Episode 3: Improve your immunity

00:00:33 Glenn:       Welcome back to Natural Health for People and Pets, I believe this is episode three. I'm your co-host, Glen Cooke, and joining me in the studio is the one in the know, Narelle Cooke.  

00:00:44 Narelle:       Hello everyone.  

00:00:45 Glenn:       How are you?  

00:00:46 Narelle:       I'm good.  

00:00:47 Glenn:       Good episode last one.  

00:00:48 Narelle:       Yeah, very popular. Pulling on the heartstrings. 

00:00:50 Glenn:       Yeah it was. One of the things I appreciated about it was the very kind people reaching out, both to send condolences and also people suggesting other alternatives.  

00:01:01 Narelle:       Yeah, that's right. I had a few people contact me to say if I wanted to try this or that, they've got some options that I can consider.

00:01:09 Glenn:       Well it was very nice of them to A, listen to the show and also B, try and be helpful as well. So appreciate it guys, thank you very much, it's very kind.  

00:01:17 Narelle:       Absolutely. So today I was gonna do a dog topic, but then I thought given the current climate and the pandemic that we're all facing around the world, I decided to focus on immune health. But in a roundabout way, this is a dog topic because unless we're our best selves, our dogs aren't gonna have the quality of life that you might want for them. So if you are sick in bed all the time or you're feeling run down, or just not your best, you can't give your dog what it needs.  

00:01:43 Glenn:       Exactly, so this is an episode for people.  

00:01:46 Narelle:       This is a people podcast.  

00:01:47 Glenn:       Okay.  

00:01:48 Narelle:       Talking about immune health is a huge topic. We are just skimming the absolute surface today with what we're gonna touch on, and because our immune systems are incredibly sophisticated, and in order for our immune system to function optimally, we need to nourish it with the nutrients it needs. We need to avoid those things which will disable it, or compromise its ability to do its job. One of the biggest things impacting our bodies and that we can control, is what we are putting into our mouths multiple times a day. So, diet is huge when it comes to immune health, and we know poor diet is now the leading risk factor for death across middle and high income countries. We know that across the world, being overweight now kills more people than being underweight. We know that 60% of average energy intake, so that's calories, for people in the US and it's about 40% for people in Australia, comes from ultra processed foods. These are foods that have very little nutritional value. They're high in sugar, salt, saturated fats and alcohol. So more than 50% of our diet is already depleted of what our immune systems needs to function. Well, we know that the majority of the population aren't even hitting the minimum government recommended daily intakes for key nutrients.  

00:03:16 Glenn:       That's scary.  

00:03:17 Narelle:       That's really scary. If you think about that, those recommended daily intakes are set for the most part at a level to prevent disease. For example, back in the day, vitamin C was set to prevent scurvy, vitamin D to prevent rickets, choline to prevent liver disease, things like that. So you don't want to be sitting just on those minimum values, we need to do a lot better than that.  

00:03:42 Glenn:       Isn't it amazing, that you've got things like tobacco for argument's sake. Smoking has warning labels all over the cigarette packets and everything about how hazardous it is to your health, and that it can cause primary and secondary issues with populations, et cetera, et cetera. Yet diet can be so deadly as you've pretty much listed out, and there's no warnings about it whatsoever. I mean, there's encouragement to eat better and exercise and so forth, yet there's no criminalisation for selling rubbish foods. If anything, it's more encouraged.  

00:04:14 Narelle:       I know. It is. It's really hard as a practitioner because people come to me with a whole range of different health problems. They want that magic pill, they want the quick fix, they want the extreme fad diet to get them where they wanna be quicker. But I keep telling people, look at your diet, start at the fundamentals because until you change your diet, there's no magic pill that can get them the health results that they're looking for.  

00:04:38 Glenn:       There was an episode of Men in Black, the movie with Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. I think it was Men in Black Three and he was saying just at the start of the movie, “do you want to know what the most dangerous thing on earth is?”. And Will Smith goes “sugar”.  

00:04:53 Narelle:       That is the perfect segue into my first point. If there's just one thing that our listeners take away from the show today, I really want you to understand how damaging sugar is for our bodies, but particularly our immune systems. 

00:05:11 Glenn:       This is one that you are constantly telling me about all the time when I start eating sugary treats and things that process into sugar.   

00:05:21 Narelle:       It is, it's one of my things.

00:05:24 Glenn:       So yeah, let's talk about that. 

00:05:26 Narelle:       Most foods that are high in sugar are also very low in nutrients. And we know that nutrient deficiencies can increase the risk of infection because our bodies simply don't have what they need to work properly. Sugar is very pro-inflammatory in the body and the main thing in terms of what we're talking about today is that sugar negatively impacts our white blood cells. Our white blood cells are our immune cells, we need to think of them as our army. We want our soldiers, or our white blood cells, to be super fit and healthy and resilient and powerful and fast. So as soon as a pathogen enters the body they're on it. They're, you know, seek and destroy. But what sugar does, and there was a study done many years ago now, it showed that just a hundred grams of sugar can impair the immune system by 75% for up to five hours. Just think about that. People might go, oh, a hundred grams of sugar, that's a lot of sugar. There's no way I would eat that much sugar in a day. But let me put it into perspective for you people. One cup of fruit juice might have about 25 grams of sugar. One standard can of Coke or any soft drink for that matter might have around 40 grams of sugar.  

00:06:48 Glenn:       So that's 65 already.  

00:06:50 Narelle:       If someone loves their large cola Slurpees from the service station that's about 85 grams.  

00:06:57 Glenn:       So that's already put you over if you have that in a day,  

00:06:59 Narelle:       If you drink a whole bottle of soft drink that adds up to about 140 grams of sugar. But if you think about the standard American, or the standard Australian diet, which ironically the acronym is SAD.  

00:07:12 Glenn:       Really?  

00:07:13 Narelle:       Yeah. In natural health circles, we talk about the SAD diet. So the Standard American Diet or the Standard Australian Diet,I love that. But if you think about the standard diet that people are eating, they might have a bowl of cereal for breakfast, which most cereals contain a lot of sugar. Then morning tea time comes, they might have a muffin and a coffee with some sugars. They get to lunchtime, they might have their soft drink, they get to afternoon, they might have some chocolate. Then dinner time and dessert. So throughout the day we're suppressing our immune system just constantly, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. So the World Health Organization actually recommends that we limit our daily sugar intake to less than 25 grams.  

00:07:54 Glenn:       So one glass of fruit juice, that's it and you're done. 

00:07:57 Narelle:       Doesn't that just put it into perspective for people?  

00:07:59 Glenn:       It's terrifying. It really is. There's been times, like I ate a block of chocolate the other day and you said to me, just so you know, you're gonna feel terrible tomorrow. 

00:08:07 Narelle: That's right.

00:08:08 Glenn: Can't even enjoy my block of chocolate.  

00:08:12 Narelle:       Yeah, you don't wanna live with me people,  

00:08:14 Glenn:       But you're right. When you point those things out, and when you've given me this information before, you are right. I do wake up and I perform less the next day, I usually notice that I've got a degree of brain fog going on. My vision is slightly, well, it's worse than what it would normally be on a normal day. So yeah, there are some depreciating factors when you consider those sort of things.  

00:08:36 Narelle:       Yeah. And a lot of those hangover feelings, and when people binge on sugar, isn't so much about the immune system, it's about other impacts in the body. including dopamine receptors and things like that. But when we think about the current climate, the last thing we wanna do is limit our immune response to 25% of its capacity. 

00:08:54 Glenn:       Well that's a really good point.  

00:08:56 Narelle:       Yeah, we can't go into war with only 25% of your soldiers and expect to come out on top. So keeping sugar to an absolute minimum as best you can is a key part of the puzzle of keeping yourself healthy.  

00:09:10 Glenn:       I don't think people realise how hard it is to get off sugar and how addictive it is.  

00:09:15 Narelle:       It is. It really plays with our neurotransmitters and it's not the topic of today, but yes. It's highly addictive. So if you are going to cut back, I don't recommend cold turkey unless you're someone who just has that willpower for all or nothing. Just do it gradually if you have two or three teaspoons of sugar in your coffee. for this week cut out one of them.  

00:09:36 Glenn:       We should talk about those neurotransmitter issues in a future episode.  

00:09:41 Narelle:       We should, because you are very knowledgeable on the brain and neurotransmitters as it relates to dog behavior and training  

00:09:47 Glenn:       I've read more about dog behavior than I have human health and human behavior.  

00:09:53 Narelle:       A lot of the principles, a lot of the underlying physiology is the same. So for sure we'll talk about that. Another factor with, again, the pandemic that we're all facing is there's a huge increase in alcohol consumption at the moment which impacts our immune system. Alcohol is actually one of the worst substances for leaching nutrients from the body. It compromises our ability to take up nutrients, it affects our digestive enzymes, it damages our gut lining, it destroys our gut microbiota, and you know, 70 to 80% of our immune system is in our gut, and alcohol is decimating that environment.  

00:10:34 Glenn:       Is it all alcohol? Is there a bad to worse list? If people were gonna say, now you've taken one of my daily pleasures away, like a glass of wine away, or a beer or something like that. What would you recommend, if they were going to have a glass of wine or anything like that, is that better than having a glass of gin or … ?

00:10:52 Narelle:       The sweeter alcohols, like the liqueurs and the Bailey's and the sweet wines, they're higher in sugar so they're gonna have a more detrimental effect from that aspect. If you are drinking high potency alcohol neat, that can potentially have a more damaging, it doesn't have the sugar, but it might have a more damaging effect on the gut lining just because of its potency. It's about minimising, I'm not telling people to go cold turkey on their alcohol, but …

00:11:17 Glenn:       So there goes your chocolate, there goes your glass of wine. 

00:11:20  Narelle:       There goes all the joy in life. 

00:11:22 Glenn:       You get cereal in the morning. 

00:11:24 Narelle:       I've probably just  lost all our listeners, but it's about being sensible and minimising it.

00:11:33 Glenn:       Stress also has a compounding effect.  

00:11:34 Narelle:       Stress tends to drive people to poor choices, whether that's overeating and making poor food choices, drinking more, smoking more, things like that. But stress definitely negatively impacts our immune system. Cortisol dampens our immune response. We produce fewer natural killer cells. So when I talk about our white blood cells being our soldiers and our army and our body, a particular type of white blood cell and natural killer cells, we can consider them like the special forces. So a lot of our white blood cells are like just beat cops that go around and just arrest anyone that looks suspicious. Whereas our natural killer cells are our special forces, they're into surveillance, they're looking for the really top end criminals to take out and destroy. 

00:12:23 Glenn:       That's interesting.  

00:12:24 Narelle:       It's fascinating. But stress can deplete our special forces soldiers. Stress impacts digestion, so even if you're eating a good diet and you're stressed, stress shuts down digestion because it comes back to that fight or flight response. If you're running from the lion, digestion is not a priority for survival, not all of the blood, but blood goes from the internal organs out to the extremities. So we've got the ability to run, and we don't produce as much gastric acid or digestive enzymes. So even if you've just had an argument with your partner, you know you're best not eating until you're feeling a bit better because you're not gonna get what you need out of that food.  

00:13:07 Glenn:       Okay, that's interesting as well. I'm just gonna out myself here and I'm gonna say I'm not a product of your good advice. When I am a product of your good advice, when I listen to you and I take in your control measures in diet and so forth, I feel amazing. But when I don't do it, and I am that typical stress eater person, you and I both know that we're at odds on that topic quite a lot. When I get overburdened with work or just stressed or anxious about something, that's my comfort to go and raid the fridge. And Narrelle tries to limit as much as she possibly can the amount of sugary and rubbishly foods. She tries to encourage me to eat healthier things that aren't going to create an impact on me, but she can't stop me from going to the shop. 

00:13:51 Glenn:       And raiding the shop every now and then. But I guess what I'm trying to say is when I do follow your guidelines, I feel amazing, when I don't do it, I suffer the consequences. And I guess what we're trying to tell people is it's really up to you, you are the captain of your own ship.

00:14:24 Narelle:       So we've touched on some of the diet and lifestyle aspects of immune health. Moving on, I wanna touch on some of the key nutrients that we can take to support our bodies. Vitamin C, It's been around forever. It's very safe. It's a water soluble vitamin so it doesn't build up in the body, but it plays a lot of important roles in our immune system and the functioning of our immune system. I is one of those nutrients that stimulates the production of white blood cells. More white blood cells, bigger army, better outcome. It helps with the production of those natural killer cells and it also stops a lot of our white blood cells from killing themselves during battle. So again you're maintaining your soldiers.  

00:15:08 Narelle:       The other great thing about vitamin C and why you need adequate levels in the body is because it supports the epithelial barrier function. Our epithelial tissues are those tissues that line both the inside and the outside surfaces of the body. We're talking about skin, the lungs, the nose, the throat, the gut. All of these surfaces are our first line of defense. If they're compromised in any way and you inhale for example a virus or a bacteria, if you don't have that integrity, then it's more likely to enter the body and make you sick. That's important. What's interesting is that studies have found that excessive amounts of sugar, so coming back to the sugar situation, specifically glucose actually inhibits the absorption of vitamin C. And the reason that this happens is that vitamin C and glucose have a very similar chemical structure and they actually enter the body through the same gateway. It's called a GLUT1 receptor, but just think of it as a doorway into our bodies. And this makes sense because most animals use glucose to make vitamin C in their bodies, but as humans we no longer have the enzyme that we need to create our own vitamin C, so we need to get it from food or supplements. But the problem with vitamin C and glucose using the same doorway to get into the body, is that that receptor … what do you call a bodyguard at a club? 

00:16:35 Glenn:       A bouncer. 

00:16:37 Narelle:       The bouncer at the doorway into our body, it prefers sugar. So when given a choice it will preferentially take up glucose instead of vitamin C. That's straightaway compromising our white blood cell production and our immune system. So that's another reason to stay off the sugar. It's interesting too, China's probably leading the world in terms of research into the therapeutic use of vitamin C, particularly now with COVID-19.  

00:17:07 Glenn:       And what sources of vitamin C would you recommend for people?  

00:17:10 Narelle:       You want a buffet source. Vitamin C is also known as ascorbic acid and that can be a little bit harsh on a lot of people's guts. But you can have it buffered. You might have potassium ascorbate or sodium ascorbate, or just bound to something and there might be some bioflavonoids added to the formula. It doesn't really matter if it's powder or … 

 00:17:31 Glenn:       So you're recommending a supplement over a natural food item or something like that. 

00:17:36 Narelle:       I do, because if we are healthy and we're not fighting anything or we are not at risk of catching things, you don't actually need a lot of vitamin C and what you get from your diet may be completely adequate. But if we are at risk and if we are fighting something, we need a lot more vitamin C. So to get a therapeutic dose and to support our white blood cells for the most part and because most people's diets aren't where they need to be, yep I do recommend supplementation. But as I've mentioned, vitamin C is very safe.  

00:18:08 Glenn:       Yep, good brands?  

00:18:10 Narelle:       Look, I won't mention brands because it's probably not as important, but just a thousand to 2000 milligrams a day would be a good place to start for most people. The only risk of too much vitamin C, if you started to get up to 5,000 or 10,000 milligrams in a day, would be diarrhea. It's called bowel tolerance. And a lot of people when they're sick, particularly those with chronic immune issues, they will actually test themself. So over a day every 15, 30 minutes, they might take another thousand milligrams, and just keep stepping that up until they hit bowel tolerance. So diarrhea, and then they know to take it back one step and that's their therapeutic dose for recovery. But you know, not a fun way.  

00:18:55 Glenn:       No, that's nothing to look forward to.  

00:18:59 Narelle:       Another really important nutrient is vitamin D. Most people might be familiar with vitamin D for bone health, for joint health, for muscle function, but it's also really important for cellular health. And most cells in the body, including our immune cells, actually have vitamin D receptors on them. They need to take vitamin D up to work properly.  

00:19:21 Glenn:       I'm sure you're gonna mention it, but one of the things that I'm always fascinated by when you talk to me about this is, is how lacking so much of the population are in vitamin D.  

00:19:30 Narelle:       It's absolutely shocking. Whenever I talk about US, or Australian data when it comes to health and nutrition, we are pretty much on par with each other. But every few years they do a massive survey in the States. Tens of thousands of people get surveyed, and the last time they did that a few years ago, 95% of adults in the US had daily intakes of vitamin D below that government recommended daily intake level, which is so you don't get rickets. 95%, which is huge.  

00:20:04 Glenn:       It's massive.  

00:20:05 Narelle:       And you know, vitamin D, we can get it in food, but it's not in many foods that people eat a lot of. You know your oily fish, how many people are eating sardines and mackerel and salmon on a regular basis. It's in dairy products and eggs, but a lot of people are going dairy free these days. Eggs are one of the most allergenic foods, so often that's compromised as well. And then people say, we make it when we're out in the sun. That's true, ut when the sun hits our skin and it creates what's called a pre-vitamin D, but for that to become active and do all its good work in the body, it needs to go through two activation steps. The first activation occurs in the liver. 

00:20:49 Narelle:       And the second step is in the kidney. So if there's anything going on that's compromising liver or kidney function, straight away you are going to have reduced conversion into the active form of vitamin D. And in Australia, I think around 30% of Australian adults have non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and so not to mention all the other pathologies that affect our liver and kidneys, that's massive. If you've got a darker skin tone, you get a poorer conversion into the active form. I have a lot of dog trainers and people who work outdoors all day, and they come to me and they're like, oh, I'm not gonna be deficient in vitamin D, I'm out in the sun all day, but the majority of them are. Even in Australia we're the sunny country, except …

00:21:32 Glenn:       If you're in Melbourne.  

00:21:32 Narelle:       Yeah, but in summer, you know, 25% of Australians are vitamin D deficient. In winter, that can jump up to 75%, and the reference ranges on the blood tests are actually, I won't say negligent, but they're not conducive to good health. So if you, I'll try and convert to US units, but in Australia, if you're sitting just over 50 nanomoles per liter on your vitamin D blood test results, your doctor will say you're fine. But you know, even the World Health Organization recognised that you need to be at least over 75 nanomoles per liter, which I could be wrong, but it converts to about 30 nanograms per milliliter in the US. So you can do the conversions yourself, but there are researchers that say we need to sit at 125 to 150 nanomoles per liter of vitamin D in summer. 

00:22:24 Narelle:       So we've got enough stores to carry us through winter. Vitamin D is really important and there's a lot of research around vitamin D in relation to Covid. Vitamin D deficiency has been shown to be independently associated with increased risk of acute respiratory infections, particularly viral. They've correlated low vitamin D levels with an increased incidence and mortality. So deaths in European countries, and a lot of European countries naturally have lower levels of sunlight, a lower natural conversion of vitamin D. There was one study that showed that around 90% of people who end up on ventilators with Covid 19 are critically low on vitamin D. So supplementing vitamin D may be something. Vitamin D, unlike vitamin C, can build up to toxic levels in the body, so you do need to be careful. But taking a thousand international units of vitamin D once a day, even if you didn't know your blood test levels, for the majority of people will be very safe. And if you're not sure about what dose you should be taking, that's where you'd speak to a healthcare professional.  

00:23:33 Glenn:       Well you're always encouraging me every time I get a blood test to get my vitamin D checked.  

00:23:37 Narelle:       Yeah, and doctors are reluctant to test it too often, but it's really important. And when we've got sufficient vitamin D in our body, our immune system, in the lungs where a virus is most likely to show up, has the ability to produce antiviral compounds if you've got enough vitamin D in your body. The other thing too is with Covid, we're all in lockdown, well we're not in lockdown in Sydney, but we're encouraged to not be going out as often,  

00:24:04 Glenn:       Socially distant and responsible, hand sanitizing, et cetera, et cetera.  

00:24:08 Narelle:        Yeah, but that's automatically keeping people indoors more too. So another factor compromising our potential to get the vitamin D that we need. So that's vitamin C, that's vitamin D. The next one of the top fundamentals for immune health is zinc. Zinc is another one that I talk about a lot with Glenn. And you need to take your zinc, especially … 

00:24:30 Glenn:       Being a man.  

00:24:30 Narelle:       Especially being a man. Zinc's involved in hundreds of biochemical processes throughout the body, but it is fundamental for the optimal functioning of our immune system. So it supports white blood cell production, it's part of good membrane integrity, and remember I said that's our first line of defense. Studies have shown that zinc deficiency significantly decreases our ability to mount an adequate immune response, particularly against viruses. And the way zinc works is it blocks what's called RNA polymerase. That's an enzyme that allows viruses to replicate and spread throughout the body. So if you don't have enough zinc, viruses have that greater ability to multiply. Coming back to the importance of diet, we don't have a specialised storage system for zinc in our bodies. A lot of nutrients can get stored in tissues in the liver.  

00:25:27 Narelle:       Zinc doesn't. So we need to consume it on a regular basis to avoid deficiency. Deficiency is quite common in the elderly not just because older people tend to have poorer diets generally, but as we age, we produce less gastric acid. And we need good gastric acid to extract minerals in particular from the food that we're eating. Vegetarians and vegans are often deficient because zinc in plant matter is often inhibited by phytates in the foods that they're eating. Anyone with gastrointestinal issues, whether it's inflammatory bowel disease or chronic diarrhea, people who've had surgery, their requirements for zinc go up significantly. We've mentioned alcohol can deplete the body of zinc in particular as well. As a general guide, anywhere up to 50 milligrams of zinc a day is safe. Usually around 20 to 30 milligrams for most people would be great. You wanna avoid zinc oxide, as that's a poorer form of zinc.  

00:26:32 Glenn:       How would they know? Does it say it?  

00:26:35 Narelle:       Yeah, it will always say on your container. Just have a look at the form of zinc that you're taking. Zinc citrates, zinc gluconate, zinc chelates are all good forms and well absorbed.  

00:26:45 Glenn:       Okay, cool. I wouldn't have known that, now I do.  

00:26:48 Narelle:       Vitamin D doesn't matter so much. Vitamin D supplements are mostly vitamin D3 and any product you pick up is generally gonna do the same job. One of the final key nutrients when we're talking about the immune system is vitamin A. It's probably the best studied nutrient with regard to viral infections and critical for immunity. Critical for maintaining the integrity of our epithelial and mucus membranes and the good thing is, vitamin A and zinc work really closely together. You do need both, we need zinc to be able to convert vitamin A into its more active form, and zinc also helps make a protein that transports vitamin A around the body so it can do its good work. Even if you're taking mega doses of vitamin A, which I wouldn't recommend, 'cause that's not safe. If you don't have enough zinc, you're still not gonna get the full benefit of vitamin A. 

00:27:43 Glenn:       So one compliments the other.  

00:27:44 Narelle:       It does, and this is where the body is just fascinating and complex in how it works. Nothing is black and white and simple, which is why getting your nutrition from a whole food diet is always the best bet because you're getting these complex mixtures of vitamins and minerals and phytonutrients with all the other bits around them to do what they need to do in the body. You're not just isolating a single nutrient and having it out of proportion in the body. Supplements have an important place when our bodies are under threat, or fighting something or you know, with Covid, and we're at greater risk. But again, coming back to diet will always be the foundation of where you should start.  

00:28:27 Glenn:       So if somebody has a really poor diet, has a history of poor diet and they wanna make a change, they're waking up feeling crap every day, where would you recommend they start?  

00:28:38 Narelle:       If that's something that's happening ongoing every day, you need to think about stress. A lot of people that are waking up feeling depleted and just struggling to get through their day, they need to look at their stress levels. Stress, like I said, affects digestion. It affects your ability to take up nutrients and, and give your body what it needs to feel good. Stress will affect your sleep. Automatically, as soon as your sleep is compromised, it's gonna affect hormones. It's going to affect blood glucose regulation. It's going to affect energy, mood. I often say to clients, until sleep is right, nothing else tends to fall into place.  

00:29:19 Glenn:       Right, that makes sense.  

00:29:20 Narelle:       So stress and sleep are really important. And then, you do need to look at your diet. So today we've just touched on the top key nutrients and lifestyle factors that could potentially be impacting your immune system. Other things that you might wanna consider, is getting enough Omega-3 fatty acids for their anti-inflammatory role in the body. Looking at prebiotics and probiotics to support gut health because as I mentioned, 70 to 80% of our immune system is in our guts. And if our guts are compromised, we're not gonna get the nutrition. There's lots of herbs that are out there for immune health, but there's no time today. That could be another whole podcast to talk about immune herbs.  

00:30:00 Glenn:       Yeah and you're gonna have a lot more information about this on your Patreon channel.  

00:30:03 Narelle:       That's right. Patreon is where I'll be going into a lot more detail about everything that we are talking about in these podcasts. So go over to Patreon if you do want more detail or if you want those more personalised Q & A sessions where you can have your own questions answered.  

00:30:18 Glenn:       And also it helps support your show as well.  

00:30:20 Narelle:       It does.  

00:30:21 Glenn:       All the research that you're putting in and all the expenses that go into it.  

00:30:24 Narelle:       It does, I actually have to cut back on my client load to fit in …  

00:30:28 Glenn:       Your podcast. 

00:30:30 Narelle:       Maybe when you listen to this podcast, just take a step back and have a look at what your diet currently is, and just where you can make just small changes. Even if it's just one sugary snack in a day that you replace with a better option That's a step forward to supporting your body. 

00:30:51 Glenn:       And if people are really struggling on their own, what would you suggest they do?  

00:30:56 Narelle:       It is important because dietary change is when they're ingrained over our lifetime, and usually they're habits that we've taken on from our parents. Change can be really hard and there's the addictive qualities of certain foods that we've mentioned as well. If you are really struggling, I do recommend that you reach out to a healthcare professional who can better guide you in how to make the changes gradually, what choices or what changes might be most indicated, and you know, they're there to support you and motivate you and, you know, be your cheerleader to keep you on track and accountable. 

00:31:30 Glenn:       Good advice as always. So if people need to reach out to you and find you, how do they do that?  

00:31:37    Narelle:    The best place if you've got questions that come up from the podcast is Patreon. But my Facebook page, Natural Health for People and Pets  is a great discussion point too. My website, naturalhealthandnutrition.com.au for more information about who I am, what I do, and if you're interested in consults, how you can go about that. 

00:31:57 Glenn:       And email?  

00:31:58 Narelle:       And if you'd like to email me hello@naturalhealthandnutrition.com.au.

00:32:02 Glenn:       Wonderful. Okay, that's episode three. Bye everyone. 

00:32:05 Narelle: Thank you. Bye.