Episode 9: Sheila Carroll

Ever wondered how your food choices impact not only your physical well-being but also your mental health? Have you considered the power of equipping your children with the knowledge of how food affects their energy levels, behavior, and health? An enlightening conversation awaits you in this episode, as we delve into the profound impact of food culture and fructose on children’s health. Our guest is none other than Dr. Sheila Carroll, a seasoned pediatrician and obesity medicine specialist dedicated to transforming pediatric health through a preventative approach.

Dr. Carroll shares her personal journey to health transformation, and how it sparked her to establish a health coaching business aimed at empowering parents. We navigate through the striking contrast in food availability between the US and Europe, highlighting the role of the US government in fostering an unhealthy eating culture. Dr. Carroll opines on how our bodies react to fructose, its storage as fat, and the undeniable connection between food, energy levels, and overall health.

As we conclude this eye-opening discussion, we delve into the realm of nutritional psychiatry and the undeniable influence of food choices on mental health. We explore the significance of fostering autonomy in children, equipping them with the tools to make informed nutritional and lifestyle choices. Dr. Carroll provides practical tips on promoting healthy eating habits, the importance of cooking, and how you as a parent, can make healthier food swaps for your children. Immerse yourself in this empowering conversation and discover how you and your children can transform your health and well-being.

ABOUT SHEILA
In 20 years of clinical medicine, I took care of a lot of very sick children. But to an even greater extent, I saw kids with lifestyle-induced problems. Poor sleep, unhealthy diet, sedentary lifestyle, unhealthy weight and frequently a lot of depression and anxiety were keeping these kids from living in their best health.

A child cannot be expected to change their lifestyle habits by themselves. Children need their parent’s and caregiver’s help. And parents need help figuring out first, exactly what to do and then, how to actually do it.

This is what I help parents do. I help parents know exactly what to do to improve their child’s health and I teach them the tools and skills they need to fully support their child and themselves along their journeys to better health.

As a Pediatrician and Obesity medicine physician as well as a Certified Life and Weight Coach, I help children by empowering their parents to be the parents they truly want to be.

Website: https://www.sheilacarrollmd.com

FB: https://www.facebook.com/sheilacarrollmd

IG: https://www.instagram.com/sheilacarrollmd/

LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheila-carroll-md-136241257/

TRANSCRIPT

Sheila Carroll: 0:00
And then when a mom feels that and experiences that for herself, they they want that for their child and then they also can see what’s possible for their child, providing that to families so that parents could change. And when the parents change.

Caroline Balinska: 0:17
It’s not just that through choices.

Sheila Carroll: 0:18
It’s that one of the most powerful parent strategies. I love that approach because it takes away the shame.

Caroline Balinska: 0:27
Welcome to the Life On Purpose Over 40 podcast, where empowerment, elegance and health take center stage. I’ll be your guide on this thrilling journey to outshine your past self. This is a podcast all about transformation. We’re plunging headfirst into exactly what health, wellness, style, relationships and career look like as a woman over 40. You’ll be hearing from all the most sought after global trailblazers and experts. This isn’t just about learning. It’s about embracing your inner fierce, fabulous self. Let’s get started. Welcome everyone back to the podcast. I have Dr Sheila Carroll with me today. I’m so excited to be speaking to Sheila because this is all about health for women, but also for our children, and most people listening have either got teenage children, or maybe they’re going to be grandparents soon or already grandparents. Or maybe, like me and Sheila, you’ve had babies later in life and have gotten young children who need to understand all of this as well. So it’s going to be a great episode. I’m so excited to be speaking to Sheila today. So, sheila, thank you for coming here. Welcome.

Sheila Carroll: 1:32
Thanks for having me, Caroline. I appreciate it.

Caroline Balinska: 1:35
Wonderful, so let’s get into it a little bit about you. You’re a board certified pediatrician and you have been speaking about the importance of healthy eating for mums understanding it because of their children. So how about you tell us a little bit about you and how you got into this, your background and why it is that you find this such an important part of women’s understanding for their children?

Sheila Carroll: 2:02
Sure, yes, I am a board certified pediatrician and I’ve been a practicing pediatrician for about 23 years I recently just left, but I’ve been doing it for 23 years and I’m also a board certified in obesity medicine and I got into kind of wanting to help parents focus on health and their family’s health, because, well, I have personal reasons for that my own health journey as a kid and a teen. As an adult, I never really suffered from like a diagnosed medical problem, except for the diagnosis of being overweight. And so I was an overweight child from the time I was nine or 10. And then up until a few about five years ago when I kind of solved this problem for myself permanently through life coaching. It just makes me laugh that I figured, you know, I needed the help of a life coach and not a doctor to solve this problem. But it just goes to show you, as adults, like our eating is very emotional and it’s not necessarily a medical reason. If you know, as doctors we give people a lot of advice do this, eat this, don’t eat that, exercise, get to sleep, you know, and that’s all great information for people. But if people can’t do it, for whatever reason, because of the way they’re thinking and feeling and the other things going on in their life and they can’t do. We call it the action line all the. If they can’t take the actions we want them to take, they’re never going to be able to have the benefits of doing those things. So you know, I know how hard it is to be an overweight child, at least for me and as a pediatrician, I’m seeing more and more and more families struggle with overweight and hearing. Kids, you know so, so innocently, you know, just want to be different, want their bodies to be different and they don’t know what to do and it’s so funny, almost all the kids think they just need to exercise more. Oh, I need to join a gym, like I guess I would like. A seven-year-old is saying you know. No, actually you know, you know. So I was seeing this huge need for education and intense support and intense help to help the parents, and it’s usually the moms who are you know at least you know, my experience has been. The moms are doing a lot of the grocery shopping, but it doesn’t always have to be the mom. So when I say mom, it can actually you know easily to the dad or to the to the male if that’s your family situation. But people were needing real help and the same kind of help that I needed for my own personal transformation that I received throughout life coach. So I wanted to start providing that to families so that parents could change. And when the parents change the kids, the kids will change, even without the kids having to do anything honestly, even without the kids having to really be involved. So, I love that approach because it takes away the shame of talking you know or not. Well, it takes away the shame of you know, having a conversation with a child. Well, okay, well, now you’re, you weigh X amount and we and you need to change this, this and this to you know, get that number to change, okay. That is so, in my opinion, really unhelpful for everybody and anybody the parent, it’s so uncomfortable for the parents, it’s so uncomfortable for the doctors to talk about like that and it’s horrible for the kids. So what I was seeing in my practice was I really wanted to have a visit just with the parents, but and of course the visit would have to be like long and multiple times in a row which our current medical system here in the US is just not set up and refuses to support that kind of preventative healthcare. So I left and started my own health coaching business for parents, with a soft spot just for the kids who are struggling with extra weight.

Caroline Balinska: 6:30
Yeah, I love that I’ve experienced a few things in my life as well. I was in a situation probably the opposite to you. I was so skinny that my teachers used to pull not just my teachers, other teachers in the school would pull me out of the classroom and ask me if my parents were too poor to feed me, because I was so skinny and I would laugh and be like, no, we’re not poor, and they used to offer me apple. I’ll bring an apple to school every day for you. I’m like I don’t have an eating. If anything, I eat too much. I would eat three of my father’s dinner plates. I would eat three of those for dinner. As a teenager, I would just eat, and eat, and eat and my brother was the same. We just could not put on weight and, yeah, not feeling that anymore.

Sheila Carroll: 7:15
But I have a point that everybody’s body is so different.

Caroline Balinska: 7:21
No, but I was going to make the yeah to prove how different it is. So that was me and my brother. But my sister, on the other hand, didn’t have that same body. So while we are the same in so many ways, her, through the journey of being from eight to about 14, she did put on weight and so did my brother. And my brother was older than her and because I knew his body and I knew once he got to 15, 16, he lost it because of his like, we ate really healthy. We were a very healthy family. We didn’t have junk food in the house, we didn’t have a soft drinks Like. All of that stuff in our house was completely, and I remember being really upset that we never had what the other kids had, but we were just a very healthy home. So my brother putting on weight was nothing to do with bad eating, it was just how his body grew. And I think that’s another thing that people they put so much emphasis on that child’s fat as an eight year old, not understanding, not actually the parents, not not feeding them properly. So my sister, on the other hand, had the problem where she did put on weight, but because in my mom’s head. I was always so skinny and my mom, probably at the time you know we’re talking about the, you know this is 30 years ago probably went about things the wrong way and said things to my sister that she shouldn’t have said. And I remember me being she was 10 years younger than me and so I was like 18, 19 years old and I would. I had friends that had suffered with eating disorders. So I was very adamant to my mom saying, do you not speak to her like that? And there was no knowledge back then about it, but I knew from what my friends at that age were going through. I was like, mom, we cannot speak to her like this because that is not going to help her, that’s only going to make things worse. And she did end up losing it Like it wasn’t something that stayed with her. But I think that we, as parents, my mom was trying to do the right thing. Yeah, my mom was just like stop eating, stop eating. You know, my brother would sometimes buy her a big Mac. I remember once in a while and my mom thought that was what was putting on the weight. That wasn’t what was putting on the weight, it was her body at that stage, but I think that as mothers so I’ve experienced it from my mom, but I’ve experienced also now I’m a stepmom to teenage girls and then I’ve got my daughter, who’s three and the importance of how we speak to our children about food. It’s I think that we can play such a pivotal role in that and that’s why I wanted to get you on today, because I think we can’t go through this blindly. We really can’t.

Sheila Carroll: 9:48
Yes, I agree, I agree. And so it’s really wonderful for parents, grandparents, to realize that every child’s biology is different, like we just said, and even if they’re siblings, you know, they handle food. Everybody’s body handles food differently. And when we start to talk about the way parents and grandparents can talk about weight with their kids, or body shape or size, well, first of all probably would just leave out talking about body shape or size, first of all. But I recommend to people to focus on health and not weight, and because if we’re only focusing on the number on the scale, there’s a lot of unhealthy ways to make that number go down. There’s a lot of unhealthy ways to make that number go up if that’s what you’re trying to do. But if we’re really taking a step back and what we’re trying to help our kids do is become healthy eaters, if parents want to raise healthy eaters with a good relationship with food, then we need to kind of talk about health in general and not weight.

Caroline Balinska: 11:05
Yeah, that is so true. I really like that. I think that that’s something that I’m going to repeat that because I think that’s really important to emphasize. It’s not about the number on the scale and it’s not about your body shape. It’s about being healthy. I think Michelle Obama was really strong on this stance of eating healthy, and there’s a lot of people that are trying to do that as well. It’s all about what the child puts on their plate, and understanding that that’s actually the most important thing is the food’s healthy.

Sheila Carroll: 11:33
Yes, yeah, and I think we parents have to really make that connection between what we’re choosing to feed our children and their health. And I’ll admit for a long time, even through medical school and certainly through my childhood and through medical school and this is not something that’s taught is that food choices really matter to us, matter to our bodies, matter to our bodies at the cellular level. So it’s not just calories coming in. All calories are not the same. And there are certain foods that are healthier to eat. There are certain foods that work better with a human being’s biology than foods that are created in labs. Some of the foods that have been created in labs, these highly processed, ultra processed foods, they actually are harming our biology. And so there’s a little bit of a movement here in the US at least, we don’t want to call foods good or bad, and I agree in the concept of that, because then sometimes when people eat especially a child eats a quote bad food, it’s a fine. It’s a slippery slope to then oh, I’m a bad person because I ate that bad food. Oh, I was bad. You’ll even hear people talking like that I was so bad last night. I ate three pieces of pizza and whatever. So I think that’s not a healthy way to talk about food. But I think, as a doctor, as a mom, as a person seeing people of all ages suffer from food induced problems type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease, I mean, the list goes on and on high blood pressure, insulin resistance there’s so many medical problems that are directly tied to our food choices. So we have to figure out a way to be able to say well, this is more healthy and this is less healthy. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person if you choose to eat the less healthy it’s not. It’s. There’s no moral judgment on the food that you’re eating, but we have to understand our bodies evolutionarily, where this very ancient species we weren’t designed to hand our body is doing the best it can. You know when, when we get past a Coca-Cola or a Big Mac, like you mentioned, or something that’s new, newish in the past 100 years, our body is doing the best it can to handle that huge load of added sugars and you know, these seed oils, these inflammatory seed oils, unhealthy fats, and it’s doing the best it can, but it can’t keep that up over a sustained period of time and that’s why we’re seeing so much disease in our population, because the foods we’re choosing to eat, the foods that are, unfortunately, they taste great, they’re affordable and they’re easily accessible. They’re, frankly, everywhere. So those foods, they are harming ourselves and so our body can’t function very well with those with it, when we constantly are eating those.

Caroline Balinska: 15:09
But it’s actually funny I wanted to mention I’m just going to write a note because there’s a couple of things that I wanted to ask you, but I just wanted to make a mention of that because I think it’s a really interesting situation. I live in the Netherlands now and I lived in Australia. And when I moved to the Netherlands, well, I moved to Europe about 10 years ago, and when I moved to Europe, first I moved to Spain and I looked around and I was like there’s so many less overweight people in Spain than there are in Australia and Australia is now classed as the third fattest country in the world. I think it’s like fighting with the UK. The US, of course, is the first and then, yeah, so Australia is not far behind the US. And moving to Europe, and now in the Netherlands, I see what I saw in Australia were teenage girls walking around very overweight, and you don’t see that here, you don’t see it in the Netherlands, you don’t see it in Spain, like you do at all. There’s nothing like it. It’s amazing the difference. And my stepchildren I’ve got four stepkids and they went to the US a couple of years ago and they were in New York and what they came back with the information was actually coming from four children that were between the ages of about 11 and 18. It was really interesting to hear them speaking about it and I think that, listening to what you’re saying, how easily accessible bad food is. It’s really scary and the fact that these we talk about big pharma ruining the world, but all of these money, hungry people trying to put in as many fast food chains, whether it’s McDonald’s or all these other fast food chains we don’t have that in Europe. We don’t have that same problem. The kids came back and they’re always saying to me here can we stop at McDonald’s? Oh, I haven’t had McDonald’s for so long. Can I have McDonald’s? There are in Amsterdam City I think there’s four or five McDonald’s in the whole of the city. Driving from the city to like, let’s say, I drive for a one hour drive to take the kids to a fun park or something, there might be a McDonald’s on that. Like highway might be, but very rarely. Like very few of the roads have a McDonald’s on that road, even compared to Australia. In Australia we have McDonald’s everywhere. We have all of these other fast food shops and here in the Netherlands there’s very few of them Same. In Spain there’s very few of these fast food places and the kids came back going oh my God, it was cheaper to buy Coca-Cola than it was to buy a bottle of water. Oh, my mom tried to buy a salad and she couldn’t buy a salad anywhere because there was nowhere to stop to get a salad. All of these comments the kids were making was really interesting to me, because we as adults can understand that, but the kids, seeing that, see the difference between the countries. So it makes me understand how hard it is in the US and in Australia and in the UK to make healthier choices where, like you said, it’s all right there. Here it’s not. Like I can say I’m going to take my daughter to McDonald’s, there’s just not a McDonald’s around to take her to.

Sheila Carroll: 18:00
Yeah, yeah, and even here in the United States. The other problem we have for all of our kids and teens is the food system in the school. It’s, you know, some people call it the biggest fast food chain in the country, because the food system that we’re using to provide nutrition to our kids is providing these unhealthy sugar filled food easy to serve, easy to keep on the shelf for a long time food and it’s really. You know parents here and kids here are really struggling because it is so you are swimming upstream. If you are trying to, you know it’s like whack them all, like you know, because it’s the the culture also that we have. It’s so pervasive to be offering kids and offering yourself unhealthy food alternatives, and so it’s hard to actually. It takes work, it takes effort to actually eat well and eat in a way that serves your body, and so so many kids are growing up not really even able to do that and they don’t even know about it. So it’s so maddening because, like you said, it’s all just about money and it’s about big food Paying. You know paying like some people I don’t even know. You know when you. I sound like a little bit of a conspiracy theorist when I start to talk about this, but you know, the fact of the matter is the amount of money that gets made by food, by food companies. It’s just astronomical and so many of these foods are harmful to us. But there’s no legislation about that because it would impact the money and so people and this is also a reason it just places the blame on the individual person and the food companies just say, hey, we’re just, we’re just offering this.

Caroline Balinska: 20:14
You don’t have to choose it. You don’t have to eat it.

Sheila Carroll: 20:16
Yeah, you don’t have to eat it, Don’t buy it. If you don’t want it, don’t buy it, you know. But meanwhile they are aggressively marketing to teens and kids. And it’s cheap because the here in the US, at least our government subsidizes so many of the, for example, corn that is put in so many of these products corn syrup, so they’re cheap, they’re artificially cheaper. So the healthy food, you know, nobody’s subsidizing the farmers who are growing carrots and lettuce and those guys you know it’s more expensive because they’re not getting. They’re not getting funds to help make it cheaper versus.

Caroline Balinska: 20:54
That’s why Coca Cola is so cheap compared to what it is. Yeah, but even my partner he works in education. He’s worked with thousands of schools across Europe and he’s launching in the US. And a couple of years back we came back and came over to the US, to Florida, and we were in around Fort Lauderdale and I stayed at the hotel. I was having lunch at a hotel. He said I’ll pop off into this school and I’ll come back and pick you up. And we were at like the W hotel. I was sitting there waiting for him and he went away for a few hours and he came back and he just had this look of absolute shock and he was like, oh my God, he goes this school. The teacher is handing out pizza and candy to get the kids to concentrate. Now he works with thousands of schools across Europe and he just could not believe and this is primary school he could not believe he’s never seen anything like this. This is just not a thing in Europe at all. You do not give your kids candy and pizza to make them listen. And this was a school with less money, but it had enough money that they could have afforded his system, so it’s not an extremely poor school. And his mind is blown by how even the teachers are doing it. And he’s not blaming the teachers because the teachers have no choice. And he said the reason why is? The teacher told him my kids do not get food from their parents. Their parents can’t afford to feed them properly. So this is by me giving them something, gives them some sort of food because they can’t afford. I don’t know the exact system, but the teacher was explaining that the parents can’t afford to provide as much food as a normal child should have. So yeah, they’re filling up what food these kids are getting, it’s just not even nutrition at all.

Sheila Carroll: 22:43
It should not even be classified as food, because it’s more like food, like substance. It’s criminal and it’s atrocious. It’s a terrible way to treat children, and so it’s a terrible way to treat families, and so we are prioritizing our government and whoever is prioritizing money and profits over human health, and our kids are paying the price for that. So until they change, which I’m hoping I think people are working for that and trying to provide education to. But when that much money is involved, change is going to come at a very slow rate and it’s going to be forced onto people.

Caroline Balinska: 23:30
Yeah, and I think it makes it realize. I think my point of all this is to say we need to stop blaming ourselves as mothers of those, and more so in the US than here. So here in Europe it’s sort of like, hey, we’ve got all the infrastructure for the right way, but in the US I think it’s really like take a breath and say, ok, there’s all of this fighting me on making the right choices, and I think it’s yeah, we have to fight against those bad. Everything is bad. But I think take a step back and not blame yourself so much for it.

Sheila Carroll: 24:04
Yeah, realize like, oh, this is the culture and this is the culture my kid is growing up in. You know, you go to soccer practice, then the coach gives you a popsicle, then you go here, and then you know, the guy gives you a cookie and then here, and it’s just the way, the way our culture is. So the only option that parents have at this point is to educate themselves, understand the world that we’re living in. You know, like we said compassionately, don’t blame ourselves, but like, oh, ok, all right, this is, this is where we’re at, this is what we have meaning, like, this is the system we’re living in, but I want my child and I want my. You know, I want my son, I want my son’s friends to be as healthy as possible for as long as possible. You know people who are getting diagnosed with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease in their 20s and 30s, or pre-diabetes and then type 2 diabetes when they’re 30 or 40, those disease processes did not start when they were 30 or 40. They’re starting as teenagers, so it does matter. The other thing, I think that it’s a lot of and probably people hear it from their doctors oh, he looks thin or he’s. He’s a normal weight. Quote normal weight, it’s fine, whatever he can eat, whatever he can eat whatever, and only wait until someone is overweight or looks like they might have extra weight to make any dietary changes. What you and I are talking about here is healthy eating and eating, choosing to eat healthy food. That should be for every single child on the planet. You know, all of us, not just kids, who are struggling with extra weight, you know, because the metabolic consequences of choosing these foods that are going to harm your cells, they will catch up with you over time and and so we parents have this amazing opportunity and it’s never too late. So if you’re a parent of a teenager or 20 something even you know it’s never too late to you know, change how you’re eating as the parent or the grandparent, change what you’re doing, so your kids will see how you, what you’re doing, and they’ll start to internalize some of that, some of your behaviors, as their own.

Caroline Balinska: 26:46
And what do you think about things like ADHD and mental health as well, when it comes to bad choices? We’re talking about what it does to our bodies, weight wise, but what about all the other things that all connected? I feel like it is all connected.

Sheila Carroll: 27:03
We are having skyrocketing rates of ADHD, skyrocketing rates of anxiety and depression, but when your energy source that’s coming into your body to fuel your brain cells is is actually damaging your brain cell, you know, or I guess it’s damaging your cells. So what we’re talking about here really want, for example I’ll just say one quick thing not to get too medical about it, but fructose. I think most people know that high fructose corn syrup isn’t great for us and a lot of people actively look for that on labels and oh, I’m not buying it if it has high fructose corn syrup. Well, what we need to know is that table sugar, just the regular sugar you have at home that you probably bake with that is 50% fructose, so it’s the same. So we and when our body, our bodies weren’t our human bodies, we lost the ability to met a healthy, in a healthy way metabolize a lot of fructose a long time ago, like thousands and thousands of years ago. And there’s a wonderful book by Dr Richard Johnson, who’s an expert in this area and his research is just so fascinating, and the book is called Nature Wants Us to Be Fat. And so he talks about fructose, this sugar that’s normally found in fruit. And so if you think of, for example, a hibernating bear, a bear that’s about to go into hibernation, what is he doing? He is eating as many berries as he can possibly find. He’s overloading on fructose and he’s gaining fat, gaining fat, gaining fat in it because he’s going to need it to hibernate and to, because he won’t eat for months and he needs to be able to burn that fat. Well, our bodies reactive fructose. The same way, we don’t metabolize fructose as an energy source, we store it as fat. So when we are getting all of this food that has added sugars in it, which has a lot of fructose in it, we’re just, you know, we’re storing it as fat, storing it as fat, storing it as fat, and that’s why, for the time that we’re going to have no food. Yes, and then winter never comes you know for us. Goodness right, but this is this is what we need to understand. We need to. Parents need to really have a good understanding. It doesn’t have to be like crazy detailed understanding, but understand the human biology, your child’s human biology, and the food choices that are available to us today. And so I think it’s you know more it’s a more effective approach to helping our kids make healthier choices when they understand that when they choose something with fructose or you know, sugar in it, that’s actually going down to their little mitochondria, their cellular you know mitochondria and costing them energy. And so it’s not, it’s not being used to generate energy or generate ATP, but when you, when how fructose is metabolized, our body sees that as a cost, and so then it sends a message oh, you got to eat more because it seems like we don’t have anything here. So kids can really understand that. I have an 11 year old son and you know he certainly doesn’t choose all the healthy food all the time. But you know, over the past year I’ve really seen a big change in him, in his, in his ability to understand and put kind of the two and two things together, like, oh, what I eat does affect how I feel, how I’m able to think at school, how I my behavior at school, my, you know. So, all of these, all of these problems that our kids are suffering from anxiety, depression, all you know. Honestly, almost everything can be not blamed on the food choices, but we should clean that up and we could really focus on that. If a family wants to focus on healthy food, appropriate, good quality sleep, that’s another thing. Movement not not hard exercise in order to lose weight, but movement as a way to like, help our muscles, help us feel better, and then learning some emotional regulation skills so that we can manage our stress. And, yes, kids have stress. Sometimes parents say like oh, it’s, he’s doesn’t have a job, he’s, he’s, you know whatever, he doesn’t have much he shouldn’t have any stress. Kids have a lot of stress and so we need to help them understand, be able to understand their feelings and manage their feelings so they can manage their stress. So when you work on all those four sometimes they call them the four pillars of health nutrition, movement, sleep and emotional regulation If we focus on all of those things in your child is still having problems with anxiety, depression, attention. Okay, fine, you know, then move forward, or you know then, then then seek medical help for all of those things. But there’s so much parents can do to improve their kids health but, like we mentioned, it is it’s work for parents because of culture that we’re in and the you know this worst you’re swimming upstream with all of the in all of those areas. This in our modern world.

Caroline Balinska: 33:02
I remember seeing about 20 years ago now was about 20 years ago there was a I think it was on 60 minutes or one of those sort of shows that they had a really controversial segment and it was something that the news, the morning news, were talking about the next day like, wow, how can they say this? There was a I think it was a doctor, because I don’t remember it was 20 years ago but this I think doctor had said I can change children’s ADHD just by and that’s what we used to call it ADD just by changing their food choices. And she put a camera inside a house of these three boys. That the mother was like I cannot do anything about my children. They’re crazy. They climb up the walls, they climb onto the ceiling like crazy. She showed on the camera these three kids. They were animals, like complete animals. And then what she said was for a few weeks I can’t remember exactly how long she just said you are just feeding your kids really terrible food and she cut out all like the process, like the frozen hamburgers and things like that. And this was in Australia, so back then we didn’t have as much bad food 20 years ago. It’s gotten worse over the years and she had cut out all of those, like the mother was just buying all the cheap stuff. I think she was a single mom and she couldn’t afford anything else. So the doctor had shown her how to implement a better food regime. And then she showed the cameras at. The children were like normal, normal, normal boys. And that was 20 years ago. And this doctor was saying back then I can help with ADHD just by doing these things. And back then it was completely controversial and that’s not true, it won’t work. And she was saying I’ve got proof. But I think it’s like you say, until you actually do that you cannot blame the child. Until you check food choices. Because I think I had a boyfriend once who had terrible depression and now that I think back on it he literally ate nothing that McDonald’s and drank Coca-Cola, like literally would not put a vegetable in his body would not eat anything healthy. And now that I think back on, like no wonder, and I was always eating healthy, no wonder he was the way he was.

Sheila Carroll: 35:12
He was an apple New branch of medicine. Well, it’s probably not new, but it’s becoming more and more well known. It’s called nutritional psychiatry. Okay, wow, it’s working with people on their diets, with the food choices they’re making. So, for example, if you have somebody who’s had depression that is not responding to medications or schizophrenia, that’s not responding to medications and they’re working with people who’ve been suffering for so long, changing their diet, and the first thing people do is take out highly processed foods and so many there’s so many reports of complete remission or that you know their depression goes away. You know all their symptoms go away Not in everybody, of course, but I think we yeah, we really just need to accept that food makes up every single one of ourselves, even our brain cells of course. And that’s. But this is not something doctors are taught and this is not something you know. And I don’t think it’s a huge plot to keep America, keep people sick and so that we can make money. I don’t think it’s that. I think it just happens to be the way that people were taught. And you know, I guess I don’t under, I don’t know why doctors don’t.

Caroline Balinska: 36:45
I’ve got a theory on it. Oh, because I had 20 years of like a very bad. I had SIBO, but an extreme case of SIBO but for about 15 years they didn’t even diagnose me. So not one doctor. I went and got every test done. Not one doctor ever told me to cut bread out of my diet. It was completely by accident. I’ve actually done like a whole blog about like exactly my my story. But mine got so bad that I couldn’t keep my eyes open after I ate, like I literally had these migraines where any light was like agonizing for hours, three hours after I ate. I had all the normal symptoms of bloating and feeling sick, but the other symptoms where I’m literally fell asleep while driving after eating and open my eyes to a pole in my like just away from my car they just stopped in time. Another time my car went into a ditch because I just fell asleep while driving. It was from the foot and I was like what’s going on? Like all these weird things are happening, but the depression from that because of the feeling that I got was just it was. I stopped working for about four months because of it, but no doctor ever told me what it was. I was just like oh, you’re just depressed, you’ve got to get over the depression. I’m like, I’m not depressed, I’m far from depressed. This is not depression. There’s something else wrong with my body and for a long time I was really angry with all the doctors because once I, you know, one of them said just drink some mint tea, you’ll be fine. I’m like mint tea is not, like there’s something else going on. And I found a really bizarre thing. It’s actually a bacteria in my nose that is going into my stomach, and by killing off that bacteria, I use a cream in my nose every day and that actually takes away that bacteria and the staphococciar auroria that’s in my nose. That 50% or 80% of people have it, but in my case it’s creating this and just by using this cream in my nose I actually calmed down the bacteria to the point where now I can eat pasta, I can eat bread not that I eat a lot of it, but I can eat it now whereas before, if I smelt it, I would get sick. Now I had been sick for so long and I was blaming all the doctors, but what I actually think it is doctors don’t get many hours of nutrition training. That’s not part of the normal thing. And then, as for science in general, I think, because these things are not killing us, it’s not cancer, it’s not something that’s actually killing us there’s not enough research that’s going into it because it’s not giving, there’s no real diagnosis and I think that up until recently there was no understanding that and even now it’s a nutritional thing for a big case of it. The money is just not there to get the research done. But I think if more money was put into the research and I think now it’s starting to, because now we’re starting to understand actually, if we can stop things like you’re saying, mental disorders, then we can be in a situation where we can have a better overall well-being of everyone. But I don’t think it was ever the doctors. Even I had suffered for so many years. I never blamed doctors. I think that we just never had the research into it because it wasn’t physically killing us, like a cancer was, and that’s where the money was going. Or something like when you get bitten by a mosquito what’s it called and then you end up being really sick from that. I think that there’s other things that have been priority.

Sheila Carroll: 40:12
Yeah, you know, at least the western healthcare we react when somebody becomes sick, when you start having a problem. That’s when doctors tend to get very involved and there’s been much less emphasis and much less value on preventative healthcare. So sometimes people are like it’s not really healthcare, it’s sick care. We are just. We are only taking care of people once they get sick and as a pediatrician, you know seeing newborn babies all the way up to, you know, 20-somethings. Part of our job is is preventative care and you know I love that. But at the same time it’s the least well well respected, number one, but also least well compensated. You know, we as a healthcare system, we just don’t value that. So you know, but we it needs to change. It needs to change because we’re just getting sicker adults. You know our population is getting sicker, we’re getting sicker younger, and all these medications we’re throwing at people, oh you’re, you know your LDL is high. Take a statin, oh you have. You know metabolic syndrome. Take metformin oh you have this. Oh you have. Your teenager has depression. Take pros up, you know they’re not. They’re sometimes providing a little bit of relief but they’re not really fixing the problem. They’re trying to cure the symptom. If you have a so we call those like non, non communicable diseases. But you know, if you have an infection, if you have a staff infection or if you have, you know something. You know that you need. You know you have an ear infection, you have a cellulite is an antibiotic. That’s perfect medicine for that, right you’ll. You’ll give the person the you need to kill off that bacteria so your body can resume its normal functioning. But these other other medications that we’re offering people, they’re not going to the root cause of the actual problem. They’re trying to help some of the symptoms, but if the person keeps doing everything that they’re doing because they haven’t been advised to change in any way, then they’re going to keep having those symptoms. And so where people where the real struggle is and again we don’t, we don’t support people in this manner because it’s not compensated. You know, doctors are compensated for this, the health care is not. You know, the health care don’t doesn’t pay for. This is once we know what to do, once a person knows what’s what to do. There’s a gap between knowing what to do and then actually knowing how to actually do it for yourself, you know. And so we don’t have the resources to walk people through, like from point a to point b to, you know, help them transition to eating a healthier diet, help them work on, you know sleep, help them work on movement, because it is kind of an experiment. You have to be willing to try something for a few weeks, see how you feel. Oh, for my individual body that doesn’t feel that good. So I need to try something else, you know, for men. What in medicine? If I would see a family that was struggling with a child with extra weight, I would say, okay, we’ll do this, this and this. Okay, come back in six months and we’ll see how it’s going, you know yeah 1000% not helpful at all, and so our system is not great, unfortunately it’s. It’s not embarrassing to be a doctor, but it’s just so, and I don’t blame the doctors, but it’s. It’s certainly not what most doctors went into medicine for to help people. But there’s so many conflicting you know what’s the right word.

Caroline Balinska: 44:13
Conflicting goals are conflicting what’s what it is more than a system, isn’t it? It’s not about the individual doctor. Who’s about the system? Yeah, but I’ve got so many questions based on that, because that was actually really great. And you, I read quite a few of your blog posts before getting on this call with you and there, and I did a lot of research to see what are people actually asking, like, what are the questions people are asking online. So I’ve got quite a few great statistics which actually freaked me out, and the word emotional eating. People are searching for that 1300 times a month on just on YouTube. So people are asking about emotional eating. So I found that a really interesting term. That that was one of the biggest ones is people. You know just weight loss, but I wanted to get deeper into because, like you said, it’s not about the weight loss, it’s about the why are we doing it, but also how to change that. So emotional eating gets so many searches and on your blog you talk about three words that will change your life. So I thought that actually that was a really good because we can say eat healthy. But I think those three words are actually a really good starting point for people to use as their base for everything to become healthier. Do you want to tell us about those three words?

Sheila Carroll: 45:33
oh, my goodness. Well, I haven’t read my blog in a little while. You’re gonna have to remind me. I don’t not sure I can’t remember. If you tell me, I’ll jog my memory. I get to choose or I will choose, or okay, that’s what I thought you were getting to, but I want to make sure. Yeah, you know, this is this. This was a light bulb moment for me and literally a life changing moment for me, because when I realize I don’t have to eat a salad or I don’t have to eat chicken, I’m choosing to eat chicken, I’m choosing to eat a salad. I’m, when I realize like, oh, it’s in my control, I’m the one who gets to decide what I want to do be based on the results I want in my life, and so it’s was so empowering to me to have that mind. You know, for example, I gave up eating flour and sugar a long time ago. I don’t, I almost never choose to eat things with flour and sugar. I certainly could. It’s everywhere. And the beauty of this whole the idea of choosing something is I never feel deprived because, you know, I’m not. I don’t want to eat that because of the way it reacts with my body. I don’t feel great, and so, you know, it’s kind of like. I describe it sometimes as do you think that vegetarians feel deprived, that they don’t get to eat meat? Most, most probably not because they’re choosing to be vegetarians. They’re choosing to eat, you know not not meet things. So once adults, who, who you know, so many people say oh, I have to eat this, or I’m on a diet, I have to eat the salad or I have to, that is not going to be a sustainable way of changing the way you’re eating and it also is tied. You know you can tell from that I have to eat this that you know there is an emotional component and they feel put upon, they feel deprived, they negative, yeah, yeah yeah, so we describe emotional eating as any eating that’s not for fuel reasons, like and not not. That you’re about, not, you’re not hungry, you’re not physically hungry, but you’re, you want to eat something. You know you’re bored, or you’re happy, you know, or you’re you’re sad. And the whole idea of that my, my coach says all the time and I think what she says is so powerful you don’t have an overeating problem, you have an under feeling problem. And so we often times eat or drink to buffer away our negative emotions, usually our negative emotions, things that feel uncomfortable when we’re restless, when we’re oh, you know, we walk by the kitchen and we should be, or we’re thinking, oh, I should be going to. You know, do this next thing on my to-do list? Oh, but I’ll just stop and have something here. You know, it’s just using food in a way. Food wasn’t ever meant to be used as, and not, and again not looking at ourselves and being like, oh, wow, that’s so wrong and I’m such a I’m so, I’m such an idiot or I’m so bad that I use food that way. No, honestly, we train, we’re training our kids to eat that way. Oh, you did a great job at soccer. Here’s a lollipop or here’s a popsicle. Oh, you, you know, oh, you had a bad day and let’s go to, let’s go get an ice cream. We are, it’s just our cult, it’s our culture here, and so we’re training ourselves to eat in ways To use food or really serving our body.

Caroline Balinska: 49:42
Yeah, no, I find that really interesting, that just that alone, if you use them, that thought process of I get to choose this. I actually use that a lot with my stepkids when it comes to just life in general. So when they’re talking about you know, I don’t want to clean my bedroom, yeah, you can sit there and you can complain about it all you want, but you should be sitting there saying, yeah, I get to clean up, because then I get to have, I get to find things that I haven’t seen for a while because they’ve been hidden under everything. And I think that that’s like I get to choose to wear clean clothes because I want that to be something I’d be proud of. I don’t want it to be something we have to change my clothes now, we have to have a shower no, be happy that you get to do those things. So I like that. That. That’s by instilling that into ourselves, but also into our children. It works across everything in life and it’s not just that. Food choices.

Sheila Carroll: 50:39
It’s one of the most powerful parenting strategies. And there’s a term autonomy, supportive parenting, and what that whole. It’s exactly that idea. You, I use it with my son and especially as he’s getting older. Okay, you have a little bit of homework to do? Okay, oh, you can choose to do it. And then what are the benefits that you’re going to experience yourself, if you choose, leaving me out of it? It’s not, this isn’t my problem. I already know how to read. You’re doing it for me, yeah, yeah, or you can choose not to do it. And what are the? What are the negative things that might, might you might occur, Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but in six months from now. If you don’t read every night, like your teacher wants you to, you know, six months from now where are you going to be? And so helping kids really. And this is what’s so what, why parents need to be so involved in kids food choices and in all of their other skills, doing their homework and all of these other things we’re talking about is because kids and teenagers brains are just developing. They’re not as developed, they’re not mature. By definition, they’re kids. So what we’re talking about is the, the development and the maturation of the prefrontal cortex and our prefrontal cortex, like I’m pointing to my forehead, because this is kind of where it is in the brain, If you can think about it like the CEO of your your brain, it’s the. It’s the part of your brain with the big picture in mind. So, for me, my prefrontal cortex is thinking about Sheila six months from now or a year from now, and it has the capability to be like okay, what I choose to do today impacts my future self. So I’m going to do this, this and this, even though I don’t really feel like it right in the moment. So kids don’t have that full capacity yet. So you know, when you offer a child, you can have this, what you know pizza marshmallow test.

Caroline Balinska: 52:54
Yeah yeah, the famous marshmallow test.

Sheila Carroll: 52:57
But yeah, yeah, but they just can’t. But it’s every single thing in their life. But we can help them understand. But you actually have to go through, you have to take the time with your child and then you have to be willing to let them make the choice, like for me. I’m like it’s up to you If you are going to do your homework or not do your homework. Before you make a decision, let’s go through what could possibly happen that would be great if you do it and what could possibly happen that would be less great if you don’t do it. And then I let him choose. And so what I’m seeing you know, what I’m seeing now for him is he’s he is able to, he’s learning more and more to tie his own results with the actions he took and the decisions that he made. And so we do this all the time with, especially, teenagers. I mean, the more they get and the more freedom they have. They need they, we. We want to, yeah, we want to foster their autonomy, but also help them, because they could have gaps, because their prefrontal cortex is just developing. We might want to help them make like a 360 view of their decisions. Yeah, and so we need to do that.

Caroline Balinska: 54:14
We haven’t had the life experience yet.

Sheila Carroll: 54:16
Yeah, and we need to do that with food for our kids too, and all lifestyle behaviors.

Caroline Balinska: 54:22
I can give a really good example. So, talking about I choose. So when I met my stepkids, I did all the cooking and I love to cook, I’m whole issues, my background. So a lot of the foods I make I make, like you know, foods that are unusual and here in the Netherlands the food is people in the Netherlands. Every day they eat two slices of bread with a slice of cheese inside it, with nothing else, and they think that that’s a lunch. So Dutch people have got a really really low bar when it comes to food options and they’re like they don’t have any cultural foods or anything like. The food choices here are, yeah, very bland and very basic and not really anything to it, and so when I met them I was coming along with I love to cook. I grew up in Australia, I grew up in Melbourne, where we love where food is in Melbourne. That’s the culture there and I was always making different meals and they were very much like ew. Before they even knew where I was cooking, they’d walk into the kitchen and they’d just go ew, that smells disgusting. I’m not going to eat that tonight. I’m like you don’t even know what it is. I’m not eating it. So I’d have four kids at the table. It went on for about a year where every single night, before they even got to see what it was, they just decided they hated it before anything. So it was. And then, of course, I’m trying to cook things that the kids will like. But I want to give them variety. I want to give them vegetables. They’re not used to eating these vegetables, they’re not used to eating different things. So this went on for about a year and finally, one day I said to my partner look, I’m done If it’s going to be like this. I’m just not cooking anymore because I’m getting really sick of it. I’m just not living like this. So he came up with this concept and I thought it was brilliant. He sat them down and he said from this day forward, you’re going to have to choose one food each that you don’t have to ever eat. It’s your choice. If that food’s ever put in a meal, you can then say I’m not eating this dish. You can eat it if you want, but you can say no to it. But one food. You can change it every three months or four months, something like that, like every quarter, but once you choose that food you can’t decide tomorrow you’re changing that food. You have to stick with it for a certain amount of time, but you’re allowed to change it after a few months. And that moment two of the kids put their hands up I’m not eating this. The other kids like I’m not eating this. And the youngest daughter, who was like the worst. She was like seven at the time. She was like let me think about what food it’s going to be. That was seven years ago. She still hasn’t chosen her food. So literally what happened from that day was they decided and one of the kids, the eldest boy, he couldn’t eat red peppers, capsicum, so like for him, they just made him gag. So he was just like I can’t have it. So but what happened after that was that sometimes he was like oh, I can eat it in that dish, I can eat it in that dish. And then I agreed and look from my end from now on, if a majority of you don’t like a dish I cook, I’ll just never cook the game. But my whole thing is I want you to try new foods. I want you to be open to different foods. I just want you to have the experience of different foods, because until you try it. You don’t know, and maybe you don’t like the potato in that meal, but you might like the potato in a different meal. So until you try these different foods, you don’t know. And they all agree to that. Since then we’ve never had any issues, because if one of them says something like, oh, I don’t know if I want to eat this, it doesn’t happen very often. If they do, I just look at them and I just go it’s not on your list, and then they just go okay, and they go back to eating. And I’m not saying these kids are like these angel kids, that, oh, that. That wouldn’t be possible. You don’t understand the fights we used to have. Like the fights were just for kids chaos every week. We had them for 50% of the week. 50% of the week was this chaotic fights every night. Every kid likes something different. And so I got to the point where, when we implemented this, it has worked brilliantly and we’ve just we don’t have any arguments now, and occasionally the kids go you know what, I don’t like that meal. And two of them will be like yeah, sorry, carolyn, I don’t like it and I’ll go okay, I’m just not cooking that again. I’ll cook something different then, and it’s just not an argument, because I know I can put those vegetables in a different type of meal next time and this has worked brilliantly. And so when we have visitors over now, they’re like wow, your kids are amazing, they try everything. And since then they’ve traveled to many different places where they actually now will try anything. So we’d been to Morocco just before this happened and they were like we were in this beautiful restaurant and we got a big plate of like all different foods and they were all like complaining and we’re like guys, just at least try the things you don’t know, you don’t like them. Since then we can travel with them and they have no problems with at least trying a majority of their foods. I think that that’s changed their worlds as well. Not just my world, but their worlds have been opened up as well.

Sheila Carroll: 58:59
What a huge gift you gave to them by being willing to keep at it for so long and to kind of endure that struggle. But you talked about so many different things, but one thing is the exposures. So what you did was you kept offering them exposures to different foods and to different vegetables, and we know that kids sometimes need 15 or 20 exposures to a food to be willing to eat it, and so that’s something that often does Parents fall down because they, well, I’ve cooked just broccoli. I cooked broccoli and he wouldn’t eat it. I cooked it, he won’t eat it. So they give up on eating that, versus just okay. Well, he’s not eating it right now, but let’s see if there’s a way we could figure out that he could potentially eat it. But I also liked what you said about like just okay, you know, because there are certain foods that I don’t like to eat. There’s probably foods that you don’t like the taste of, and kids have that too. They do, but not everything, not every vegetable, you know. That’s that’s. That’s just taking it too far. So what a great strategy to offer those kids, and it’s awesome.

Caroline Balinska: 1:00:14
Yeah, it works beautifully. So, if anyone’s listening and they don’t know what to do. It’s a really good strategy. I wanted to ask you about talking about feeding kids you spoke about on your blog again. There was another blog I read and this one gets 6,000 searches every month just on YouTube alone is how to stop snacking. Yeah, it’s the search term that people are asking about and you do a great blog post about snacking and how you don’t believe in it. So can you give us a little bit of information about your position on snacking?

Sheila Carroll: 1:00:46
Sure, you know there’s, biologically speaking, snacking is not well. I guess it would depend on what you’re snacking on, but we never snacked here in the United States. Snacking kind of became a thing in the 70s and 80s and has been gangbusters since then. It came of age with the snack food industry and big food making these products that they wanted people to eat. So there’s data. People used to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner and kids could go a long period of time. They would eat well at breakfast and they would have four to six hours eat lunch or four to six more hours eat dinner, and then you know, that was it Today. So those are, that’s three meals a day. Today, kids in America are eating anywhere between, I think, seven to ten times a day, and so we’ve just exponentially increased the amount of the frequency that we’re eating. And the problem with that is that, depending on the food you’re eating and a lot of Americans at least but people buy snack food, so they snack on snack foods which are high in sugar, and so when your sugar goes up, your insulin level goes up, and when your insulin level is high in your bloodstream it doesn’t allow you to use your fat stores as energy. So a long time ago, you know, when people weren’t snacking and even before there were even three meals a day. You know, you, you could. Our bodies are designed to store some fat when we have the ability to have those excess calories and store them as energy. But our body easily can access that fat when we need to, when there’s a gap in our eating, when there’s a period of time where we’re not eating, and so that’s how people maintained their body weight and stayed lean and and, could you know, do all the things that they needed to do. So today we’re never giving our body. Because of the frequency of snacking and the snack choices that people are making, the food choices, our bodies are never experiencing that period of time where our body is able to access our own fat stores for energy. So we’re storing fat, storing fat, storing fat, but we’re never using that fat, and that’s what. That’s why people are gaining weight and we’re storing extra weight. So I am not a fan of snacking. I I don’t snack myself. I try to eat enough at a meal of real food so that I can go four to six hours or longer even without eating the thing. The thing you really realize as an adult if you are willing to give up flour and sugar and get rid of, get those out of your diet, it kind of resets and balances your hunger hormones so you’re not even hungry, you don’t even feel like snacking, except emotionally, like if I don’t want to do something. Or I’m like, oh, I have to go whatever, mow the lawn or clean the garbage or something, and I’m like, oh, I should eat something, you know, like that. And then you can realize like oh yeah, I’m just trying to avoid doing what I you know, unpleasant tasks or but I have my hunger levels changed. This was the game changer for me, biologically, that I had never tried before. I spent decades trying to lose weight and I never really could because I was always hungry. So you know, for example, if I was eating, say, two cookies instead of four or five cookies, even that the the, so I was cutting back and I was so supposedly like trying to lose weight that way. But the, the sugar in those cookies and the flour. The flour turns immediately to sugar in our body. So the sugar in that cookie was driving up my insulin, which was affecting my hunger hormones. So I was quickly hungry again. And you can’t lose me and you can’t maintain a healthy weight when you’re hungry all the time. So our snacking and the rise of the snack food industry, pushing these unhealthy snack foods on us, it’s actually making people hungrier. So people are eating more and it’s it’s, it’s been a disaster. If you look at, you know there’s I forget where the article is. It’s either the journal of them, of the New England Journal of Medicine, I’m not sure I’d have to look back, but there’s a graph that shows the rise of snacking and the number of times per day that people snack and the rise of pediatric obesity in in the United States. And it’s they just they mirror each other. So, and today, here at least in the U S, you know kids are offered food, snack foods, all the time. You know they go to school, they go to, they have breakfast, then they’re offered a snack. You know, then they have lunch, then a snack, and they come home from school a snack, have dinner, a snack, and it’s just we have this mentality that we, our kids, need this, but the truth is they really don’t. But we don’t want them to be hungry. So my recommendation for parents are is use real food as a snack. So don’t buy chips, don’t buy all the you know the snack foods oh, you’re hungry, okay, so you could have some. You know protein, your cheese, meat, you know. Just use real, any kind of real food fruits and vegetables, nuts, seeds and that will dampen, depending on what you choose. You won’t have that glucose rise, you won’t have that insulin spike and your body will handle that much better over time.

Caroline Balinska: 1:07:07
I even see that. So I’m the same with my daughter. Is that she’s? She goes through most days where she eats like four breakfasts, so she’ll have breakfast and an hour later she’ll want to have breakfast and she’ll have a pardon, she’s like a hobbit. Yeah, she’s crazy and so, and then in the afternoon sometimes she wants to snack a lot and so I give her, yeah, fresh, like real nuts or carrots or something cheese. But I was in the supermarket one day and I was looking at these and I was like, even when she was young, I tried to stay away from all these like processed biscuits, crackers and things. And I was looking at one of the packets and it’s on there, you know, from 12 months plus, and I thought, okay, these are like it’s an actual kids friendly fruit of food in the kids section. I was shocked with what was inside there, absolutely shocked. So even those things that you think are specifically made for children, they’re terrible. Yeah, yeah, just as bad as an adult version.

Sheila Carroll: 1:08:02
Yeah, yogurt powders with fruit. Yeah, so this is a tip for parents. You really need to understand the food labels, and I don’t know what the food labels are like in the Netherlands, but here they have to have added sugars. How many added sugars are?

Caroline Balinska: 1:08:20
in the food.

Sheila Carroll: 1:08:21
Yeah, and even that it’s a little, you know.

Caroline Balinska: 1:08:26
They word it in ways sometimes that you just go that’s interesting.

Sheila Carroll: 1:08:29
I think there’s at least 270 different words.

Caroline Balinska: 1:08:33
Yeah.

Sheila Carroll: 1:08:35
And the other thing is, if it’s under 5% of the complete ingredients, then they don’t even have to list it. So you could have 20 different kinds of sugar, but if they’re under 20% you don’t have to even list them on the package.

Caroline Balinska: 1:08:51
Not only that but they can be out by is it 10 or 20% of the? So if it says 100 calories, they can be out by 20% on the calories, which is also making up the sugar amount. So they can be out by 20% of what it’s actually in there, based on what’s allowed by the regulatory agencies. It’s so frustrating, so frustrating so you just have to stay away from it, yeah.

Sheila Carroll: 1:09:18
I teach parents to be like I call a sugar detective and look for added sugars. It’s in spaghetti sauce, ketchup, barbecue sauce, all of these kid foods. Kids like sweet things, so if your kid’s willing to eat it, it probably has sugar in it. Kids can learn to eat things that don’t have sugar, of course. But here, or the CDC and the World Health Organization, they recommend that kids from zero to two years old have zero grams of added sugar a day. So all of those little things that parents buy for their kids I did too. There’s little biscuits, those puffs, the juice packets, yeah yeah, kids just don’t need juice. That’s another tip for parents. They only need water Juices. Just this huge fructose load right to their livers. They can’t handle it and they’ll store that as fat. But zero to two years old, you’re supposed to have zero grams of added sugar. So we’re not talking about sugar. And whole fruit apples, pears, whatever fruit you’re choosing, that’s totally fine. And then two years old. To the rest of us, the recommendation is to have about 25 grams of sugar a day, and that might sound like a lot. Oh, I probably don’t get 25 grams of sugar a day. Well, it’s about four or five teaspoons. But one of my son’s friends came over the other day and he had a Gatorade, a sports drink. I don’t know if they sell that where you are.

Caroline Balinska: 1:11:03
Yeah, he says that.

Sheila Carroll: 1:11:05
So 69 grams of sugar in the bottle that he had, yeah, wow.

Caroline Balinska: 1:11:11
I am joking you.

Sheila Carroll: 1:11:13
And it’s a sports drink, it’s healthy, he’s a sporting, yeah, and so it’s just so. And so half of that sugar is fructose. So half of that 69 grams, is going right to his liver and he can’t process that.

Caroline Balinska: 1:11:29
And it’s. So what would be? Let’s say, someone wants to still give their kids some sort of sweet treats, and is honey better? Is there any of those sugars that you say are better? Or you’re just saying, like for kids, because I know that now, going through menopause and I’m learning all about like sugars and that something I stayed away with for so many years that sugars just are just a no go. But with kids it is a little bit harder. So if you’re going to give them something, is there a sugar? Or you’re just saying like, just don’t.

Sheila Carroll: 1:12:00
Well, I mean, my son eats sugar too, and I think this is the world that we live in as parents. I think, just understanding that the sugar is making their insulin go up, whether it’s honey, whether it’s organic, all the sugars are kind of acting in the same way. But I would, so I don’t think that there’s necessarily one sugar that’s better than another. I don’t like those, although I’m not a fan of the artificial sugars in their packets, that those negatively affect people’s microbiome and also the problem.

Caroline Balinska: 1:12:45
Now there’s some talk coming out about the actual diseases that it causes.

Sheila Carroll: 1:12:50
For some of them, yeah, and the problem with those sugars, for example, is they are exponentially sweeter than regular sugar. So what that does is affects your child’s taste buds so that if they’re getting a lot of artificial sugars they might not even be able to taste the sugar that you would have in an apple or the sugar there is sugar in carrots. Nobody says, oh, these carrots are so sweet because our taste buds are so jacked up to, we’re so used to tasting things with huge. The sweetness level is huge. We, most kids, can’t really taste and I think that’s why a lot of kids are not great at eating vegetables. Well, number one kids don’t really like that bitter flavor. That’s a, that’s a light, you know a protecting, evolutionary protective mechanism. Oh, it’s bitter. It might be bad for me, I might not want to eat it. But the other thing I think is vegetables don’t taste good to kids because their taste buds are so used to getting so much sugar from other things they can’t even taste the natural sugar in a food.

Caroline Balinska: 1:14:03
So what would you say? If people are listening and they’re in a situation now where they’re listening, saying, hang on, I’m making those mistakes in my own child’s life. What would be a few steps that you recommend that they take to start the change process?

Sheila Carroll: 1:14:19
So I, like my recommendation is for parents to start with themselves. Before you change anything for your child like, really try to get to an understanding of how you and your body would react to the changes that you eventually want to make for your child. So what I mean by that is parents, become aware of how much, how many processed foods you’re eating and try to cut that back. Become aware of the sugars, the added sugars that you’re eating and cut that back. And ideally, in my program I mean in my coaching program that I work with parents I recommend that the parents it’s mostly moms I recommend that you give up flour and sugar, not permanently, not forever, but for a period of time. And I use a term like reset to factory settings Because it does. It does reset your body to kind of the way it was designed to be. Your hunger, hormones are balanced and and when you, when you can get through the two or three days that it doesn’t feel great to be withdrawing from sugar and flour, once you’re beyond that and your body starts to really function like it, like it’s supposed to, you realize how good you feel and, oh my gosh, I have so much energy. Oh my gosh, I’m not even. You know I don’t crave this anymore. My hunger levels are better things, I’m sleeping better, everything’s better for me. And then when a mom feels that and experiences that for herself, they they want that for their child and then they also can see what’s possible for their child and so then it’s not like go cold turkey on your child. I never recommend that a child. You know the parents try to police all the things that their kids are eating. But then you may healthy swaps, you know, for your kids. You know over time there’s something and I’ll I’ll give you the link that you could give to your listeners.

Caroline Balinska: 1:16:29
I have a place, I’ll put in the street.

Sheila Carroll: 1:16:30
I have a thing called how to make parenting around food feel less hard, and what this describes is this tool that parents can use called the division of responsibility, and this is a concept created by a woman named Ellen Satter. She’s a dietitian of family therapists, but she created this framework to think about how you’re feeding your kids, and she describes parents jobs and kids jobs. And the parents jobs are to decide what is being offered to eat, when it’s being offered to eat and where it’s being offered to eat, and the kids jobs are to decide whether they’re going to eat and how much they’re going to eat. So this is this is what I work on with my clients is the biggest stumbling block is usually the what to offer the kids, because what you described going through with your own family. You took that, took on that job. You own that job of what to eat, and your kids gave you a lot of pushback against that, which is fine, but it’s your job to decide what. It’s their job to decide whether and if whether they’re going to eat and if they’re going to eat. So that framework can really be life changing for families. Because you know from if a mom feels confident like, oh, I’m, I’m, that’s one of my jobs and I also view it as a safety issue. It’s one of my. I say this to my son it’s my job as your mom to keep you as healthy and safe as possible. And I just, I just know that these, this food’s not actually even safe for you. Not that it’s junk food, you shouldn’t eat it but it’s actually not safe for you. So why would I give you a food that I think is harming you? And so when parents can feel confident in their jobs and their in their role, then they can just let the children do their job, which is to decide whether they’re going to eat it and how much they’re going to eat. Now, of course, there’s lots of tips and tricks. Like you don’t want to just make something that you know your kids don’t like, or you know you don’t want every meal to be, you know, a battle. So I recommend, you know I, you know, if you have, like you have four kids you would want to make something that at least, whatever the meal that you’re pulling together, has at least one thing in it that each you know each child likes to eat, and that way they’ll always have something available for them to eat at that meal. And then it’s just, you know, experimenting, a work in progress. But over time, what this does is it teaches the kids that they’re in charge of their bodies. They eat when they’re hungry. They learn to stop eating when they’ve had enough. And the parent in the, in the job of deciding what to eat, is acting like their child’s prefrontal cortex, deciding the best, what they think is the best food for them, and then letting everybody do their jobs. And this isn’t to say you always have to make a health, you know, a super healthy. You, the parent, can decide okay, tonight we’re having pizza, and then the child decides how much pizza, that, if they want to eat pizza, and how much pizza they’re going to eat. So it’s really, it’s not, it’s not. This is not the division of responsibility is not saying eat these certain foods and avoid these certain foods. It’s. It’s giving families their individual jobs and then, when people do their jobs, that results in, you know, learning the kids learning to eat in a healthy way.

Caroline Balinska: 1:20:27
Yeah, that’s great. I’ve got another tip as well, having four step kids, and one thing that I found worked really well for our family to make it, because I think I love to cook, so for me it was easy. But I think there’s a lot of moms that don’t either don’t have time or don’t enjoy it. So one of the best things that I used to do to have something that everyone would eat was I would get a platter, a long platter, and I would put on their strips of different vegetables. So I’d either grate them just a box grater and grate everything on different sizes so great, some tomato or, sorry, great some carrot on one. I’d grate something else on another and I’d have like different or chop it up, so I’d have different sizes of everything. Chop some tomatoes and have strips of lettuce and a spinach and different things on the plate and nice and colorful. So I’d like either do it where I’d like, rotate the colors, have some avocado, so it’d be like a red, then a green, then an orange, then a red, then a green, so it’d look really pretty on the table. Everyone loved it. And then I’d either give them like a pita bread or a bowl of rice, and when I did rice, I’d mix in there some couscous or some different grains, so it was like rice but with some sort of other multi grain in there. And then they would get their bowl of rice or a pita bread whatever it was for that night, and some grilled chicken just grilled chicken, really simple to cut it, some chicken breast and grilled some chicken. And I would say to everyone I don’t care what you eat, but you have to choose at least three of those vegetables. I don’t care, I don’t have a choice of like six different vegetables, no dressing on it or anything, and then they could go okay, tonight I want the cucumber and the carrot and the tomato, or they’d have to have minimum of three, I don’t care which ones. And then I would try to make them eat as much as possible and that either have it in their wrap or that have it on the rice and chicken. They could have different dressings on there. And then anything that was left was really easy to put in the fridge for the next day, because I had no dressing on it, so then it could just go in the fridge and become the salad for the next day, but that was a really good one that every kid then had autonomy of what they wanted. They love that and they felt and when I the first time I ever did it, it was just such a great one that worked even before we had the rule of the one food choice, but that was just the one that they had complete power and they always asked for that meal and the chicken was always different. Sometimes I’d make popcorn. Chicken was like chicken shinsals little chicken shinsals with that, or grilled chicken, or maybe I’d put some fish on the side, whatever it was. But I found that then they all had the choice of which of those vegetables they wanted. And, yeah, that that to me and it’s so easy because you’re not thinking about how am I going to make a salad is like literally chopping up some vegetables and putting it on a plate and some grilled chicken and that’s all there was to it.

Sheila Carroll: 1:23:08
Yeah, that’s wonderful, that’s so good.

Caroline Balinska: 1:23:12
Because I think, as busy moms, we need to have something that works as well.

Sheila Carroll: 1:23:16
I think that’s the hardest thing. And you mentioned cooking and I think that is such a powerful and empowering skill and you know, like you said, it does take time and you do need to have some basic knowledge of how to cook. My mom actually taught me how to cook when I was a little kid and I love to cook, but some people don’t, I know, but I would as if you’re a parent who’s like I don’t know how to cook or I don’t love cooking, or I would revisit that and and because the upsides of knowing how to cook are so freeing and powerful. There’s another doctor I read all of his books. His name is Dr Robert Lustig and he is a genius and he says if you don’t know how to cook, you are hostage to the process food industry. And it’s so true and you know, here in the US at least, they used to have home economics in school. They teach people how to cook and that’s a lot of those things have been cut out because of budgetary reasons and focusing on other things, but that is such and now with YouTube and now with the internet there’s, you can learn to cook very simple, very easy things and it’s not hard. And I would really encourage all parents to learn how to cook and teach your kids how to cook too, because then you’re offering them that life skill that is freeing for them, where they go off to college or get their first apartment or whatever, they don’t have to eat out at a restaurant or get take out every or buy things every night, they can cook for themselves, and that they will just stay so much healthier that way.

Caroline Balinska: 1:25:11
Yeah, I tried to make a rule of one every month. The kids have to cook with me at least once a month oh great, and they get to cook whatever they want. But we come up with a recipe together and we cook together. And the eldest boy, who’s now in university, lives out of home. He actually talks to me about recipes and his friends are shocked that he knows how to cook. And if it wasn’t for me going through that process and I have to admit, especially for someone like me who cooks a lot and I know what I’m doing it’s not that it’s an easy process to do, because you’re cleaning up after them, you’re helping them, and if you don’t know how to cook, it’s probably even bigger. But I think, as a parent, if we can give that to our children, I think that that’s something they look back on Like. My stepdaughter went to Thailand recently for a trip and she was doing a cooking class. We gave her a cooking class there and she wrote me a message afterwards. She said the lady can’t believe how much I know about cooking and I learned it from you. So it made me realize all of that time, of that extra effort, has actually come back in a very good way, and it’s the power of the children. And if you’re a parent that doesn’t know how to cook because you didn’t get that experience from your own parents, then you know the disservice you’re doing by not going through that process. And, like you said, youtube you can learn the most basic cooking now and go through that process with your child, and it doesn’t have to be anything. And what I love about this salad that I spoke about is that when you’re making a salad, if you don’t know how to follow a complete recipe and you want to come up with an idea, or you don’t have all the ingredients for that salad, then mixing the wrong things together can taste really disgusting. So then you don’t like what you’ve made and then you go. I’m not a good cook, but then if you do what I did and just put all the things out on a plate, the children get to make their gross selections by themselves. Sometimes they go why would you add those two things together? But they like it, so who cares, as long as they’re eating it. I think that that’s the most important part and that’s why just putting together. Something where they grab their own pieces from the platter is actually just such a simple way to take away that anxiety about cooking as well.

Sheila Carroll: 1:27:19
Yeah, I agree, I agree and you know so. Getting your child involved in even grocery shopping, going to the store with you and picking out the vegetables or the you know whatever you’re going to eat. And then the cooking process. You know how earlier we talked about exposures to food. This also has been shown to help kids be willing to try a wide variety of foods. For example, if they refuse to eat broccoli but you’re going to cook with them with something with broccoli, you know, at the grocery store you say, hey, could you run over there and grab some broccoli for me? And that’s considered even an exposure, because they’re going there, they’re touching it, they might be smelling it, they’re seeing it and they’re getting used to it. And then they come home, oh, chop that up for me, and they’re chopping or whatever you know, and so that’s another exposure. So it is so valuable over time to be willing to take the extra time and extra work to go shopping with your children. So much easier for us to just do it ourselves and you know to cook it for ourselves, cook something ourselves. But it’s so powerful to include them, take the extra time and teach them.

Caroline Balinska: 1:28:35
Yeah, definitely. You have been amazing, Sheila, and we’ve taken up so much of your time already. I’ve got one more question for you. What are three tips I always ask all of my guests Just three general life tips that you would give to any woman listening that’s over the age of 40 that you think are important tips for a more fulfilling life.

Sheila Carroll: 1:28:57
My first tip would be they’re all going to be probably health related. My first tip is sleep. Make sure you’re getting enough sleep. I think, at least here in the US, we sleep is very underrated and it is so powerful. So the recommendation is for adults to get between seven and nine hours of sleep every night, and lots of people aren’t getting that, and so when you aren’t getting good sleep, it’s affecting your hormones, it’s affecting your hunger, it affects your food choices, it affects your ability to be a role model honestly, a role model for your kids. So there’s so much in our culture that prevents us from getting sleep. People bring their work home, people are scrolling on social media, there’s movies, netflix I mean, there’s so many fun things to be doing all the time, but that’s encroaching on our sleep. So really trying to dial in and focus on your sleep, that would be my first tip. My second tip I’m 55. So, as a woman who is above 40, and I wish I had started more when I was 40, but would be exercise on purpose, and I love the title of your podcast Life on Purpose or Living on Purpose, life on Purpose, life on Purpose I mean, I just love that. That’s so the message why we’re doing things, we’re doing it on purpose. So women can exercise, especially over 40, because over 40 we know that we start to lose muscle mass more quickly than when we were younger, and so even walking or, even better, a little bit of strength training, lifting some weights, to maintain our muscle mass, which is going to improve your metabolic health. So if you keep your muscles up and keep working on your muscles, maintain your muscle strength Well, number one, it’s great for your bones, but also it improves your metabolic health, because when you do eat things that have sugar in it, your muscles will burn that sugar more efficiently. So it gives you wiggle room that you need, that you probably didn’t need before. So sleep, exercise. And my last one, I guess, would be just connection and connection to yourself, number one, and really get having a good, you know, spending time with yourself and really getting to enjoy spending time with yourself, but also connection to, if you’re a mom, to your kids. It can be to anybody really, but that has been something that has been shown to improve people’s health lifespan, the length of their life and their health span. So the quality of your health is your relationships and your connection, and so, you know, really focusing on staying connected to people in a meaningful way, because sometimes busy moms 40, you know, in your 40s, 50s you had a million things going on your job, your kids, your spouse. Everything is going in many different directions and you can not meet up with your friends or you can not stay connected to your friends, or you can lose connection to your kids or your spouse. But understanding that that connection is what’s going to help you really enjoy your life, like you said, on purpose. So those are my three tips.

Caroline Balinska: 1:32:50
Love them. Fantastic. I’m building up a little collection, and if I had to choose three, I wouldn’t be able to do it, because I’m getting really great answers, so I love that. That’s fantastic. Sheila, you have been amazing. You have got a program that you offer, you have got a free download that you want to share with everyone as well, and you have got a wealth of knowledge that I know that we haven’t even touched the surface yet, and I’d love to get you back another time to share more. But where can people find you if they want to get in touch with you?

Sheila Carroll: 1:33:20
The best place is through my website, sheilacarolmdcom. I’ll give you the link and my email is on there, so people could just email me.

Caroline Balinska: 1:33:32
Super and you’ve got a free download that people can download.

Sheila Carroll: 1:33:36
Yes, it’s called how to Make Parenting Around Food Feel Less Hard and we kind of talked a little bit about it and it just yeah, and I think I hope it’s helpful for people to understand why it feels hard. But also, okay, how can I parent on purpose around food? And that’s what this handout helps people with Super.

Caroline Balinska: 1:34:03
I will put all those links in the show notes so people can get hold of those. But thank you for being here. It’s been wonderful having you here. You have given us so much insight into how to make better choices with our help. So thank you so much. Thank you, caroline, thank you for having me and thanks everyone for watching. See you soon. Bye.