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root causes

Anxiety Summit 6: Toxins/Meds/Infections – Your Roadmap to Finding Your Solutions

October 8, 2020 By Trudy Scott 7 Comments

anxiety summit 6 roadmap root causes

I’ve created this roadmap for The Anxiety Summit 6: Toxins, Meds & Infections because I want to make it easy for you to get the best value from these wonderful interviews. I don’t want you to feel totally overwhelmed and more stressed when you see all these experts and interview topics and wonder “where am I going to start?”

I’m using the map analogy because as a hiker I know I need a map to be able to find where I’m going and because being out in nature is a big part of the healing process.  I’m a visual person and I like to have a clear picture in my mind of the lay of the land BEFORE I set off somewhere new.

It’s for this reason that I’ve created this document with these handy dandy charts that you can refer to at the start of the summit, come back to during the summit and refer to after the summit when you’re re-listening to interviews and reading transcripts. 

I hope you enjoy it and find it easier to navigate the summit with these maps:

  • Root Causes/Triggers – figure out which may be your root causes/triggers
  • Solutions – for you to explore with the summit interviews
  • Conditions – see which ones are relevant for you

The numbers in parentheses refer to the number in the cross-reference table at the end – which then gives you the actual talk/s where this topic is discussed.

Here is an example of one of many possible root causes of your anxiety – in the Foods section on the first root causes/triggers map you’ll see: Bone broth, tea, wine and kombucha (fluoride) (17).

These are all surprising sources of fluoride and we talk about these and much more in the interview with Melissa Gallico: “Fluoride: Neurotoxicity, Anxiety, Acne and Hypothyroidism.”

What you’ll learn –

  • Prenatal fluoride exposure and lower IQ scores in children aged 3 to 4 years
  • How fluoride can be a trigger for cystic acne, depression, anxiety, Tourette’s, migraines, insomnia and hypothyroidism
  • Surprising sources of fluoride and protective nutrients

As you know, anxiety can be related to your daily life experiences BUT it can also be triggered by:

  • foods you eat and what you drink (like wheat, oxalates, alcohol and more)
  • environmental toxins (like fluoride, lead, plastics, fragrances, insecticides, fluoride and more)
  • many types of medications (like the benzos/SSRIs, birth control pill, acne medication, fluoroquinolone antibiotics and more) and/or
  • chronic infections (like Lyme disease, PANDAS, parasites, candida and more).

Once you identify the root causes and understand anxiety’s mechanisms you can support the liver/gallbladder, detox, address infections, implement targeted and supportive solutions, and get relief!

This is my 6th Anxiety Summit, featuring all new topics and the latest research related to anxiety and toxins, medications and infections.

Click below to download your copy of the entire Roadmap – 2 pages of Root Causes, 2 pages of Solutions and a page of Conditions (and get access to the summit at the same time).

Download the Roadmap

 

I’d love your feedback in the comments section below

  • Let us know you find this helpful for navigating the summit 
  • Give us suggestions for improving it and let us know which topics we missed and we’ll do our best to create an updated version
  • Tell us which aspects of the roadmaps you loved and topics you’d like to learn more about

Even if you already receive my newsletters and signed up some time ago to be notified about the upcoming Anxiety Summit 6, you will still need to register at the new link here, because Health Talks Online is doing the production and backend work for me.

If you don’t register you won’t get access to the daily summit emails with all the interviews.

You will however, continue to get these emails from me.

This is my 6th Anxiety Summit and it is all new content!

The content is research-based and practical, and is geared to anxious individuals who are health-savvy and to practitioners who work with anxious individuals.

If you are totally new to functional medicine and nutritional solutions for anxiety, you will still learn so much so just take in what you can and know you’ll get all this eventually.

Filed Under: Anxiety Summit 6 Tagged With: acne, anxiety, bone broth, broth, conditions, fluoride, kombucha, Roadmap, root causes, Solutions, tea, The Anxiety Summit 6, triggers, wine

Can food and nutrients really help me if I have very severe anxiety and/or panic attacks and I’m using medications?

June 21, 2019 By Trudy Scott 8 Comments

food, nutrients and med

As I prepare for “The Anxiety Summit 5: Gut-Brain Axis” (airing in November 2019) I have been going through interviews from the first Anxiety Summit in 2014 and would like to share something that I addressed in my opening interview as a good recap for you as you are on your healing journey with anxiety (or in case this comes up again in the future) – you truly can eliminate anxiety entirely!

This is a question I am often asked: “Can I really eliminate anxiety using food, nutrients (and a functional medicine approach) if I have very severe anxiety and/or panic attacks and I’m using medications?”

Way too many folks don’t believe it’s possible but yes, you can! You can completely eliminate full blown anxiety, panic attacks, social anxiety (where you cannot go out to social event or go and feel so anxious), phobias like fear of spiders or agoraphobia (where you cannot get out of the house), and even obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

Many folks believe their anxiety is much too severe and that food and nutrients couldn’t possibly help. I’m here to tell you this is just not true.

It’s not uncommon for well-known thought leaders to perpetuate this myth, implying anxiety and fears never go away.

Ali Brown, entrepreneurial guru for women, and one of my amazing business mentors, created a program to help businesswomen overcome their fears. She shared this in the program information: “Let’s not forget women’s darkest best friends: anxiety and worry” and admitted “I still have to fight it. I come from a long line of worriers.”

I say no, you don’t have to fight it. Just because you come from a long line of worriers doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to put up with it and live with it. There is something you can do to eliminate the anxiety, worries and fears.

Seth Godin, author and thought leader, says this: “When fear shows up, understand that it never goes away. Dance with it instead.”

While I really enjoy the dance suggestion – it’s fun and the joy of dancing and the exercise may help – however I really do disagree with the fact that he says fear never goes away.

In season 1 interviewed Julia Ross, MA, my mentor and author of The Mood Cure (my Amazon link), on using amino acids for anxiety and she summed it up perfectly:

On a scale from zero to 10, zero is not an unrealistic goal when it comes to anxiety. It’s really the human potential and GABA and tryptophan give us access to it.

I’m going to repeat this because I think it’s really worth repeating. Zero is not an unrealistic goal when it comes to anxiety. Bravo Julia – I totally agree with this and I want you to know this!

It starts with doing trials of GABA and tryptophan, and using food and nutrients, and finding all the root causes and addressing them.

I really want you to know this, remember this, and don’t stop looking for the answer and the root causes. It may be food changes that you need to make. It may be breakfast that you need to eat. It may be low serotonin or low GABA. It may be foods that are problems for you like gluten or dairy. It may be additives in the foods that you’re eating. It may be toxins in your environment. There are many possible root causes, and you may have one or many root causes that are causing your anxiety.

Addressing these root causes with food and nutrients (and a functional medicine approach you can completely eliminate your anxiety even if you have very severe anxiety and/or panic attacks and you’re using medications.

Resources for you

  • My book The Antianxiety Food Solution (my Amazon affiliate link) covers the 9 steps I use with clients. Read it and become a savvy health-advocate for yourself. Share a copy with your doctor and point out the references.
  • Here is a blog on: How to do an amino acid trial for anxiety
  • You can find GABA and tryptophan and other nutrients in my supplement store here
  • Here is a blog on: 60+ Nutritional & Biochemical Causes of Anxiety

Do you believe your anxiety is much too severe for food and nutrients to be of help?

Or did you believe this and started looking at nutritional and biochemical root causes anyway and found solutions and anxiety resolution?

Filed Under: Food and mood Tagged With: anxiety, food, medications, nutrients, panic attacks, root causes, social anxiety

Kate Spade: suicide, hormonal imbalance, antidepressants as a trigger and the stigma of mental health

June 15, 2018 By Trudy Scott 32 Comments

Photo by Paul Keleher (originally posted to Flickr as kate spade) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons
Kate Spade, a well-known American fashion icon and handbag designer, died by suicide last week at the age of 55. I’m always torn in situations like this…just share the news story with my sympathies in order to respect the family or use this as an opportunity to learn from and prevent others from suffering the same fate. This time I’m doing the latter – with the risk of appearing insensitive – because there are red flags here and I feel so strongly that we all need to learn from this in order to move mental health forward. I’m hoping her husband and family would approve.

In the announcement about Kate Spade’s suicide in the New York Times, Mr. Spade said:

that though his wife had suffered from anxiety at points during their relationship and marriage, her serious bouts of depression only began about six years ago, at the age of 49.

Kate suffered from depression and anxiety for many years. She was actively seeking help and working closely with her doctors to treat her disease, one that takes far too many lives. We were in touch with her the night before and she sounded happy. There was no indication and no warning that she would do this. It was a complete shock. And it clearly wasn’t her. There were personal demons she was battling.

My heart goes out to Kate Spade’s husband, young daughter and loved ones. Her suicide is just so sad but as I said I have a fair bit to say about this….

 

Hormone imbalance triggering anxiety and depression?

According to the reports, Kate’s “serious bouts of depression only began about six years ago, at the age of 49, but she had suffered “from depression and anxiety for many years”.

Perimenopause and menopause is a classic time for women to experience worsening anxiety and depression and can be driven by fluctuating hormones, especially low estrogen. In this study, Depression and the menopause: why antidepressants are not enough? the authors share that

Postmenopausal depression is more severe, has a more insidious course, is more resistant to conventional antidepressants in comparison with premenopausal women and has better outcomes when antidepressants are combined with HT (hormone therapy).

Addressing hormone imbalance as one possible root cause can eliminate the anxiety and depression. Some of my favorite resources for hormone balance are these books: The Hormone Secret and Cooking for Hormone Balance.

 

Low levels of neurotransmitters like serotonin, catecholamines and GABA?

Directly connected to hormonal imbalance is brain chemistry imbalance. Addressing low levels of neurotransmitters like serotonin, the catecholamines and GABA provide results quickly when they are used in a targeted way based on individual needs:

  • Low serotonin is an issue when estrogen levels are declining and the amino acid tryptophan can have profound benefits if low serotonin is one of the root causes, leading to depression, worry, fear, overwhelm and sleep issues.
  • Low catecholamines can cause the “I just want to say in bed” depression and low motivation, together with fatigue and poor focus. The amino acid tyrosine can help to eliminate some of this and also provides thyroid support.  Poor thyroid health can also be a root cause of depression.
  • We see low GABA levels when progesterone is low and if this is one of the root causes, it can result in increased physical anxiety and insomnia. The amino acid GABA, opened on to the tongue, can provide calming results within minutes.

I can totally relate to the hormonal aspect as I suffered from PMS for years and my anxiety issues and panic attacks started in my late 30s and I had a really low spell as I was going through menopause.  Both GABA and tryptophan turned things around very quickly for me as they do for my clients.

 

The role of diet and nutritional psychiatry?

There is so much new science behind the role of a real foods traditional diet for alleviating both depression and anxiety. The SMILES study, published by Prof Felice Jacka early 2017, was the first randomized controlled diet depression study and ONE THIRD of the dietary intervention group saw improvements in their depression symptoms.  This was just diet alone and switching from processed and junk food to real food with no specific dietary restrictions.

There is also much clinical evidence supporting how diet can have an impact. Holly, suffered from with severe depression and anxiety changed her diet and shared this with me:

Over the course of a year and a half, I was given 10 different psychiatric diagnoses and cycled through 10 different medications. I discovered the healing power of diet completely by accident, and it changed my life. I now live with no diagnoses and no symptoms.

I started with the Whole30 (strict paleo), then went paleo, dabbled with a ketogenic approach, and now I eat a modified paleo diet, with some rice and goat dairy.

This has been termed nutritional psychiatry and you can read more diet-depression and diet-anxiety success stories here.

Keep in mind that your prescribing psychiatrist may not yet be on board with this or up to date on the newest research. Just last week someone told me what happened when they discussed nutritional psychiatry with their doctor and showed them my book The Antianxiety Food Solution (my Amazon link). He said: “Good luck with that!”

 

Could the antidepressant medication have triggered her suicide?

The statement from Kate’s husband says “She was actively seeking help for depression and anxiety over the last 5 years, seeing a doctor on a regular basis and taking medication for both depression and anxiety.”  Could the antidepressant medication have triggered her suicide or played some part?

We will never know with Kate but this is always my first thought when I learn of a suicide and when we hear of homicides in the news. One of my colleagues shared this when her suicide was first announced: “I was wondering if she was under psych care and what role meds might have played in this tragedy.”

This paper is one of many papers reporting similar antidepressant suicide and violence risks, and concludes that:

Antidepressants double the occurrence of events in adult healthy volunteers that can lead to suicide and violence

Kelly Brogan MD – Holistic Psychiatrist​ no longer prescribes psychiatric medications because we don’t know who will experience this side-effect. She writes this about a Swedish study and antidepressants and increased suicides

As antidepressant prescriptions increased 270% over 15 years, suicide rates also increased. Strikingly, more than half of the young women who committed suicide (52%) were prescribed antidepressants within a year of committing suicide. And antidepressants were detected in 41% of the women who committed suicide, showing that they were under the influence of antidepressants at the time of death. 

 

What if you are taking an antidepressant and seeing benefits?

When I posted some of this on Facebook earlier in the week someone who is on an antidepressant and benefiting shared her frustration that we are blaming suicide on medications.

There are many who do benefit but there are two issues I have:

  1. Even if someone is doing well on an antidepressant, benzodiazepine or other psychiatric medication I feel we need informed consent about the side-effects and training for the individual and family on what to look out for as things can change. The can occur when meds are changed, doses are increased or decreased, new meds are added, one or more are stopped abruptly or too quickly (called discontinuation syndrome). Many doctors also need to be educated and to acknowledge that suicide and homicide are very real side-effects of these meds.
  2. We don’t know who will be adversely impacted, which is why consent/knowledge about this is so important.

When we rent ski equipment or go bungee jumping we sign an informed consent form, acknowledging the possible risks of death. Why is this not happening with these medications? I just want individuals to be going into this with eyes wide-open so they don’t say “why didn’t anyone tell us this?”

If someone is currently seeing benefits from antidepressants (or benzodiazepines) I make sure they know ALL the risks and encourage them to continue to look for root the causes and address these (never stopping medications abruptly and never without the prescribing doctor’s permission).

There are many possible biological or biomedical or metabolic causes of depression and anxiety and many of these can play a factor in suicide.  Here is a list of just some of them:

  • gluten sensitivity and celiac disease
  • low B12, low B6, low omega3s, low zinc
  • the anti-malaria drug mefloquine (has been associated with acts of violence and suicide)
  • toxoplasma gondii
  • fluoroquinolone antibiotics
  • many common drugs may be contributing to depression (over 200 including acid reflux meds, blood pressure meds, birth control pill)

My concern is that none of these – the medications or poor diet and nutritional deficiencies – are ever discussed when someone does commit suicide or goes on a violent or homicidal rampage.

 

The stigma of mental health and the fear of seeking help

There are reports that “Kate Spade felt unable to seek help or discuss her mental health because she feared this might damage the brand she created.”  This is a huge issue and if it was true for her or if anyone with a mental health condition feels like this, this has to change!

As Dr. Mark Hyman MD​ said this when I interviewed him last year before the launch of his Broken Brain docu-series

I began to realize that the body was driving a lot of this brain dysfunction, and that if you fix the body, a lot of the brain disorders would get better, that it wasn’t a primarily a mental problem, but it was a physical problem.

Our interview and full transcript is here and we cover the gamut in 12 minutes: the gut and microbiome, nutritional deficiencies, food sensitivities, heavy metals, other environmental toxins and medications.

We don’t hide the fact that we have a broken leg so why do we have to hide it when we have a broken brain? If we can start to acknowledge that mental health issues so often have this physical aspect (and often it’s 100% physical) then hopefully we can end this crazy stigma.

And even if there is also trauma or lifestyle factors that make someone depressed or anxious – so be it. Stop the stigma and shame. Why do we have to put on a brave face and pretend all is well. It has to stop so people can ask for help.

Last but not least, I feel we need to offer practical nutritional psychiatry resources to the family who have been traumatized by the loss of a loved one to suicide.  We know the amino acids and B vitamins help individuals recover from psychological stress after a natural disaster and these same nutrients can help the family in the midst of their sorrow.

I am aware it’s a very delicate subject and I’m sure this will rub some people the wrong way but I believe we all need to be talking about this and not tip-toeing around it.

I really feel this all needed to be said today. I hope this helps you or a loved one.

Rest in peace Kate Spade.

Filed Under: Amino Acids, Depression, Nutritional Psychiatry Tagged With: antidepressant, anxiety, depression, estrogen, fear, GABA, hormone imbalance, Kate Spade, mental health, progesterone, root causes, serotonin, SSRI, stigma, suicide

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