tart from coming from a place of doing the best you can with what you have was where you are, and not guilting yourself when that's not perfect, not letting perfect become the enemy of the good. But I think there's some strategies that can really help.

Katie Wells:

And about 10 years ago I got to a point where I probably almost had a nervous breakdown. I was so stressed with all the kids being young, with trying to run business, and I got to a point where I almost deleted Wellness Mama, because I was like this is not sustainable. I cannot continue with all of these plates in the air. Something's going to break and it's not going to be my family, so it's going to be work. And then I realized, wait a minute, work is not what's stressing me out. So why am I so stressed in all the stuff I'm doing at home but not in business? And I realized it was because I was running business with intention, with systems, I had plans, I knew what the KPIs were, I knew what I was moving toward and I let those things happen on the schedule that I knew would work, rather than trying to do them all at one time, whereas at home I was trying to manage the emotional labor for eight people schedules, meals, sleep, everything in my head and so I had 90 open loops open at any given time and it was the mental load of it was actually where the exhaustion was coming from, not the getting things done. Actually getting things done felt fulfilling and that was actually a source of joy. And so I learned to take some of the things I had learned in business and to apply them to my home life and start in a sense, not rigidly, but running my house like I would run a business, becoming the CEO of the home and implementing systems that helped solve for that variable of less mental load and less stress. And that's things like we talked about.

Katie Wells:

There's a lot of genetic difference among people, but there also are a lot of similarities in the human animal. We have basic needs for enough key nutrients, protein. We have needs for sunlight, for rest, for hydration. So I could build from the things I knew all of us would need and then specialize based on each child or each person and what they specifically needed. So I implemented a strategy of batch cooking. You mentioned the Mongolian beef. I do a lot of slow cooker meals or instant pot meals, things where I can set it and forget it, but it was really the planning aspect that reduced my mental stress and allowed me to be much more productive in my work life and my home life and a lot less stress. I think, as moms, anytime, we can reduce that stress load at version of ourselves that has such positive ripples into the whole family, because I believe moms set the nervous system tone for the household. So it's not selfish to take care of yourself. It's not selfish to prioritize the things that are going to reduce your stress, because you show up better as a person, as a mom, as a partner, when you're able to do that.

Katie Wells:

And the cool thing was it really was simple strategy. So like batch cooking twice a week meant I was cooking way less the other days. It also meant that there was always protein pre-made, so if the kids got hungry I got less questions about what can I eat, can I have a snack? They always had high nutrient booze available that they could get, so that reduced it. When the kids were little, it was even little strategies like moving non-breakable dishes to a bottom cabinet so they could reach it, so they didn't have to ask me every time they needed water or a plate. It was things like creating just a simple schedule for the house and knowing when the laundry was going to get done. So it wasn't an open loop in my mind of when is the laundry going to get done. It was ordering little bead containers from Amazon and putting everybody's supplements in those with names on them and keeping them in a drawer in the kitchen so everybody could get their own supplements. I wasn't doing the emotional labor of that every day, I was doing it once a month, and so those little strategies over time freed up so much of my bandwidth.

Katie Wells:

And then I think another area, especially for moms, that's important to talk about is making sure our family also gets both the choice and the emotional responsibility for their own health, and very young kids obviously cannot take full responsibility for this, but I believe this is a slow and gradual handoff throughout their childhood. That can happen actually much earlier than we often think. We don't have to wait till our children are 18 and they're adults before they can have ownership and choice of their own health if they understand why they're doing those things. So one of my only sort of non-negotiable parenting rules is that I won't do anything for my kids once they're capable of doing it themselves Outside of things like I will braid my daughter's hair for fun, because I love spending time with them. But once they're capable of doing things, it no longer needs to be my emotional labor. It needs to be there so that they actually learn that responsibility and can feel the ownership and the fulfillment of having done those things which meant with six kids.

Katie Wells:

Once they were capable of doing their own laundry, that became no longer my responsibility, that became their responsibility. They have a kitchen system they actually created where they clean the kitchen every single day and a schedule. But who does what meal? They have their own sort of bidding economy and IOU system to make sure it happens. But that's no longer my emotional labor. I don't even remember the last time I did dishes, but I think it's like that mindset shift which comes from first respecting that they are infinite, autonomous humans and that they are incredibly capable, and not taking that emotional labor for them, and then also making sure we're moving as a family culture toward a common goal. Not I'm carrying everyone toward this goal and I'm responsible for it, but we're moving together as a team to this outcome that we want.

Dr. Carver:

This is amazing, and I hope everybody goes back and just listens to the last few minutes, because everything that you said was absolutely incredible. So it's not as simple as okay, just write out your meals for the week and do this and that. What I love, that you described and where I made the mistakes with my kids, was always trying to control, trying to control everything and not giving them that sense of choice. And over the years I've learned that, through lots of therapy and all sorts of stuff, is just like you said these children are their own autonomous beings and our role is to help them become those independent beings, right, and to know that they have. Just like we're saying, you have to be your own best doctor. You have to be so giving them that confidence, right, that they develop that confidence when you have confidence in them, right, when they know that they have a choice, and I think this is so important.

Dr. Carver:

When you also said about the mom's nervous system, I see this all the time and I kept seeing I have a lot of moms who consider themselves more holistic and they want to come and they just don't understand why their kids have so much, so many cavities and what's going on and you see the moms and their stress level and I was like the kid is totally because, you're right, we set that emotional nervous system tone from day one. So, me being more type A and I was like whoa. I see now that my response is creating the stress in the children or it's causing nervous system dysregulation and, as we know, when that nervous system dysregulated you could feed your kids the healthiest meals on the planet but if they can't digest it, if they're in that sympathetic nervous system all the time, it doesn't matter what you feed them. So this is what I've realized over the last 13 years too is really is like we gotta start at that nervous system and as a mom, like you said, it is from day one, just like the whole cuddling and that snuggling and the touch. That's what makes kids feel secure and safe. And then again, how stressed we are.

Dr. Carver:

Kids are incredibly intuitive beings, absolutely incredible, and they you don't have to say anything, they can sense. My kids are both empaths too, especially my older daughter, and I don't even have to say anything. She knows what I'm thinking and feeling and even when I'm trying to hide it from her, if I'm disappointed or something, I don't even have to say anything. She already knows that because she can feel it and I'm like so I think that's a really important point that I want people to take away with is that we always, as moms, with that mom guilt, we're always trying to take care of them, but we are not doing a good job if we don't take care of them. So it is not selfish to take care of ourselves and to get our own nervous systems as balanced as possible. So I think that's amazing.

Dr. Carver:

And then I love what you said about giving them that responsibility. We have chore charts in our house and that's what I, like you said too, is okay. On Tuesdays, my older daughter does the laundry right, thursdays, my younger daughter and having them. This is your day, and so you cannot no longer complain if the other day my daughter was yelling at me because she couldn't find her soccer jersey and it was my fault because I like to go in there and clean their rooms, and I said that wasn't my responsibility. You've got to know, but I'm not as good as you are and it just gives me some more power to be like all right, I got to stick to it. They're not getting any younger, they only have a few more years left in high school. So I love what you say that because I think that's really true too.

Dr. Carver:

Why we get so stressed out is it does it comes from the emotional and the overthinking. We're all busy, so it's not necessarily the busyness and how much we have to accomplish, but it's the way we're thinking about that stuff. So that's so awesome when you take that mental, emotional kind of stress off it to have the family work as a team. That's the other thing. We know that one major part of health is community, right, the more community that we have, the healthier we are. I've been telling my kids a lot it's not all about money, certainly doesn't make you happy, it's helpful, it can create some comfort, but it's really that connection with others and that's what I've been trying to teach my kids. It's the quality of relationships that you make with people. I think is really what underlies happiness.

Dr. Carver:

And it's funny because I just heard a Mel Robbins podcast and she was saying the same thing. I was like, ah, I knew it. Yes, and again, that whole mental. When we're in our own mental space, we don't have the capacity to create those relationships. So this is absolutely amazing and again, everybody re-listened to everything she said because it was incredibly valuable. So let's switch gears a little bit and talk about some more health stuff. So you have your own kind of wellness company where you have some a lot of nice products there, and tell me the story about how you I think it was like a blog post that you talked about reversing a cavity and it got so much, so many followers and so many people asking questions. So maybe tell us a little bit about how you understand oral health to be related to diet, nutrition and all the other good stuff.

Katie Wells:

Absolutely, and just to build on what you said too, before I go into oral health, I think you're so right. Community my friend Lauren says humans are nutrients, and I think we're all a little bit deficient in that one. And that's actually what, now that we have AI analyzing blue zone data, everybody wants to say it's what they eat, it's they drink red wine or not, it's that they're vegetarian, which they're not. What actually stands out as the strongest correlation is they have a really solid community, and I think if we do nothing else, if we focus on that, that alone can be the most impactful change for our health. And then on the nervous system side, we know that babies in the first seven years of life don't nervous system regulate on their own. They are entirely co-regulated to their caregivers, and so actually one of the biggest gifts we can give our children is to be in our own nervous systems, calm and regulated, and thankfully there are so many resources for that now, as well as modeling. I think it's oversaid, but what we tell our kids they pay a little bit of attention to. Maybe, if they're teenagers, almost no attention to, but they do pay attention to what we do, and so I've seen this play out over time for me a lot. I used to try to encourage them to take music lessons and then I realized, oh wait, this is because I actually wish I had done this. And so I took voice lessons and then, ironically, they became interested in it when I was doing it. Same with different workouts I've done. They became interested when I started doing it. And so I think just those little mindset shifts can make a big difference.

Katie Wells:

And then you just touched on one of my favorite pet research topics, which is the connection of oral health to the health of the entire body, and I know you've talked about this quite a bit, but I feel like this is a whole other world that is not nearly enough part of the mainstream understanding. We understand that when we break a bone it can heal. We understand that when we get a cut it can heal, but for some reason we think that the mouth is entirely separate. And I certainly did for a long time. And starting to research that world was absolutely fascinating. So I first dove into work like Dr Weston, a Price which thankfully now I know lots of people talk about, but in his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, seeing for the first time that not only does oral health, of course, impact cavities that we would understand but there's things going on in our body with fat-soluble vitamins, with minerals, that affect the development of the jaw, which, if teeth are overcrowded, that can also impact cavities. But this also affects our airways. This affects how we function and affects nervous system health, because if we have an overly tight jaw and we're clenching, that's a cortisol response and just how drastically our oral health is connected to every other area of the body. And one example I give to help people understand this is if someone has a heart condition, they will often be given antibiotics when they have dental work because of that connection to the whole body and the higher potential for there being a problem if they already have a heart condition. We know that we can take medications that we just put under our tongue and they can actually get into our bloodstream more quickly. So some medications are given that way on purpose. Yet we seem to not think about that when we're talking about what we put in our mouth, the products we use and things like that.

Katie Wells:

I also was fascinated to learn that our oral microbiome is kind of just as important as our gut microbiome. They're very connected but most people don't think about the oral microbiome environment and how. If we have oral health problems, there's usually a pathogenic bacteria, and it can be a kind of in a couple directions. One can be in the strep mutans family, which is where we see cavities, but there's also a family of bacteria linked to gingivitis, and because they're both pathogenic, we don't typically see them both at the same time. But either one can indicate that we have non-optimal oral microbiome things going on or that our good bacteria are struggling. So thankfully, now we all are understanding gut health a lot more.

Katie Wells:

I know a lot of people are focused on making sure that they don't have leaky gut, on taking probiotics that actually work, of avoiding the things that are going to harm the gut, and I feel like it's time for the conversation about that with the oral microbiome as well, because a lot of the things we're told to do actually can be harmful to the oral microbiome. We think we're doing something good when we're using mouthwash to kill the bacteria, but we're also wiping out our good bacteria, which diminishes our ability to produce nitric oxide, which is important for so many things beyond even just what we think of when it comes to exercise. But that's connected to neurotransmitters. That's connected to our energy level. That's connected to our energy level. That's connected to it cleaning out cells, and so I think it's time for the conversation about the oral microbiome and how to support it versus chill it, because we still but a lot of areas in gut health where we're like, okay, too much antibiotic use can be really harmful to the gut, but we're still using antiseptic mouthwash and wiping out our oral microbiome all the time and not understanding how that's so connected to our health.

Katie Wells:

It also was fascinating to me to realize, of course, that nothing in the body exists in isolation. So when we're talking about our oral health, that impacts the body in a lot of other ways and there's actually a two-way relationship there. So most people have the understanding that sugar on the teeth might be bad bacteria and lead to cavities. Most people don't have necessarily the deeper understanding that what we put in our body or don't put in our body when we need something actually impacts our teeth's ability to remineralize and to heal.

Katie Wells:

And learning about remineralization absolutely blew my mind, and I actually learned about it accidentally, because I went to the dentist when I was pregnant with my third child and found out I had a few very small cavities, but I didn't want to fill them while I was pregnant, so I decided to wait and wait till after he was born and then to fill them then. But during that time we moved. So I went to a new dentist after he was born and got the cleaning and the checkup and he was like, okay, you're good to go, didn't say anything about cavities, and so I started researching this idea of remineralization, and it's basically this beautiful interaction between the nutrient levels in our body, especially minerals and fat-soluble vitamins, and our oral microbiome and our body's ability to create new enamel and remineralize as it needs to. But this can get thwarted if we don't have enough of those fat-soluble vitamins, or if we don't have enough minerals, or if we're just super stressed and now our mouth is super acidic, or if we're killing all of our good bacteria and not giving our body the basic building blocks it needs.

Katie Wells:

I've come to this realization across the board when it comes to health and it applies to oral health too which is that the body's natural state is to heal, it is to always move to optimal health, and if there's a problem going on, even that quote, symptom or problem is still our body doing what's in our best interest, and it's still our body doing the best it can and with what it has, and so, rather than symptoms being a bad thing, I now look at them as messages and gifts.

Katie Wells:

It's our body directly talking to us, saying I either need something I don't have, or there's something I don't need that I'm getting too much of, and so when we reframe it that way, it gives us much more insight into what's actually going on. And with oral health, this often can be as simple as I need certain nutrients that I'm not getting, or I'm doing something to my oral microbiome that is changing my microbial environment in a negative way, and so how can I listen to what my body needs and then give it what it needs to reverse that? Because the body always wants to heal. The body is always on our side. I learned that even in having Hashimoto's which I no longer have, but that my body was always trying to heal the whole time, and when I said things like I am sick or my body is attacking itself, my body was never attacking me. My body was always operating in my best interest. I just had to learn how to listen.

Dr. Carver:

Absolutely and, as I said, like when I had my eczema, it was finally like, wait a minute, my body's telling me something. I just intuitively knew that I'm like, okay, and that's what I want people to. That's why, hey, when people you go to the physician or whatever and you get a label, okay, you have this disease, and I like to tell people. Think about it this way you could say I have high blood pressure or my blood pressure is high, and you're basically saying the same thing, but your mindset is different, right? Because if you say I have high blood pressure, it's this chain around your neck and this diagnosis and this label and there's nothing you can do about it. It's like the victim mentality, Whereas when you say my blood pressure is high, you're recognizing oh, this is a symptom of maybe something deeper. So patients come in all the time they're on blood pressure medication and statins and reflux medication. I'm like, oh, we just keep hitting the symptoms and we're never uprooting the cause. So I think that's really valuable to know. Just because we get a diagnosis or a label does not destine us to have a lifetime of medications and issues. Like you said, the body is designed to work optimally and when it can't, we know there's something that's missing. So I love that you're saying and I think a lot of people don't realize.

Dr. Carver:

People don't realize like a tooth is an organ, it has its own blood supply, lymph supply, nerve supply. Of course anybody who's had a toothache will know there's a nerve in there and that eats constantly, all day, every day. Remineralizing, demineralizing, remineralizing, demineralizing. People think of it as just this stagnant thing that helps you chew food. But no, when you can say now it's hard once. And there's always this misnomer that people come to me all the time and say fix my cavity Once it's a whole, once it's completely cavitated, at that point we haven't got there yet. There's constantly research and we're getting there, but that sometimes you get to a point where we can still remineralize. So when you have those little white spots on your teeth and in between the teeth, sometimes we see just starting on an x-ray, my first goal is to always try to remineralize first, because once you cut it into a tooth, that's forever and maybe we don't use the amalgams with the heavy metals anymore but we're replacing it with plastics. So you know and yes, there are more biocompatible ones that most biological dentists are using, but it's still not natural tooth structure, it's still a foreign substance. So I'm always pushing let's prevent, because you get one cavity and then for the rest of your life you're going to constantly have to be probably replaced a few times. So let's try to not cut into the tooth at all, to the tooth at all.

Dr. Carver:

So maybe talk to us a little bit about how you learned. What can we? You talked about the fat soluble vitamins and minerals, which I think is a really important point. Everybody. People say oh, your vitamin, your calcium's low, just take calcium. No mineral works in isolation. Right.

Dr. Carver:

If you build a lot of tartar in your teeth, we're often saying there's a calcium imbalance there.

Dr. Carver:

You're not supposed to precipitate anything out, because if you're precipitating that into your teeth you better believe you're doing that in your arteries too.

Dr. Carver:

So we're always saying well, you're not balancing your calcium properly with magnesium, or you may be low in vitamin K, because we need all of those things together to put the calcium and the phosphorus into the teeth and the bones. So if you're just taking calcium or just taking magnesium or whatever, just taking your vitamin D, that's not enough and that's why the whole Weston Price is based along this. He noticed people in 1930s who went all over the world and was seeing that, even though these populations were eating vastly different diets, when he looked at the content of the diet, that's what he noticed All these fat soluble vitamins 10 times the amount of minerals. I think it was like four times the amount of fat soluble vitamins, 10 times the amount of minerals in these diets. And that's why they had such beautiful wide jaws, no cavities. So that's what we wanted to think about. So tell us a little bit about what you think is a good strategy for remineralizing those very beginning, what we would call incipient decay areas.

Katie Wells:

Yeah, I love that you brought that up. I think Weston A Price's work is a great starting point for people if they really want to go deeper on this. So is Dr Kate Shanahan in deep nutrition. She has some wonderful resources and understanding there as well. But really it's just understanding that, especially in the last hundred years or so, our diets have changed so drastically that our bodies may not even entirely recognize our diets as nutrient sources anymore.

Katie Wells:

And I've had people on my podcast, even Chris Kresser, who when I first interviewed him 10 years ago said we should get as much as we can from food. He now, even recently, has said we're now at a time where we can't, unfortunately, as a human population, live optimally just based on food, because the volume of food we would have to eat to get the minimum nutrients we need is so high that we would create more problems from overeating. So unfortunately, I do think in our current time we are in a place where, especially if you have something going on, supplementation in various forms can be really helpful. But I still think it's important to start with food. I think one shift here is the mindset shift away from, like I talked about, macros and calories and to now, when I look at food, I look at how can I get the most micro and macronutrient density from the foods I'm going to consume today? And especially when we look at the micronutrient quality, that leads to vastly different food choices, because you could get the same macros, calories, protein, whatever from bars or shakes or these different things, but they don't have the micronutrient profile of whole foods. So I think, especially when we're talking about kids who are developing their skeletal structure, developing their muscle that will last their whole lives, hopefully developing their initial teeth and gum structure, we really want to focus on those nutrient-dense foods.

Katie Wells:

Like Dr Weston A Price talks about, the things that are largely removed from our modern diets the animal-based foods, the broths that we are over-consuming, muscle meat and not getting enough of the other amino acids that are synergistic to those to actually be used most effectively in the body. Same thing with fat-soluble vitamins the levels have declined in our diet so drastically and been replaced with industrial seed oils which the body doesn't recognize. These are foreign to the body. Of course, the body, like we said, is always on our side, so it's going to use what it has to the best of its ability. So it's going to use these oils, but it's not what it's designed to use in those various processes in the body, and so inflammatory oils are getting put into our cells, if that's all the body has, and there's theories that this is what's leading to the rise in various problems and chronic conditions across the board, because it's just the wrong chemical messages the body doesn't understand. And so returning to the foods that our bodies know how to use most optimally is a big first step.

Katie Wells:

And, like I said, I do think we're also in a time of supplementation, especially when it comes to things like minerals and fat-soluble vitamins. But, as you said, they don't exist in isolation. So, just like with broken bones, taking calcium alone is not going to be what needed to heal that bone. Because if you think about a piece of chalk, pure calcium, very easily breakable, without the silica matrix, the collagen, all the other micronutrients, you just have a very breakable bone. Same thing with the teeth Without all the other components, the body can't make the strongest enamel. Like you said, if a cavity is through the dentin, it can't necessarily heal, but if we just have a small one in the enamel, the body knows what to do if we give it the right building blocks.

Katie Wells:

I also personally think that we're in a time of nature deficit disorder is what I call it that we were, as humans, meant to spend a lot more time outside than we do, and this is vitamin D is one important component of that, but only one small piece of what time outside does for us. And, as an aside, they've done camping studies where people camped outside for seven days without any artificial light and their stress levels, their sharpening, their hormones all got into optimal ranges in one week because our bodies are wired to be in rhythm with nature. So the more time we can get outside, especially, that was something I did when, during that phase, because I was pregnant, trying to get enough vitamin D, I think that was instrumental in my cavities reversing as well, because, again, with the personalization, I don't absorb vitamin D from supplements very well, though my body can produce it very well from the sun. So I think getting outside not ever burning, but getting enough time outside is an important way to get that, not just vitamin D, but the entire spectrum of light from the sun that is helpful in that entire healing cascade. Another aside on that it's fascinating People.

Katie Wells:

We got into this red light therapy craze over the last five years, which is great.

Katie Wells:

There's a lot of benefits to that.

Katie Wells:

What people don't realize is all of those spectrum of light are available in the light of the sun for free outside every single day, and we get that red light concentration especially at sunrise and sunset but it's there throughout the day as well, and so, rather than spend thousands of dollars on red lights, just prioritize going outside and watching the sunrise and the sunset and getting that midday bright light to get the UV and to get vitamin D, and you might be amazed at how much that changes your stress levels, which impact also, ironically, the acidity in your mouth and your oral microbiome, but also your hormone levels or sleep, which is when your body's repairing and when the actual work of all of those things happening is going on.

Katie Wells:

Anyway, anytime I get to get on the soapbox and spend more time outside and get sunshine, I'm a big fan of that. As a side note for that, any of the sunlight outside, without looking through a window, through glasses, through contacts, there's important signaling reactions happening in the retina and in the eye that don't happen if we block that light with glass, with contacts in between us in the sunlight not that you need to look at the sun, but you need to be exposed to it without something in between you, um, and then beyond there. That's where we really get into the personalization aspect of health, I feel like, and the the very specific nutrients that people will need. There's genetic components there, there's if there's deficiencies going on, but I think the 80 20 of it is those things that are universally applicable to the human animal, which are the things like super nutrient-dense diet, making sure you're hydrated, getting the basic minerals that your body needs to function optimally, and then getting time outside so your body's getting the right signals to do all of those things.

Dr. Carver:

Absolutely. Those are just amazing. We can all just download Katie's brain, but luckily we have it on a podcast so we can listen to it over and over. But you can see how she's not saying we specifically need to eat these things. So in general, again, we want's not that. It's not the same thing, and that's why we used to be big proponents of get your nutrients from food because they're in the right forms. Because there are a lot of supplements, maybe in a says this form, but when you eat it your body doesn't really recognize and so you can't use it. And that's why there's so much controversy in the supplement field. Oh, supplements don't work or they're not good, and that's true. There's a lot that are junky, but there are a lot of quality brands out there too, and that's why I love the field of kinesiology and muscle testing, and anybody can learn that. We've had a podcast episode back in the beginning about that, so go back and listen to that one because you can test yourself. Right, we were trying to be our own best doctors, so when you can learn simple techniques like that, I love it. Proud mama moment. When I see my daughter in a restaurant, she hides her salmon ring finger under the tables, mom test me which food should I have? So I love that when we're talking about trying to empower our kids to be their own best doctor. So those are some good techniques.

Dr. Carver:

But, yes, they tend to fortify foods with some vitamins. Again, they're usually the lowest quality when you see fortified, but the minerals are really lacking today. So that is something I'm always talking to people. Ideally you have to have a good diet of foundation with the good foods, but minerals are so lacking because the soil is lacking today we're just over-farming all of the pesticides and all that. So I think at the very minimum, a mineral supplement is really necessary. I make sure my kids get that. We're seeing so many kids being injured, so many ligament issues, tears and ACL in these kids. That really didn't happen a generation ago. But again, with all the deficiencies in our diet, our body's not building strong, bones not building strong. I remember thinking when I came out of dental school 20 years ago, maybe I should be an orthodontist because cavities aren't going to be a thing anymore. And now it's worse than ever. 20 years I've seen this vast increase because and it's very rapidly, like you said drastically changed Just in a generation. No-transcript of the animal right Because, again, that's how humans we were designed to eat all of those things. So, yeah, it's important to get that, the variety, and I think, a lot.

Dr. Carver:

I know my own kids. I struggle to get them protein. They don't want to eat eggs every day but I'm trying to teach them. Like you get exhausted when you go onto the soccer field because you're not giving your body the building blocks. But, like you said, they're teenagers so they don't want to listen to everything I said they've got to experience it themselves. But I got her last night when she was talking about I said one of her cousin's friends started the carnivore diet, which I'm not saying I'm a proponent of, but she was noticing how much better her skin was getting.

Dr. Carver:

Immediately and that's a hot topic for my daughter she said should I try that? And I said you still need your carbohydrates, but maybe just reduce all the grains, all that, the junky processed foods that don't have any of the nutrients in there. You'll notice a big difference. And now she's at the age she's like oh, okay, maybe I can control this. So, again, empowering our kids to give them the information and let them make the choice what they want to do and it's been a hard lesson for me to learn.

Dr. Carver:

But I love what you said earlier in the podcast about definitely giving them a choice. And I know that somewhere I failed in the beginning, always trying to control every little thing without letting them. And my daughter said to our therapist one time. She said, why don't you take all the supplements your mom gives me? She's? I don't even know what they are. And I was like, oh, it's bad, I'm just showing. And so of course I was like, wow, that makes perfect sense. So now when I say I said, hey, how about some minerals to help with your? Whatever it may be? Now I always learn the lesson the hard way. That's why I do the podcast, so I can help everybody else avoid those mistakes and do a little bit better. Tell us a little bit about your line, the Wellness N-E-S-S-E, and you have a whole website dedicated to your product. So I know you have a lot of oral products. What else do you promote on that website?

Katie Wells:

First I'll say I'm right there with you. I've learned a lot of these things the hard way, especially when it comes to parenting, and I think that's also a moment of give ourselves grace, because they're also resilient and adaptable and they have wonderful lessons in there too. But also just wanted to echo what you said of not coming from a place of fear but from a place of empowerment, understanding that we hear about the obesity epidemic, for instance, and how this is rapidly on the rise and that's one symptom of this drastic change in our food supply, along with declining fertility rates and these very dire predictions that by 2045 fertility could go to zero. But this is impacting our body in other small ways as well, and we know that in 1900, for instance, we ate zero pounds of soybean oil per year, and now the average American consumes 24 pounds of soybean oil per year, which is nutrient devoid. It's not that anything alone in isolation, is necessarily bad or good. It's just that we're not giving our bodies the building blocks they need. We know that we're not getting the just bare micronutrients that used to be in our food. We're not getting the nutrient-dense fats and proteins that used to be the staples in our diet. So understanding that lets us approach it from a place of empowerment rather than from a place of fear, from wellness. It definitely started from my passion for oral health, so the majority of our line focuses on toothpaste, floss, oral probiotics and things that support the oral microbiome without killing the good bacteria and the bad bacteria, but in supporting that natural balance in the same way that you would support your gut through the right nutrients, through probiotics, things like that.

Katie Wells:

But also, what I realized years ago was that I had these friends who were eating organic, avoiding GMOs, using natural cleaning products, and they were still using conventional things for certain products, especially hair care and oral care, and it was because those things worked better and I realized we weren't going to see changes here unless we could create natural products. I also realized I'm a big fan of the rule of 80-20, the Pareto principle, which is that 80% of our results come from 20% of our inputs, and we see this play out in economics and science and lots of fields. But when it comes to personal care, I realized that the majority, that 80% of our toxin exposure from personal care products came from 20% of products, especially in a family environment, and these were the things we were putting on our bodies every day, like what we washed our hair with, our soap, our oral care, et cetera. And so I realized if I could create things that would outperform the conventional alternatives in those categories and make it an effortless switch, we could reduce our toxin exposure from personal care by as much as 80%, especially for guys and for kids, who aren't using the 80 plus products a day that women often use. And so that's why I started there, and just with the same idea as a lot of the things on Wellness Mama, of getting things in natural form as much as possible, at the very least getting safe things. In my opinion, it would be great if we lived in a world where safe was the absolute baseline. That that was the bare minimum is that we don't put anything on our bodies that we wouldn't eat.

Katie Wells:

But with oral care in particular, I realized there was this really unique opportunity because, since we know what we put on our skin, and especially in our mouth, can enter our body so rapidly, that means we also can use that principle for good, so we can put beneficial things in our oral care products and in our hair care that we actually want to get into our bodies, and so we really carefully tweaked and developed things that would support whatever in the oral microbiome we were trying to support, while, of course, not being toxic, but also help the nutrient delivery system in our mouth, in our hair, in our skin in a way that was non-toxic.

Katie Wells:

So it's been a really fun project. That way, I feel like it's been an adult science fair project, and I'm just glad that, whether it's Wellness or there's so many other natural companies now, and I love this I love that we actually have alternatives, because when I started 15 years ago, I was making these things from scratch in my kitchen because they didn't exist. I couldn't even buy grass-fed meat in my grocery store. Back then I was buying it from an Amish farmer on a dirt road and I think it was actually illegal at the time, and I was making toothpaste at home, and so I'm very excited that now, I think, thanks to moms I think moms are leading this demand for change but we see natural products, we have much more availability, and I wanted to be a part of helping that change.

Dr. Carver:

You definitely are, I have to say your website, all the reaches and everything that you talk about. I love, too, how you we talk. We're really big on the mental, emotional, spiritual side of health too, so I love that you appreciate that, especially when it comes to parenting and I think that's that a lot of people don't understand how much our you know unperceived stress affects all those around us. So that's really important, for because, as I've always said, you can use the best products and you can eat the best foods, but if the nervous system is not regulated properly, it's not going to work. That energy really underlies a lot of that biochemistry.

Dr. Carver:

So we're putting it all together and I appreciate you so much for all your amazing knowledge, your incredible reach, for everything that you're doing and, again, I'm a huge fan of all your work. I love all your recipes. It's made my life so much easier. So I really appreciate you taking the time to meet with us today and share all of your amazing insight with our audience. Is there anything else you'd like to leave us with today?

Katie Wells:

Thank you so much for the patience. I know this took a few tries and I'm so glad we got to finally connect and I think, to end, I think what you just said is actually the perfect pin to put in this conversation of really that nervous system and that inner emotional state. First, that was a lesson. That was it took. I was a very slow learner. It took me a lot of years to understand that part and for years I was doing all the things quote unquote, right on paper and I had spreadsheets of all the supplements I was taking and I was avoiding everything bad, or so I thought, and I was eating all the nutrients. And it wasn't until I addressed the inner side, the emotional, the nervous system side, that everything really started to shift for me, and so I think that's an often overlooked piece that we are thankfully now talking about a lot more and I think there are many more resources for this as well.

Katie Wells:

But I think you're right. I think we hear you can't out supplement a poor diet. You can't out exercise a poor diet. You also can't out diet or supplement or exercise a stressed out nervous system, because if your body is in fight or flight and if you think you're running from a tiger, your body is not in the state to be able to rest and digest and to heal, and so I think that alone, that inner shift, can actually be one of the most impactful for our health and, like we talked about, for women especially. We set that tone for our house, so it is, I would say, one of actually the most selfless things we can do to go on that journey of developing nervous system resilience and addressing whatever it is we need to address to get to that point.

Dr. Carver:

I think that pays absolute dividends, not just for ourselves, but for our families and for everyone we come in contact absolute dividends, not just for ourselves, but for our families and for everyone we come in contact 100%, so tell us your exact websites and how everybody else can connect. Tell us about your podcast.

Katie Wells:

I'm sure everybody would love to tune in. I would love to hear from everybody. Everything lives at wellnessmamacom. There's links there to wellness and to the products, to the podcast, and then I'm just wellnessmama everywhere, on social media as well.

Dr. Carver:

Fantastic. Thank you again. So much, Katie. I hope you all enjoyed this. Please listen to this a couple of times. I think this is one of the most impactful episodes we've done to date. I hope you all have a really wonderful day and we'll see you on the next episode.