PUSHING THE LIMITS PODCAST

Lisa, welcome to Pushing the Limits. Today I'm super excited to have a wonderful guest for you. I have Professor Julia Rucklidge. Julia, welcome to the show. It's absolutely wonderful to have you with me today.

Julia: Oh, thanks for inviting me, Lisa.

Lisa: It's been a long time coming. I had the privilege of listening to your lecture at the naturopath and medical herbalist conference that I was able to attend a few weeks ago, and I was absolutely blown away with your research, going, yes, yes, this is so important that we share this information with the world. Can you give the listeners a little bit of your background before we dive into your current research? How did you get here? You're a clinical psychologist, you're a researcher, a world-renowned expert in things like ADHD and mental health. Can you give us your background?

Julia: Sure. Okay, well, it's a long background, but I'll try to keep it short. I did my PhD at the University of Calgary, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and I did clinical psychology training. When I was there, I heard about some families who were using vitamins and minerals to treat some serious psychiatric disorders. Now, my training in clinical psychology had taught me that nutrition was irrelevant to the brain, and that only medications and psychotherapy could treat serious conditions. But then my PhD supervisor got a little bit interested in this and she published preliminary work in the early part of the century, as well as others, showing people getting well and staying well and also being able to reduce their medications.

Julia: So I was curious, I was interested, but then I moved on. I went and did a postdoc at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, and then I got this job here to teach child clinical psychology in New Zealand back in 2000. So I moved to New Zealand. And then Bonnie Kaplan, my former PhD supervisor, came and gave a talk here in about 2002, again talking about these data. At that point I was thinking, you know what, we're not doing as well as we could in terms of helping people with psychiatric conditions. Not enough people get well. Why don't I study this? I'll either learn that these supplements don't work, or I'll learn that they do have a big effect, and that's got to be a good thing to learn. And little did I know that I would have a lot of opposition to this work, a lot of push back and a lot of challenges. And they continue, with all the craziness of how supplements are regulated in New Zealand, and the push back from the medical community. It's everywhere. We could spend hours just talking about all of that, but I can just say that it's not easy doing research in the supplement space.

Lisa: No, absolutely not. I've been in this space doing recordings, in the functional medicine space, for about 11 years now, and it doesn't matter. There are so many professors and doctors that I've interviewed over the years whose research has not been listened to, and it absolutely baffles me that we're not following the science. I have a few suspicions. I probably won't go down a rabbit hole here.

Julia: It's usually financial. That's usually what it is. It's the bottom line.

Lisa: Exactly. There are interests that don't want us to take this route, because if supplements and nutrition could play a massive role in something like mental health. In your TEDx talk, you opened with a very provocative statement, that we're more depressed and anxious than ever despite record spending on psychiatric drugs. What does that tell you that we've got fundamentally wrong here?

Julia: Yeah. Well, I think we just continue to be the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. We wait for people to get unwell and then we give them medications that really are not addressing the root cause. They can dampen symptoms, for sure, but they are not addressing the root problem. So when you take that approach, it's no wonder that people then stay on medications. It becomes a bit of a revolving door, and we don't end up with people who are flourishing. There are, of course, and I always make sure to say this, people who do well with that approach, but not enough of them are doing well. Otherwise, over time, the numbers should decrease rather than continue to escalate. If we had really gold-standard treatments that were having a great impact in terms of getting people back to where they were, then we would not be in the crisis that we are currently.

Julia: But we also have it so backwards, in that we don't focus on keeping people well, making them resilient, making sure that they have what I like to call the biological foundations. The biological foundations are that you have all the nutrients that your body needs to function at its best. And when you pair that up with our current toxic food environment, where it is so hard to eat real whole foods, people do it, but it's super hard, and you need to invest an enormous amount of time in the education, the learning, the avoiding all of the packages that say it's going to be amazing for you but it's not. It's such an uphill battle for the regular average person who's just trying to make ends meet. And then on top of that, we're in a cost-of-living crisis. So real foods become even less accessible, and there are fiscal levers that influence the cost of our foods now, because of such a focus on export and not caring about the people who live in New Zealand and making sure we feed them first. There are so many barriers to being well and being resilient, which would prevent you from going on and maybe developing some of the psychiatric disorders. I'm not sure if I answered your question or not.

Lisa: Perfectly. In The Better Brain, the book which you co-authored, you argue that a real share of modern mental illness is driven by suboptimal nutrition. How big is that share, in your estimate, and how confident are you in that number? Do you think a lot of depression and ADHD is actually coming from suboptimal nutrition?

Julia: Yeah, that's a really hard number to attach and to figure out how much of this is due to suboptimal nutrition. It is one of many risk factors, and I'm always really careful to say that, because these conditions have existed for centuries. We've been aware of problems like kids struggling with ADHD, or people having bipolar disorder or psychosis. These are conditions that existed before the advent of ultra-processed foods. So we know that there are going to be other risk factors contributing to it. It's hard to give a number, or to say that if we could address the food environment, x number of people would get better. I can't put a specific number on that.

Julia: But what I can say is that when we bring people into our research and we try broad-spectrum micronutrients with them, we find that in the blinded stage, about 50 percent of them have a really good response. When you go into the open-label stage, which is where everyone knows what they're getting, we tend to see more like between 60 and 80 percent response.

Lisa: Wow.

Julia: There's a reason why it's dulled down in the randomised phase, when it's blinded, because there are so many mind games going on, where people think, am I on the placebo, am I on the micronutrients, and that influences outcome. That does happen in clinical research. So when you get people out of that and you ask, how many can we actually make a difference for, I would put it more in that 60 to 80 percent category. That's a really amazing number. It's not everybody, and we're never going to hit 100 percent. There is this 20 percent of people who show no response whatsoever to micronutrients. We don't know why. We've tried to figure that out. Is it because they're not deficient? No, that's not necessarily it. Is it some other risk factor? Is there a gender issue, an ethnicity issue, a socioeconomic status issue? We've tried to explore what it is about that 20 percent, and I can't tell you why that is at this stage. So it's not for lack of effort.

Julia: How much is it the nutritional environment? It's hard to say. But I do know we can have huge benefit when people change their diet. There's data around 30 percent going into remission with a diet change alone, in people who have depression. That's comparable to a medication intervention or a psychotherapy intervention. So it can be as effective as other interventions, and in many cases more effective. But the benefit of this approach is that there are no side effects. If you change your diet, you're only going to have good effects. You're going to be healthier in a lot of different ways, and not just your mental health, everything will improve. Whereas if you take a psychiatric medication, you might find a dampening down of your symptom, but you're at risk of metabolic disorder, increased risk of type 2 diabetes or obesity. It doesn't happen with everyone, but it can happen with some. So I always think you should try changing your diet first. But that's not the message you'd get if you went to see your regular GP, who's really hurried and rushed, and lifestyle change does take more time than they have in their 15 minutes.

Lisa: That's part of the problem with the model we have. The doctor's got 10 or 15 minutes with you and then they're on to the next one. They cannot dive into things like nutrition. They also often don't have the training in that area.

Julia: Exactly, it's not part of their toolkit.

Lisa: In functional medicine, I like to look at root cause, to go as far upstream as I can to work out what's going on. And it's always a multifactorial approach. This must be so hard in your area of research, because you've got to provide the hard evidence. At the same time, you're using broad-spectrum micronutrients, you're not using vitamin D or magnesium or vitamin C on their own, and that makes total sense to me, because of the synergy of these things working together. I have a biotech company and we use extracts, and sometimes the synergy of the whole thing together has a different effect. If you think about the Krebs cycle, you've got all these cofactors. If you don't have your B vitamins in the right places, and your magnesium, then the whole Krebs cycle is impacted, and that affects your energy and everything, and then there's the microbiome and all these aspects as well.

Julia: Exactly.

Lisa: How do you tease all of that out when you're trying to do research?

Julia: You have to accept that you'll never be able to tease it all out, nor should we necessarily expect to. I am always hitting up against the single-nutrient concept. Sometimes it'll be, oh, the doses in the broad-spectrum that you study are really high. And I'm like, yes, they are higher than your recommended dietary allowance, but let me tell you, there's something wrong with that system. It's really flawed. They get worried that they're touching on the upper level, the UL, and I'm like, well, that doesn't necessarily mean it's toxic. Some of the reasons you have a UL is to prevent a deficiency in another nutrient, but if you're giving them together, then those ULs may be less important.

Julia: When you come from a reductionist perspective, that we're going to find that one single nutrient that makes the difference, there are isolated cases where that will happen, people who benefit from just one nutrient, who take vitamin D and suddenly feel better. That does happen. But if you're trying to find something effective for a broader number of people, then you're going to have a much easier time with a broad-spectrum approach, because it'll sort itself out. Some people might need one combination of nutrients, others might need another. I don't have to worry about that. All I know is that if we give the whole spectrum, the body will do the rest. It'll use what it needs and eliminate what it doesn't. That's how I sit with it. I'm not here to figure out which of those nutrients or combinations is going to work, because when you think about it for 10 seconds, that would be impossible to do. You'd have to take a few out and ask how that went, then another combination, and in the end it's going to take thousands of years to do that kind of work.

Julia: So I accept that I'm not a supplement maker, I'm a psychologist. I happened to fall upon this micronutrient concept and I've gone from there and done the research, which is, can we make people better? That's ultimately why I went into psychology in the first place, to help people. So getting myself knotted up because I don't know which of the nutrients is effective is almost the wrong question. What we do know is that we haven't really addressed things like the Krebs cycle and whether we can support it. We started a study like that during COVID, but unfortunately it fell over. But what we have looked at are things like inflammatory markers, and we know those get better with the micronutrients. We've looked at methylation, and methylation increases with the broad spectrum, which is a good thing. We've looked at homocysteine levels, and homocysteine goes down with the micronutrients, which we know is a good thing. And the microbiome, where we found that the diversity of the bacteria within the microbiome increases, which is a good thing. So we're looking at these systemic indicators of health, and we know we're improving them. That gives me reassurance that what we're doing is probably having a systemic effect, that it's not just one neurotransmitter like dopamine.

Lisa: Yeah.

Julia: Dopamine is a hard one to study, to pin down. You can do it a little bit with urine metabolites, and a colleague of mine is dabbling in that space, but it's not a simple thing to do. So it's probably having effects across multiple systems. That's maybe why people not only feel mentally better, we hear about better energy, the fog lifting, the focus being better. The best one is emotional dysregulation, where irritability is better, the aggression goes down. Those benefits aren't specific to any disorder, you'll see them across many disorders. We also hear about the skin getting better, or people not getting sick as often. Those are so hard to put a number to and to study. I've thought about how we assess sickness. Is it sick days? We can't capture that in our randomised controlled trials because they're just too short. But that's what we hear over the years from people taking this kind of supplement, that they just don't get sick the way everybody else does.

Julia: A lot of it is just common sense. This whole pharmaceutical model where one molecule must be the thing, so we study the one molecule and extrapolate out, just does not make sense in nature. And another thing I have an issue with in medicine, and we partly have to do this, you go to the cardiologist for your heart, the gastroenterologist for your gut, and they're all separate compartments, because of the depth of knowledge each requires. But what they forget is that this is a system. Your gut affects your brain, there's a gut-brain axis both ways, it affects your heart, all of these systems are interconnected. So when you push on one, of course you're going to affect the others.

Lisa: In functional medicine we do take that approach, looking at the whole person, working out which system needs more support and what we can put into the mix. Definitely in my practice, using broad-spectrum micronutrients, and sometimes specific ones depending on the case, I've seen incredible changes. I've experienced incredible changes in my own life. I was on an SSRI in my early adulthood, depression after life events. I was stuck on those things for 15 years. I could not get off. They never told me they were addictive. I was very angry when I tried to get off them and could not. It took me three years to wean myself slowly off them. Why is that not even talked about? And then it did not help me at all, actually, because mine was more of a GABA problem than a serotonin problem.

Julia: Yeah, it's hard to know. That's what we write about in The Better Brain, that withdrawal, and how that's probably also contributing to those statistics, people not being well on medications because they can't get off them. That whole side of it is not talked about when you're put on it. It's so devastating whenever I hear stories like that, but I've heard them over and over in my career. I'm on this medication, I don't like it, I can't get off it. It's something we do need to talk a lot more about. And that discussion needs to happen at the prescription stage too, at the point of informed consent: this might not work, but you might end up stuck on it anyway. In all fairness, a prescriber really should be saying, you know what, exercise is just as good as medication, so why don't you get out and move. But I think sometimes people feel dismissed when they're told that, they feel like they want the pill, they don't want to go home with nothing.

Lisa: Yeah.

Julia: They feel like the seriousness of their problem hasn't been heard if they're told to just go for a walk. I've heard this over and over. And I'm like, that's not why they told you that. They told you that because it's actually helpful. They have heard you, and they're offering you something that can be as effective as the medicine. But people do want that fix. They feel so broken.

Lisa: I don't even know if it's that it's a quick fix. I appreciate that's how people might look at it, but they feel so broken and so down, in utter despair, that they think only a very strong medicine is going to fix them.

Julia: Whereas if we had these conversations more honestly, more often, and it was more of the paradigm in public hospitals and GP practices, then that would shift. People would start to understand, you know what, this stuff has got good evidence. But even the media contribute to this. They'll tout a new medicine, a new drug, and it's incredible. And then I publish work where we show a reduction in suicidal ideation in teenagers, reducing irritability, temper, the kids feel better, their quality of life goes up, conduct problems go down, and it gets no media attention whatsoever. I'm like, what happened there, that they didn't think this was important and relevant to young people these days? I was absolutely devastated when that happened with our most recent trial. And it's not like it wasn't published in a good journal, it was published in a top psychiatry journal. When you get into one of those journals, you have gone through the mill around your data.

Lisa: Yeah.

Julia: And then to have it ignored by the media. And also that you can't easily buy them in New Zealand now, because they're caught up with that company, we won't mention any names. I trained with them at the time when they were still able to bring them into New Zealand, and now I can't get them anymore. You can get them, but it has to be through prescription only.

Lisa: This is why this form of media is so important to me, Julia. This is why I started this podcast 11 years ago. I wanted the doctors, the researchers at the cutting edge, the professors, to get their information out, because I had experienced in my life, with my mother and my father and their health journeys, and my own, that I wasn't being offered the things that are out there. I went looking, I went learning, I went on an odyssey to meet all these incredible people and learn about their research, and to get access to the things myself because I had to, and then started sharing it. This is why we have to be the change that we want to see. So make a show.

Julia: Yes, exactly. I'm always happy to talk about this stuff. And I hate hearing that somebody like you, who would have been telling people about the broad-spectrum micronutrients we've been studying, can no longer do that, and that patients have to go to their doctors now to get a prescription. It's not a medicine. It's an unapproved medicine, so it can't be advertised, and it sits in this no man's land, and Medsafe absolutely refused to do anything about it and solve the problem.

Lisa: Why?

Julia: I don't know. It boggles my mind. I can only think they have a very medically oriented mindset, and they think they can take this and put it into the medicine box, and it is not a pharmaceutical medicine. They say, well, we have a route for medicines in this country, so it has to go through that route. And I'm like, but it can't go through that route, because your application form requires you to talk about how every single one of those ingredients affects another one of those ingredients. When you have a product with 40 or so ingredients, you can't do that. And then it has to be made in a pharmaceutical facility, which supplements typically aren't. And then you want a big fee for registering it, and it's not a patentable drug, so there's no benefit, so who's going to do it? But they won't solve this problem.

Julia: And to be honest, I think the supplement industry may be contributing to this problem too. As far as I understand, if there was new legislation in New Zealand where every single product had to go through some kind of investigation around its ingredients, its doses, its health claims, the cost of them would go up a lot. So I wonder if those who import supplements into the country have an opposition to more regulation, even though that could solve this problem. Supplements should be allowed to have a health claim if there's evidence behind it. But when you get the research, that's when the government comes along and stops its sales.

Lisa: Exactly.

Julia: I have ended up in the middle of a disaster, not of my making. All I wanted to do was prove whether or not it was an effective way forward, and I thought that would benefit consumers in New Zealand, but instead the company got massively hit by it.

Lisa: That's so sad and so wrong. I've had supplements I've imported into New Zealand, really good quality, and one of them had slightly more tryptophan in it than was allowed in the ridiculous RDAs we have currently in New Zealand, and it was stopped. It was a very good quality supplement that had been researched by a doctor for a long time. It was really brilliant. And I was so frustrated, I wanted it for myself, because I knew how it had helped me massively.

Julia: I know. I spent the better part of the last two years talking to ministers, going up to Wellington, talking to the people who write the legislation on the dietary supplement regulations, saying this is so outdated. I talked to David Seymour, who's supposed to fix this kind of thing, because he's the Minister of Regulation. And in the end he just said, well, Medsafe told me it's all fine. They will not challenge the regulator unless there's political gain for them. I guess David Seymour thought supplements weren't political gain enough for him to do anything about it, because it has gone absolutely nowhere. And it's not for lack of writing, phoning, or talking. I've spent time with Pharmac, I've spent time with Medsafe, and I've said, you guys need to find a solution, because this is unacceptable. And they say, but we have found a solution, we've classified it as an unapproved medicine. And I'm like, that's not a solution, because the doctors don't know what to do with a supplement. They're not trained in it, they don't know where to find the evidence, it doesn't fit into your mould. You need to sort this out. And it's just too hard, not enough resources, not enough money, not enough people on the ground. This is definitely something they've declared as being too hard. They think they've found a way forward, and it's not an acceptable way forward in the long term.

Lisa: There's an election.

Julia: There's an election, we can vote. But it's really difficult.

Lisa: I hear your frustration, and I feel like I've been in a battle zone of sorts for the last decade as well. I've had experiences with my mum, who had a massive aneurysm and then a brain cancer, and was written off so many times. The last time, with the brain cancer, I went full metabolic approach to cancer. I used diet, a very strict diet, cutting off different routes of feeding the tumours. It was a terminal cancer, weeks to live, no options, nothing you could do. And that was so untrue. I released an audiobook of 21 of the interviews I did with some of the world's leading metabolic researchers in cancer. And she's sitting on the couch next to me five years later. She doesn't have cancer. She's got some other issues going on, disabilities, but she's not got cancer. Nobody asked me how, or why, except my listeners, because they listen to the show and to the people doing the research. How many people are dying, or just suffering from mental illness, from all these things, that could be benefiting from your research? We've just got to keep trying to get the message out, whichever way we can.

Julia: And I think it has to be a ground-up movement. I really think that through these podcasts, all of these alternative media channels, we can have an influence in the world, and we are doing that in a positive way. Everybody has their point of view, and we're not all going to be right, but having these conversations is very, very important. I'm having conversations at the moment with Health New Zealand around robotics and physical AI coming into the hospital systems, trying to get the conversation going in that direction. Again, it's years of groundwork to be laid. We're going to have these helpers, but I see a massive crisis coming if we don't, because we do not have enough healthcare workers in the world to support the number of old and sick people coming at us.

Lisa: I know. And they're just putting their hands up in despair and doing nothing about it. We have escalating problems and challenges, and we are bankrupting ourselves, because we are refusing to deal with the root cause. It's devastating.

Julia: It's absolutely devastating, and so frustrating, that raising these issues with politicians, they acknowledge that all the regulations are wrong. They do acknowledge it. They know the RDA limits are stupid. They know the limit on B12 makes no sense. They've told me all of that. But after two years of battling, just saying, raise the B12 level, how hard is that? It's a regulation, it's not even a law. The whole point of a regulation is that it should be able to be adapted and changed over time. And what they did do was change some of the regulation so that it was easier for export. There was something about the labelling that was becoming a problem for exporters. So they were willing to make changes to support the export industry, but they were not willing to make the changes to support New Zealanders. That is what I just cannot understand, why they couldn't make those very simple changes. Just raise the level of zinc, not a lot, just allow the zinc levels to go up. And the vitamin D, they finally, it's over now, it was a month or so ago, they were consulting on the vitamin D level and acknowledging that maybe we could lift it to 2,000 IU a day. I had put in a submission to the medicine classification committee for 3,000 IU a day, and they rejected that. I put in a submission for lithium, under three milligrams, to be allowed in a supplement, and they rejected that. And I'm like, on what basis? They're like, well, it's harmful. And I'm like, where is the evidence that it's harmful under three milligrams? It's a tiny dose.

Lisa: But beneficial.

Julia: Yeah, exactly. But you can't argue on a beneficial level, because remember, supplements aren't allowed to prevent or treat disease.

Lisa: So it's like we're all pretending. It's the emperor with no clothes.

Julia: Yeah, exactly that.

Lisa: And intelligent people, we've got to use our common sense here. I had a situation, completely unrelated, but my husband's a firefighter and he had a PTSD situation. For it to be recognised as PTSD, it had to be one event. We all know the cumulative effect of 30 years of being a firefighter tips you over the edge at some point, but it is not one event. But you cannot say that.

Julia: I know. There's the common sense on the supplements and the regulations, and foods are the same. Foods cannot be therapeutic. That's just crazy, when of course they're therapeutic, but we pretend that they're not. And someone like me can talk about it, because I don't sell supplements. I can stand in front of the naturopaths at that conference and tell them exactly as it is, and here's the evidence. But somebody who is selling the products cannot talk in a public forum about the benefits and the therapeutic effects of their products, otherwise they'll get slammed by the government. What they did do to the distributor of the products I've studied was threaten him with a 100,000 dollar fine and six months of jail, for selling a supplement that was therapeutic and slightly above the doses allowed under the dietary supplement regulations of 1985. So the rest of the industry will have seen that and gone, whoa, we're not going to go anywhere near that. Some of them will not even want to study their supplement. They don't even want proof that it works, because when you prove that something is effective, that's what happens.

Julia: The science has moved on. These regulations on supplements were written at a time when we did not mandate seatbelts in the back of cars. The science moved on on that one. We recognised it was a useful thing to have, and we acted on it. But when it comes to supplements, we just seem to turn a blind eye to it. We don't want to know. We know people are using them, it's a billion-dollar industry, but we're not going to make it helpful to the consumer, so they actually know what they're buying, what it's good for and what it's not good for. They just want to leave it as it is, the wild west.

Lisa: We want good regulation. We don't want bad regulation that stops us being able to sell certain things. This leads me into another topic I wanted to talk to you about today: our depleted soils, our ultra-processed food, the preservatives, the glyphosates, whatever else is in our environment. Why do we need, I don't know if we can say need, but with our typical diet, it's very hard to cover the bases. When I say to my clients, maybe you want to look at this or the other supplement, they say, can I get that from my food? And I'm like, normally your grandmother could have. In our environment, with a higher need, we've got technology, we've got stresses coming at us in a different way, changes in our circadian rhythms, which I do a lot of work in, the different lights, not having normal exercise, being sedentary. All of these facets play into this. Give us your take on the state of our soils, the state of the pesticides, all that.

Julia: Yes. I'm almost at the end of an incredibly good book. Montgomery and Biklé, I think, are the authors, and the book is called What Your Food Ate. It is so brilliant, such a wonderful walk through the changes in our soil, and the impact that what your food eats has on our health. One of the examples they give is talking about grain-fed cows versus grass-fed. Fortunately, in New Zealand, we are grass-fed, so the quality of the meat here is going to be better than in the US. They've done studies on the omega-3 to omega-6 ratios, which are so much better in the grass-fed. The animals don't get as much disease when they're grass-fed. There are so many health benefits to the animal and to us. The nutrient levels are lower in those that are corn or grain-based, zinc is lower. So there are all these fascinating outcomes from comparing the different ways we feed animals and the impact on our health.

Julia: Then they talk about the soil, and that when you till the soil you start to destroy the ecosystem within it. That means the fungi involved in helping the plants pull up the nutrients are disrupted, so they can't get the minerals as easily out of the soil. When you put fertilisers on the soil, it's almost like a couch-potato situation, where the plant has the NPK it needs to grow, so it can't be bothered to seek out the other minerals it needs. It was a fascinating walk through all the changes in our agricultural system that have depleted our soils, or, not necessarily depleted, but affected the access the plant has to unlock those nutrients. So yes, we should be worried. Regenerative agriculture is something a lot of people talk about as a way forward, and I think that's a fantastic thing we could be encouraging. A lot of farmers in New Zealand are catching on to that and are great stewards of the land. Unfortunately, their eye is on the export market. It's not about us.

Lisa: We're not even getting the food from those regenerative farms.

Julia: Exactly.

Lisa: You can talk to some farmers and 98 percent of their produce is export, and I'm like, don't you care about the New Zealander? Why can't we figure out, and this is financial.

Julia: I know it's financial, but that can be changed. A government can address that. This is not difficult. They just have to have the will to do it. But I suspect the voters that want it want to support export, because that's how they make their money. They're going to be driven by wanting the regulations to support the export, and not about, let's feed the five million or so we have here before we start exporting away, because we export enough to feed 40 million people or something like that.

Lisa: Really?

Julia: I know.

Lisa: We are an abundant country. We are in paradise. It should be paradise for us to be living in.

Julia: Exactly. To be honest, I think we should be ashamed of what we've done, that we're not feeding our tamariki first, that we should be making sure we are well nourished, and then we've got so much left over, no problem, let's feed the world.

Lisa: Let's make the financial incentives, because of course the farmer has to make the money. But let's make it from a policy position that we are supporting these people.

Julia: Exactly. I was once invited to speak at an agricultural conference. It was funded by supermarkets, and I was given five minutes or so, but the entire conference was about export, and the MPs who spoke there, it was all about how can we help you with your export business. And I'm like, in my five minutes, can you guys not hear that our health is suffering as a consequence of this kind of regulation, and that we've got to change those fiscal levers so we can keep the food here and feed ourselves well before we export it? But that's just how it is, and that's why butter is the price it is. It just should be solvable. But somehow the politics and the lobbying always win.

Lisa: Always wins. It seems like we do this in every aspect of society in our country. We don't think about national security, national sovereignty. We're always looking at the profit. This plant or this thing was not profitable, therefore shut it down, and it was the only one in the country, and now we don't have any. Where we should be thinking, maybe we need to make sure this survives, because we need this from a security and economic point of view, if something happens. The oil crisis is an obvious one at the moment, without going into the politics of it all. Maybe we need to look at supporting our own backyard, even if it's more profitable to send something overseas.

Julia: It would save the country money. That's the thing, it would save us money if families, regardless of socioeconomic status, could have access to real whole food. But instead, what happens is that it filters down, and the lower socioeconomic status families are going to be eating more ultra-processed products. You can look at the food deserts within those communities, where they have less access to real whole food. So you've got more of the takeaways, more of your KFC, more of your McDonald's. And we know those foods are depleted in nutrients, and that they have additives affecting the microbiome. We know all of this. How much more science do we have to have in order for action to happen? Other countries have taken action. They've done things like put proper front-of-pack symbols on packages, not our five-star rating system, which is terrible.

Lisa: Shocking.

Julia: It's shocking. They've got skulls and bones in the South American foods. It's a starting point. In the UK, they've taxed sugar-sweetened beverages. It's a starting point, but what it does is signal to the community that actually these foods are a problem. When these things get raised here, they get knocked down, or they say you're going to hit the low socioeconomic status families the hardest. All kinds of things happen that prevent these changes from occurring here. There's so much resistance, and it should be bipartisan. We should all be interested in improving the health of New Zealanders. Every political party should be on board with that, and we should be doing everything we can politically to change this. And we've done it before. Cigarettes.

Lisa: Sort of. Took a long time.

Julia: Yeah, I know. But what made the difference in terms of reducing the consumption of cigarettes was a multitude of regulations. It wasn't education. That's a piece of it. But people who smoked knew it, they knew that maybe lung disease or other things were going to happen to them down the road, but it's an addictive product, so they continued. But when you did things like make it more difficult to smoke, smoking bans in public places, increases in taxes so that it was more costly to purchase, all of the legislation around it, you can see consumption goes down. There are graphs out there where you can see consumption went down when those different kinds of legislation came in.

Julia: So can't we do that with ultra-processed food? I call ultra-processed food the 21st-century cigarette. There's sufficient evidence already, we don't need more. There's not a single study showing these foods have been good for us.

Lisa: Chronic illness has gone up something like 3,000 percent since the early 70s, when this came in.

Julia: Exactly.

Lisa: So what is it going to take to change that? Unfortunately, education is one of them, but when you are surrounded by these toxic foods and we simply say to people, don't eat them, and they're addictive.

Julia: Exactly. It seems unfair to the individual. It's kind of like the climate change crisis, where we put it onto the individual, just don't fly, don't do these things that use up fossil fuels, but we're not going to do anything about the big companies that are the big heavy hitters when it comes to fossil fuels. When we do that, putting the blame on the individual is a strategy by big companies, so they don't have to act on it, they don't have to change. So it is financial, and it's sad, and it's an uphill battle every single day to try to make this change.

Julia: But when I get overwhelmed with the system, I call it the system in my head that I'm fighting against, I shouldn't use that terminology, but it feels like that, then I bring it down to the individual level again and again. Can I influence somebody listening to this? Can I help somebody individually? That keeps me going, because a lot of the time, when I've tried to stand up against something happening in the medical system, I've just got shot down, shot to pieces, completely ignored, or treated abominably. Then I get very angry, and that anger doesn't help anybody, because I'm just turning it in on myself. So I always bring it back to, who can I influence today in a positive way, whose life can I help on the individual level. That keeps me going, because otherwise you look at the whole wall you're up against and you become overwhelmed.

Lisa: Yeah, exactly.

Julia: And Lisa, that's exactly the approach I take when I get overwhelmed. The decision I made was, I started a course at the University of Canterbury called the Science and Practice of Wellbeing. It teaches young people all of the skills of lifestyle medicine. It teaches them about exercise, about food, about being mindful, being in nature, forest bathing, growing your own food, we cover that, we talk about ice baths. It's all covered in this course, and they get the experiential evidence for it, because we run labs where they go out into the gardens and learn to grow food, we do cooking lessons, and we have them walking through forests in groups. So I think, okay, I can't change this at the national level, I've tried and it's not gone very well, but what can I do in my little community to make a difference?

Lisa: And you are, because you are brave and you stand up against them again and again. I know that takes a lot of energy, but it is having an impact on the people who hear your lectures, who listen to what you're saying, who look at your research. You just have to keep chipping away and eat the elephant a bite at a time. What a fabulous thing you're doing. I just think you're a courageous woman, and I'm so glad to have met you and to have had the privilege of listening to you and reading your research, because it just makes common sense. If anyone's listening to this and just thinks, this is just common sense, people, why do we tie ourselves in these bureaucratic knots, when we could be just helping people live better lives. We know so many people are hurting, we know they're suffering, we know people have deficiencies and malnutrition despite having an overabundance of calories. So before we wrap up, Julia, is there anything we missed today that you would love to share on this podcast?

Julia: I'm so grateful for the opportunity, because I know you have very switched-on listeners, and hopefully there are ones out there who can chip away at changing the system bit by bit. I could talk about this for hours, but I think we've had a great conversation around the battles and the challenges, but also knowing that we have to keep going forward, because that's the right thing to do.

Lisa: If you were to give people just a last bit of advice, if they're dealing with emotional dysregulation, kids with ADHD, anything, what would be your first thing to think about, rather than going straight to drugs? What would be your first thing for a parent listening to this?

Julia: It's something we're actually starting to think about doing some research in. But the first thing I would say is, change the diet. Look at the diet. Be honest and look at the diet, because it's so easy for the snacks to be creeping in, and we know those things can have an influence on behaviour. I go to, I don't know if you've interviewed Grant Schofield, but he just wrote a book. Choose Your Hard. I've been thinking about this from the perspective of a parent. Parenting is hard, and once children are in the school system and they're surrounded by ultra-processed foods, it's everywhere, ubiquitous. It's really hard for a parent to go against that wave and make different decisions, to try to make sure their child eats real whole food. We know it's going to benefit their health now and in the future. But choose your hard, from my perspective. Right now it is going to be hard to change your child's diet, not because you might not know about real cooking, you might be well educated, but your child is going to resist it and reject it. But it's not going to be forever. If those foods are not in your house, then eventually they're going to have to eat, they're going to go back to the real whole food diet and realise, actually, this is okay. It will be hard, but you are either choosing your hard today, or you're choosing your hard down the road, where your child is going to continue to have escalating problems as a consequence of exposure to ultra-processed foods. I'm just trying that out as an idea, but that's my take, because I work with a lot of children and families, and that's my space.

Lisa: I think that's a brilliant title for Grant's book. Choose your hard. I love it. He's probably looking at the athletic side of things, but it's exactly like with my mum. I have to train her every day, she's got a disability, she's been through hell, and people often look at me and say, you're mean, you're so hard on her, you're so disciplined, you're so strict with her food, can't she have a piece of cake? And I'm like, no, she can't. And they look at me as if I'm an awful person. I'm like, no, she has to train every day, she has to do these routines, and she knows that. We went to the oncologist one day and he goes, oh, Isobel, make sure you eat your pudding, we've got to keep your weight up. And she just looks at me and goes, I wish. Like, I'm not allowed to eat my pudding. We've done a very strict ketogenic diet, but there are a lot of things she can eat, and a lot of things she can't. But she survived. She's still going, and we have a battle every day with other problems we're dealing with. So we choose our hard every day. And we're still alive to tell the tale. She's still with me, and I love her to pieces. So I think that's a good place to wrap it up. Choose your hard, everybody. Everything in life, is it hard now or hard later? It's hard in some way.

Julia: Exactly.

Lisa: So you've chosen your hard, Julia. You picked the toughest research area to go into. So you chose your hard.

Julia: I guess I hadn't thought about it that way. It wasn't deliberate though.

Lisa: You're in the mix, the turmoil. But please keep going. You're a warrior woman, very strong and very courageous, and we need people like you. Thank you so much for what you do.

Julia: Thank you for having me on your podcast. Much appreciated.