Podcast: Unveiling the Modern Famine with Dr. Kathy Campbell

Transcription of Podcast

Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to Fit and Fabulous with me, Dr. Orlena. We have an amazing guest today. I'm super excited to welcome Dr. Kathy Campbell. Kathy, hello and welcome. Thank you. Glad to be here. Perfect. I am going to leave you to introduce yourself. So do you want to tell everybody what you do and why you're on the podcast?

Certainly. My name is Dr. Kathy Campbell. I am a clinical community pharmacist. I consider myself a wellness pharmacist, and I've been practicing in my community for 32 years in Owasso, Oklahoma. I've also had a long journey with my personal journey with weight. Long history. And so I'm actually help patients from a very different viewpoint on managing and, and finding an optimal health.

And I've got a new book coming out called Obesity, the Modern Famine, and that's a. That comes from my TED talk that I did several years ago. And I really assert that obesity is a function of what we don't have, not what we're eating too much of. So glad to be here. I want people to have great lives, and health is foundational to that.

And so I use all my skills, my pharmacy, my wellness center, to really support people in having great lives. Perfect. I love it. And I always say, I'm a doctor who helps people avoid going to the doctor. So we're obviously kindred spirits. So I'm intrigued by your book and I totally love the title, but I understand that most people will be going, what, what are you talking about?

But do you want to tell people like, why is obesity the modern famine? Well, I, you know, we've been kind of groomed to think that obesity is a personal failing of eating too much and exercising too little and I just don't see that. I actually think we live in a world that is completely lacking the critical things we need for our bodies to work right.

One of which is basic nutrition, some of its water, some of its movement. I've got several different famines in there. And when the body doesn't have what it needs, it finds a way to survive. And I actually see obesity as a symptom of that survival. And you know, we live just in a culture, especially in the West, that is completely devoid of the foundational chemistries and, and.

based in basic lifestyle that we need for our bodies to function well. And, you know, as a chemist, I had a lot of chemistry and basically we don't have what it takes for our bodies to work well. And so thus, you know, starting to disrupt that wrong thought about eat less and exercise more. The key is eating a heck of a lot of the right stuff.

And basically that's the micronutrients of plant and protein that our culture just does not make easy to find anymore. Yeah, no, and I totally love that. And I think, you know, I love that you've included movement in there as well. And I always think people have this idea that they have to go and walk their dogs.

And I'm like, what about yourself? Don't you have to walk yourself as well? And it's definitely been for me, like, I love movement now when I swim and I exercise, but it's definitely been something that came to me later on in life. Like I, when I was younger, I say I was. exercise resistant. And you know, it wasn't in my culture to, or in culture that I grew up in, we weren't taught to move to look after our body.

We were taught to play sports to win, not because it was part of our healthcare, essentially, which I think is really sad. I do think things are changing a little bit now. So I told I totally agree. And I actually tell patients, you know, what's interesting is you look at the research around blue zones.

What's common to people who live to be 100 is they across the board do not exercise. but they have lives that nudge them into movements. Our ancestors never, ever, ever, ever exercise. Exercise has been developed to compensate for the fact we don't have to use our bodies to live anymore. And so often there is more shame or Or individual blame if somebody doesn't exercise, but I think we need to shift the culture such that movement is just built back in and so that you say that because there's just too many weird psychological punishments around eating and around it.

movement. But the reason to move is to circulate oxygen, is to acquire and circulate oxygen. And if you circulate oxygen, then you have a chance of making critical energy molecules. And so the reason to move is to produce energy. Yeah, I always say people always say Oh, I'm too tired to exercise. And I'm like, no, wait, you've got it wrong.

Exercise is what gives you energy. I know that when I have, I love swimming. If I have been swimming, oh my goodness, I have so much energy that day. But if I have a day where I can't exercise, I'm like, well, number one, I'm super grumpy and number two, I just feel more tired. But yeah, you're absolutely right.

Let's change track a little bit. I'd love to know a little bit more about nutrition, because you talked, you mentioned them in passing, but I love this idea that obesity isn't really about eating too much. It's essentially about eating the wrong thing. So could you talk a little bit more about that? Well, if you look at the biochemistry like I do as a pharmacist, you know, we're designed, we're trained highly in impacting metabolic function, right?

That's what medications often are designed to do. But it started to occur to me that nobody had normal metabolic function. And so I started digging into how you actually have. Your body chemistry work and foundationally, it is through the nutrition and the biochemistry present in food. Now, our ancestors, primitive man, Neanderthals never had to worry about grabbing the wrong thing because when they were hungry, they grabbed the leaf or they grabbed the fish.

They grabbed things that were relatively easy to grab. And within those plants, had everything the biochemistry needed for our metabolism to work. Fast forward to today, when we have those same primitive drives, we grab things that have been stripped or manipulated for money, not for nutrition. And you have to look at a bigger idea around nutrition.

There's, they've identified 26, 000 different chemicals in food. Wow, that's amazing. Yes, it is amazing and it's very complex and they're very ephemeral. So this idea of having 150 vitamins, it just doesn't get close to what our body needs. So I always just try to encourage people to increase the variety and the volume.

of nature's bounty into their life. The problem is we have many cultures where those have been made very difficult to do. And it really started shifting around the time we went from hunting and gathering to agriculture. But in our lifetime, the processing of food has just been profound and from the 80s on, what humans foundationally are trained to eat isn't even food.

It's highly processed I call them food like substances. that totally lack the necessary biochemistry and the quantities we need for our metabolisms and our brains and our organs to fully work well. Yes. Yes. And it's very sad. And I think even You know, I love your analogy of, you know, cavemen snacking on food rather than just getting a quick packet of what I would call crisps.

And I presume you call potato chips or something, but yeah, totally. And, but even less processed food like pasta, for example, I remember having a conversation with someone and they said. Pasta's not processed, and I'm like, wait a minute, I've never seen a pasta tree. Like, even in our minds, we, there's that line where it's just normal.

And I know for me growing up having, you know, we used to eat breakfast cereal and bread and pasta and having that sort of epiphany of like, oh my goodness, this isn't actually how we're supposed to eat. This is just how I've grown up eating. It's a really difficult thing because you're inside that box and it's your normality.

And it's what we've always done. So how do we change this? How do we get to healthy, what I call healthy, amazing you, how do we change the way we eat? Well, I think awareness is first. And that's one of the reasons I wrote the book. I mean, the book is written for people to make very little small, impactful changes, awareness and understanding first comes and then.

things like just adding more, you know, look for more plant. Can you put parsley in your soup? Just adding and increasing the density of these nutrients in what you are eating. And then the other thing you mentioned, pasta. I love that. I mean, There's a very different impact from you making pasta and processing it yourself called cooking versus a machine that's already done that.

And you trust somebody else to do that. The problem is when somebody else does that. They're not doing it for nutrition. They're doing it for profitability. And so when you are, if you are going to eat processed food, I kind of have a rule that you need to be involved in the processing and that may be cooking.

That may be, I mean, I love the concept and the, the, the process of, of Making pasta. I mean, there's you can watch 100 year old grandmothers making pasta and they're 100 years old eating pasta their whole life. Why? What's the variable? Well, I think a lot of it is they did it and they were responsible for what went into what they consumed.

And those ingredients were often. From the garden that they grew. And so I think those are a couple things. One, just be aware, start auditing what is actually going in, and then start looking at our function. How well are you functioning? And we have to start correlating that food is part of that. We've kind of been led, especially where I am in the medical field and you are, we've been led to think that disease just happens.

And the reality is we know that some of these foundational micronutrient deficiencies are completely correlate to low function, which is often then diagnosed as a disease. I'm sure you see this a lot. You know, I, I tell people, I don't want you to need medication. I'm the expert with medications, and I'm not saying that they can't be very valuable, but it's so much better if we just don't need them.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And I totally agree with you, and I'm all for eating lots of vegetables, and I always talk about who's wearing the cabbage crown this week, but I do think there is, there are sort of like, we can take it a step further and say, but the way that things are farmed now means that there aren't as many nutrients, and The fruits and vegetables have all been, you know, selectively picked so that they are sweeter and have less fiber.

So it's not, even if you want to eat healthy, which obviously you can, but it's not as healthy as our ancestors would have eaten a few hundred years ago, depending, I put a side note, depending on where they lived, obviously. Right. Well, and you are correct there, but I still think given that 26, 000 unique chemicals, we have to try.

I always tell my patients, we got to get the food as right as possible. That's the first step. And then as a pharmacist, I started really vetting any kind of supplementation. From a similar lens that I would compound medications or, or assist people with their medications. I've got to make sure these supplements aren't doing harm and are actually.

Well designed so that they will work. So I, I say we have to get the food right. There's just too much going on that we cannot supplement. And if you can grow it and enrich your, your own ability to increase that, I mean, yes. It's really easy to get a little overwhelmed with all the variables, but I always like do what you can, where you can, where you're at.

I love it. I love it. And talking about supplements, I totally agree with you on supplements. What is your line on supplements? Do you recommend them or do you recommend no supplements? I do recommend supplements, but I have vetted them over 30 years. So, I mean, the, the most expensive supplement you could take is the one that's not working you think is working or worse is causing harm.

So you, you really have to have a critical eye about what's in that bottle, what's in that capsule, and then how your body is actually able to utilize it. If you eat a great diet and you take a lot of supplements, but your gut doesn't work, you didn't need them. They didn't get where they needed to go. So we have to.

Be critical of this whole process. And that's where I'm a team member for my patients. I'm a partner in their health and they are actually the only them, they are the only system that is theirs. So what I know doesn't matter near as much as what the individual knows about their own unique machine.

And then we just support it and we journey to learn and to adapt and to navigate life based on their unique sailboat. Perfect. It sounds like your clients are very, very lucky to have you. Oh, I'm lucky to have them too. You know, it's a great life both ways. Thank you. Perfect. Perfect. And so tell us a little bit about where people can find you and about how to get hold of your book.

Sure. Probably the easiest way is through the internet and it's drkathysays. com. D R K A T H Y. S a y s dot com will, will get you close to me. My book is called obesity, the modern famine, and it is currently in pre sales with Amazon and all the other places you can find that. I'm really excited to share, you know, some, it's such an interesting thing to write a book.

Somebody said it's like thinking out loud. It's a, it's going to be very interesting once it goes out there. I really hope that it makes a difference for people living a healthy and wonderful life. Perfect. And when does it, when does it come out? Valentine's day. So it's a February 14th. Okay. Perfect.

Fabulous. Well, thank you so much for spending some time with us. Thank you so much. It's my privilege and I appreciate you very much.