Episode #89 Andrea Beaman On Thyroid Health And Holistic Wellness

Fat To Fit My Quest

Today we’re sitting down with Andrea Beaman to discuss the impact of thyroid problems and how a healthy, holistic and nutrition-based management plan can make a bigger difference than medication. The right food and lifestyle can trigger a boost in your immune system and have you feeling better.

Some of the key ways you can change your habits include cooking in bulk to save yourself time and keep your diet plan on track, and selecting fresher foods from local farmers’ markets to maximize your nutritional intake. You can also find a whole host of spices and condiments at these markets to add flavor to your meals and improve leftovers. Eating right can have such an important effect on your health and wellbeing, and we discuss some of the ways that you can bring healthy eating into your own routine.

We also chat about how traditional responses to the discovery of the BCRA gene may be more extreme than is appropriate, and discuss whether there could be more benefit from a change in diet and lifestyle than in irreversible surgeries. A tendency towards an illness is not a guarantee of getting it, and a healthier lifestyle could prevent the problem occurring without the need to go under the knife.

As always, please leave us your comments regarding this week’s topics and let us know what you think. If you’d like to win some great prizes from our recent guests, leave us a review in iTunes now and we’ll add you into this month’s prize draw.

Find Andrea Beaman online:

Visit www.andreabeaman.com for a whole host of blogs, webinars, Q&As and other resources.
Follow Andrea on Twitter and Facebook for the latest updates

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

MELISSA: Welcome, Andrea. Thanks so much for taking time to be on the program today.

ANDREA: Well, hello, Melissa. I’m happy to be here.

MELISSA: Andrea, a lot of people in the audience may not be familiar with you, some may. So I’d like you to just give us a little background as to how and why you decided to make the changes you did in your own health and where you are today health-wise.

ANDREA: Oh my gosh, how much time do we have, Melissa?

MELISSA: [Laughs] I’ll keep track. Give us the list in five-hour episode.

ANDREA: [Laughs] Okay.

MELISSA: But a key point is what really was the turning point for you to take control of it because I think that’s the place where a lot of people are on the edge and they need a little encouragement to step forward and make some changes.

ANDREA: Yeah, for me, it was like for most people, like I got a diagnosis of a disease at a young age. So I was 28 years old and I was diagnosed with hyperthyroid and a goiter, but I had the all the symptoms of hypothyroid which was weight gain and nails were splitting, depression, exhaustion, chronically-fatigued. My immune system was crashing. So I had this condition and the doctor said to me, “You need to take radioactive Iodine and then be in Synthroid for the rest of your life. And red flags went up for me everywhere, Melissa. I mean, like, boom, boom, boom, red flag, so as soon as she said, “radiation,” because I had years prior watched my mom go through the process of cancer in modern medicine. And when I said “the process of cancer,” is you’re diagnosed with cancer and you’re given radiation and chemotherapy. And then, you know, five years later if you don’t have any cancer cells left in your body, they tell you that you’re clear and that’s what happened with my mom. In the 1980’s, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and they took off a breast and all the lymph nodes and they gave her radiation and all that stuff. And five years later, they said, “Okay, you’re cancer free.”

But that’s not exactly what happened. 11 years after she had all of those treatments and the radiation and all that stuff, 11 years after, she fainted and we took her to the hospital because she couldn’t stand up. And we did all of these tests and found that the breast cancer, even though the breast was no longer there, the breast cancer had come back and it was now in her bones and in her liver, and in her brain. And it was everywhere, proliferated. It was just completely throughout all of her system. And so we did what modern technology and modern medicine told us to do which was okay, do radiation again and chemotherapy again. And we just were poisoning and attacking her body.

An interesting thing happened. She just started to get weaker, and weaker and weaker, and hair was falling out and all of this stuff. And as I watched her going through this process, my dad had read an article about how this doctor had changed his pancreatic cancer diagnosis from terminal, you know, he had four months to live, to live for approximately 10 years when he changed his diet and his lifestyle. So my dad said, “Listen, let’s try this thing of the changing of the diet.” And we did. And my mom, when she started to eat natural foods and whole foods, we saw some color come back into her face. We saw her eyes get a little clearer. You know, we saw a difference. We certainly saw a difference and made the connection that, wow, food can either harm you or heal you. It can have a dramatic effect. Now, it wasn’t enough to bring my mom back, but it planted a seed in me, Melissa. And the seed was that if you get sick, before doing anything radical and dramatic and dangerous to your body, try food first. And that’s what I did. When I got my diagnosis of thyroid disease that needed radiation to destroy my thyroid and then be on medication for the rest of my life, I said, “No.” I said, “Thank you very much for the diagnosis, but I’m going to change my diet.” And the doctor said, “Your diet has nothing to do with your thyroid condition.” And I said, “Okay. I get that you understand that because that’s what you were taught. But I’m going to try something else and I’ll be back in a few months.” And I did. I radically transformed my diet. I was a chronic dieter, Melissa, my whole life, non-fat, low-fat, sugar-free, fat-free, you know-

MELISSA: Been there.

ANDREA: -like food that’s pretending to be food but it’s not really food, all right?

MELISSA: Yeah. Been there, done that.

ANDREA: Oh my gosh, it’s horrible. These crazy substances that the body can’t even digest, so I took all of that crap out and I put in natural foods. And when I say “natural,” I mean like it didn’t come out of boxes and packages. It was like right from the farm, right into my body, all right? In the farm and into the plate, and into my body and interesting things started to happen. Within four months of changing my diet and my lifestyle, by the way, changing my diet and my lifestyle, my body started to change, my physical body started to change. My hair stopped falling out. My nails stopped splitting.

They started getting stronger, I was sleeping better at night. My goiter was shrinking and I started to feel better, and I lost about 18 pounds. So I go back to the doctor for another blood test and she said to me, she said, “Okay,” she goes, “Your thyroid levels are definitely changing,” she says, “But it’s still not normal. You have to take this medication.” And I said, “Thanks so much.” I said, “I understand that you believe that but I’m going to continue doing what I’m doing and see what happens.” So for the next two years, I continued doing what I was doing, eating well, taking care of myself, getting to bed on time, right? It was a nice combination stuff. And every six months, maybe five months, six months, I went to a new doctor each time. And each time, I got a different diagnosis. So first, it was hyperthyroid and a goiter, and then it was Hashimoto’s, and then it was hypothyroid. It was just flipping out all over the place. And finally, and each time all the doctors recommended medication because that’s what they know. So it’s not their fault, that’s just what they’re taught.

So finally, after two years, zero goiter. Like if you look on my website, you look at pictures of me today, no goiter. Thyroid is completely normal. Health is vibrant. I’m vibrant, happy and healthy. You know, I get sick, but my sicknesses are like small, all right?

MELISSA: Right.

ANDREA: You know, it’s like a cold comes in and a cold goes out, right? So it’s a totally different experience, and that’s how I got started. And what I discovered over the past 20 years with the healing of the thyroid is part of healing the thyroid is learning how to express yourself and speak your truth. And that’s part of the emotional healing of the thyroid, so that’s what I’ve been doing. Since I healed myself, I’ve been expressing to the world, “Hey, there’s another option, certainly, you can get your thyroid ready and it’s certainly, you could take medication for the rest of your life. Certainly, you can have a thyroidectomy, or you could have this other option as well because this option isn’t given to people when they show up in the doctor’s office. They’re not giving the option, “Okay, you may not need surgery or medication or thyroidectomy or to be on medication for the rest of your life or have a radioactive Iodine, maybe diet and lifestyle can help you. So that’s how I started in this industry, in this business.

MELISSA: Yeah. Well, I’m hoping that that is going to be an option soon, I’m hoping that doctors—and I’m very encouraged because what I’ve seen, I’ve seen just amazing changes and I’m sure you have just in the last couple of years into how people are looking for alternatives actively, and they’re questioning. And I don’t mean in a mean way question their doctors, but they’re just going in with information in saying, “Why can’t I do this?”

ANDREA: Yes.

MELISSA: Maybe I should do this. And I’ve seen in my own experience. You know, I’ve had doctors that just fired me and it’s mutual.

ANDREA: [Laughs]

MELISSA: We fired each other, or we’re like we don’t need each other.

ANDREA: Funny. [Laughs]

MELISSA: And then, I’ve seen doctors, conventional medical doctors who aren’t necessarily in agreement but they’ve seen the results. And like I say to people, you know, we’re not medical practitioners on this program. But when you go get your blood work done and there are obvious changes from what you’ve been doing compared to what you had been doing, you can’t mess with that. The doctor has to, himself, say, or she, “Yeah. Okay, something worked here.”

ANDREA: Yeah.

MELISSA: You know, great. Sometimes they’re happy. Sometimes they’re confused about it. But when you show them the black and white results, they have to go with it and they have to say, “Keep doing what you’re doing.” And I think in some cases, they are more open to it than others. And like you say, if you said, “I’d like to try this. I’d like to try doing this with my diet,” and you’ve got a little plan written out or a printout of what you’re planning to do, I think there are some, some are a little bit more open to that as long as they feel they’ve given you sort of the right act of what they have to say-

ANDREA: That’s right.

MELISSA: -to be covered against lawsuits, insurance and medical healthcare in the country today. But I’ve seen changes and I’m very hopeful. And I think it takes people a lot of courage to stand up to. I mean, I just went along for the ride with my doctors again and again. I wasn’t just fooled once—or not fooled—but I didn’t question three or four times when I should have and I paid the price down the road. So I know it’s hard for people because we’ve been taught that they’re the experts. They’re the know-it-alls. They’re the medical healers. We go to them, they give us the magic stuff and we’re good, and unfortunately not. [Laughs]

ANDREA: Right.

MELISSA: They’ve been trained to use pharmaceuticals and things like that to help. And believe me, without some of those products, we’d all be dead. We’d be back in the Civil War dying from a cut finger and an infection, but use them judiciously and ask questions. It is hard because the practitioners only have tops, 15 minutes to spend with you today under the medical system. And you’re not going to get all your information answered or issued. But if you do have those blood test results, that tends to perk them up a lot.

ANDREA: Yeah.

MELISSA: But the courage to do it, I think, is very good and your story certainly shows that. And we’re going to come back to this actually in a few minutes because I want to touch on something else which relates to the thyroid issue and how those things come about and other more serious things related to genes that you got involved with on your website there. But since you are also a chef, I want to—everybody always asks me—and I’m terrible with this and I should just go to chef school and be done with it, or actually hire myself out as a chef, and then I’ll have to do it—but is one of the biggest issues, of course, is shopping, organizing yourself for getting meals and meal plans ready. And again, we’re focusing here on whole foods and unprocessed, unpackaged foods and getting that all together. That’s the next biggest stumbling block for so many people that I meet and talk to. And I know you’re a coach in this area so I’m sure you’ve got some secret stuff that you can share with us about how to organize yourself for shopping, putting together a plan for the week that is low-stress and results in great-tasting food for the whole family.

ANDREA: Yeah. Well, the first thing that we have to do, the very, very first thing is we have to make eating a priority. So something happened over the past, maybe 75 years, where eating became this tertiary, not even secondary, like this tertiary thing that we think about, “Oh yeah, I’ll get food when I’m on the run or when I’m out,” you know, “I’ve got to get to work. I’ll get, you know, another time.” It’s like it used to be that food was a primary thought.

This is important, like, what are we going to have for dinner tonight? It was an important thing. Eating was a priority. If you didn’t eat, then there was going to be problems, starvation or you wouldn’t be nourished properly, you’ll be malnourished, right? So we’re in this situation today where there is an abundance of everything. And everything is available so much all over the place that we don’t need to make food a priority, because you know what, I can grab and go. I can get in this on the run, I can get that on the run. So that’s the first thing that we have to do is we have to stop and say, “Okay, eating is a priority.” And eating well, because food is creating my blood which is feeding all of my organs and my glands and my skin, and my hair, and my everything, right?

Food is literally becoming your body on a cellular level, so food needs to become a priority. So with that in mind, you take Sunday afternoon and you say, “Okay, what is my week going to look like?” Because you don’t want to spend hours and hours, and hours in the kitchen. Nobody wants to do that, not unless you’re a chef. And even the chefs that I know don’t want to do that, right? They want to get in. They want to cook. They want to get out. So let’s sit down on a Sunday and say, “Okay, what is my week going to look like?” Well, the first thing is you’re going to look at what is in season. What season is this? Is this summer time? Is this winter time? Is this fall? Is this spring? Because within each season, there is another set of foods that is naturally provided by the earth. So again, we live in this state of abundance, where you can go into the grocery store and you could get anything from anywhere at any time of the day and any time of the night, at any time of the year. And it may not necessarily be the best food for us. So we have to get back to a little bit of seasonal eating, so I’ll give you a great example and then I’ll tell them how to do it, how to put it all together.

MELISSA: Great.

ANDREA: So right now, as we’re recording this, this is summertime and it’s probably going to air, you know, in October or something like that. But right now, it’s summertime in New York City and it’s very hot. It’s 93 degrees today. So a great food that is available and abundant at this time of year is fruit: watermelons, right? What is the energy of watermelon? It’s very cooling, very refreshing. I could also get a watermelon in the middle of February and which is what some people do. So in the middle of February, they could certainly get a watermelon but it may not be the best food for their body and it could throw them out of balance. So when you’re healing body on any level, you have to get it in balance so that it has the energy to do what it’s designed to do, right? So the first thing that they do when they’re thinking about how to put a meal together is what season is this? What is the best food? What is growing at this time of the year? And most people do not know.

They don’t know what’s growing because they’ve been so removed from their food. So I always suggest that they find a farmer’s market anywhere, like you could go to www.localharvest.org and you could punch in your zip code, and it’ll tell you where the farmer’s markets are by you. You find a farmer’s market and you spend one hour, one hour at that farmer’s market and you see what is available at the time of year in the area that you’re living, in the environment that you’re living, what is available? What are the farmers bringing in? Because that is the food that’s going to be the best for your body for where you live. So what’s available at this time of year?

Well, there’s lot of salads. There’s greens. We have some light roots that are coming in. We’ve got radishes. We’ve got fishes in abundance in this summertime. There’s so many things that you could choose from. So first, just get an idea of what’s available and then you could sit down and you could start to write out. And of course, while you’re there, intuitively purchase things. “Oh my. Would you look at that green vegetable? I don’t know what it is but let me see if I can eat it.” Right? We have this set of foods that are available in the grocery store that we see and those are the only foods that we think that are available and it’s not necessarily the truth, right?

MELISSA: Right, for sure.

ANDREA: Yeah, so when you go to a farmer’s market, you’ll some things that you may never have seen before and you may see a lot of familiar things, but you’ll always see the thing that are actually growing at that time of year. So then you want to sit down with a potential menu and you want to cook in bulk. You don’t want to cook one meal at a time. Like I don’t suggest-

MELISSA: exhausting, exhausting at a time. [Laughs]

ANDREA: You’ll never want to get beat on day two. You’ll be like, “Oh my god,” by the end of day two, you’ll be like, “I can’t do this anymore.”

MELISSA: Right.

ANDREA: You want to be able to cook in bulk. So big pots of food, like what our ancestors used to do or what our grandma used to do. They make a big pot of food and then you would have leftovers. Why you’d have leftovers for two or three days and then you would freshen up those leftovers, right? So you’d have the same leftovers and then you put a little salad on the side or you put a little fresh vegetables in there. So there’s lots of ways to make eating support you and make it a priority and understand it better. And like I said, Melissa, we are so disconnected that people don’t know what’s growing, what time of year it is, what’s available and we have to get connected to that first.

MELISSA: Right.

ANDREA: And then you could certainly shop in a supermarket. You don’t have to shop everything at the farmer’s market. Just get an idea what’s available and then go to your local supermarket. And I highly suggest that people shop in the organic aisles, right? So that they’re not getting all the chemicals and the pesticides and all the other crap. Get the most natural foods. Go ahead, you were going to say something.

MELISSA: No, I was going to say that that’s great ideas, go and see at the farmer’s market, kind of look around, see what bargains you can get there which are a lot.

ANDREA: Yes.

MELISSA: There’s much cheaper produce there than you’re going to get in a supermarket mostly. But you can also experiment and you have a chance to ask them, not that your supermarket produce guy won’t know. But you have a chance to ask them about something new that you haven’t seen. But I want to also mention that it’s a great place to pick up spices and condiments and things like that really add to leftovers.

ANDREA: Yes.

MELISSA: I remember grandma making things that would be a leftover pot roast or something, but we had these great condiments that went with it which were so tasty, or great herbs that you can throw in. And that’s a good place to find those, but yeah. And then we you get to your supermarket, you’re a little bit more tuned in to what you’re looking for.

ANDREA: Yes, that’s right.

MELISSA: But I think the nutrient value of eating in season is one of the points you’re focusing on.

ANDREA: Yes.

MELISSA: And that is so people again have been unaware, I think, for the longest time of why processed food is so harmful is because your body is not getting the nutrients it needs to keep you healthy. And so it’s actually depleting your body of these nutrients, and so when you eat in season and you eat things that are near you that are fresh that only took, you know, a day to get there or whatever, particularly at the farmer’s market, it’s the day they may have been picked that day.

ANDREA: That’s right.

MELISSA: You’re getting the biggest boost of nutrients and I am so aware of it because at the current time, I’m trying to boost up my immune system from somebody who’s had the many exposures I had in the past. And that’s one of the fastest ways to do it, I found. You don’t want to just load yourself down with supplements. You want to be eating real, whole foods that have the value, the nutrient value, nutrient-dense values in them, because that’s going to bring your system up faster.

ANDREA: That’s correct. And you made a great point. Like if something is picked, like, let’s say I live in New York, so if I’m shopping in a regular supermarket and something was picked two weeks ago in Mexico and shipped up to New York, it was picked unripe, meaning it didn’t have the full time that it needed on the vine. So it is less nutrient-dense as opposed to something that’s picked in New York today if I go to the farmer’s market. It was picked this morning right at the peak of freshness, at the peak of ripeness. It’s had its full time on the vine, right?

It has all the nutrients and all the things that it needs. And it’s not like, it’s almost like a premature baby when it’s picked two weeks early and then shipped over, right? And we know what happens with preemies. They have lower immunity, they have more susceptibility to lung issues, respiratory issues, all this stuff. So the same thing with the preemie fruits and the preemie vegetables, the preemie foods that we’re eating. So we have to make sure that it’s getting the time that it needs on the vine, all of its nutrients, exactly what you said, nutrient-dense.

MELISSA: Right. Absolutely want it for sure. And I can just tell you that to the use of – and I’ve talked about this before in the program – but so valuable is do make the bone broths and things like that from pastured meats, and you can also go online, there’s a bunch of places you can buy those and you can get gelatins and stuff because I have found those in the last two years to be invaluable and I’ll do like an ice cube tray of the broths from the chickens or the beef whatever as long as it’s pasture-raised you want to make sure so you’re not making broth out of toxins.

ANDREA: That’s right.

MELISSA: But you could pop one of those in a mug and have a couple of those if you feel a cold or something coming on, and I have been totally recovered, along with having enough sleep, I felt myself bounce back from having a really tough travel schedule, for instance, and being on plane with sick people. I’ll get back home or get to my, wherever I’m going, if I have one of those little pouches with me and warm that up in a microwave, in a mug, and I’m good.

ANDREA: You throw a chop, when you find me chopping some fresh herbs, throw it in there, that is a meal right there. It’s so nourishing to your digestive system.

MELISSA: Boosts your whole immune system really…

ANDREA: Absolutely.

MELISSA: Way more than taking a flu shot and I haven’t had a flu shot in years. And you see that takes quite a lot of limited time when traveling. So that’s another good thing is at the farmer’s market you’ll most likely find some pastured chickens or pastured animal that you can use to make broth and then save that for down the road.

ANDREA: Well, totally.

MELISSA: But, great. So cook in bulk, go to your farmer’s market and find out what’s in season or refresh yourself on what’s good, and then whiz through the supermarket on the organic food aisle, and also I have to say, there’s pretty much now grass-fed meats are available in major supermarket chains across the country. I go hopping around from everywhere from California to Connecticut, to Florida, to Texas and I find in the big supermarket chains there are things like that available now.

ANDREA: Yeah, because there’s a demand for it. People are demanding it, otherwise it wouldn’t be there.

MELISSA: Right.

ANDREA: Yeah.

MELISSA: So keep demanding it, kids. [Laughs]

ANDREA: That’s right. Bulk with your purchases.

MELISSA: Well, that’s what I would say. I know that there’s some activists, I think you were called an activist here, we’ll bring you onto that in a second. But I always say, don’t bother boycotting stuff. Just talk with your wallet because if you don’t buy what they’re stocking the shelves with, the grocery business is a very scarce margin business. They can’t afford to have stuff on the shelves that isn’t selling. So if you’re not buying it, they’re not going to stock it. They’re going to replace it with what you want. And tell your supermarket person where you shop. I know I have with the chain we have out here, the Ralph’s chain. I’ve talked to my local supermarket guy about getting like, Kerrygold butter and stuff like that and, bam! I said to him, “If you stock that, it will be sold out because there’s so many of the paleo people around me and crossfitters that shop at that market. And sure enough, once they did that, that’s some grass-fed butter and all those people are looking for. So they were loading up by the basket for me and said, “Oh, that was such a great dip you made.” And I’m like, “Yeah.”

ANDREA: [Laughs]

MELISSA: I got a lot more, man. But again, that chain is boosting up almost every week that I’m in there. I notice they added to their products like that with the grass-fed meats and so on and so forth. So ask for what you want and believe me, the supermarkets are going to respond because they lose money otherwise.

ANDREA: That’s right.

MELISSA: But now I want to segue over to this topic that we were talking about before we started recording here which was sort of a very controversial post you had on your—it wasn’t a controversial post, but it turned out to be quite a discussion point on your blog. And I’ll put a link in the show notes so people can just go over to it. And it’s basically talking about potential for breast cancer and ways to approach breast cancer, basically piggybacking on what you said to begin with about your own thyroid issue. I know it’s a long post, you got a lot of things happening. But I think two points I wanted to make, and this came up a few months ago when I was interviewing another doctor. And it was the notoriety of the BRCA, I think I’m pronouncing that correctly, the BRCA1 gene. And this came to prominence a couple of years ago when Angelina Jolie announced that she had this and then went ahead and decided to have a double mastectomy. And who knows? I don’t know her. I don’t think you know her unless you’re going to reveal that now. But we don’t know what her decision-making was on that. We heard about what the press said that her mother had died of cancer and that she didn’t, she made a decision based on that and that’s general, general terms. But we don’t know anything beyond that. We’re not her consulting physician, of course, and we don’t know.

I think she was advised by the hospital in LA. We don’t know again her practitioner what that conversation was. But what happened I think that people should be very careful about is there’s good genes, there’s bad genes, and there’s pairs of genes. And I did my genetic testing a while back and you have to understand a little bit more about this and how just because you may have a gene 1 or a pair, or a mutated gene or a gene that’s not quite right, it doesn’t mean that you’re definitely or you’re on a 99% path or even a 50% path to contract cancer or anything else down the road.

It can be a pre-disposition but you have to be careful there that you don’t throw up the baby with the bathwater or go screaming down the road onto a track of something that may cause you even more problems later as you were talking about with your mother. And so one of the points that was brought up in this little discussion was about breastfeeding and about breast removal and things like that. And one of the points you bring up also is about the importance of breastfeeding. So if you could just talk about that a little bit, how you answered in your post?

ANDREA: Oh, you know, like breastfeeding, the breasts are amazing. First of all, they’re beautiful, and second of all, they’re built-in baby bottles, right? So the universe is very smart, puts the humans down on the planet, or the mammals down on the planet and then gives them exactly what they need to nourish their little creatures that come out of them, right? So here we have these breasts and in the 1970’s and 1960’s, women across America were told that their breast milk was inferior to formula milk, you know, the formula that was created. And a lot of those formulas contains soy and other crap that they put in. And that’s ego, that’s all ego-talking, you know, scientific ego, that we created something better than the universe created, right? Whatever you believe in. And so all of those children, well, not all of them but a majority of them, and what they found out now 50 years later is that the majority of the children that were not breastfed had higher rates of all diseases across the board.

MELISSA: Yes. I’m one of them. [Laughs]

ANDREA: That’s right. You know, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to be ruined for the rest of your life.

MELISSA: No, turned it around. [Laughs]

ANDREA: Yes, but it definitely means that you have a more sensitive digestive system because part of the job of the breast milk and the colostrum is assume as that baby gets that first feedings, the first few feedings, the bacteria from the mother’s body and the antibodies and all these great immune-stimulating and immune-boosting good juiciness enters into the baby’s body and it starts to line the intestines. And it fills those little holes. So like the holes, you know, like we have these little permeable holes in the intestines, and they’re actually filled with the bacteria that comes from the mother, so the people that are suffering with leaky gut and IBS and Crone’s and colitis. They’re missing that initial bacteria that should be there. So that’s why the food goes in and either it’s not absorbed properly or it’s leaked out into the rest of the body which causes extreme inflammation because the body will start to attack. You know, it’s like, “Oh, this food is not supposed to be here in the rest of the body. It’s supposed to be in the digestive system.” So there’ll be attacks happening all over the body. So breastfeeding is imperative to the health of the human baby and we have to get back to understanding that the breasts are a part of our design. We’re designed to have these beautiful things. And like modern technology is, “Oh, there’s something wrong with the breast, boom, take it off like it doesn’t even matter.” Same thing with the uterus, “Oh, there’s a fibroid in the uterus, boom, take that uterus out” I mean, modern science, oh my gosh. I don’t know what the heck they were thinking. But they even have gone so far as to say, “Oh yeah, you could be fine without your uterus.” I think Angeline Jolie has also had her uterus taken out as well.

MELISSA: Right.

ANDREA: So women around the globe say when they get their uterus taken out that they lost, a desire for sex diminishes, or it becomes less. But in modern science, they say, “Well, no. There’s no connection. We should take that out, it’s not going to affect your sex life. You’re going to be fine.” Hello, on what planet? Our whole body is connected. The breasts, when you stimulate the breast for releasing feel good hormones, the whole body, we live in this beautiful, wonderful creation that is wonderfully pleasurable and exciting and we just like, not us, but in modern medicine, like, “Take the breasts off. Take the uterus out. Take the ovaries while you’re in there.” And I think that this is so damaging to women. And some doctors have even said, “Oh yeah, you’re still a woman without your uterus.” Well, of course, you’re still a woman, but now one of the things that’s missing is the pleasure of being a woman or the extreme pleasure that you could be having as a woman. So I think that we’ve been led astray. We’ve been led astray and they look at the physical body as this thing that can just be chopped into and cut off and ripped apart without looking at the deeper part of this physical body which is, “Wow, you’re inside a human body. What an amazing, physical, pleasurable experience.” And of course, it can be a painful experience as well. But I think we’ve completely gone astray and we just start ripping things out of the body. And the breasts, I mean, they look at the breasts like the breasts are, they’re not even useful. You’re beyond the time of breastfeeding, take those things off too. And I think that it’s unhealthy. I think it’s an unhealthy state of mind to be in, that we can just cut and slash and take things apart. What you were talking about the genes? Just because you have the gene, the BRCA, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to get breast cancer especially because if you look at the modern science, the newest science which has yet to make it to the front page of any newspaper, the newest science said your environment and what you eat and where you live all have an effect on what is actually going to happen inside your genes.

MELISSA: Right.

ANDREA: What’s going to turn that gene on? The negative gene or the positive gene, what’s going to turn it on?

MELISSA: Right, we have to say that we’re not geneticists but the current theory and also science that’s coming out from geneticists and from people that are studying this here and all around the world is that you may have these genes and they may express themselves, but it depends on your environment, on what’s happening with you, around you, where you are, all these things affect the expression of the gene and it may not turn on ever or it may turn on by something you’ve done. And again, we don’t know what happened with Angeline Jolie. We don’t know her background information there. But for someone facing something like that, like a lot of people said to me when I did my genetic testing, “Why would you want to know?” “Why would you want in case there’s something depressing in there, why would you want to know?” I’m like, “No, I want to know because I know ways I can help myself then.”

ANDREA: That’s empowering.

MELISSA: Yes. And I think the other point that you’ve talked about here is you want to be super careful when you start to cut into your body because again, you’re opening the door for inflammation and there’s no question, I mean, without surgery and without certain things that we could do in modern medicine today, a lot of people would be not with us anymore. And some things have to be removed or whatever. But we want to take a step back and say, “What are my alternatives here? What are my options that I can do?” Because again, that’s a tremendous blow to the body to have surgery going on, to have any kind of injury going on. And believe me, I’ve got plenty of injuries to draw from, so I know. And the recovery time, although I’ve done some amazing things to recover from different things that have happened to me, you have to look at it in terms of months and years maybe to recover your health after some serious injury, if ever. But there’s no question in my mind that definitely eating a different diet will help you enormously. And like I said, I got the blood results to show it. So I know that I reversed serious conditions just through changing my diet and not to crossfit, let’s put it that way. [Laughs]

ANDREA: That’s fantastic.

MELISSA: But again, I recommend people, you know, if they feel so inclined, that they definitely should look into genetics. And I think in the coming years in my opinion, it’s going to be one of the cutting edge places as where modern medicine is going to go, because that’s where I think the answers are to improving our health and is looking at the human genome being able to determine how to get the genes to express that aren’t because I think the body itself can probably resolve these cancer issues as you’ve seen in your own family, or reverse some of the damage that’s been done.

ANDREA: Yeah. You know, like when I think about the BRCA gene, right? And they say, “Well, if you have the gene,”—or some people say, right? The fear-monger will say, “Oh, if you have the gene, you got to get your breasts removed.” Really? Nobody in my mother’s family had breast cancer so where is the gene factor for her? Nobody. Right?

MELISSA: Yeah.

ANDREA: Not one single relative. Where was the gene factor in there?

MELISSA: That’s where the whole question that we talked about earlier is the environment and then that’s something that I’ve looked at very carefully for my own thyroid issues is we’ve been able to intersect an exposure, we think, to a toxic metal and then the diagnosis of the thyroid issue. And so, I’m super interested and I think that’s been overlooked in recent years is people’s environmental exposure to things, which they think are minor, which can be major in terms of your genes, in terms of like turning on a bad gene or turning on one part of a pair of genes to start causing something to happen inside.

ANDREA: Right.

MELISSA: So people, pay attention to what we said here. [Laughs] We’re giving out words of wisdom. But anyway, we’re almost out of time, Andrea. So I want to be sure people know where to find you. And we’ll put a link, like I said, to that blog post and also to the footnotes and stuff you have there because it sends people around to some of the National Health Journal articles about what we’ve talked about. And it’s definitely a topic people should read a little bit up on so that they know instead of reading the tabloid pages.

ANDREA: [Laughs] Right. Fear-mongers.

MELISSA: Right. Where can people find you online and around the Interwebs?

ANDREA: Ah, the Interwebs. They could go to www.andreabeaman.com. And they could find me there. You could find me on Facebook as well. But generally, like if you go to my website, you’ll have—there’s a whole bunch of information about different various blogs and I have recipes, so that’s everything’s there for you guys to check out. I also do lots of free webinars. I really love to inform people. Remember earlier we’re talking about thyroid and speaking truth, right?

MELISSA: Right.

ANDREA: So I really like to share knowledge with people. I love it. I love when people have another option besides the one or two that they’ve been given for the past how many years. Take it out, whip it out, cut it out.

MELISSA: Yeah.

ANDREA: I like to share with people another option. So they could find me on my website and they’ll see a whole bunch of information there that can help them.

MELISSA: Great. And like I said, Andrea has a lot of articles there and a lot of interaction between her people that come to her blog and stuff. So you’ll see there’s quite a bit of good reading material there and also references for people to check out to find out more. It’s always nice to go to a place where there’s footnotes, some references, because then you can even click around. And so as I said, inform yourself and add a little bit on to your education so that when you do go to see your family practitioner, you’ll be able to be a bit more prepared and armed to ask some more questions.

ANDREA: Yeah, that’s great. Knowledge is power.

MELISSA: That’s true. [Laughs]

ANDREA: [Laughs]

MELISSA: Okay, Andrea. Thanks so much and we’re looking forward to have you come back on the show down the road.

ANDREA: Thanks, Melissa.