Episode 95
Carol Lourie:
Food for Thought: Debunking Standard Dietary Advice for Cancer Patients
In this episode, Dr. Carol Lourie, an integrative practitioner, shares her approach to chronic illnesses management using naturopathy, acupuncture, and homeopathy. She critiques the standard American diet and suggests dietary modifications, such as a ketogenic diet, for overall wellness. The episode explores the societal and cultural pressures women face, the importance of addressing past traumas, and practical steps towards better health, emphasizing the power of small changes.
First Aired on: Jul 10, 2023
Episode 95
Carol Lourie:
Food for Thought: Debunking Standard Dietary Advice for Cancer Patients
In this episode, Dr. Carol Lourie, an integrative practitioner, shares her approach to chronic illnesses management using naturopathy, acupuncture, and homeopathy. She critiques the standard American diet and suggests dietary modifications, such as a ketogenic diet, for overall wellness. The episode explores the societal and cultural pressures women face, the importance of addressing past traumas, and practical steps towards better health, emphasizing the power of small changes.
First Aired on: Jul 10, 2023
Table of Contents:
In this episode:
In this episode, I had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Carol Lourie again on the podcast (check out episode 6). Dr Lourie is a practitioner with extensive experience in naturopathy, acupuncture, and homeopathy.
This time around, we delved into a range of topics within the integrative medicine field, including the disconnect between medical oncology and natural or integrative medicine and how breast cancer is a disease related to femininity and cultural conflict.
We discussed the importance of personalized nutrition and advanced blood work to monitor metabolic changes that could potentially contribute to cancer development. We also explored the benefits of a ketogenic diet and the impact of nutrition and diet on cancer.
Carol emphasized the need for empowerment to make choices for one's own health and the importance of retraining and reprogramming oneself to overcome societal expectations and norms. She provided practical tips on how to navigate social situations where certain foods cannot be eaten and how to make clean eating cost-effective.
Finally, we touched on the importance of prioritizing one's health and attending to individual needs, even if it means moving more slowly and deliberately.
This time around, we delved into a range of topics within the integrative medicine field, including the disconnect between medical oncology and natural or integrative medicine and how breast cancer is a disease related to femininity and cultural conflict.
We discussed the importance of personalized nutrition and advanced blood work to monitor metabolic changes that could potentially contribute to cancer development. We also explored the benefits of a ketogenic diet and the impact of nutrition and diet on cancer.
Carol emphasized the need for empowerment to make choices for one's own health and the importance of retraining and reprogramming oneself to overcome societal expectations and norms. She provided practical tips on how to navigate social situations where certain foods cannot be eaten and how to make clean eating cost-effective.
Finally, we touched on the importance of prioritizing one's health and attending to individual needs, even if it means moving more slowly and deliberately.
Other Resources:
Connect with Carol Lourie
Episode Transcript
Julie Michelson: [Page//00:00:00] Welcome back to The Inspired Living with Autoimmunity podcast. I'm your host, Julie Michelson, and today we're joined once again by Dr. Carol Lourie.
Dr. Lourie is a dedicated practitioner with over three decades of clinical experience as a naturopath, acupuncturist, and homeopath. She's helped hundreds of women recover their health and restore their life through her holistic protocols involving [Page//00:01:00] focus, nutrition, targeted supplementation, lifestyle changes, and a centered mindset.
Carol specializes in complex and chronic disease management, focusing on women's health, specifically breast cancer. Fertility for older women and autoimmune illness. I'm excited to have her back on the podcast. If you haven't listened to episode six, I encourage you to check it out. We had a great conversation Today.
We are continuing to discuss the out of the box integrative approach that goes beyond tra traditional medical oncology to truly create wellness. Listen in to find out why you don't wanna be in the middle of the bell curve.
Dr. Lourie, welcome to the podcast.
Carol Lourie: I, I'm so excited and happy to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Julie Michelson: I am so thrilled to have you back on. I almost fell over when I realized that it's been close to two years since our last conversation on the podcast. [Page//00:02:00] And that was such a great conversation. I know that listeners are gonna get so much value from digging deeper. And as we were saying before I hit record, we evol, we evolve, and we grow and we keep learning.
And, and so let's jump into to part two for listeners that didn't hear that first episode we did together I'd love to have you share a little bit of your journey of, you know, how did you get into this integrative world and, and just so deep.
Carol Lourie: Well, I always wanted to be a doctor for some reason. And initially I thought I was going to medical school, and then I ended up living in a spiritual community in New York in the seventies, and that was before the world word detoxify became a household word, and I ended up working with this chiropractor who used iridology to diagnose areas of imbalance in our [Page//00:03:00] bodies.
And for those of you who don't know what iridology is, It's a very old science that where they map out the eye into specific different sections and you can look at these sections and see, depending on how your iris looks, if you have toxins, if you have buildup, what's going on. And he would do that and then put people on detoxifying diets Now.
When I first started working with him, this young girl came into the office and she had bad skin, and I thought to myself, what is the big deal? You have bad skin, you take antibiotics. That's like, why is she even here eating these blended salads and drinking these juices? And that was how naive I was because she came back a month later and she had lost weight.
Her skin was much better. And I began to see this from people who had not, either not been helped through the regular medical treatment or who had been damaged. And so my eyes and my mind beca [Page//00:04:00] be really began to do a radical shift away from symptom A equals drug B.
Julie Michelson: Yay.
Carol Lourie: Yes. Yay. And then one day I was going through this big stack of papers and I lifted up a paper and there was a catalog to the National College of Naturopathic Medicine.
And that was like a bell ringing moment. I thought, oh, maybe I should go here. It was in Portland, Oregon. And I applied and I got in and that was the beginning of my. Really gathering the tools that I needed. I graduated from the National College of Naturopathic Medicine in Portland, Oregon. I moved to California and there wasn't any licensing for naturopaths at that point.
And I got my acupuncture license. And I opened up my clinical practice, you know, in the late eighties and I specialized in women's health and chronic disease. And then one day, recently, well actually it's 15 years now. [Page//00:05:00] A dear friend called me up and I didn't understand what she was saying. And then finally I realized she was saying they found a lump.
And this is a woman who ate healthy and she said, what the heck's going on? I eat organic. Why did I get this? And I said to her, don't worry, you're not alone. I'm, and I attended every treatment session of 18 months with lumpectomy chemotherapy, radiation for her. And I got an up close and personal perspective of what was great about medical oncology and what really was lacking.
And one of the first areas I realized that was lacking is when we went into the chemotherapy infusion room. Now there is this, Medical proven science fact that sugar feeds cancer, it's not negotiable. It was discovered by Otto Warburg in the 1920s. He won the Noble Medicine Peace Prize for this. Given cancer cells given a choice between [Page//00:06:00] oxygen and ca sugar or glucose, always choose sugar even though they have to work twice as hard for it and they get less energy or a t p.
Julie Michelson: Just like humans.
Carol Lourie: yeah, exactly. we go into U C S F chemotherapy infusion room, and sh they look at her and they go, oh, you're a little thin. Would you like some? Ensure? Ensure is the number one ingredient is glucose. And then they offer a lollipop. They offer Gatorade, they offer cookie. And when you're done, they wanna give you a cupcake.
Five times during the infusion was she offered sugar and we came with our ginger tea and our smoothie. And our peeler broth and we kept saying, no thanks. So that was the beginning. Oh, and then there was the time when the candy cart walked by. That was the beginning of my eye awakening towards. The, the disparaging information, the disconnect between medical oncology and natural or integrative medicine and which are, which is [Page//00:07:00] science backed.
We're not like making stuff up, right?
Julie Michelson: woo woo, right.
Carol Lourie: So, so I began to Really work with her from an integrative perspective. And we were in her medical oncology appointment and her oncologist looked up at looked at her blood work and then looked at us and said, what are you doing? And I got, got alarmed. Is there a problem?
And I said, is there a problem? She said, no, your blood work does not look like the blood work of somebody in the middle of chemotherapy. Your white cell count is great. You're not anemic. You look great. What are you doing? I want all of my patients to be doing that too.
Julie Michelson: I wish every doctor were that on it and open to even ask, what are you doing?
Carol Lourie: right. So that was the beginning of, she referred a lot of her patients to me in my practice in Berkeley, California at the time, really began to focus on breast cancer and then the individual need [Page//00:08:00] expanded beyond what I could handle. So I created an online program. To provide women with this really lifesaving and life-changing information that's called Empowered Against Recurrence at this point.
And there's other aspects of that in development. But on a deeper level, let's talk about what breast cancer is on a deeper level. Breast, it's a disease of the feminine, right? It's the breasts and the feminine. In our culture right now is not doing so great. It's better than it was. Unfortunately.
There's still this conflict between what men think we should be, should and how we want to live, and we can see that about how that's happening in the political arena regarding the Roe versus Wade. We can see that in the messaging that we get from television. Perspectives on women being depressed, the ads for psychiatric [Page//00:09:00] antidepressants.
A woman is depressed. What does that look like? The house is a mess, quote unquote. What does that look like? There's dishes in the sink. The beds aren't made. There's laundry. And when I first saw that commercial, I'm screaming at the television to myself. I'm not depressed. And when I had a child, I had dishes in the sink.
My beds weren't made. And you know, I had piles of laundry and, and then she takes a pill and everything's quote unquote spec and span. So I'm thinking, why is it just the woman's job to take care of all this stuff? Where's the partner, whether that partner's a man or a woman? And why does that equal depression?
Julie Michelson: right.
Carol Lourie: And what happened before? This mess of a house, quote unquote, that made this woman feel unwell. What kind of stress was she on under? Was she being harassed at work? Was she having difficult communication in her relationship? Were her children suffering from some ailment? I mean, there is [Page//00:10:00] always a reason for depression, right?
Julie Michelson: Absolutely, and it's never a lack of antidepressants. It's, it's never the cause of depression.
Carol Lourie: Right. Too many women go into their doctors and they're not complaining. They're reporting, they're sole aching, and it's taken as complaining, number one. And number two, the next thing you know out comes the prescription pad. And out comes the words, well, let's just put you on a short course of X, Y, z, antidepressant, and let's see how, if that helps.
Julie Michelson: Yep. And, and even the, just, especially in the autoimmune world, the fatigue just expressing the level of fatigue I. Out comes the pad for an antidepressant. It's,
Carol Lourie: A hundred percent. Now from our perspective, you have fatigue. Let's see what adrenal support you need. Let's see what's happening from your, with your [Page//00:11:00] mitochondrial. So, How are they functioning your mitochondria? Let's see where your energy sources are coming. Let's see if you're eating food that doesn't agree with your body and you need to really, you know, clean up some aspects of what you're eating.
Are you getting enough good sleep? I. Are you getting positive movement? You know what Julie Julie's work with Autoimmune is very similar to how I assist women recover their health and restore their life. With breast cancer, it's very similar because the foundation for all disease is inflammation. The foundation for breast cancer is inflammation.
We need to dial back and heal the inflammation, not suppress, but heal as much as we can with all of these areas that we're talking about.
Julie Michelson: And, and from where I sit. And I will try to keep calm through our conversation
Carol Lourie: we don't have to.
Julie Michelson: so much of what you say makes sense. And, and I find, you know, I have these conversations and amazing connections [Page//00:12:00] and I think the world, you know, the needle has moved so far and the world knows and they get it. And then I, you know, then I see the line around the corner at the fast food joint and I think, nope, I live in a bubble.
So.
Carol Lourie: Yeah.
Julie Michelson: This, and I love Thank you. And I know that's how you genuinely feel. The, the integrative approach is the best of all worlds. It's, it's not, this approach is wrong, you know, it's, it's where can we do better and what compliments each other. So to me, I listened to you and so far nothing you've said seems out of the box at all.
Where is that kind of standard oncology care now? Like has that needle moved at all? Cuz I haven't met anybody diagnosed with cancer that was told to watch sugar. Like, I, I still haven't since. Are you seeing a shift?
Carol Lourie: I think one of the most dangerous things somebody can be told no matter what cancer [Page//00:13:00] they have is eat everything in moderation, and that is the standard line that. Women and men are given with cancer by their oncology nutritionists, unless those nutritionists have taken specialized programs and realized that that is a very dangerous statement.
So, If you have cancer, if you have a family history of cancer, you do not want to eat everything in moderation. That means you can eat fast food in moderation. And what's the definition of moderation for you? That may mean twice a week for somebody else. It may be. You know, for me it's zero. I mean, there's certain things that we need to become very conscious of making a really good decision if we're going to blow it.
Like, if you want, if it's your birthday and you love, you know, smoked meats and there's this barbecue place that you, so you go there and you get it once a year and [Page//00:14:00] you don't eat the bread and you don't eat the mac and cheese, you just eat the, the meat. Which is not great, but it's not horrible.
Julie Michelson: I eat nightshades probably two or three times a year cause they don't agree with me and I love them.
Carol Lourie: Yeah, like if you're in Italy, you're going to
Julie Michelson: Yes,
Carol Lourie: and you're not going to worry about it, but, or if you're in California or if wherever you live, you know, there's this delicious tomato and it's in season, you're gonna make a decision to eat that. But you know that if you eat that three days or five days in a row, you're gonna wake up and your hands are going.
You're gonna be swollen, you're gonna have a headache, you're gonna be not able to move, and then you're gonna think, well, was it worth it? The pro, the problem with nutrition and oncology is it's not always a one plus one equals two approach. Where if you eat product A, you're going to feel bad, but your blood work will show it.
Your circulating tumor cells can elevate [Page//00:15:00] and that impact can happen months later. And most physicians, as standard of care, are not doing circulating tumor accounts. You know, they don't do that as standard of care, and we have to have a serious conversation with them and present them with studies in PubMed in order for them to.
Do some of this more thorough and advanced blood work because cancer is a metabolic disease. What that means is there's not just one thing that goes into creating cancer, whether it's breast cancer, ovarian cancer. Melanoma, it doesn't matter. There are these pathways where your cells, instead of staying in the healthy freeway, they get all discombobulated and the next thing you know, they have stopped paying attention to the rules of stop and go. And they think they can go wherever they want. They can over progress. They can create angiogenesis, ex extra blood [Page//00:16:00] vessels. And the next thing you know, you have a severe inflammatory problem and you have a tumor or blood dysplasia where your blood is unhealthy. And so, and it doesn't happen overnight, it happens over a period of time.
Right.
Julie Michelson: And that's, I think that's where it gets tricky and that's where having some of these advanced labs where people can see, cuz if you can't feel it, you think, oh, maybe that one McDonald's is fine this week. Or, or whatever your jam is. I'm picking on fast food just cuz I, I can't remember the last time I had, you know, I, I would, I would fast if.
Carol Lourie: I, I, yeah, I, I would have to be, yeah, I can't even imagine.
Julie Michelson: it is so much easier when, you know, you do feel a, a, a direct impact where you can connect those dots. And so I love that idea of, okay, well if we're following, you know, seeing these advanced markers, we can [Page//00:17:00] sh people can see, you know, even if they can't feel it, they're still getting the feedback.
And it's kind of hard to, I, I have a client who. When eating, you know, doing the things working together, cancer markers were coming way down. You know, after a long time of him not doing anything and then he kind of fell off the wagon and guess what? Cancer markers started to go back up. And it was like, okay.
His doctor said to him, now, you know, what you were doing was working. And going back to, you know, eating on the fly is feeding the cancer. So, you know, there is sometimes a, a bit of a learning curve and I think that feedback is, is remarkable.
Carol Lourie: It's, it's not so easy. I had, last year I was a speaker at the Society for Integrative Oncology in Arizona, and one of the other speakers was [Page//00:18:00] a brain surgeon. And he came from his office in Scottsdale and his scrubs, and he had images that he shared with the on the presentation of using ketogenic diet to reduce brain tumors.
So this wasn't like, oh, I'm gonna tell you a nice story. This was science-based and he's about to publish it. Here is before ketogenic. Here is after. And there was a remarkable shift. In the size of the tumor and where it was and everything from, not just one people, but many, many people. Now, several of the people went off the ketogenic diet and then they had a brain scan and that you could see that the tumor had grown.
And one of his patients said, why are you talking to me about nutrition and diet? I'm, you're a surgeon. I came to you for surgery. I have a brain tumor, I want surgery. And the doctor said, well, let's shrink the tumor first and then see if you still need, do [Page//00:19:00] you know surgery? Sometimes if it gets small enough, we can just leave it there if it's not growing.
So Yes, it, it matters what we eat. And it's very difficult sometimes to not eat that pasta. And if you're doing ketogenic, you cannot eat pasta. And if you're, if you are staying on a healthy plan through breast cancer, you really, really, you don't wanna eat birthday cake, but, You can make your own and use a very, very tiny amount of monk fruit instead of white sugar.
You can make it the, the cake with te you can have, you know, organic, unfiltered, heavy cream for a an icing instead of some buttercream junk. I mean, there are ways of doing this once or twice a year where,
Julie Michelson: We don't have to be deprived.
Carol Lourie: no, I'm not, it, it's, I don't, you know, The word restrict and deprivation are bad words. It doesn't work for us as adults.
We, I don't think anybody should feel restricted or [Page//00:20:00] deprived in their life. I think it's about education and understanding equals you have the ability to make really empowered choices for yourself and you need begin to,
Julie Michelson: and then it's sustainable.
Carol Lourie: Yeah, it needs to be sustainable for you and you need to figure out. Your path.
For example, you know, you have dear friends and you go over to their house for dinner all the time, and the woman makes lasagna and you, you are not eating lasagna. And so can you say to her, look, I'm gonna bring my piece of fish that I've cooked and I'm gonna eat your salad and vegetables, and can you stick to that?
When you go out to eat to an Italian restaurant, everybody else is getting some pasta dish. Can you get a piece of grilled fish with tomato sauce over it? If you're able to eat that with, you know, sauteed vegetables and a salad and be okay? I mean, I, I, that's what I do. The only place I don't, I think that you have difficulty eating at is a [Page//00:21:00] pizza place.
You can't really go to a pizza place and eat
Julie Michelson: No, and, and I think, you know, you talked about EM empowering and that's, we're both all about that. That part is a process, especially for women of saying, you know, like, why do we feel like it's an imposition if a friend is hosting us and we're gonna bring something we can eat? You know, that takes train retraining and reprogramming to, to realize like, I am allowed to make the choices for my own body and, and you know, it's nobody's business.
Also. You're not asking somebody to cook for you.
Carol Lourie: Right. And what's the big deal about taking it out, putting it on your plate, and then bringing it to the table? I mean, I, I just, you know, oh, I'm gonna upset the hostess.
Julie Michelson: Yeah. We're trained, you know, or ex holiday need, like you say, you know, you have to have birthday cake, like gross birthday cake. And I'm, I guess I, I am just anxious. I hope [Page//00:22:00] it's in my lifetime of where there's this tipping point where instead of, You know, shaming people, people that are trying to protect their health.
You know, get curious and, and like, where's the trickle down? And there is some I remember I, I had a border colleague a few years ago. Who was, she? She had been, she'd had been a perfect candidate for you. She was born in a shelter. Sick. The only one in the litter who lived in foster care for a year and a half, cuz she was so shy and, and you know, high stress, just high, high stress.
And we gave her, thank goodness, you know, she had a wonderful family and we got her no pressure. We adopted her with her foster sibling and
Carol Lourie: Oh, nice.
Julie Michelson: she loved dogs. She was totally comfortable with dogs. And we were like, I don't need to pet you. I don't need to, you know, of course ended up like the biggest love bug in the
Carol Lourie: Oh, that's so sweet. That's very healing story.
Julie Michelson: well, it, it's, [Page//00:23:00] it does, you know, the animals go through the same processes, right? And I remember this, we found out she had a tumor and the second I found out, now this is me telling on myself the second I found out she had a tumor, I put her on a keto diet. I had a custom keto diet made for her,
Carol Lourie: for the dog.
Julie Michelson: for the dog.
We then found out that it was hemangiosarcoma and it was gonna be very aggressive and, I I was not go, and I'm not saying all key for this dog at this time in her life, and this was in the be just in the beginning of shutdown and covid, like, I couldn't even go in the vet with her, which was
Carol Lourie: Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness.
Julie Michelson: the, the surgical oncologist really did such a good job on selling me for. You know, if you don't do chemo for this dog, for this kind of cancer, she's got three months to live and that's it. And I made the decision for her, there'll be three happy months. She feels well, [Page//00:24:00] and she lived three years.
And what I did was I came home and I put my other two dogs on a keto diet because did I love her more than the other dogs?
Carol Lourie: was eating the same food.
Julie Michelson: So it didn't have to be, she didn't feel bad and it, it wasn't because she'd feel awkward. She was eating crappy kibble and it was high quality. It was already, she was already paleo.
So, you know, shocker, my dog was paleo. She had an integrative vet, you know?
Carol Lourie: Right. Well, they're part of the family. You know, the animals are part of the family.
Julie Michelson: But I brought her up because I, I know, and I, I really encourage listeners to go back and listen to our first interview from, from 2021 because this dog exemplifies us of, you know, all she had, all of those things aligned.
How we end up with cancer, autoimmunity, chronic illness, you know, name it, which whatever it is. From, you know, just the trauma, the stress, all the [Page//00:25:00] things.
Carol Lourie: All right. Life.
Julie Michelson: Yeah. And so I, I'm waiting, you know, that, that's my hope is that, that instead of, you know, it's that now all my dogs and they still are, all my dogs still are clean eaters.
And watch cuz why not?
Carol Lourie: I was gonna say, why not? I mean, and when I talk to people about changing how they eat, There's a couple objections which I want to bring up. One, it's going to be more expensive and actually it isn't because when you go into the regular grocery store and anything that you buy that's processed and you pick it up in this box and you read the list of ingredients that are in there, and most of those words nobody has ever heard before.
Julie Michelson: Right.
Carol Lourie: You're paying for that fake junk to be put into the food re and you're paying for that. People who design the box, the packaging, the [Page//00:26:00] label, the putting it, transporting it to the supermarket, all of that, you are paying for that.
Julie Michelson: Yeah.
Carol Lourie: You can make your own crackers if you want, or you can, you know, go get gluten.
A few gluten-free crackers, which you are going to eat very infrequently cuz even though it's gluten-free, it's still high glycemic from the health food store. But you don't need to be eating cereal in a box's sort of like eating, you know, paper eating cereal is like eating paper with. House milk, which nobody needs to be eating anyway.
So there's a lot of messaging that we've been brainwashed. So. Why does diet the American diet need to start in breakfast? Breakfast with a pop-tart, a waffle, cold cereal, hot cereal, bacon and eggs, which are not that bad as long as the bacon doesn't have nitris in it and it's organic. Why does breakfast need to start like that?
Why couldn't it be a smoothie that has a protein base in it? Why couldn't it [Page//00:27:00] be leftovers from dinner, which is protein and vegetables? Why does it have to be some carbohydrate with sugar in it and coffee with, yeah, it's very draining.
Julie Michelson: from mar marketing marketing to children. Right from, from day one, that sugar for breakfast. I, yeah. You mentioned like even oncology, nutritionists, unless they have special training, You know, saying eat everything in moderation. I had a, a client with type one diabetes who saw a diabetes coach, and for those of you listening on audio, I'm using air quotes.
I, I don't know what kind of training she had. And this woman was shocked to learn with type one diabetes. That oatmeal for breakfast was not a good choice for
Carol Lourie: Oh, I'm so happy. I'm so happy you brought that up because one of the things that drives me crazy is when I do my life. Presentations for my Empowered Against Recurrence program. I have women put in [Page//00:28:00] the chat, what did you eat for breakfast? And it's amazing to me what is seen, but I'd say 80% is oatmeal.
Now let's talk about that. First of all, there's a, a colleague who, who has said that oatmeal is great for breakfast. Now even there's a couple of C caveats here. Even if it's gluten free, even if it's steel cut oats, oat oatmeal is still a carbohydrate. Which means it is processed very quickly into a sugar glucose.
You do not wanna start your day with food that's going to be quickly processed into sugar because then you're feeding, you've basically been fasting while you're sleeping, and then the cancer cells are hungry. So you eat food that is going to be processed into sugar quickly, and the cancer cells go great.
I now have gas for my gas tank. Thank you very much.
Julie Michelson: Yeah.
Carol Lourie: oatmeal is not, oh, I don't really think anybody should really be eating oatmeal. I had a woman in my program who said, I have to have my oatmeal. And [Page//00:29:00] I said, okay, let's make a deal. Let's have you eat it two or three times a week for lunch, and you put a lot of ghee fat in it.
Well,
Julie Michelson: Yeah. Nuts
Carol Lourie: you put a lot of fat in it because that slows down how the sugar is metabolized. And that's what she did. And she used coconut milk and she
Julie Michelson: of the things that's so frustrating for me, and I'm sure she learned through that process, that she probably could live without oatmeal eventually. I bet you,
Carol Lourie: I hope so.
Julie Michelson: the, the thing that frustrates me, and that goes back to that marketing. A lot of pe, most people are eating oatmeal because they're actually trying to make a good choice.
Right. It's not like the Pop-Tart, you eat a Pop-tart, you know you're eating a Pop-tart. Right? You're eating oatmeal. Oh, well, I've heard it's good for my heart and it
Carol Lourie: And good for lower cholesterol. Right.
Julie Michelson: No, it doesn't
Carol Lourie: With the round paper oatmeal container with the red and blue [Page//00:30:00] Quaker oats. So that's what we grew up with when you know, and we thought it was healthy and it was delicious, my mom would put white sugar on top of,
Julie Michelson: Mine would put brown, you know, but we put white sugar on grapefruits. Why? I just had that conversation. Who started that?
Carol Lourie: Yeah.
Julie Michelson: Why? But it is, so some of it is habitual. Some of it is conditioning and marketing. You know, those, those commercials are just as powerful as the antidepressant commercials
Carol Lourie: They are, they are. There are people who study this. There's science behind it. And so unfortunately in the world of natural medicine, which is what we're talking about, we don't have the billions of dollars to put our commercials up on television. And I don't even think regular TV channels would, you know, run them
Julie Michelson: Well, and social media certainly would knock it right down.
Carol Lourie: Well, social media, you
Julie Michelson: Some of it, if you're, but I mean, You know, if you're a [Page//00:31:00] little too vocal about it, it's not, it's not the right message.
Carol Lourie: need a lot of money for Facebook ads to have it have a large
Julie Michelson: people see
Carol Lourie: I mean,
Julie Michelson: Yeah. Yeah. So,
Carol Lourie: dollars in a month. No joke. And then it takes a while because you're up against people's. Brain conditioning that they've seen for many years. So this brings us back to my. Philosophy of the bell curve, which I wanna share with you.
So the bell curve is curved like this, and any statement you see about breast cancer, any research about whatever the topic is, the research is done with women in the middle of the bell curve. And what does that mean? That most American women are. Overweight to obese. They don't exercise. They eat the standard American diet, which is what Julie and I have been talking about.
It's filled with processed food sugars. The meat is not farm to table. It's the kind of meat you get at Costco or one of the fast food [Page//00:32:00] places, which has been proven to be carcinogenic. There's, and the Standard American diet literally quadruples the cancer rate. So that's the studies and that's the middle of the bell curve in my community and through my life coaching program and in my individual work, I want you to be out of the bell curve.
That's where the magic happens. And so it takes a while to get out of the bell curve. You have to shift your mindset. You have to leave all that other stuff behind, and you have to walk forward on a new path you are creating, you know, forging a new path for yourself. That that can be difficult, which is why we have live coaching, which is why I offer individual sessions.
It's as the work with Julie, it's very hard to separate what you've been. Taught and how you've grown up and create new habits. And there's research that says it takes a hundred days for an activity to become a new habit. And those [Page//00:33:00] habits, new habits, it takes time and energy to create them.
Julie Michelson: Right,
Carol Lourie: So you don't wanna do 15 new things at once because it's all gonna, you know, not work out.
The plate's gonna break. You need to choose, I think, the first one to three most difficult areas that you have with, and attend to them first. And you need to realize and understand at that time that you will be moving much, slowly, more slowly than you usually do, because you have to think about what you're doing.
Julie Michelson: Yeah, I, I love, there's so many things that you said that if you hit three more hours but the, the bell curve. I, I had an article published a few months ago about how, and, and here's one of those we're talking about outside of the box, right? Standard of care versus integrative or functional medicine.
You don't wanna be in the bell curve. No, you don't want normal li you don't wanna be in the middle of the sick [Page//00:34:00] population in our country. And people don't understand that when they're, I actually had that just this morning doing a lab review with a client, he wanted to know why his omega3s got flagged.
And I said, cuz they're so high. They're better than the
Carol Lourie: which is good.
Julie Michelson: This is what we've been working toward. Yay. Yeah. Celebration, you know?
Carol Lourie: Yeah, it's not a problem. It's a good thing.
Julie Michelson: yeah. But people see, you know, the, the labs will flag it cuz it's outside of range. And so I love this. This is such a. An important thing for people to understand is, you know, that average is not optimal, and, and this is not average of top of the class.
This is an average. You don't wanna be in the middle
Carol Lourie: I was just gonna say, this is an average. You don't wanna be part of. You don't wanna be average. You do not wanna be average of your blood work. You don't wanna be average of your weight. You don't wanna be average of your muscle development. You don't wanna be average in your [Page//00:35:00] stamina. You don't wanna be average in how much time you spend on social media or watch television.
It's a, it's really different perspective on life because cancer doesn't happen overnight. And I try to get women to begin to have conversations with their cancer. Like, not just the hell with you. Goodbye. It's like, What are you doing here? How did I get this? What do you, what am I missing in my life? What, you know, what do you wanna say to me?
What do I need to shift? And it's, that's a very challenging conversation. That is not a conversation that your oncologist has with you, which I actually think there should be as part of the oncology team talking to your breast cancer, what comes up?
Julie Michelson: Yeah.
Carol Lourie: Because you'd be surprised. And you know, one time I always, as part of my intake, I say to women, have you ever had any traumatic experiences?
[Page//00:36:00] And one woman got very upset with me and she said, no, I, I've never had anything traumatic. And I said, okay, let me change the word traumatic to upsetting. Have you ever had any upsetting experiences? And she said, well, yeah, but it happened like, you know, 30 years ago. I said, oh, okay, so what could they, what were they?
Do you mind telling me? And she starts giving me this list.
Julie Michelson: Yep.
Carol Lourie: And so every, any one of those was traumatic,
Julie Michelson: Sure.
Carol Lourie: and women are like frogs. And what that means is frogs. This is true about frogs. For those of you who don't know this, this is the frogs and warm water fact. If you put a frog in warm water and you gradually increase the temperature, the frog will not realize it is being boiled to death.
Julie Michelson: Yep.
Carol Lourie: Women are a lot like that. If you've had traumatic experiences as an infant and a child and a teenager, As a self-protective device. [Page//00:37:00] You acclimate to those and you don't realize that they were as difficult as they were. And then many years later, after a period of stress or whatever, all of a sudden your body goes, I can't hold onto this anymore.
And you have a lump in your breast. So
Julie Michelson: And it doesn't have to be one huge, big thing. Sometimes it's, it's a history of stuffing. I call it stuffing. Stuffing the little things, you know, I'm okay. I'm okay. The I'm fine syndrome. I'm fine until you're not.
Carol Lourie: Right, right. So there is, you know, there is validity to unpacking your trauma. It's like peeling away layers of an onion and your psyche will allow you to do that at a speed and a place as you're ready. You don't need to. Take a knife and smash the onion and get everything out all at once.
That's too upsetting. You need to begin to gradually peel back the layers and to recover your [Page//00:38:00] health and understand what was happening then. And that is in addition to doing medical oncology. So you wanna do that work and then you wanna do this work. So you're taking the best of both worlds. It's not, in my opinion, it's not one or the other.
Julie Michelson: I'm glad you highlighted that again because Yeah. That, that is the, that is what integrative is, right? It's,
Carol Lourie: Integrative takes the best of both
Julie Michelson: yeah.
Carol Lourie: and we don't wanna diminish the importance of medical oncology.
Julie Michelson: No, no, not at all. And it's just how do we optimize the, it's, it's, again, the standard and then optimal and, and when you marry the two, it's, it's optimal. There's no either or. For sure. For sure. Amazing. You, you've given us so many steps already, but I always like to ask for the listeners at the end, one.
Step listeners can take today to start to [Page//00:39:00] improve their health or protect it.
Carol Lourie: Go into your pantry and take out everything that's in a box
Julie Michelson: Mm-hmm.
Carol Lourie: and take a serious look at the labels.
Julie Michelson: Yeah,
Carol Lourie: make some decisions about moving forward.
Julie Michelson: I love that.
Carol Lourie: if there's too many red dye 54, yellow number 27, whatever those big words are that you don't talk, that you don't use every day, that box is not healthy for you.
And then think about just maybe three vegetables that you can start buying organic. And
Julie Michelson: Yep. That combo is amazing.
Carol Lourie: right. It's too expensive. It's like if you gave up buying a six pack of soda, how much more would that give you if you gave up
Julie Michelson: you know, the Frappuccino or what?
Carol Lourie: The frappuccino, nobody needs to be eating a frappuccino. It's filled with sugar.
Julie Michelson: all corn syrup and, [Page//00:40:00] yeah. And I've had the, I I also have to remind, I don't know about you because you were even in the seventies already kind of in introduced to this na, more natural world. But people are always shocked to find out, like, I used to eat junk. I grew up on junk food
Carol Lourie: We all grew up on, oh, we all grew up on junk
Julie Michelson: my children on drunk on junk food.
You
Carol Lourie: When my mom would buy Wonder Bread, I was very excited. Oh, wonder Bread and Baloney.
Julie Michelson: thing, bologna or peanut butter and jelly.
Carol Lourie: Yeah.
Julie Michelson: Oh god. With a
Carol Lourie: You know, here we are. We lived through Wonder Bread.
Julie Michelson: So we, we didn't, we weren't formed this informed. And, and I, I wanna circle back just to, to highlight, you were talking about change and, and to, you know, the. It takes energy and it takes effort and, and you know, you made it clear, but I, I love to, to underscore, especially [Page//00:41:00] so many of my listeners, You know, don't have energy, they don't feel well.
So many of the women you're working, you know, we're talking about mostly people who are at a point where they already don't feel well, and resources are, are at a minimum, and that's where it's, you know, that one, each change will give you more energy to make the additional changes.
Carol Lourie: a hundred percent.
Julie Michelson: And so just another, I just wanted to underscore that for listeners that, you know, we, we know change takes effort and energy and it's not easy
Carol Lourie: Especially if you don't have a lot of energy and you feel horrible when you do have it.
Julie Michelson: Right. So if you pick, you know, what you can be successful with, out of that top three, like the one that'll be easiest for you to have success with. And you'll start to improve your energy and, and all of a sudden it'll be, oh, what else can I do? You know? But I, I just wanted to highlight, we know that we know you may not [Page//00:42:00] have the energy and just the word change may make you wanna take into the app, like no.
Yeah.
Carol Lourie: it's also the time to call up your friends.
Julie Michelson: Yes.
Carol Lourie: say, you know what? I need some help. Can you come over and call up three friends and ask them to come over different days and spend an hour to three hours with each one of them and have them help you clean out your pantry, have them help you get rid of toxic cleaning agents in your home, and then, you know, have them drive you to the health food store and buy eco detergent and dishwashing laundry and all of that.
I mean, Ask your friends to help you. People love to do that,
Julie Michelson: This is the Yes. Allowing friends to help. And that creates that trickle down we were talking about. Because they may be like, oh, why are you throwing away your blue laundry detergent? Why aren't you using your dryer sheets? You
Carol Lourie: No dryer sheets ever again.
Julie Michelson: conversations and that's how, that's how we all [Page//00:43:00] learn is
Carol Lourie: That's how change happens. Yes, you're changing your, your, your family and then your friend goes, oh, I don't wanna use that junk in my house either. And they, they're changing and their family will get healthier.
Julie Michelson: and, and so that's the goal. That's why we're, that's why we're doing this.
Carol Lourie: That is the goal. The trickle down effect is a very powerful way of upleveling not just your health, but everyone in your circle.
Julie Michelson: Absolutely. Amen. While all of your contact will be in the show notes, where is the best place for people to find you?
Carol Lourie: well, carol laurie.com is my website, and at the top right is the contact me and it sends me an email and I always respond personally to everyone's email. And my last name is l o u r i e, not l a. It's very common
Julie Michelson: that for, for listeners. Yes. And
Carol Lourie: And there's two Ls. So it's my first name, Carol, my full last name, [Page//00:44:00] laurie.com.
And I, I love hearing from all of you. It's just really my honor and pleasure to respond. Okay.
Julie Michelson: For anybody who is feeling called but a little unsure really, you know, she is amazing. So if you're called to reach out, absolutely reach out.
Carol Lourie: There's no question too small. Okay.
Julie Michelson: Love that. Doctor. Lourie, thank you so much. You have again, shared amazing gold with us today.
Carol Lourie: Well, thank you so much for having me. It's been so wonderful to be here. I.
Julie Michelson: For everyone listening. Remember, you can get the show notes and transcripts by visiting InspiredLiving.Show I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. Have a great week. I. Dr. Lourie welcome to the podcast.
Carol Lourie: I, I'm so excited and happy to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Julie Michelson: I am so thrilled to have you back on. I almost fell over when I realized that it's been close to two years since our last conversation on the podcast.[Page//00:45:00] And so I'm I, it, that was such a great conversation. I know that listeners are gonna get. So much value from digging deeper. And as we were saying before I hit record, we evol, we evolve, and we grow and we keep learning.
And, and so let's jump into to part two for listeners that didn't hear that first episode we did together I'd love to have you share a little bit of your journey of, you know, how did you get into this integrative world and, and just so deep.
Carol Lourie: Well, I always wanted to be a doctor for some reason. And initially I thought I was going to medical school, and then I ended up living in a spiritual community in New York in the seventies, and that was before the world word detoxify became a household word, and I ended up working with this chiropractor who used iridology to diagnose areas of [Page//00:46:00] imbalance in our bodies.
And for those of you who don't know what iridology is, It's a very old science that where they map out the eye into specific different sections and you can look at these sections and see, depending on how your iris looks, if you have toxins, if you have buildup, what's going on. And he would do that and then put people on detoxifying diets Now.
When I first started working with him, this young girl came into the office and she had bad skin, and I thought to myself, what is the big deal? You have bad skin, you take antibiotics. That's like, why is she even here eating these blended salads and drinking these juices? And that was how naive I was because she came back a month later and she had lost weight.
Her skin was much better. And I began to see this from people who had not, either not been helped through the regular medical treatment or who had been damaged. And so my eyes [Page//00:47:00] and my mind beca be really began to do a radical shift away from symptom A equals drug B.
Julie Michelson: Yay.
Carol Lourie: Yes. Yay. And then one day I was going through this big stack of papers and I lifted up a paper and there was a catalog to the National College of Naturopathic Medicine.
And that was like a bell ringing moment. I thought, oh, maybe I should go here. It was in Portland, Oregon. And I applied and I got in and that was the beginning of my. Really gathering the tools that I needed. I graduated from the National College of Naturopathic Medicine in Portland, Oregon. I moved to California and there wasn't any licensing for naturopaths at that point.
And I got my acupuncture license. And I opened up my clinical practice, you know, in the late eighties and I specialized in women's health and chronic disease. And then one day, recently, well actually it's 15 years [Page//00:48:00] now. A dear friend called me up and I didn't understand what she was saying. And then finally I realized she was saying they found a lump.
And this is a woman who ate healthy and she said, what the heck's going on? I eat organic. Why did I get this? And I said to her, don't worry, you're not alone. I'm, and I attended every treatment session of 18 months with lumpectomy chemotherapy, radiation for her. And I got an up close and personal perspective of what was great about medical oncology and what really was lacking.
And one of the first areas I realized that was lacking is when we went into the chemotherapy infusion room. Now there is this, Medical proven science fact that sugar feeds cancer, it's not negotiable. It was discovered by Otto Warburg in the 1920s. He won the Noble Medicine Peace Prize for this. Given cancer cells given a [Page//00:49:00] choice between oxygen and ca sugar or glucose, always choose sugar even though they have to work twice as hard for it and they get less energy or a t p.
Julie Michelson: Just like humans.
Carol Lourie: yeah, exactly. we go into U C S F chemotherapy infusion room, and sh they look at her and they go, oh, you're a little thin. Would you like some? Ensure? Ensure is the number one ingredient is glucose. And then they offer a lollipop. They offer Gatorade, they offer cookie. And when you're done, they wanna give you a cupcake.
Five times during the infusion was she offered sugar and we came with our ginger tea and our smoothie. And our peeler broth and we kept saying, no thanks. So that was the beginning. Oh, and then there was the time when the candy cart walked by. That was the beginning of my eye awakening towards. The, the disparaging information, the disconnect between medical oncology and natural or integrative medicine [Page//00:50:00] and which are, which is science backed.
We're not like making stuff up, right?
Julie Michelson: woo woo, right.
Carol Lourie: So, so I began to Really work with her from an integrative perspective. And we were in her medical oncology appointment and her oncologist looked up at looked at her blood work and then looked at us and said, what are you doing? And I got, got alarmed. Is there a problem?
And I said, is there a problem? She said, no, your blood work does not look like the blood work of somebody in the middle of chemotherapy. Your white cell count is great. You're not anemic. You look great. What are you doing? I want all of my patients to be doing that too.
Julie Michelson: I wish every doctor were that on it and open to even ask, what are you doing?
Carol Lourie: right. So that was the beginning of, she referred a lot of her patients to me in my practice in Berkeley, California at the time, really began to focus on breast cancer and then the individual [Page//00:51:00] need expanded beyond what I could handle. So I created an online program. To provide women with this really lifesaving and life-changing information that's called Empowered Against Recurrence at this point.
And there's other aspects of that in development. But on a deeper level, let's talk about what breast cancer is on a deeper level. Breast, it's a disease of the feminine, right? It's the breasts and the feminine. In our culture right now is not doing so great. It's better than it was. Unfortunately.
There's still this conflict between what men think we should be, should and how we want to live, and we can see that about how that's happening in the political arena regarding the Roe versus Wade. We can see that in the messaging that we get from television. Perspectives on women being depressed, the ads [Page//00:52:00] for psychiatric antidepressants.
A woman is depressed. What does that look like? The house is a mess, quote unquote. What does that look like? There's dishes in the sink. The beds aren't made. There's laundry. And when I first saw that commercial, I'm screaming at the television to myself. I'm not depressed. And when I had a child, I had dishes in the sink.
My beds weren't made. And you know, I had piles of laundry and, and then she takes a pill and everything's quote unquote spec and span. So I'm thinking, why is it just the woman's job to take care of all this stuff? Where's the partner, whether that partner's a man or a woman? And why does that equal depression?
Julie Michelson: right.
Carol Lourie: And what happened before? This mess of a house, quote unquote, that made this woman feel unwell. What kind of stress was she on under? Was she being harassed at work? Was she having difficult communication in her relationship? Were her children suffering from some [Page//00:53:00] ailment? I mean, there is always a reason for depression, right?
Julie Michelson: Absolutely, and it's never a lack of antidepressants. It's, it's never the cause of depression.
Carol Lourie: Right. Too many women go into their doctors and they're not complaining. They're reporting, they're sole aching, and it's taken as complaining, number one. And number two, the next thing you know out comes the prescription pad. And out comes the words, well, let's just put you on a short course of X, Y, z, antidepressant, and let's see how, if that helps.
Julie Michelson: Yep. And, and even the, just, especially in the autoimmune world, the fatigue just expressing the level of fatigue I. Out comes the pad for an antidepressant. It's,
Carol Lourie: A hundred percent. Now from our perspective, you have fatigue. Let's see what adrenal support you need. Let's see what's happening from [Page//00:54:00] your, with your mitochondrial. So, How are they functioning your mitochondria? Let's see where your energy sources are coming. Let's see if you're eating food that doesn't agree with your body and you need to really, you know, clean up some aspects of what you're eating.
Are you getting enough good sleep? I. Are you getting positive movement? You know what Julie Julie's work with Autoimmune is very similar to how I assist women recover their health and restore their life. With breast cancer, it's very similar because the foundation for all disease is inflammation. The foundation for breast cancer is inflammation.
We need to dial back and heal the inflammation, not suppress, but heal as much as we can with all of these areas that we're talking about.
Julie Michelson: And, and from where I sit. And I will try to keep calm through our conversation
Carol Lourie: we don't have to.
Julie Michelson: so much of what you say makes sense. And, and I find, you know, I have these conversations and [Page//00:55:00] amazing connections and I think the world, you know, the needle has moved so far and the world knows and they get it. And then I, you know, then I see the line around the corner at the fast food joint and I think, nope, I live in a bubble.
So.
Carol Lourie: Yeah.
Julie Michelson: This, and I love Thank you. And I know that's how you genuinely feel. The, the integrative approach is the best of all worlds. It's, it's not, this approach is wrong, you know, it's, it's where can we do better and what compliments each other. So to me, I listened to you and so far nothing you've said seems out of the box at all.
Where is that kind of standard oncology care now? Like has that needle moved at all? Cuz I haven't met anybody diagnosed with cancer that was told to watch sugar. Like, I, I still haven't since. Are you seeing a shift?
Carol Lourie: I think one of the most dangerous things somebody can be [Page//00:56:00] told no matter what cancer they have is eat everything in moderation, and that is the standard line that. Women and men are given with cancer by their oncology nutritionists, unless those nutritionists have taken specialized programs and realized that that is a very dangerous statement.
So, If you have cancer, if you have a family history of cancer, you do not want to eat everything in moderation. That means you can eat fast food in moderation. And what's the definition of moderation for you? That may mean twice a week for somebody else. It may be. You know, for me it's zero. I mean, there's certain things that we need to become very conscious of making a really good decision if we're going to blow it.
Like, if you want, if it's your birthday and you love, you know, smoked meats and there's this barbecue place that you, so you go there and you [Page//00:57:00] get it once a year and you don't eat the bread and you don't eat the mac and cheese, you just eat the, the meat. Which is not great, but it's not horrible.
Julie Michelson: I eat nightshades probably two or three times a year cause they don't agree with me and I love them.
Carol Lourie: Yeah, like if you're in Italy, you're going to
Julie Michelson: Yes,
Carol Lourie: and you're not going to worry about it, but, or if you're in California or if wherever you live, you know, there's this delicious tomato and it's in season, you're gonna make a decision to eat that. But you know that if you eat that three days or five days in a row, you're gonna wake up and your hands are going.
You're gonna be swollen, you're gonna have a headache, you're gonna be not able to move, and then you're gonna think, well, was it worth it? The pro, the problem with nutrition and oncology is it's not always a one plus one equals two approach. Where if you eat product A, you're going to feel bad, but your blood work will show it.
Your circulating tumor cells can [Page//00:58:00] elevate and that impact can happen months later. And most physicians, as standard of care, are not doing circulating tumor accounts. You know, they don't do that as standard of care, and we have to have a serious conversation with them and present them with studies in PubMed in order for them to.
Do some of this more thorough and advanced blood work because cancer is a metabolic disease. What that means is there's not just one thing that goes into creating cancer, whether it's breast cancer, ovarian cancer. Melanoma, it doesn't matter. There are these pathways where your cells, instead of staying in the healthy freeway, they get all discombobulated and the next thing you know, they have stopped paying attention to the rules of stop and go. And they think they can go wherever they want. They can over progress. They can create [Page//00:59:00] angiogenesis, ex extra blood vessels. And the next thing you know, you have a severe inflammatory problem and you have a tumor or blood dysplasia where your blood is unhealthy. And so, and it doesn't happen overnight, it happens over a period of time.
Right.
Julie Michelson: And that's, I think that's where it gets tricky and that's where having some of these advanced labs where people can see, cuz if you can't feel it, you think, oh, maybe that one McDonald's is fine this week. Or, or whatever your jam is. I'm picking on fast food just cuz I, I can't remember the last time I had, you know, I, I would, I would fast if.
Carol Lourie: I, I, yeah, I, I would have to be, yeah, I can't even imagine.
Julie Michelson: it is so much easier when, you know, you do feel a, a, a direct impact where you can connect those dots. And so I love that idea of, okay, well if we're following, you know, seeing these advanced markers, [Page//01:00:00] we can sh people can see, you know, even if they can't feel it, they're still getting the feedback.
And it's kind of hard to, I, I have a client who. When eating, you know, doing the things working together, cancer markers were coming way down. You know, after a long time of him not doing anything and then he kind of fell off the wagon and guess what? Cancer markers started to go back up. And it was like, okay.
His doctor said to him, now, you know, what you were doing was working. And going back to, you know, eating on the fly is feeding the cancer. So, you know, there is sometimes a, a bit of a learning curve and I think that feedback is, is remarkable.
Carol Lourie: It's, it's not so easy. I had, last year I was a speaker at the Society for Integrative Oncology in Arizona, and one of the other [Page//01:01:00] speakers was a brain surgeon. And he came from his office in Scottsdale and his scrubs, and he had images that he shared with the on the presentation of using ketogenic diet to reduce brain tumors.
So this wasn't like, oh, I'm gonna tell you a nice story. This was science-based and he's about to publish it. Here is before ketogenic. Here is after. And there was a remarkable shift. In the size of the tumor and where it was and everything from, not just one people, but many, many people. Now, several of the people went off the ketogenic diet and then they had a brain scan and that you could see that the tumor had grown.
And one of his patients said, why are you talking to me about nutrition and diet? I'm, you're a surgeon. I came to you for surgery. I have a brain tumor, I want surgery. And the doctor said, well, let's shrink the tumor first and [Page//01:02:00] then see if you still need, do you know surgery? Sometimes if it gets small enough, we can just leave it there if it's not growing.
So Yes, it, it matters what we eat. And it's very difficult sometimes to not eat that pasta. And if you're doing ketogenic, you cannot eat pasta. And if you're, if you are staying on a healthy plan through breast cancer, you really, really, you don't wanna eat birthday cake, but, You can make your own and use a very, very tiny amount of monk fruit instead of white sugar.
You can make it the, the cake with te you can have, you know, organic, unfiltered, heavy cream for a an icing instead of some buttercream junk. I mean, there are ways of doing this once or twice a year where,
Julie Michelson: We don't have to be deprived.
Carol Lourie: no, I'm not, it, it's, I don't, you know, The word restrict and deprivation are bad words. It doesn't work for us as adults.
We, I don't think anybody should feel [Page//01:03:00] restricted or deprived in their life. I think it's about education and understanding equals you have the ability to make really empowered choices for yourself and you need begin to,
Julie Michelson: and then it's sustainable.
Carol Lourie: Yeah, it needs to be sustainable for you and you need to figure out. Your path.
For example, you know, you have dear friends and you go over to their house for dinner all the time, and the woman makes lasagna and you, you are not eating lasagna. And so can you say to her, look, I'm gonna bring my piece of fish that I've cooked and I'm gonna eat your salad and vegetables, and can you stick to that?
When you go out to eat to an Italian restaurant, everybody else is getting some pasta dish. Can you get a piece of grilled fish with tomato sauce over it? If you're able to eat that with, you know, sauteed vegetables and a salad and be okay? I mean, I, I, that's what I do. The only place I don't, I think that you have difficulty [Page//01:04:00] eating at is a pizza place.
You can't really go to a pizza place and eat
Julie Michelson: No, and, and I think, you know, you talked about EM empowering and that's, we're both all about that. That part is a process, especially for women of saying, you know, like, why do we feel like it's an imposition if a friend is hosting us and we're gonna bring something we can eat? You know, that takes train retraining and reprogramming to, to realize like, I am allowed to make the choices for my own body and, and you know, it's nobody's business.
Also. You're not asking somebody to cook for you.
Carol Lourie: Right. And what's the big deal about taking it out, putting it on your plate, and then bringing it to the table? I mean, I, I just, you know, oh, I'm gonna upset the hostess.
Julie Michelson: Yeah. We're trained, you know, or ex holiday need, like you say, you know, you have to have birthday cake, like gross birthday cake. And I'm, I guess I, I am [Page//01:05:00] just anxious. I hope it's in my lifetime of where there's this tipping point where instead of, You know, shaming people, people that are trying to protect their health.
You know, get curious and, and like, where's the trickle down? And there is some I remember I, I had a border colleague a few years ago. Who was, she? She had been, she'd had been a perfect candidate for you. She was born in a shelter. Sick. The only one in the litter who lived in foster care for a year and a half, cuz she was so shy and, and you know, high stress, just high, high stress.
And we gave her, thank goodness, you know, she had a wonderful family and we got her no pressure. We adopted her with her foster sibling and
Carol Lourie: Oh, nice.
Julie Michelson: she loved dogs. She was totally comfortable with dogs. And we were like, I don't need to pet you. I don't need to, you know, of course ended up like the biggest love bug in the
Carol Lourie: Oh, that's so sweet. That's very healing story.[Page//01:06:00]
Julie Michelson: well, it, it's, it does, you know, the animals go through the same processes, right? And I remember this, we found out she had a tumor and the second I found out, now this is me telling on myself the second I found out she had a tumor, I put her on a keto diet. I had a custom keto diet made for her,
Carol Lourie: for the dog.
Julie Michelson: for the dog.
We then found out that it was hemangiosarcoma and it was gonna be very aggressive and, I I was not go, and I'm not saying all key for this dog at this time in her life, and this was in the be just in the beginning of shutdown and covid, like, I couldn't even go in the vet with her, which was
Carol Lourie: Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness.
Julie Michelson: the, the surgical oncologist really did such a good job on selling me for. You know, if you don't do chemo for this dog, for this kind of cancer, she's got three months to live and that's it. And I made the decision for her, there'll be three happy months. She [Page//01:07:00] feels well, and she lived three years.
And what I did was I came home and I put my other two dogs on a keto diet because did I love her more than the other dogs?
Carol Lourie: was eating the same food.
Julie Michelson: So it didn't have to be, she didn't feel bad and it, it wasn't because she'd feel awkward. She was eating crappy kibble and it was high quality. It was already, she was already paleo.
So, you know, shocker, my dog was paleo. She had an integrative vet, you know?
Carol Lourie: Right. Well, they're part of the family. You know, the animals are part of the family.
Julie Michelson: But I brought her up because I, I know, and I, I really encourage listeners to go back and listen to our first interview from, from 2021 because this dog exemplifies us of, you know, all she had, all of those things aligned.
How we end up with cancer, autoimmunity, chronic illness, you know, name it, which whatever it is. From, you know, just the [Page//01:08:00] trauma, the stress, all the things.
Carol Lourie: All right. Life.
Julie Michelson: Yeah. And so I, I'm waiting, you know, that, that's my hope is that, that instead of, you know, it's that now all my dogs and they still are, all my dogs still are clean eaters.
And watch cuz why not?
Carol Lourie: I was gonna say, why not? I mean, and when I talk to people about changing how they eat, There's a couple objections which I want to bring up. One, it's going to be more expensive and actually it isn't because when you go into the regular grocery store and anything that you buy that's processed and you pick it up in this box and you read the list of ingredients that are in there, and most of those words nobody has ever heard before.
Julie Michelson: Right.
Carol Lourie: You're paying for that fake junk to be put into the food re and you're paying for that. People who design the box, the [Page//01:09:00] packaging, the label, the putting it, transporting it to the supermarket, all of that, you are paying for that.
Julie Michelson: Yeah.
Carol Lourie: You can make your own crackers if you want, or you can, you know, go get gluten.
A few gluten-free crackers, which you are going to eat very infrequently cuz even though it's gluten-free, it's still high glycemic from the health food store. But you don't need to be eating cereal in a box's sort of like eating, you know, paper eating cereal is like eating paper with. House milk, which nobody needs to be eating anyway.
So there's a lot of messaging that we've been brainwashed. So. Why does diet the American diet need to start in breakfast? Breakfast with a pop-tart, a waffle, cold cereal, hot cereal, bacon and eggs, which are not that bad as long as the bacon doesn't have nitris in it and it's organic. Why does breakfast need to start like that?
Why couldn't it be a smoothie that has a protein base [Page//01:10:00] in it? Why couldn't it be leftovers from dinner, which is protein and vegetables? Why does it have to be some carbohydrate with sugar in it and coffee with, yeah, it's very draining.
Julie Michelson: from mar marketing marketing to children. Right from, from day one, that sugar for breakfast. I, yeah. You mentioned like even oncology, nutritionists, unless they have special training, You know, saying eat everything in moderation. I had a, a client with type one diabetes who saw a diabetes coach, and for those of you listening on audio, I'm using air quotes.
I, I don't know what kind of training she had. And this woman was shocked to learn with type one diabetes. That oatmeal for breakfast was not a good choice for
Carol Lourie: Oh, I'm so happy. I'm so happy you brought that up because one of the things that drives me crazy is when I do my life. Presentations for my Empowered Against Recurrence [Page//01:11:00] program. I have women put in the chat, what did you eat for breakfast? And it's amazing to me what is seen, but I'd say 80% is oatmeal.
Now let's talk about that. First of all, there's a, a colleague who, who has said that oatmeal is great for breakfast. Now even there's a couple of C caveats here. Even if it's gluten free, even if it's steel cut oats, oat oatmeal is still a carbohydrate. Which means it is processed very quickly into a sugar glucose.
You do not wanna start your day with food that's going to be quickly processed into sugar because then you're feeding, you've basically been fasting while you're sleeping, and then the cancer cells are hungry. So you eat food that is going to be processed into sugar quickly, and the cancer cells go great.
I now have gas for my gas tank. Thank you very much.
Julie Michelson: Yeah.
Carol Lourie: oatmeal is not, oh, I don't really think anybody should really be eating oatmeal. I had a woman in my program who said, I have [Page//01:12:00] to have my oatmeal. And I said, okay, let's make a deal. Let's have you eat it two or three times a week for lunch, and you put a lot of ghee fat in it.
Well,
Julie Michelson: Yeah. Nuts
Carol Lourie: you put a lot of fat in it because that slows down how the sugar is metabolized. And that's what she did. And she used coconut milk and she
Julie Michelson: of the things that's so frustrating for me, and I'm sure she learned through that process, that she probably could live without oatmeal eventually. I bet you,
Carol Lourie: I hope so.
Julie Michelson: the, the thing that frustrates me, and that goes back to that marketing. A lot of pe, most people are eating oatmeal because they're actually trying to make a good choice.
Right. It's not like the Pop-Tart, you eat a Pop-tart, you know you're eating a Pop-tart. Right? You're eating oatmeal. Oh, well, I've heard it's good for my heart and it
Carol Lourie: And good for lower cholesterol. Right.
Julie Michelson: No, it doesn't
Carol Lourie: With the round paper oatmeal container [Page//01:13:00] with the red and blue Quaker oats. So that's what we grew up with when you know, and we thought it was healthy and it was delicious, my mom would put white sugar on top of,
Julie Michelson: Mine would put brown, you know, but we put white sugar on grapefruits. Why? I just had that conversation. Who started that?
Carol Lourie: Yeah.
Julie Michelson: Why? But it is, so some of it is habitual. Some of it is conditioning and marketing. You know, those, those commercials are just as powerful as the antidepressant commercials
Carol Lourie: They are, they are. There are people who study this. There's science behind it. And so unfortunately in the world of natural medicine, which is what we're talking about, we don't have the billions of dollars to put our commercials up on television. And I don't even think regular TV channels would, you know, run them
Julie Michelson: Well, and social media certainly would knock it right down.
Carol Lourie: Well, social media, you
Julie Michelson: Some of it, if you're, but I mean, [Page//01:14:00] You know, if you're a little too vocal about it, it's not, it's not the right message.
Carol Lourie: need a lot of money for Facebook ads to have it have a large
Julie Michelson: people see
Carol Lourie: I mean,
Julie Michelson: Yeah. Yeah. So,
Carol Lourie: dollars in a month. No joke. And then it takes a while because you're up against people's. Brain conditioning that they've seen for many years. So this brings us back to my. Philosophy of the bell curve, which I wanna share with you.
So the bell curve is curved like this, and any statement you see about breast cancer, any research about whatever the topic is, the research is done with women in the middle of the bell curve. And what does that mean? That most American women are. Overweight to obese. They don't exercise. They eat the standard American diet, which is what Julie and I have been talking about.
It's filled with processed food sugars. The meat is not farm to table. It's the kind of meat you get at Costco or [Page//01:15:00] one of the fast food places, which has been proven to be carcinogenic. There's, and the Standard American diet literally quadruples the cancer rate. So that's the studies and that's the middle of the bell curve in my community and through my life coaching program and in my individual work, I want you to be out of the bell curve.
That's where the magic happens. And so it takes a while to get out of the bell curve. You have to shift your mindset. You have to leave all that other stuff behind, and you have to walk forward on a new path you are creating, you know, forging a new path for yourself. That that can be difficult, which is why we have live coaching, which is why I offer individual sessions.
It's as the work with Julie, it's very hard to separate what you've been. Taught and how you've grown up and create new habits. And there's research that says it takes a hundred days for an activity to become a new habit. [Page//01:16:00] And those habits, new habits, it takes time and energy to create them.
Julie Michelson: Right,
Carol Lourie: So you don't wanna do 15 new things at once because it's all gonna, you know, not work out.
The plate's gonna break. You need to choose, I think, the first one to three most difficult areas that you have with, and attend to them first. And you need to realize and understand at that time that you will be moving much, slowly, more slowly than you usually do, because you have to think about what you're doing.
Julie Michelson: Yeah, I, I love, there's so many things that you said that if you hit three more hours but the, the bell curve. I, I had an article published a few months ago about how, and, and here's one of those we're talking about outside of the box, right? Standard of care versus integrative or functional medicine.
You don't wanna be in the bell curve. No, you don't want normal li you don't [Page//01:17:00] wanna be in the middle of the sick population in our country. And people don't understand that when they're, I actually had that just this morning doing a lab review with a client, he wanted to know why his omega3s got flagged.
And I said, cuz they're so high. They're better than the
Carol Lourie: which is good.
Julie Michelson: This is what we've been working toward. Yay. Yeah. Celebration, you know?
Carol Lourie: Yeah, it's not a problem. It's a good thing.
Julie Michelson: yeah. But people see, you know, the, the labs will flag it cuz it's outside of range. And so I love this. This is such a. An important thing for people to understand is, you know, that average is not optimal, and, and this is not average of top of the class.
This is an average. You don't wanna be in the middle
Carol Lourie: I was just gonna say, this is an average. You don't wanna be part of. You don't wanna be average. You do not wanna be average of your blood work. You don't wanna be average of your weight. You don't wanna be average of your muscle development. You [Page//01:18:00] don't wanna be average in your stamina. You don't wanna be average in how much time you spend on social media or watch television.
It's a, it's really different perspective on life because cancer doesn't happen overnight. And I try to get women to begin to have conversations with their cancer. Like, not just the hell with you. Goodbye. It's like, What are you doing here? How did I get this? What do you, what am I missing in my life? What, you know, what do you wanna say to me?
What do I need to shift? And it's, that's a very challenging conversation. That is not a conversation that your oncologist has with you, which I actually think there should be as part of the oncology team talking to your breast cancer, what comes up?
Julie Michelson: Yeah.
Carol Lourie: Because you'd be surprised. And you know, one time I always, as part of my intake, I say to women, have you ever had any [Page//01:19:00] traumatic experiences?
And one woman got very upset with me and she said, no, I, I've never had anything traumatic. And I said, okay, let me change the word traumatic to upsetting. Have you ever had any upsetting experiences? And she said, well, yeah, but it happened like, you know, 30 years ago. I said, oh, okay, so what could they, what were they?
Do you mind telling me? And she starts giving me this list.
Julie Michelson: Yep.
Carol Lourie: And so every, any one of those was traumatic,
Julie Michelson: Sure.
Carol Lourie: and women are like frogs. And what that means is frogs. This is true about frogs. For those of you who don't know this, this is the frogs and warm water fact. If you put a frog in warm water and you gradually increase the temperature, the frog will not realize it is being boiled to death.
Julie Michelson: Yep.
Carol Lourie: Women are a lot like that. If you've had traumatic experiences as an infant and a child and a teenager, As a [Page//01:20:00] self-protective device. You acclimate to those and you don't realize that they were as difficult as they were. And then many years later, after a period of stress or whatever, all of a sudden your body goes, I can't hold onto this anymore.
And you have a lump in your breast. So
Julie Michelson: And it doesn't have to be one huge, big thing. Sometimes it's, it's a history of stuffing. I call it stuffing. Stuffing the little things, you know, I'm okay. I'm okay. The I'm fine syndrome. I'm fine until you're not.
Carol Lourie: Right, right. So there is, you know, there is validity to unpacking your trauma. It's like peeling away layers of an onion and your psyche will allow you to do that at a speed and a place as you're ready. You don't need to. Take a knife and smash the onion and get everything out all at once.
That's too upsetting. You need to begin to gradually peel back the layers and [Page//01:21:00] to recover your health and understand what was happening then. And that is in addition to doing medical oncology. So you wanna do that work and then you wanna do this work. So you're taking the best of both worlds. It's not, in my opinion, it's not one or the other.
Julie Michelson: I'm glad you highlighted that again because Yeah. That, that is the, that is what integrative is, right? It's,
Carol Lourie: Integrative takes the best of both
Julie Michelson: yeah.
Carol Lourie: and we don't wanna diminish the importance of medical oncology.
Julie Michelson: No, no, not at all. And it's just how do we optimize the, it's, it's, again, the standard and then optimal and, and when you marry the two, it's, it's optimal. There's no either or. For sure. For sure. Amazing. You, you've given us so many steps already, but I always like to ask for the listeners at the end, one.
Step listeners can take today [Page//01:22:00] to start to improve their health or protect it.
Carol Lourie: Go into your pantry and take out everything that's in a box
Julie Michelson: Mm-hmm.
Carol Lourie: and take a serious look at the labels.
Julie Michelson: Yeah,
Carol Lourie: make some decisions about moving forward.
Julie Michelson: I love that.
Carol Lourie: if there's too many red dye 54, yellow number 27, whatever those big words are that you don't talk, that you don't use every day, that box is not healthy for you.
And then think about just maybe three vegetables that you can start buying organic. And
Julie Michelson: Yep. That combo is amazing.
Carol Lourie: right. It's too expensive. It's like if you gave up buying a six pack of soda, how much more would that give you if you gave up
Julie Michelson: you know, the Frappuccino or what?
Carol Lourie: The frappuccino, nobody needs to be eating a frappuccino. It's filled with sugar.
Julie Michelson: [Page//01:23:00] all corn syrup and, yeah. And I've had the, I I also have to remind, I don't know about you because you were even in the seventies already kind of in introduced to this na, more natural world. But people are always shocked to find out, like, I used to eat junk. I grew up on junk food
Carol Lourie: We all grew up on, oh, we all grew up on junk
Julie Michelson: my children on drunk on junk food.
You
Carol Lourie: When my mom would buy Wonder Bread, I was very excited. Oh, wonder Bread and Baloney.
Julie Michelson: thing, bologna or peanut butter and jelly.
Carol Lourie: Yeah.
Julie Michelson: Oh god. With a
Carol Lourie: You know, here we are. We lived through Wonder Bread.
Julie Michelson: So we, we didn't, we weren't formed this informed. And, and I, I wanna circle back just to, to highlight, you were talking about change and, and to, you know, the. It takes energy and it takes effort and, and you know, you made it clear, but I, I love to, to underscore, [Page//01:24:00] especially so many of my listeners, You know, don't have energy, they don't feel well.
So many of the women you're working, you know, we're talking about mostly people who are at a point where they already don't feel well, and resources are, are at a minimum, and that's where it's, you know, that one, each change will give you more energy to make the additional changes.
Carol Lourie: a hundred percent.
Julie Michelson: And so just another, I just wanted to underscore that for listeners that, you know, we, we know change takes effort and energy and it's not easy
Carol Lourie: Especially if you don't have a lot of energy and you feel horrible when you do have it.
Julie Michelson: Right. So if you pick, you know, what you can be successful with, out of that top three, like the one that'll be easiest for you to have success with. And you'll start to improve your energy and, and all of a sudden it'll be, oh, what else can I do? You know? But I, I just wanted to highlight, we know that we [Page//01:25:00] know you may not have the energy and just the word change may make you wanna take into the app, like no.
Yeah.
Carol Lourie: it's also the time to call up your friends.
Julie Michelson: Yes.
Carol Lourie: say, you know what? I need some help. Can you come over and call up three friends and ask them to come over different days and spend an hour to three hours with each one of them and have them help you clean out your pantry, have them help you get rid of toxic cleaning agents in your home, and then, you know, have them drive you to the health food store and buy eco detergent and dishwashing laundry and all of that.
I mean, Ask your friends to help you. People love to do that,
Julie Michelson: This is the Yes. Allowing friends to help. And that creates that trickle down we were talking about. Because they may be like, oh, why are you throwing away your blue laundry detergent? Why aren't you using your dryer sheets? You
Carol Lourie: No dryer sheets ever again.
Julie Michelson: conversations and that's [Page//01:26:00] how, that's how we all learn is
Carol Lourie: That's how change happens. Yes, you're changing your, your, your family and then your friend goes, oh, I don't wanna use that junk in my house either. And they, they're changing and their family will get healthier.
Julie Michelson: and, and so that's the goal. That's why we're, that's why we're doing this.
Carol Lourie: that is the goal. The trickle down effect is a very powerful way of upleveling not just your health, but everyone in your circle.
Julie Michelson: Absolutely. Amen. While all of your contact will be in the show notes, where is the best place for people to find you?
Carol Lourie: well, carol laurie.com is my website, and at the top right is the contact me and it sends me an email and I always respond personally to everyone's email. And my last name is l o u r i e, not l a. It's very common
Julie Michelson: that for, for listeners. Yes. And
Carol Lourie: And there's two Ls. So it's my first name, Carol, my [Page//01:27:00] full last name, laurie.com.
And I, I love hearing from all of you. It's just really my honor and pleasure to respond. Okay.
Julie Michelson: For anybody who is feeling called but a little unsure really, you know, she is amazing. So if you're called to reach out, absolutely reach out.
Carol Lourie: There's no question too small. Okay.
Julie Michelson: Love that. Doctor. Lourie thank you so much. You have again, shared amazing gold with us today.
Carol Lourie: Well, thank you so much for having me. It's been so wonderful to be here. I.
Julie Michelson: For everyone listening. Remember, you can get the show notes and transcripts by visiting InspiredLiving.Show. I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. Have a great week. [Page//01:28:00]
Dr. Lourie is a dedicated practitioner with over three decades of clinical experience as a naturopath, acupuncturist, and homeopath. She's helped hundreds of women recover their health and restore their life through her holistic protocols involving [Page//00:01:00] focus, nutrition, targeted supplementation, lifestyle changes, and a centered mindset.
Carol specializes in complex and chronic disease management, focusing on women's health, specifically breast cancer. Fertility for older women and autoimmune illness. I'm excited to have her back on the podcast. If you haven't listened to episode six, I encourage you to check it out. We had a great conversation Today.
We are continuing to discuss the out of the box integrative approach that goes beyond tra traditional medical oncology to truly create wellness. Listen in to find out why you don't wanna be in the middle of the bell curve.
Dr. Lourie, welcome to the podcast.
Carol Lourie: I, I'm so excited and happy to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Julie Michelson: I am so thrilled to have you back on. I almost fell over when I realized that it's been close to two years since our last conversation on the podcast. [Page//00:02:00] And that was such a great conversation. I know that listeners are gonna get so much value from digging deeper. And as we were saying before I hit record, we evol, we evolve, and we grow and we keep learning.
And, and so let's jump into to part two for listeners that didn't hear that first episode we did together I'd love to have you share a little bit of your journey of, you know, how did you get into this integrative world and, and just so deep.
Carol Lourie: Well, I always wanted to be a doctor for some reason. And initially I thought I was going to medical school, and then I ended up living in a spiritual community in New York in the seventies, and that was before the world word detoxify became a household word, and I ended up working with this chiropractor who used iridology to diagnose areas of imbalance in our [Page//00:03:00] bodies.
And for those of you who don't know what iridology is, It's a very old science that where they map out the eye into specific different sections and you can look at these sections and see, depending on how your iris looks, if you have toxins, if you have buildup, what's going on. And he would do that and then put people on detoxifying diets Now.
When I first started working with him, this young girl came into the office and she had bad skin, and I thought to myself, what is the big deal? You have bad skin, you take antibiotics. That's like, why is she even here eating these blended salads and drinking these juices? And that was how naive I was because she came back a month later and she had lost weight.
Her skin was much better. And I began to see this from people who had not, either not been helped through the regular medical treatment or who had been damaged. And so my eyes and my mind beca [Page//00:04:00] be really began to do a radical shift away from symptom A equals drug B.
Julie Michelson: Yay.
Carol Lourie: Yes. Yay. And then one day I was going through this big stack of papers and I lifted up a paper and there was a catalog to the National College of Naturopathic Medicine.
And that was like a bell ringing moment. I thought, oh, maybe I should go here. It was in Portland, Oregon. And I applied and I got in and that was the beginning of my. Really gathering the tools that I needed. I graduated from the National College of Naturopathic Medicine in Portland, Oregon. I moved to California and there wasn't any licensing for naturopaths at that point.
And I got my acupuncture license. And I opened up my clinical practice, you know, in the late eighties and I specialized in women's health and chronic disease. And then one day, recently, well actually it's 15 years now. [Page//00:05:00] A dear friend called me up and I didn't understand what she was saying. And then finally I realized she was saying they found a lump.
And this is a woman who ate healthy and she said, what the heck's going on? I eat organic. Why did I get this? And I said to her, don't worry, you're not alone. I'm, and I attended every treatment session of 18 months with lumpectomy chemotherapy, radiation for her. And I got an up close and personal perspective of what was great about medical oncology and what really was lacking.
And one of the first areas I realized that was lacking is when we went into the chemotherapy infusion room. Now there is this, Medical proven science fact that sugar feeds cancer, it's not negotiable. It was discovered by Otto Warburg in the 1920s. He won the Noble Medicine Peace Prize for this. Given cancer cells given a choice between [Page//00:06:00] oxygen and ca sugar or glucose, always choose sugar even though they have to work twice as hard for it and they get less energy or a t p.
Julie Michelson: Just like humans.
Carol Lourie: yeah, exactly. we go into U C S F chemotherapy infusion room, and sh they look at her and they go, oh, you're a little thin. Would you like some? Ensure? Ensure is the number one ingredient is glucose. And then they offer a lollipop. They offer Gatorade, they offer cookie. And when you're done, they wanna give you a cupcake.
Five times during the infusion was she offered sugar and we came with our ginger tea and our smoothie. And our peeler broth and we kept saying, no thanks. So that was the beginning. Oh, and then there was the time when the candy cart walked by. That was the beginning of my eye awakening towards. The, the disparaging information, the disconnect between medical oncology and natural or integrative medicine and which are, which is [Page//00:07:00] science backed.
We're not like making stuff up, right?
Julie Michelson: woo woo, right.
Carol Lourie: So, so I began to Really work with her from an integrative perspective. And we were in her medical oncology appointment and her oncologist looked up at looked at her blood work and then looked at us and said, what are you doing? And I got, got alarmed. Is there a problem?
And I said, is there a problem? She said, no, your blood work does not look like the blood work of somebody in the middle of chemotherapy. Your white cell count is great. You're not anemic. You look great. What are you doing? I want all of my patients to be doing that too.
Julie Michelson: I wish every doctor were that on it and open to even ask, what are you doing?
Carol Lourie: right. So that was the beginning of, she referred a lot of her patients to me in my practice in Berkeley, California at the time, really began to focus on breast cancer and then the individual need [Page//00:08:00] expanded beyond what I could handle. So I created an online program. To provide women with this really lifesaving and life-changing information that's called Empowered Against Recurrence at this point.
And there's other aspects of that in development. But on a deeper level, let's talk about what breast cancer is on a deeper level. Breast, it's a disease of the feminine, right? It's the breasts and the feminine. In our culture right now is not doing so great. It's better than it was. Unfortunately.
There's still this conflict between what men think we should be, should and how we want to live, and we can see that about how that's happening in the political arena regarding the Roe versus Wade. We can see that in the messaging that we get from television. Perspectives on women being depressed, the ads for psychiatric [Page//00:09:00] antidepressants.
A woman is depressed. What does that look like? The house is a mess, quote unquote. What does that look like? There's dishes in the sink. The beds aren't made. There's laundry. And when I first saw that commercial, I'm screaming at the television to myself. I'm not depressed. And when I had a child, I had dishes in the sink.
My beds weren't made. And you know, I had piles of laundry and, and then she takes a pill and everything's quote unquote spec and span. So I'm thinking, why is it just the woman's job to take care of all this stuff? Where's the partner, whether that partner's a man or a woman? And why does that equal depression?
Julie Michelson: right.
Carol Lourie: And what happened before? This mess of a house, quote unquote, that made this woman feel unwell. What kind of stress was she on under? Was she being harassed at work? Was she having difficult communication in her relationship? Were her children suffering from some ailment? I mean, there is [Page//00:10:00] always a reason for depression, right?
Julie Michelson: Absolutely, and it's never a lack of antidepressants. It's, it's never the cause of depression.
Carol Lourie: Right. Too many women go into their doctors and they're not complaining. They're reporting, they're sole aching, and it's taken as complaining, number one. And number two, the next thing you know out comes the prescription pad. And out comes the words, well, let's just put you on a short course of X, Y, z, antidepressant, and let's see how, if that helps.
Julie Michelson: Yep. And, and even the, just, especially in the autoimmune world, the fatigue just expressing the level of fatigue I. Out comes the pad for an antidepressant. It's,
Carol Lourie: A hundred percent. Now from our perspective, you have fatigue. Let's see what adrenal support you need. Let's see what's happening from your, with your [Page//00:11:00] mitochondrial. So, How are they functioning your mitochondria? Let's see where your energy sources are coming. Let's see if you're eating food that doesn't agree with your body and you need to really, you know, clean up some aspects of what you're eating.
Are you getting enough good sleep? I. Are you getting positive movement? You know what Julie Julie's work with Autoimmune is very similar to how I assist women recover their health and restore their life. With breast cancer, it's very similar because the foundation for all disease is inflammation. The foundation for breast cancer is inflammation.
We need to dial back and heal the inflammation, not suppress, but heal as much as we can with all of these areas that we're talking about.
Julie Michelson: And, and from where I sit. And I will try to keep calm through our conversation
Carol Lourie: we don't have to.
Julie Michelson: so much of what you say makes sense. And, and I find, you know, I have these conversations and amazing connections [Page//00:12:00] and I think the world, you know, the needle has moved so far and the world knows and they get it. And then I, you know, then I see the line around the corner at the fast food joint and I think, nope, I live in a bubble.
So.
Carol Lourie: Yeah.
Julie Michelson: This, and I love Thank you. And I know that's how you genuinely feel. The, the integrative approach is the best of all worlds. It's, it's not, this approach is wrong, you know, it's, it's where can we do better and what compliments each other. So to me, I listened to you and so far nothing you've said seems out of the box at all.
Where is that kind of standard oncology care now? Like has that needle moved at all? Cuz I haven't met anybody diagnosed with cancer that was told to watch sugar. Like, I, I still haven't since. Are you seeing a shift?
Carol Lourie: I think one of the most dangerous things somebody can be told no matter what cancer [Page//00:13:00] they have is eat everything in moderation, and that is the standard line that. Women and men are given with cancer by their oncology nutritionists, unless those nutritionists have taken specialized programs and realized that that is a very dangerous statement.
So, If you have cancer, if you have a family history of cancer, you do not want to eat everything in moderation. That means you can eat fast food in moderation. And what's the definition of moderation for you? That may mean twice a week for somebody else. It may be. You know, for me it's zero. I mean, there's certain things that we need to become very conscious of making a really good decision if we're going to blow it.
Like, if you want, if it's your birthday and you love, you know, smoked meats and there's this barbecue place that you, so you go there and you get it once a year and [Page//00:14:00] you don't eat the bread and you don't eat the mac and cheese, you just eat the, the meat. Which is not great, but it's not horrible.
Julie Michelson: I eat nightshades probably two or three times a year cause they don't agree with me and I love them.
Carol Lourie: Yeah, like if you're in Italy, you're going to
Julie Michelson: Yes,
Carol Lourie: and you're not going to worry about it, but, or if you're in California or if wherever you live, you know, there's this delicious tomato and it's in season, you're gonna make a decision to eat that. But you know that if you eat that three days or five days in a row, you're gonna wake up and your hands are going.
You're gonna be swollen, you're gonna have a headache, you're gonna be not able to move, and then you're gonna think, well, was it worth it? The pro, the problem with nutrition and oncology is it's not always a one plus one equals two approach. Where if you eat product A, you're going to feel bad, but your blood work will show it.
Your circulating tumor cells can elevate [Page//00:15:00] and that impact can happen months later. And most physicians, as standard of care, are not doing circulating tumor accounts. You know, they don't do that as standard of care, and we have to have a serious conversation with them and present them with studies in PubMed in order for them to.
Do some of this more thorough and advanced blood work because cancer is a metabolic disease. What that means is there's not just one thing that goes into creating cancer, whether it's breast cancer, ovarian cancer. Melanoma, it doesn't matter. There are these pathways where your cells, instead of staying in the healthy freeway, they get all discombobulated and the next thing you know, they have stopped paying attention to the rules of stop and go. And they think they can go wherever they want. They can over progress. They can create angiogenesis, ex extra blood [Page//00:16:00] vessels. And the next thing you know, you have a severe inflammatory problem and you have a tumor or blood dysplasia where your blood is unhealthy. And so, and it doesn't happen overnight, it happens over a period of time.
Right.
Julie Michelson: And that's, I think that's where it gets tricky and that's where having some of these advanced labs where people can see, cuz if you can't feel it, you think, oh, maybe that one McDonald's is fine this week. Or, or whatever your jam is. I'm picking on fast food just cuz I, I can't remember the last time I had, you know, I, I would, I would fast if.
Carol Lourie: I, I, yeah, I, I would have to be, yeah, I can't even imagine.
Julie Michelson: it is so much easier when, you know, you do feel a, a, a direct impact where you can connect those dots. And so I love that idea of, okay, well if we're following, you know, seeing these advanced markers, we can [Page//00:17:00] sh people can see, you know, even if they can't feel it, they're still getting the feedback.
And it's kind of hard to, I, I have a client who. When eating, you know, doing the things working together, cancer markers were coming way down. You know, after a long time of him not doing anything and then he kind of fell off the wagon and guess what? Cancer markers started to go back up. And it was like, okay.
His doctor said to him, now, you know, what you were doing was working. And going back to, you know, eating on the fly is feeding the cancer. So, you know, there is sometimes a, a bit of a learning curve and I think that feedback is, is remarkable.
Carol Lourie: It's, it's not so easy. I had, last year I was a speaker at the Society for Integrative Oncology in Arizona, and one of the other speakers was [Page//00:18:00] a brain surgeon. And he came from his office in Scottsdale and his scrubs, and he had images that he shared with the on the presentation of using ketogenic diet to reduce brain tumors.
So this wasn't like, oh, I'm gonna tell you a nice story. This was science-based and he's about to publish it. Here is before ketogenic. Here is after. And there was a remarkable shift. In the size of the tumor and where it was and everything from, not just one people, but many, many people. Now, several of the people went off the ketogenic diet and then they had a brain scan and that you could see that the tumor had grown.
And one of his patients said, why are you talking to me about nutrition and diet? I'm, you're a surgeon. I came to you for surgery. I have a brain tumor, I want surgery. And the doctor said, well, let's shrink the tumor first and then see if you still need, do [Page//00:19:00] you know surgery? Sometimes if it gets small enough, we can just leave it there if it's not growing.
So Yes, it, it matters what we eat. And it's very difficult sometimes to not eat that pasta. And if you're doing ketogenic, you cannot eat pasta. And if you're, if you are staying on a healthy plan through breast cancer, you really, really, you don't wanna eat birthday cake, but, You can make your own and use a very, very tiny amount of monk fruit instead of white sugar.
You can make it the, the cake with te you can have, you know, organic, unfiltered, heavy cream for a an icing instead of some buttercream junk. I mean, there are ways of doing this once or twice a year where,
Julie Michelson: We don't have to be deprived.
Carol Lourie: no, I'm not, it, it's, I don't, you know, The word restrict and deprivation are bad words. It doesn't work for us as adults.
We, I don't think anybody should feel restricted or [Page//00:20:00] deprived in their life. I think it's about education and understanding equals you have the ability to make really empowered choices for yourself and you need begin to,
Julie Michelson: and then it's sustainable.
Carol Lourie: Yeah, it needs to be sustainable for you and you need to figure out. Your path.
For example, you know, you have dear friends and you go over to their house for dinner all the time, and the woman makes lasagna and you, you are not eating lasagna. And so can you say to her, look, I'm gonna bring my piece of fish that I've cooked and I'm gonna eat your salad and vegetables, and can you stick to that?
When you go out to eat to an Italian restaurant, everybody else is getting some pasta dish. Can you get a piece of grilled fish with tomato sauce over it? If you're able to eat that with, you know, sauteed vegetables and a salad and be okay? I mean, I, I, that's what I do. The only place I don't, I think that you have difficulty eating at is a [Page//00:21:00] pizza place.
You can't really go to a pizza place and eat
Julie Michelson: No, and, and I think, you know, you talked about EM empowering and that's, we're both all about that. That part is a process, especially for women of saying, you know, like, why do we feel like it's an imposition if a friend is hosting us and we're gonna bring something we can eat? You know, that takes train retraining and reprogramming to, to realize like, I am allowed to make the choices for my own body and, and you know, it's nobody's business.
Also. You're not asking somebody to cook for you.
Carol Lourie: Right. And what's the big deal about taking it out, putting it on your plate, and then bringing it to the table? I mean, I, I just, you know, oh, I'm gonna upset the hostess.
Julie Michelson: Yeah. We're trained, you know, or ex holiday need, like you say, you know, you have to have birthday cake, like gross birthday cake. And I'm, I guess I, I am just anxious. I hope [Page//00:22:00] it's in my lifetime of where there's this tipping point where instead of, You know, shaming people, people that are trying to protect their health.
You know, get curious and, and like, where's the trickle down? And there is some I remember I, I had a border colleague a few years ago. Who was, she? She had been, she'd had been a perfect candidate for you. She was born in a shelter. Sick. The only one in the litter who lived in foster care for a year and a half, cuz she was so shy and, and you know, high stress, just high, high stress.
And we gave her, thank goodness, you know, she had a wonderful family and we got her no pressure. We adopted her with her foster sibling and
Carol Lourie: Oh, nice.
Julie Michelson: she loved dogs. She was totally comfortable with dogs. And we were like, I don't need to pet you. I don't need to, you know, of course ended up like the biggest love bug in the
Carol Lourie: Oh, that's so sweet. That's very healing story.
Julie Michelson: well, it, it's, [Page//00:23:00] it does, you know, the animals go through the same processes, right? And I remember this, we found out she had a tumor and the second I found out, now this is me telling on myself the second I found out she had a tumor, I put her on a keto diet. I had a custom keto diet made for her,
Carol Lourie: for the dog.
Julie Michelson: for the dog.
We then found out that it was hemangiosarcoma and it was gonna be very aggressive and, I I was not go, and I'm not saying all key for this dog at this time in her life, and this was in the be just in the beginning of shutdown and covid, like, I couldn't even go in the vet with her, which was
Carol Lourie: Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness.
Julie Michelson: the, the surgical oncologist really did such a good job on selling me for. You know, if you don't do chemo for this dog, for this kind of cancer, she's got three months to live and that's it. And I made the decision for her, there'll be three happy months. She feels well, [Page//00:24:00] and she lived three years.
And what I did was I came home and I put my other two dogs on a keto diet because did I love her more than the other dogs?
Carol Lourie: was eating the same food.
Julie Michelson: So it didn't have to be, she didn't feel bad and it, it wasn't because she'd feel awkward. She was eating crappy kibble and it was high quality. It was already, she was already paleo.
So, you know, shocker, my dog was paleo. She had an integrative vet, you know?
Carol Lourie: Right. Well, they're part of the family. You know, the animals are part of the family.
Julie Michelson: But I brought her up because I, I know, and I, I really encourage listeners to go back and listen to our first interview from, from 2021 because this dog exemplifies us of, you know, all she had, all of those things aligned.
How we end up with cancer, autoimmunity, chronic illness, you know, name it, which whatever it is. From, you know, just the trauma, the stress, all the [Page//00:25:00] things.
Carol Lourie: All right. Life.
Julie Michelson: Yeah. And so I, I'm waiting, you know, that, that's my hope is that, that instead of, you know, it's that now all my dogs and they still are, all my dogs still are clean eaters.
And watch cuz why not?
Carol Lourie: I was gonna say, why not? I mean, and when I talk to people about changing how they eat, There's a couple objections which I want to bring up. One, it's going to be more expensive and actually it isn't because when you go into the regular grocery store and anything that you buy that's processed and you pick it up in this box and you read the list of ingredients that are in there, and most of those words nobody has ever heard before.
Julie Michelson: Right.
Carol Lourie: You're paying for that fake junk to be put into the food re and you're paying for that. People who design the box, the packaging, the [Page//00:26:00] label, the putting it, transporting it to the supermarket, all of that, you are paying for that.
Julie Michelson: Yeah.
Carol Lourie: You can make your own crackers if you want, or you can, you know, go get gluten.
A few gluten-free crackers, which you are going to eat very infrequently cuz even though it's gluten-free, it's still high glycemic from the health food store. But you don't need to be eating cereal in a box's sort of like eating, you know, paper eating cereal is like eating paper with. House milk, which nobody needs to be eating anyway.
So there's a lot of messaging that we've been brainwashed. So. Why does diet the American diet need to start in breakfast? Breakfast with a pop-tart, a waffle, cold cereal, hot cereal, bacon and eggs, which are not that bad as long as the bacon doesn't have nitris in it and it's organic. Why does breakfast need to start like that?
Why couldn't it be a smoothie that has a protein base in it? Why couldn't it [Page//00:27:00] be leftovers from dinner, which is protein and vegetables? Why does it have to be some carbohydrate with sugar in it and coffee with, yeah, it's very draining.
Julie Michelson: from mar marketing marketing to children. Right from, from day one, that sugar for breakfast. I, yeah. You mentioned like even oncology, nutritionists, unless they have special training, You know, saying eat everything in moderation. I had a, a client with type one diabetes who saw a diabetes coach, and for those of you listening on audio, I'm using air quotes.
I, I don't know what kind of training she had. And this woman was shocked to learn with type one diabetes. That oatmeal for breakfast was not a good choice for
Carol Lourie: Oh, I'm so happy. I'm so happy you brought that up because one of the things that drives me crazy is when I do my life. Presentations for my Empowered Against Recurrence program. I have women put in [Page//00:28:00] the chat, what did you eat for breakfast? And it's amazing to me what is seen, but I'd say 80% is oatmeal.
Now let's talk about that. First of all, there's a, a colleague who, who has said that oatmeal is great for breakfast. Now even there's a couple of C caveats here. Even if it's gluten free, even if it's steel cut oats, oat oatmeal is still a carbohydrate. Which means it is processed very quickly into a sugar glucose.
You do not wanna start your day with food that's going to be quickly processed into sugar because then you're feeding, you've basically been fasting while you're sleeping, and then the cancer cells are hungry. So you eat food that is going to be processed into sugar quickly, and the cancer cells go great.
I now have gas for my gas tank. Thank you very much.
Julie Michelson: Yeah.
Carol Lourie: oatmeal is not, oh, I don't really think anybody should really be eating oatmeal. I had a woman in my program who said, I have to have my oatmeal. And [Page//00:29:00] I said, okay, let's make a deal. Let's have you eat it two or three times a week for lunch, and you put a lot of ghee fat in it.
Well,
Julie Michelson: Yeah. Nuts
Carol Lourie: you put a lot of fat in it because that slows down how the sugar is metabolized. And that's what she did. And she used coconut milk and she
Julie Michelson: of the things that's so frustrating for me, and I'm sure she learned through that process, that she probably could live without oatmeal eventually. I bet you,
Carol Lourie: I hope so.
Julie Michelson: the, the thing that frustrates me, and that goes back to that marketing. A lot of pe, most people are eating oatmeal because they're actually trying to make a good choice.
Right. It's not like the Pop-Tart, you eat a Pop-tart, you know you're eating a Pop-tart. Right? You're eating oatmeal. Oh, well, I've heard it's good for my heart and it
Carol Lourie: And good for lower cholesterol. Right.
Julie Michelson: No, it doesn't
Carol Lourie: With the round paper oatmeal container with the red and blue [Page//00:30:00] Quaker oats. So that's what we grew up with when you know, and we thought it was healthy and it was delicious, my mom would put white sugar on top of,
Julie Michelson: Mine would put brown, you know, but we put white sugar on grapefruits. Why? I just had that conversation. Who started that?
Carol Lourie: Yeah.
Julie Michelson: Why? But it is, so some of it is habitual. Some of it is conditioning and marketing. You know, those, those commercials are just as powerful as the antidepressant commercials
Carol Lourie: They are, they are. There are people who study this. There's science behind it. And so unfortunately in the world of natural medicine, which is what we're talking about, we don't have the billions of dollars to put our commercials up on television. And I don't even think regular TV channels would, you know, run them
Julie Michelson: Well, and social media certainly would knock it right down.
Carol Lourie: Well, social media, you
Julie Michelson: Some of it, if you're, but I mean, You know, if you're a [Page//00:31:00] little too vocal about it, it's not, it's not the right message.
Carol Lourie: need a lot of money for Facebook ads to have it have a large
Julie Michelson: people see
Carol Lourie: I mean,
Julie Michelson: Yeah. Yeah. So,
Carol Lourie: dollars in a month. No joke. And then it takes a while because you're up against people's. Brain conditioning that they've seen for many years. So this brings us back to my. Philosophy of the bell curve, which I wanna share with you.
So the bell curve is curved like this, and any statement you see about breast cancer, any research about whatever the topic is, the research is done with women in the middle of the bell curve. And what does that mean? That most American women are. Overweight to obese. They don't exercise. They eat the standard American diet, which is what Julie and I have been talking about.
It's filled with processed food sugars. The meat is not farm to table. It's the kind of meat you get at Costco or one of the fast food [Page//00:32:00] places, which has been proven to be carcinogenic. There's, and the Standard American diet literally quadruples the cancer rate. So that's the studies and that's the middle of the bell curve in my community and through my life coaching program and in my individual work, I want you to be out of the bell curve.
That's where the magic happens. And so it takes a while to get out of the bell curve. You have to shift your mindset. You have to leave all that other stuff behind, and you have to walk forward on a new path you are creating, you know, forging a new path for yourself. That that can be difficult, which is why we have live coaching, which is why I offer individual sessions.
It's as the work with Julie, it's very hard to separate what you've been. Taught and how you've grown up and create new habits. And there's research that says it takes a hundred days for an activity to become a new habit. And those [Page//00:33:00] habits, new habits, it takes time and energy to create them.
Julie Michelson: Right,
Carol Lourie: So you don't wanna do 15 new things at once because it's all gonna, you know, not work out.
The plate's gonna break. You need to choose, I think, the first one to three most difficult areas that you have with, and attend to them first. And you need to realize and understand at that time that you will be moving much, slowly, more slowly than you usually do, because you have to think about what you're doing.
Julie Michelson: Yeah, I, I love, there's so many things that you said that if you hit three more hours but the, the bell curve. I, I had an article published a few months ago about how, and, and here's one of those we're talking about outside of the box, right? Standard of care versus integrative or functional medicine.
You don't wanna be in the bell curve. No, you don't want normal li you don't wanna be in the middle of the sick [Page//00:34:00] population in our country. And people don't understand that when they're, I actually had that just this morning doing a lab review with a client, he wanted to know why his omega3s got flagged.
And I said, cuz they're so high. They're better than the
Carol Lourie: which is good.
Julie Michelson: This is what we've been working toward. Yay. Yeah. Celebration, you know?
Carol Lourie: Yeah, it's not a problem. It's a good thing.
Julie Michelson: yeah. But people see, you know, the, the labs will flag it cuz it's outside of range. And so I love this. This is such a. An important thing for people to understand is, you know, that average is not optimal, and, and this is not average of top of the class.
This is an average. You don't wanna be in the middle
Carol Lourie: I was just gonna say, this is an average. You don't wanna be part of. You don't wanna be average. You do not wanna be average of your blood work. You don't wanna be average of your weight. You don't wanna be average of your muscle development. You don't wanna be average in your [Page//00:35:00] stamina. You don't wanna be average in how much time you spend on social media or watch television.
It's a, it's really different perspective on life because cancer doesn't happen overnight. And I try to get women to begin to have conversations with their cancer. Like, not just the hell with you. Goodbye. It's like, What are you doing here? How did I get this? What do you, what am I missing in my life? What, you know, what do you wanna say to me?
What do I need to shift? And it's, that's a very challenging conversation. That is not a conversation that your oncologist has with you, which I actually think there should be as part of the oncology team talking to your breast cancer, what comes up?
Julie Michelson: Yeah.
Carol Lourie: Because you'd be surprised. And you know, one time I always, as part of my intake, I say to women, have you ever had any traumatic experiences?
[Page//00:36:00] And one woman got very upset with me and she said, no, I, I've never had anything traumatic. And I said, okay, let me change the word traumatic to upsetting. Have you ever had any upsetting experiences? And she said, well, yeah, but it happened like, you know, 30 years ago. I said, oh, okay, so what could they, what were they?
Do you mind telling me? And she starts giving me this list.
Julie Michelson: Yep.
Carol Lourie: And so every, any one of those was traumatic,
Julie Michelson: Sure.
Carol Lourie: and women are like frogs. And what that means is frogs. This is true about frogs. For those of you who don't know this, this is the frogs and warm water fact. If you put a frog in warm water and you gradually increase the temperature, the frog will not realize it is being boiled to death.
Julie Michelson: Yep.
Carol Lourie: Women are a lot like that. If you've had traumatic experiences as an infant and a child and a teenager, As a self-protective device. [Page//00:37:00] You acclimate to those and you don't realize that they were as difficult as they were. And then many years later, after a period of stress or whatever, all of a sudden your body goes, I can't hold onto this anymore.
And you have a lump in your breast. So
Julie Michelson: And it doesn't have to be one huge, big thing. Sometimes it's, it's a history of stuffing. I call it stuffing. Stuffing the little things, you know, I'm okay. I'm okay. The I'm fine syndrome. I'm fine until you're not.
Carol Lourie: Right, right. So there is, you know, there is validity to unpacking your trauma. It's like peeling away layers of an onion and your psyche will allow you to do that at a speed and a place as you're ready. You don't need to. Take a knife and smash the onion and get everything out all at once.
That's too upsetting. You need to begin to gradually peel back the layers and to recover your [Page//00:38:00] health and understand what was happening then. And that is in addition to doing medical oncology. So you wanna do that work and then you wanna do this work. So you're taking the best of both worlds. It's not, in my opinion, it's not one or the other.
Julie Michelson: I'm glad you highlighted that again because Yeah. That, that is the, that is what integrative is, right? It's,
Carol Lourie: Integrative takes the best of both
Julie Michelson: yeah.
Carol Lourie: and we don't wanna diminish the importance of medical oncology.
Julie Michelson: No, no, not at all. And it's just how do we optimize the, it's, it's, again, the standard and then optimal and, and when you marry the two, it's, it's optimal. There's no either or. For sure. For sure. Amazing. You, you've given us so many steps already, but I always like to ask for the listeners at the end, one.
Step listeners can take today to start to [Page//00:39:00] improve their health or protect it.
Carol Lourie: Go into your pantry and take out everything that's in a box
Julie Michelson: Mm-hmm.
Carol Lourie: and take a serious look at the labels.
Julie Michelson: Yeah,
Carol Lourie: make some decisions about moving forward.
Julie Michelson: I love that.
Carol Lourie: if there's too many red dye 54, yellow number 27, whatever those big words are that you don't talk, that you don't use every day, that box is not healthy for you.
And then think about just maybe three vegetables that you can start buying organic. And
Julie Michelson: Yep. That combo is amazing.
Carol Lourie: right. It's too expensive. It's like if you gave up buying a six pack of soda, how much more would that give you if you gave up
Julie Michelson: you know, the Frappuccino or what?
Carol Lourie: The frappuccino, nobody needs to be eating a frappuccino. It's filled with sugar.
Julie Michelson: all corn syrup and, [Page//00:40:00] yeah. And I've had the, I I also have to remind, I don't know about you because you were even in the seventies already kind of in introduced to this na, more natural world. But people are always shocked to find out, like, I used to eat junk. I grew up on junk food
Carol Lourie: We all grew up on, oh, we all grew up on junk
Julie Michelson: my children on drunk on junk food.
You
Carol Lourie: When my mom would buy Wonder Bread, I was very excited. Oh, wonder Bread and Baloney.
Julie Michelson: thing, bologna or peanut butter and jelly.
Carol Lourie: Yeah.
Julie Michelson: Oh god. With a
Carol Lourie: You know, here we are. We lived through Wonder Bread.
Julie Michelson: So we, we didn't, we weren't formed this informed. And, and I, I wanna circle back just to, to highlight, you were talking about change and, and to, you know, the. It takes energy and it takes effort and, and you know, you made it clear, but I, I love to, to underscore, especially [Page//00:41:00] so many of my listeners, You know, don't have energy, they don't feel well.
So many of the women you're working, you know, we're talking about mostly people who are at a point where they already don't feel well, and resources are, are at a minimum, and that's where it's, you know, that one, each change will give you more energy to make the additional changes.
Carol Lourie: a hundred percent.
Julie Michelson: And so just another, I just wanted to underscore that for listeners that, you know, we, we know change takes effort and energy and it's not easy
Carol Lourie: Especially if you don't have a lot of energy and you feel horrible when you do have it.
Julie Michelson: Right. So if you pick, you know, what you can be successful with, out of that top three, like the one that'll be easiest for you to have success with. And you'll start to improve your energy and, and all of a sudden it'll be, oh, what else can I do? You know? But I, I just wanted to highlight, we know that we know you may not [Page//00:42:00] have the energy and just the word change may make you wanna take into the app, like no.
Yeah.
Carol Lourie: it's also the time to call up your friends.
Julie Michelson: Yes.
Carol Lourie: say, you know what? I need some help. Can you come over and call up three friends and ask them to come over different days and spend an hour to three hours with each one of them and have them help you clean out your pantry, have them help you get rid of toxic cleaning agents in your home, and then, you know, have them drive you to the health food store and buy eco detergent and dishwashing laundry and all of that.
I mean, Ask your friends to help you. People love to do that,
Julie Michelson: This is the Yes. Allowing friends to help. And that creates that trickle down we were talking about. Because they may be like, oh, why are you throwing away your blue laundry detergent? Why aren't you using your dryer sheets? You
Carol Lourie: No dryer sheets ever again.
Julie Michelson: conversations and that's how, that's how we all [Page//00:43:00] learn is
Carol Lourie: That's how change happens. Yes, you're changing your, your, your family and then your friend goes, oh, I don't wanna use that junk in my house either. And they, they're changing and their family will get healthier.
Julie Michelson: and, and so that's the goal. That's why we're, that's why we're doing this.
Carol Lourie: That is the goal. The trickle down effect is a very powerful way of upleveling not just your health, but everyone in your circle.
Julie Michelson: Absolutely. Amen. While all of your contact will be in the show notes, where is the best place for people to find you?
Carol Lourie: well, carol laurie.com is my website, and at the top right is the contact me and it sends me an email and I always respond personally to everyone's email. And my last name is l o u r i e, not l a. It's very common
Julie Michelson: that for, for listeners. Yes. And
Carol Lourie: And there's two Ls. So it's my first name, Carol, my full last name, [Page//00:44:00] laurie.com.
And I, I love hearing from all of you. It's just really my honor and pleasure to respond. Okay.
Julie Michelson: For anybody who is feeling called but a little unsure really, you know, she is amazing. So if you're called to reach out, absolutely reach out.
Carol Lourie: There's no question too small. Okay.
Julie Michelson: Love that. Doctor. Lourie, thank you so much. You have again, shared amazing gold with us today.
Carol Lourie: Well, thank you so much for having me. It's been so wonderful to be here. I.
Julie Michelson: For everyone listening. Remember, you can get the show notes and transcripts by visiting InspiredLiving.Show I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. Have a great week. I. Dr. Lourie welcome to the podcast.
Carol Lourie: I, I'm so excited and happy to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Julie Michelson: I am so thrilled to have you back on. I almost fell over when I realized that it's been close to two years since our last conversation on the podcast.[Page//00:45:00] And so I'm I, it, that was such a great conversation. I know that listeners are gonna get. So much value from digging deeper. And as we were saying before I hit record, we evol, we evolve, and we grow and we keep learning.
And, and so let's jump into to part two for listeners that didn't hear that first episode we did together I'd love to have you share a little bit of your journey of, you know, how did you get into this integrative world and, and just so deep.
Carol Lourie: Well, I always wanted to be a doctor for some reason. And initially I thought I was going to medical school, and then I ended up living in a spiritual community in New York in the seventies, and that was before the world word detoxify became a household word, and I ended up working with this chiropractor who used iridology to diagnose areas of [Page//00:46:00] imbalance in our bodies.
And for those of you who don't know what iridology is, It's a very old science that where they map out the eye into specific different sections and you can look at these sections and see, depending on how your iris looks, if you have toxins, if you have buildup, what's going on. And he would do that and then put people on detoxifying diets Now.
When I first started working with him, this young girl came into the office and she had bad skin, and I thought to myself, what is the big deal? You have bad skin, you take antibiotics. That's like, why is she even here eating these blended salads and drinking these juices? And that was how naive I was because she came back a month later and she had lost weight.
Her skin was much better. And I began to see this from people who had not, either not been helped through the regular medical treatment or who had been damaged. And so my eyes [Page//00:47:00] and my mind beca be really began to do a radical shift away from symptom A equals drug B.
Julie Michelson: Yay.
Carol Lourie: Yes. Yay. And then one day I was going through this big stack of papers and I lifted up a paper and there was a catalog to the National College of Naturopathic Medicine.
And that was like a bell ringing moment. I thought, oh, maybe I should go here. It was in Portland, Oregon. And I applied and I got in and that was the beginning of my. Really gathering the tools that I needed. I graduated from the National College of Naturopathic Medicine in Portland, Oregon. I moved to California and there wasn't any licensing for naturopaths at that point.
And I got my acupuncture license. And I opened up my clinical practice, you know, in the late eighties and I specialized in women's health and chronic disease. And then one day, recently, well actually it's 15 years [Page//00:48:00] now. A dear friend called me up and I didn't understand what she was saying. And then finally I realized she was saying they found a lump.
And this is a woman who ate healthy and she said, what the heck's going on? I eat organic. Why did I get this? And I said to her, don't worry, you're not alone. I'm, and I attended every treatment session of 18 months with lumpectomy chemotherapy, radiation for her. And I got an up close and personal perspective of what was great about medical oncology and what really was lacking.
And one of the first areas I realized that was lacking is when we went into the chemotherapy infusion room. Now there is this, Medical proven science fact that sugar feeds cancer, it's not negotiable. It was discovered by Otto Warburg in the 1920s. He won the Noble Medicine Peace Prize for this. Given cancer cells given a [Page//00:49:00] choice between oxygen and ca sugar or glucose, always choose sugar even though they have to work twice as hard for it and they get less energy or a t p.
Julie Michelson: Just like humans.
Carol Lourie: yeah, exactly. we go into U C S F chemotherapy infusion room, and sh they look at her and they go, oh, you're a little thin. Would you like some? Ensure? Ensure is the number one ingredient is glucose. And then they offer a lollipop. They offer Gatorade, they offer cookie. And when you're done, they wanna give you a cupcake.
Five times during the infusion was she offered sugar and we came with our ginger tea and our smoothie. And our peeler broth and we kept saying, no thanks. So that was the beginning. Oh, and then there was the time when the candy cart walked by. That was the beginning of my eye awakening towards. The, the disparaging information, the disconnect between medical oncology and natural or integrative medicine [Page//00:50:00] and which are, which is science backed.
We're not like making stuff up, right?
Julie Michelson: woo woo, right.
Carol Lourie: So, so I began to Really work with her from an integrative perspective. And we were in her medical oncology appointment and her oncologist looked up at looked at her blood work and then looked at us and said, what are you doing? And I got, got alarmed. Is there a problem?
And I said, is there a problem? She said, no, your blood work does not look like the blood work of somebody in the middle of chemotherapy. Your white cell count is great. You're not anemic. You look great. What are you doing? I want all of my patients to be doing that too.
Julie Michelson: I wish every doctor were that on it and open to even ask, what are you doing?
Carol Lourie: right. So that was the beginning of, she referred a lot of her patients to me in my practice in Berkeley, California at the time, really began to focus on breast cancer and then the individual [Page//00:51:00] need expanded beyond what I could handle. So I created an online program. To provide women with this really lifesaving and life-changing information that's called Empowered Against Recurrence at this point.
And there's other aspects of that in development. But on a deeper level, let's talk about what breast cancer is on a deeper level. Breast, it's a disease of the feminine, right? It's the breasts and the feminine. In our culture right now is not doing so great. It's better than it was. Unfortunately.
There's still this conflict between what men think we should be, should and how we want to live, and we can see that about how that's happening in the political arena regarding the Roe versus Wade. We can see that in the messaging that we get from television. Perspectives on women being depressed, the ads [Page//00:52:00] for psychiatric antidepressants.
A woman is depressed. What does that look like? The house is a mess, quote unquote. What does that look like? There's dishes in the sink. The beds aren't made. There's laundry. And when I first saw that commercial, I'm screaming at the television to myself. I'm not depressed. And when I had a child, I had dishes in the sink.
My beds weren't made. And you know, I had piles of laundry and, and then she takes a pill and everything's quote unquote spec and span. So I'm thinking, why is it just the woman's job to take care of all this stuff? Where's the partner, whether that partner's a man or a woman? And why does that equal depression?
Julie Michelson: right.
Carol Lourie: And what happened before? This mess of a house, quote unquote, that made this woman feel unwell. What kind of stress was she on under? Was she being harassed at work? Was she having difficult communication in her relationship? Were her children suffering from some [Page//00:53:00] ailment? I mean, there is always a reason for depression, right?
Julie Michelson: Absolutely, and it's never a lack of antidepressants. It's, it's never the cause of depression.
Carol Lourie: Right. Too many women go into their doctors and they're not complaining. They're reporting, they're sole aching, and it's taken as complaining, number one. And number two, the next thing you know out comes the prescription pad. And out comes the words, well, let's just put you on a short course of X, Y, z, antidepressant, and let's see how, if that helps.
Julie Michelson: Yep. And, and even the, just, especially in the autoimmune world, the fatigue just expressing the level of fatigue I. Out comes the pad for an antidepressant. It's,
Carol Lourie: A hundred percent. Now from our perspective, you have fatigue. Let's see what adrenal support you need. Let's see what's happening from [Page//00:54:00] your, with your mitochondrial. So, How are they functioning your mitochondria? Let's see where your energy sources are coming. Let's see if you're eating food that doesn't agree with your body and you need to really, you know, clean up some aspects of what you're eating.
Are you getting enough good sleep? I. Are you getting positive movement? You know what Julie Julie's work with Autoimmune is very similar to how I assist women recover their health and restore their life. With breast cancer, it's very similar because the foundation for all disease is inflammation. The foundation for breast cancer is inflammation.
We need to dial back and heal the inflammation, not suppress, but heal as much as we can with all of these areas that we're talking about.
Julie Michelson: And, and from where I sit. And I will try to keep calm through our conversation
Carol Lourie: we don't have to.
Julie Michelson: so much of what you say makes sense. And, and I find, you know, I have these conversations and [Page//00:55:00] amazing connections and I think the world, you know, the needle has moved so far and the world knows and they get it. And then I, you know, then I see the line around the corner at the fast food joint and I think, nope, I live in a bubble.
So.
Carol Lourie: Yeah.
Julie Michelson: This, and I love Thank you. And I know that's how you genuinely feel. The, the integrative approach is the best of all worlds. It's, it's not, this approach is wrong, you know, it's, it's where can we do better and what compliments each other. So to me, I listened to you and so far nothing you've said seems out of the box at all.
Where is that kind of standard oncology care now? Like has that needle moved at all? Cuz I haven't met anybody diagnosed with cancer that was told to watch sugar. Like, I, I still haven't since. Are you seeing a shift?
Carol Lourie: I think one of the most dangerous things somebody can be [Page//00:56:00] told no matter what cancer they have is eat everything in moderation, and that is the standard line that. Women and men are given with cancer by their oncology nutritionists, unless those nutritionists have taken specialized programs and realized that that is a very dangerous statement.
So, If you have cancer, if you have a family history of cancer, you do not want to eat everything in moderation. That means you can eat fast food in moderation. And what's the definition of moderation for you? That may mean twice a week for somebody else. It may be. You know, for me it's zero. I mean, there's certain things that we need to become very conscious of making a really good decision if we're going to blow it.
Like, if you want, if it's your birthday and you love, you know, smoked meats and there's this barbecue place that you, so you go there and you [Page//00:57:00] get it once a year and you don't eat the bread and you don't eat the mac and cheese, you just eat the, the meat. Which is not great, but it's not horrible.
Julie Michelson: I eat nightshades probably two or three times a year cause they don't agree with me and I love them.
Carol Lourie: Yeah, like if you're in Italy, you're going to
Julie Michelson: Yes,
Carol Lourie: and you're not going to worry about it, but, or if you're in California or if wherever you live, you know, there's this delicious tomato and it's in season, you're gonna make a decision to eat that. But you know that if you eat that three days or five days in a row, you're gonna wake up and your hands are going.
You're gonna be swollen, you're gonna have a headache, you're gonna be not able to move, and then you're gonna think, well, was it worth it? The pro, the problem with nutrition and oncology is it's not always a one plus one equals two approach. Where if you eat product A, you're going to feel bad, but your blood work will show it.
Your circulating tumor cells can [Page//00:58:00] elevate and that impact can happen months later. And most physicians, as standard of care, are not doing circulating tumor accounts. You know, they don't do that as standard of care, and we have to have a serious conversation with them and present them with studies in PubMed in order for them to.
Do some of this more thorough and advanced blood work because cancer is a metabolic disease. What that means is there's not just one thing that goes into creating cancer, whether it's breast cancer, ovarian cancer. Melanoma, it doesn't matter. There are these pathways where your cells, instead of staying in the healthy freeway, they get all discombobulated and the next thing you know, they have stopped paying attention to the rules of stop and go. And they think they can go wherever they want. They can over progress. They can create [Page//00:59:00] angiogenesis, ex extra blood vessels. And the next thing you know, you have a severe inflammatory problem and you have a tumor or blood dysplasia where your blood is unhealthy. And so, and it doesn't happen overnight, it happens over a period of time.
Right.
Julie Michelson: And that's, I think that's where it gets tricky and that's where having some of these advanced labs where people can see, cuz if you can't feel it, you think, oh, maybe that one McDonald's is fine this week. Or, or whatever your jam is. I'm picking on fast food just cuz I, I can't remember the last time I had, you know, I, I would, I would fast if.
Carol Lourie: I, I, yeah, I, I would have to be, yeah, I can't even imagine.
Julie Michelson: it is so much easier when, you know, you do feel a, a, a direct impact where you can connect those dots. And so I love that idea of, okay, well if we're following, you know, seeing these advanced markers, [Page//01:00:00] we can sh people can see, you know, even if they can't feel it, they're still getting the feedback.
And it's kind of hard to, I, I have a client who. When eating, you know, doing the things working together, cancer markers were coming way down. You know, after a long time of him not doing anything and then he kind of fell off the wagon and guess what? Cancer markers started to go back up. And it was like, okay.
His doctor said to him, now, you know, what you were doing was working. And going back to, you know, eating on the fly is feeding the cancer. So, you know, there is sometimes a, a bit of a learning curve and I think that feedback is, is remarkable.
Carol Lourie: It's, it's not so easy. I had, last year I was a speaker at the Society for Integrative Oncology in Arizona, and one of the other [Page//01:01:00] speakers was a brain surgeon. And he came from his office in Scottsdale and his scrubs, and he had images that he shared with the on the presentation of using ketogenic diet to reduce brain tumors.
So this wasn't like, oh, I'm gonna tell you a nice story. This was science-based and he's about to publish it. Here is before ketogenic. Here is after. And there was a remarkable shift. In the size of the tumor and where it was and everything from, not just one people, but many, many people. Now, several of the people went off the ketogenic diet and then they had a brain scan and that you could see that the tumor had grown.
And one of his patients said, why are you talking to me about nutrition and diet? I'm, you're a surgeon. I came to you for surgery. I have a brain tumor, I want surgery. And the doctor said, well, let's shrink the tumor first and [Page//01:02:00] then see if you still need, do you know surgery? Sometimes if it gets small enough, we can just leave it there if it's not growing.
So Yes, it, it matters what we eat. And it's very difficult sometimes to not eat that pasta. And if you're doing ketogenic, you cannot eat pasta. And if you're, if you are staying on a healthy plan through breast cancer, you really, really, you don't wanna eat birthday cake, but, You can make your own and use a very, very tiny amount of monk fruit instead of white sugar.
You can make it the, the cake with te you can have, you know, organic, unfiltered, heavy cream for a an icing instead of some buttercream junk. I mean, there are ways of doing this once or twice a year where,
Julie Michelson: We don't have to be deprived.
Carol Lourie: no, I'm not, it, it's, I don't, you know, The word restrict and deprivation are bad words. It doesn't work for us as adults.
We, I don't think anybody should feel [Page//01:03:00] restricted or deprived in their life. I think it's about education and understanding equals you have the ability to make really empowered choices for yourself and you need begin to,
Julie Michelson: and then it's sustainable.
Carol Lourie: Yeah, it needs to be sustainable for you and you need to figure out. Your path.
For example, you know, you have dear friends and you go over to their house for dinner all the time, and the woman makes lasagna and you, you are not eating lasagna. And so can you say to her, look, I'm gonna bring my piece of fish that I've cooked and I'm gonna eat your salad and vegetables, and can you stick to that?
When you go out to eat to an Italian restaurant, everybody else is getting some pasta dish. Can you get a piece of grilled fish with tomato sauce over it? If you're able to eat that with, you know, sauteed vegetables and a salad and be okay? I mean, I, I, that's what I do. The only place I don't, I think that you have difficulty [Page//01:04:00] eating at is a pizza place.
You can't really go to a pizza place and eat
Julie Michelson: No, and, and I think, you know, you talked about EM empowering and that's, we're both all about that. That part is a process, especially for women of saying, you know, like, why do we feel like it's an imposition if a friend is hosting us and we're gonna bring something we can eat? You know, that takes train retraining and reprogramming to, to realize like, I am allowed to make the choices for my own body and, and you know, it's nobody's business.
Also. You're not asking somebody to cook for you.
Carol Lourie: Right. And what's the big deal about taking it out, putting it on your plate, and then bringing it to the table? I mean, I, I just, you know, oh, I'm gonna upset the hostess.
Julie Michelson: Yeah. We're trained, you know, or ex holiday need, like you say, you know, you have to have birthday cake, like gross birthday cake. And I'm, I guess I, I am [Page//01:05:00] just anxious. I hope it's in my lifetime of where there's this tipping point where instead of, You know, shaming people, people that are trying to protect their health.
You know, get curious and, and like, where's the trickle down? And there is some I remember I, I had a border colleague a few years ago. Who was, she? She had been, she'd had been a perfect candidate for you. She was born in a shelter. Sick. The only one in the litter who lived in foster care for a year and a half, cuz she was so shy and, and you know, high stress, just high, high stress.
And we gave her, thank goodness, you know, she had a wonderful family and we got her no pressure. We adopted her with her foster sibling and
Carol Lourie: Oh, nice.
Julie Michelson: she loved dogs. She was totally comfortable with dogs. And we were like, I don't need to pet you. I don't need to, you know, of course ended up like the biggest love bug in the
Carol Lourie: Oh, that's so sweet. That's very healing story.[Page//01:06:00]
Julie Michelson: well, it, it's, it does, you know, the animals go through the same processes, right? And I remember this, we found out she had a tumor and the second I found out, now this is me telling on myself the second I found out she had a tumor, I put her on a keto diet. I had a custom keto diet made for her,
Carol Lourie: for the dog.
Julie Michelson: for the dog.
We then found out that it was hemangiosarcoma and it was gonna be very aggressive and, I I was not go, and I'm not saying all key for this dog at this time in her life, and this was in the be just in the beginning of shutdown and covid, like, I couldn't even go in the vet with her, which was
Carol Lourie: Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness.
Julie Michelson: the, the surgical oncologist really did such a good job on selling me for. You know, if you don't do chemo for this dog, for this kind of cancer, she's got three months to live and that's it. And I made the decision for her, there'll be three happy months. She [Page//01:07:00] feels well, and she lived three years.
And what I did was I came home and I put my other two dogs on a keto diet because did I love her more than the other dogs?
Carol Lourie: was eating the same food.
Julie Michelson: So it didn't have to be, she didn't feel bad and it, it wasn't because she'd feel awkward. She was eating crappy kibble and it was high quality. It was already, she was already paleo.
So, you know, shocker, my dog was paleo. She had an integrative vet, you know?
Carol Lourie: Right. Well, they're part of the family. You know, the animals are part of the family.
Julie Michelson: But I brought her up because I, I know, and I, I really encourage listeners to go back and listen to our first interview from, from 2021 because this dog exemplifies us of, you know, all she had, all of those things aligned.
How we end up with cancer, autoimmunity, chronic illness, you know, name it, which whatever it is. From, you know, just the [Page//01:08:00] trauma, the stress, all the things.
Carol Lourie: All right. Life.
Julie Michelson: Yeah. And so I, I'm waiting, you know, that, that's my hope is that, that instead of, you know, it's that now all my dogs and they still are, all my dogs still are clean eaters.
And watch cuz why not?
Carol Lourie: I was gonna say, why not? I mean, and when I talk to people about changing how they eat, There's a couple objections which I want to bring up. One, it's going to be more expensive and actually it isn't because when you go into the regular grocery store and anything that you buy that's processed and you pick it up in this box and you read the list of ingredients that are in there, and most of those words nobody has ever heard before.
Julie Michelson: Right.
Carol Lourie: You're paying for that fake junk to be put into the food re and you're paying for that. People who design the box, the [Page//01:09:00] packaging, the label, the putting it, transporting it to the supermarket, all of that, you are paying for that.
Julie Michelson: Yeah.
Carol Lourie: You can make your own crackers if you want, or you can, you know, go get gluten.
A few gluten-free crackers, which you are going to eat very infrequently cuz even though it's gluten-free, it's still high glycemic from the health food store. But you don't need to be eating cereal in a box's sort of like eating, you know, paper eating cereal is like eating paper with. House milk, which nobody needs to be eating anyway.
So there's a lot of messaging that we've been brainwashed. So. Why does diet the American diet need to start in breakfast? Breakfast with a pop-tart, a waffle, cold cereal, hot cereal, bacon and eggs, which are not that bad as long as the bacon doesn't have nitris in it and it's organic. Why does breakfast need to start like that?
Why couldn't it be a smoothie that has a protein base [Page//01:10:00] in it? Why couldn't it be leftovers from dinner, which is protein and vegetables? Why does it have to be some carbohydrate with sugar in it and coffee with, yeah, it's very draining.
Julie Michelson: from mar marketing marketing to children. Right from, from day one, that sugar for breakfast. I, yeah. You mentioned like even oncology, nutritionists, unless they have special training, You know, saying eat everything in moderation. I had a, a client with type one diabetes who saw a diabetes coach, and for those of you listening on audio, I'm using air quotes.
I, I don't know what kind of training she had. And this woman was shocked to learn with type one diabetes. That oatmeal for breakfast was not a good choice for
Carol Lourie: Oh, I'm so happy. I'm so happy you brought that up because one of the things that drives me crazy is when I do my life. Presentations for my Empowered Against Recurrence [Page//01:11:00] program. I have women put in the chat, what did you eat for breakfast? And it's amazing to me what is seen, but I'd say 80% is oatmeal.
Now let's talk about that. First of all, there's a, a colleague who, who has said that oatmeal is great for breakfast. Now even there's a couple of C caveats here. Even if it's gluten free, even if it's steel cut oats, oat oatmeal is still a carbohydrate. Which means it is processed very quickly into a sugar glucose.
You do not wanna start your day with food that's going to be quickly processed into sugar because then you're feeding, you've basically been fasting while you're sleeping, and then the cancer cells are hungry. So you eat food that is going to be processed into sugar quickly, and the cancer cells go great.
I now have gas for my gas tank. Thank you very much.
Julie Michelson: Yeah.
Carol Lourie: oatmeal is not, oh, I don't really think anybody should really be eating oatmeal. I had a woman in my program who said, I have [Page//01:12:00] to have my oatmeal. And I said, okay, let's make a deal. Let's have you eat it two or three times a week for lunch, and you put a lot of ghee fat in it.
Well,
Julie Michelson: Yeah. Nuts
Carol Lourie: you put a lot of fat in it because that slows down how the sugar is metabolized. And that's what she did. And she used coconut milk and she
Julie Michelson: of the things that's so frustrating for me, and I'm sure she learned through that process, that she probably could live without oatmeal eventually. I bet you,
Carol Lourie: I hope so.
Julie Michelson: the, the thing that frustrates me, and that goes back to that marketing. A lot of pe, most people are eating oatmeal because they're actually trying to make a good choice.
Right. It's not like the Pop-Tart, you eat a Pop-tart, you know you're eating a Pop-tart. Right? You're eating oatmeal. Oh, well, I've heard it's good for my heart and it
Carol Lourie: And good for lower cholesterol. Right.
Julie Michelson: No, it doesn't
Carol Lourie: With the round paper oatmeal container [Page//01:13:00] with the red and blue Quaker oats. So that's what we grew up with when you know, and we thought it was healthy and it was delicious, my mom would put white sugar on top of,
Julie Michelson: Mine would put brown, you know, but we put white sugar on grapefruits. Why? I just had that conversation. Who started that?
Carol Lourie: Yeah.
Julie Michelson: Why? But it is, so some of it is habitual. Some of it is conditioning and marketing. You know, those, those commercials are just as powerful as the antidepressant commercials
Carol Lourie: They are, they are. There are people who study this. There's science behind it. And so unfortunately in the world of natural medicine, which is what we're talking about, we don't have the billions of dollars to put our commercials up on television. And I don't even think regular TV channels would, you know, run them
Julie Michelson: Well, and social media certainly would knock it right down.
Carol Lourie: Well, social media, you
Julie Michelson: Some of it, if you're, but I mean, [Page//01:14:00] You know, if you're a little too vocal about it, it's not, it's not the right message.
Carol Lourie: need a lot of money for Facebook ads to have it have a large
Julie Michelson: people see
Carol Lourie: I mean,
Julie Michelson: Yeah. Yeah. So,
Carol Lourie: dollars in a month. No joke. And then it takes a while because you're up against people's. Brain conditioning that they've seen for many years. So this brings us back to my. Philosophy of the bell curve, which I wanna share with you.
So the bell curve is curved like this, and any statement you see about breast cancer, any research about whatever the topic is, the research is done with women in the middle of the bell curve. And what does that mean? That most American women are. Overweight to obese. They don't exercise. They eat the standard American diet, which is what Julie and I have been talking about.
It's filled with processed food sugars. The meat is not farm to table. It's the kind of meat you get at Costco or [Page//01:15:00] one of the fast food places, which has been proven to be carcinogenic. There's, and the Standard American diet literally quadruples the cancer rate. So that's the studies and that's the middle of the bell curve in my community and through my life coaching program and in my individual work, I want you to be out of the bell curve.
That's where the magic happens. And so it takes a while to get out of the bell curve. You have to shift your mindset. You have to leave all that other stuff behind, and you have to walk forward on a new path you are creating, you know, forging a new path for yourself. That that can be difficult, which is why we have live coaching, which is why I offer individual sessions.
It's as the work with Julie, it's very hard to separate what you've been. Taught and how you've grown up and create new habits. And there's research that says it takes a hundred days for an activity to become a new habit. [Page//01:16:00] And those habits, new habits, it takes time and energy to create them.
Julie Michelson: Right,
Carol Lourie: So you don't wanna do 15 new things at once because it's all gonna, you know, not work out.
The plate's gonna break. You need to choose, I think, the first one to three most difficult areas that you have with, and attend to them first. And you need to realize and understand at that time that you will be moving much, slowly, more slowly than you usually do, because you have to think about what you're doing.
Julie Michelson: Yeah, I, I love, there's so many things that you said that if you hit three more hours but the, the bell curve. I, I had an article published a few months ago about how, and, and here's one of those we're talking about outside of the box, right? Standard of care versus integrative or functional medicine.
You don't wanna be in the bell curve. No, you don't want normal li you don't [Page//01:17:00] wanna be in the middle of the sick population in our country. And people don't understand that when they're, I actually had that just this morning doing a lab review with a client, he wanted to know why his omega3s got flagged.
And I said, cuz they're so high. They're better than the
Carol Lourie: which is good.
Julie Michelson: This is what we've been working toward. Yay. Yeah. Celebration, you know?
Carol Lourie: Yeah, it's not a problem. It's a good thing.
Julie Michelson: yeah. But people see, you know, the, the labs will flag it cuz it's outside of range. And so I love this. This is such a. An important thing for people to understand is, you know, that average is not optimal, and, and this is not average of top of the class.
This is an average. You don't wanna be in the middle
Carol Lourie: I was just gonna say, this is an average. You don't wanna be part of. You don't wanna be average. You do not wanna be average of your blood work. You don't wanna be average of your weight. You don't wanna be average of your muscle development. You [Page//01:18:00] don't wanna be average in your stamina. You don't wanna be average in how much time you spend on social media or watch television.
It's a, it's really different perspective on life because cancer doesn't happen overnight. And I try to get women to begin to have conversations with their cancer. Like, not just the hell with you. Goodbye. It's like, What are you doing here? How did I get this? What do you, what am I missing in my life? What, you know, what do you wanna say to me?
What do I need to shift? And it's, that's a very challenging conversation. That is not a conversation that your oncologist has with you, which I actually think there should be as part of the oncology team talking to your breast cancer, what comes up?
Julie Michelson: Yeah.
Carol Lourie: Because you'd be surprised. And you know, one time I always, as part of my intake, I say to women, have you ever had any [Page//01:19:00] traumatic experiences?
And one woman got very upset with me and she said, no, I, I've never had anything traumatic. And I said, okay, let me change the word traumatic to upsetting. Have you ever had any upsetting experiences? And she said, well, yeah, but it happened like, you know, 30 years ago. I said, oh, okay, so what could they, what were they?
Do you mind telling me? And she starts giving me this list.
Julie Michelson: Yep.
Carol Lourie: And so every, any one of those was traumatic,
Julie Michelson: Sure.
Carol Lourie: and women are like frogs. And what that means is frogs. This is true about frogs. For those of you who don't know this, this is the frogs and warm water fact. If you put a frog in warm water and you gradually increase the temperature, the frog will not realize it is being boiled to death.
Julie Michelson: Yep.
Carol Lourie: Women are a lot like that. If you've had traumatic experiences as an infant and a child and a teenager, As a [Page//01:20:00] self-protective device. You acclimate to those and you don't realize that they were as difficult as they were. And then many years later, after a period of stress or whatever, all of a sudden your body goes, I can't hold onto this anymore.
And you have a lump in your breast. So
Julie Michelson: And it doesn't have to be one huge, big thing. Sometimes it's, it's a history of stuffing. I call it stuffing. Stuffing the little things, you know, I'm okay. I'm okay. The I'm fine syndrome. I'm fine until you're not.
Carol Lourie: Right, right. So there is, you know, there is validity to unpacking your trauma. It's like peeling away layers of an onion and your psyche will allow you to do that at a speed and a place as you're ready. You don't need to. Take a knife and smash the onion and get everything out all at once.
That's too upsetting. You need to begin to gradually peel back the layers and [Page//01:21:00] to recover your health and understand what was happening then. And that is in addition to doing medical oncology. So you wanna do that work and then you wanna do this work. So you're taking the best of both worlds. It's not, in my opinion, it's not one or the other.
Julie Michelson: I'm glad you highlighted that again because Yeah. That, that is the, that is what integrative is, right? It's,
Carol Lourie: Integrative takes the best of both
Julie Michelson: yeah.
Carol Lourie: and we don't wanna diminish the importance of medical oncology.
Julie Michelson: No, no, not at all. And it's just how do we optimize the, it's, it's, again, the standard and then optimal and, and when you marry the two, it's, it's optimal. There's no either or. For sure. For sure. Amazing. You, you've given us so many steps already, but I always like to ask for the listeners at the end, one.
Step listeners can take today [Page//01:22:00] to start to improve their health or protect it.
Carol Lourie: Go into your pantry and take out everything that's in a box
Julie Michelson: Mm-hmm.
Carol Lourie: and take a serious look at the labels.
Julie Michelson: Yeah,
Carol Lourie: make some decisions about moving forward.
Julie Michelson: I love that.
Carol Lourie: if there's too many red dye 54, yellow number 27, whatever those big words are that you don't talk, that you don't use every day, that box is not healthy for you.
And then think about just maybe three vegetables that you can start buying organic. And
Julie Michelson: Yep. That combo is amazing.
Carol Lourie: right. It's too expensive. It's like if you gave up buying a six pack of soda, how much more would that give you if you gave up
Julie Michelson: you know, the Frappuccino or what?
Carol Lourie: The frappuccino, nobody needs to be eating a frappuccino. It's filled with sugar.
Julie Michelson: [Page//01:23:00] all corn syrup and, yeah. And I've had the, I I also have to remind, I don't know about you because you were even in the seventies already kind of in introduced to this na, more natural world. But people are always shocked to find out, like, I used to eat junk. I grew up on junk food
Carol Lourie: We all grew up on, oh, we all grew up on junk
Julie Michelson: my children on drunk on junk food.
You
Carol Lourie: When my mom would buy Wonder Bread, I was very excited. Oh, wonder Bread and Baloney.
Julie Michelson: thing, bologna or peanut butter and jelly.
Carol Lourie: Yeah.
Julie Michelson: Oh god. With a
Carol Lourie: You know, here we are. We lived through Wonder Bread.
Julie Michelson: So we, we didn't, we weren't formed this informed. And, and I, I wanna circle back just to, to highlight, you were talking about change and, and to, you know, the. It takes energy and it takes effort and, and you know, you made it clear, but I, I love to, to underscore, [Page//01:24:00] especially so many of my listeners, You know, don't have energy, they don't feel well.
So many of the women you're working, you know, we're talking about mostly people who are at a point where they already don't feel well, and resources are, are at a minimum, and that's where it's, you know, that one, each change will give you more energy to make the additional changes.
Carol Lourie: a hundred percent.
Julie Michelson: And so just another, I just wanted to underscore that for listeners that, you know, we, we know change takes effort and energy and it's not easy
Carol Lourie: Especially if you don't have a lot of energy and you feel horrible when you do have it.
Julie Michelson: Right. So if you pick, you know, what you can be successful with, out of that top three, like the one that'll be easiest for you to have success with. And you'll start to improve your energy and, and all of a sudden it'll be, oh, what else can I do? You know? But I, I just wanted to highlight, we know that we [Page//01:25:00] know you may not have the energy and just the word change may make you wanna take into the app, like no.
Yeah.
Carol Lourie: it's also the time to call up your friends.
Julie Michelson: Yes.
Carol Lourie: say, you know what? I need some help. Can you come over and call up three friends and ask them to come over different days and spend an hour to three hours with each one of them and have them help you clean out your pantry, have them help you get rid of toxic cleaning agents in your home, and then, you know, have them drive you to the health food store and buy eco detergent and dishwashing laundry and all of that.
I mean, Ask your friends to help you. People love to do that,
Julie Michelson: This is the Yes. Allowing friends to help. And that creates that trickle down we were talking about. Because they may be like, oh, why are you throwing away your blue laundry detergent? Why aren't you using your dryer sheets? You
Carol Lourie: No dryer sheets ever again.
Julie Michelson: conversations and that's [Page//01:26:00] how, that's how we all learn is
Carol Lourie: That's how change happens. Yes, you're changing your, your, your family and then your friend goes, oh, I don't wanna use that junk in my house either. And they, they're changing and their family will get healthier.
Julie Michelson: and, and so that's the goal. That's why we're, that's why we're doing this.
Carol Lourie: that is the goal. The trickle down effect is a very powerful way of upleveling not just your health, but everyone in your circle.
Julie Michelson: Absolutely. Amen. While all of your contact will be in the show notes, where is the best place for people to find you?
Carol Lourie: well, carol laurie.com is my website, and at the top right is the contact me and it sends me an email and I always respond personally to everyone's email. And my last name is l o u r i e, not l a. It's very common
Julie Michelson: that for, for listeners. Yes. And
Carol Lourie: And there's two Ls. So it's my first name, Carol, my [Page//01:27:00] full last name, laurie.com.
And I, I love hearing from all of you. It's just really my honor and pleasure to respond. Okay.
Julie Michelson: For anybody who is feeling called but a little unsure really, you know, she is amazing. So if you're called to reach out, absolutely reach out.
Carol Lourie: There's no question too small. Okay.
Julie Michelson: Love that. Doctor. Lourie thank you so much. You have again, shared amazing gold with us today.
Carol Lourie: Well, thank you so much for having me. It's been so wonderful to be here. I.
Julie Michelson: For everyone listening. Remember, you can get the show notes and transcripts by visiting InspiredLiving.Show. I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. Have a great week. [Page//01:28:00]
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My Guest For This Episode
Connect with Carol Lourie
Carol Lourie
Dr. Carol Lourie is a dedicated practitioner with over three decades of clinical experience as a Naturopath, Acupuncturist, and Homeopath.
She's helped hundreds of women recover their health and restore their life through her holistic protocols involving focused nutrition, targeted supplementation, lifestyle changes, and a centered mindset. Carol specializes in complex and chronic disease management, focusing on women's health, specifically breast cancer, fertility for "older" women, and autoimmune illness.
When the body and mind work together, healing is always possible.
She's helped hundreds of women recover their health and restore their life through her holistic protocols involving focused nutrition, targeted supplementation, lifestyle changes, and a centered mindset. Carol specializes in complex and chronic disease management, focusing on women's health, specifically breast cancer, fertility for "older" women, and autoimmune illness.
When the body and mind work together, healing is always possible.
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