Katie Wells: Supplements Vs Real Foods, How To Approach Prenatal Nutrition, And Pillars For Optimal Hormone Health (Part 2) | MMP #302

Katie is the founder of Wellness Mama, a health and wellness brand she started in 2006, as well as Mywellnesse, a popular personal health care line. As a mother of six children, she embarked on a personal health journey to address her own autoimmune condition, Hashimoto's, which she has successfully reversed. Through her blog, Katie shares her experiences and knowledge to help others take ownership of their health and find natural solutions to improve their well-being.

Key topics discussed:

- Hormone health and the modern environment's impact, building blocks like salt and cholesterol, adrenal health, stress and hormone production
- Hydration and salt intake, the benefits of salt in water, discussion on hydration powders and mineral supplements
- Prenatal nutrition, nourishing the mother, prioritizing protein and healthy fats, impact of maternal diet on placenta health
- Blood work and supplementation, availability and interpretation of lab tests, balancing real food with targeted supplementation
- Peptides and their potential benefits, oral and injectable peptides for gut health and injury recovery, caution against certain peptides for weight loss

Timestamps:

(00:00) Optimal Hormone Health and Nutrition
(06:14) Nutrition, Salt, and Pregnancy Importance
(11:39) Discussion on Nutrition, Labs, and Supplementation
(15:37) Benefits of Supplements and Peptides
(26:28) Gratitude for Inspiring Food Change


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Part 2

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[00:00:00] Should we hit it? Let's do it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

What have you learned being the mother of 6 children? Just the importance of. eating and the foods that you incorporate into your diet as you're preparing for pregnancy? Oh, that's a great question too.

I think the prenatal part is such an important question as well, especially when we're staring at statistics, like people saying by 2050 there, the fertility rate might be zero.

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one of the things that you mentioned, um, was the hormone health and. We're really experiencing this insane phenomenon in the U. S. and all across the world where hormone health really seems like it's under attack. And, um, whether it's just systematically, we've shifted more towards processed foods and away from real foods, whatever the cause that people want to prescribe to why we're here, we are here.

And a lot of [00:01:00] people are struggling with hormone health. So I'm, you know, Curious. Do you have any, um, opinions on how we've gotten to this place and how you would fix it, how you would address some of these hormone problems? Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And like I said, this is what I was a slow learner on. So I had many years of not having optimal hormone function.

Um, I think for one, our modern environment as a whole does not set us up for optimal hormone health and you can certainly use the extreme measures. They actually have done studies on this. There's one called the camping study where they took people outside for, there was, durations, but three to seven days.

And they had no exposure to artificial light. And their hormones entirely shifted in the span of just that amount of time. Now, I realize most of us are not going to go camp for seven days straight with no artificial light, but that tells us something valuable about how to set up our environment to be more circadian friendly.

And I know we already talked about that part quite a bit. So I think, um, I don't really need to build on that, but get the light part right, because that makes a huge difference. You may not [00:02:00] understand it until you feel it, but at least give it a try and you'll feel the difference even if you don't cognitively understand it.

But I think beyond that, we just simply aren't getting the basic building blocks that we need to actually create hormones, because we've been told salt's bad. We've been told cholesterol's bad. We've been told the sun is bad. We've been told all these things. And so we're literally just not giving ourselves the basic building blocks.

So part of it is simply like the micronutrient thing we talked about, shifting into really eating in a way that gives us the nutrients we need to build the hormones. But I think there's also another component, which is our body has sort of two pathways. We will often Use those building blocks to make either stress hormones or sex hormones.

And we all know like if in a fight or flight situation, this is well talked about the sex hormones are the first to go because if you're running from the metaphorical tiger, you don't need to make a baby. But our modern environments communicate to our neurology and our biology that we're constantly being chased by a tiger.

Our modern, our brains haven't adapted to the modern environment to know. So [00:03:00] that when we watch the news and we see a war across an ocean, that it's not actually happening to us. So often it's just that our, all of our resources are being used to create stress hormones and not sex hormones. So that's the conversation about shifting away into a less stressful lifestyle in whatever way that is for you.

Whether it's going on a media fast and avoiding the news for a while, whether that's building in a meditation practice or just making note of your nervous system. And taking steps to be able to downshift into parasympathetic, where you can create the proper hormones. I think there's also an adrenal, adrenal component here, because when we're creating stress hormones and cortisol, and especially if that's out of balance like it is for many people, the adrenals are just working harder.

And that whole process is also quite mineral dependent. So for a lot of women, magnesium ends up being a really helpful building block in that process. But even simpler than that, we often are not getting enough simple salt and basic minerals in our diet or in our water supply for those processes to happen correctly.

[00:04:00] So, a tip that I give that's almost free because it's so inexpensive. Is I will drink usually about three water bottles per day with a teaspoon of salt added to each one and granted. I live in a hot climate. I exercise a lot and I sauna. So most people may not need quite that much salt, but just getting pure basic sodium chloride can make a huge difference in that hormone production and also in your energy level.

Uh, and there's a whole science to this as well with there's a book called the body electric Which explains a lot of the electrical components within the body, but we sort of run on voltage gated ion channels. And things like our sodium potassium pump in the cell regulates a lot of the energy function of the cell.

So if we're not getting those basic building blocks, we're often going to have an energy deficiency simply because there's not enough electrical communication in that cell. And adding salt in is supportive of the adrenals and also of that electrical process in the body. A lot of people also find that helps with their digestion and their gut health and their sleep pretty tremendously.

But that's a simple one that's almost free that we're just sort of [00:05:00] missing. In the modern world, and so that's why I also encourage people try that, especially if you have hormone issues. Just add some salt to your water, get some sunlight, and then focus on the micronutrients you need to actually build the hormones.

Very, just very basic, just doing these things. Well, compounded over time. We'll have amazing results and success for you. I'm curious. Do you like any hydration powders out there? Do you just like to keep it simple and just do the teaspoon of salt per bottle of water that you drink a day? There are some great ones out there.

Now, um, what I do is usually kind of a mix personally. Like I love element and my kids especially love that one. Cause it tastes better. So for athletes and kids, that's easier. Um, I know there's different camps on the mineral side. I do a combination. So I do the saltwater plain. I do element, which also has magnesium and potassium that are important.

And then I also have been experimenting with plant minerals, which are sort of humic and fulvic minerals, and those enter the cell in a different way. So, um, there's a lot of potential evidence that that could have sort of like a flushing detoxifying effect to help move stuff out of the cell that [00:06:00] doesn't need to be there.

Um, I find I feel best on a hybrid. I know it can get a little polarizing and you have the salt only camps and you have the like trace minerals only camps and you have the plant mineral only camps. And I think it's a both and not an either or, um, another random note that might be relevant to some people listening is a lot of people in the modern world we know have issues with stomach acid and proper digestion.

And a lot of people end up supplementing HCL to help their digestion. A lot of this sometimes can be caused by not having enough available chloride in the body. So when we're getting that salt, you're getting sodium and chloride and that extra chloride, once the body's replenished, can be used to create better stomach acid.

So I've personally heard from a lot of people in my own life when they started doing the salt and they had chronic constipation for years. That that resolved because they were now making enough stomach acid simply from just having those building blocks available. It's so interesting. I found that, especially on a low carb diet, you learn pretty quickly that you need salt and that salt plays [00:07:00] a massive role in being able to retain water and where salt goes, water flows.

And, um, I just think it's one of those aspects of satiety that people just in general, if you're following a standard American diet, you're not, you're probably not thinking about salt correctly. You have a adverse relationship with salt, but then, you know, once you start to tinker with the diet a little bit, maybe go a little bit more low carb, you start to appreciate the importance of having that.

That's all because it can make or break the way you're feeling day to day, uh, as you transition from a standard American diet to a low carb diet or a carnivore diet. Um, 1 of the things I was curious about Katie is just going from the hormone health conversation to more of like a prenatal nutrition, uh, conversation.

Like, what have you learned being the mother of 6 children? Just the importance of. eating and the foods that you incorporate into your diet as you're preparing for pregnancy? Oh, that's a great question too. And just briefly to touch on [00:08:00] something else you just said, I think you're right. This, the salt component becomes especially important if a person is in a state of ketosis, which I do think is very valuable.

And even if someone like, there's an argument for women not living forever ketosis, or at least cycling it for hormones. But I do think it's a really valuable, like nutritional and physiological state to. kind of cycle in and out of because when you are in ketosis, the body is more readily available using the things it already has.

So that's why it's so effective for things like releasing excess fat, for instance, and on the energy conversation for anybody with autoimmune disease, when you can actually shift into ketosis. So not just eating low carb and thinking you're in ketosis, but when you're actually in ketosis, you are then running, as we know, on ketones instead of glucose for fuel, which is metabolically really helpful to a lot of people who have done metabolic damage.

Okay. But a side effect of that is you're creating acetoacetic acid in the body. And as a downstream effect of that, you're getting beta hydroxybutyrate, which is great for your brain and often gives you a huge burst of [00:09:00] energy. And so I feel like cycling that can be really helpful as well as just using that as a tool to break down the things we've accumulated in our bodies from years of not having a cleanup phase and just having a building phase by eating constantly all the things we talked about earlier.

Um, I think the prenatal part is such an important question as well, especially when we're staring at statistics, like people saying by 2050 there, the fertility rate might be zero, like we're, this isn't a very widespread problem. Um, and it's really fascinating with pregnancy because I don't know how accurate the statistic is, but it's still circulates a lot that the maximum increase in metabolic metabolic demand that the human body can tolerate is about 2.

6. times your BMR. So what you would burn at rest, the maximum you can take without breaking down is 2. 6 and that would be like ultramarathoners, people who are doing extreme levels of activity can often get close to that range. During pregnancy, you're constantly operating at about 2. 2. Because you're literally building [00:10:00] an entire human body from scratch.

And during pregnancy, the body will prioritize building a healthy baby. So it's going to take what it needs from your body. So unless you're extremely, extremely depleted, it's often not as much a conversation about the baby, not getting what they need as it is about the mom, not getting what she needs to thrive because the body is going to prioritize building that baby.

And having done that six times, I know you can get quite depleted from having. So many pregnancies or any pregnancies, and so the focus I think is for really nourishing the mom to make sure that she can make it through pregnancy and postpartum in as much of a nourished state as possible because of the metabolic demand on her body.

Um, a lot of midwives I feel like are ahead in this conversation, but So even before I understood all of this, I had midwives telling me, you have to eat enough protein when you're pregnant, because that actually, and the reasons that it supported me, it helps the baby as well, but it really supports the mom.

And it statistically reduces the risk of some of the bigger problems like proclampsia. And if you're prioritizing protein and [00:11:00] fats and not carbs, it reduces the chances of things like gestational diabetes. So I think everything we're talking about amplifies when it comes to prenatal nutrition. And that really is, if you were going to use kind of the bodybuilding phase, you're in a, a bulking phase, you are in a massive growth phase with pregnancy.

It's just going to your baby, not to you. And so I think if, if ever you're going to prioritize it, that's the time to do it. And I'm grateful, actually, I was pregnant so often through my healing journey, because I think we'll often do for our kids what we have trouble doing for ourselves. And I knew I needed to, you know, on protein and omegas and all those things during pregnancy.

So I prioritize them a lot more. That's great. When you're speaking, it makes me think back to the, um, the doc, that mini documentary that heart and soil created called nourished on YouTube. And, um, the most striking thing about that documentary, it went really viral on Twitter is there's a picture of. two different placentas.

One is from a mom that was plant based and it's like this very dull like pink color and then there's a [00:12:00] mom on the placenta of the mom that's on an animal based diet and it's very dark ruby rich color and this the comparison is so striking between the difference of like the mom that probably fueled with the right foods versus the mom that fueled and was maybe a little bit nutrient deficient and like.

your child is either benefiting or not based on the foods that you put into your system. And so that's obviously something that you've intimately experienced over the last, you know, 10 plus years of having children. So did you get to see that documentary at all? No, but I'm definitely going to check it out now.

I'll send you the YouTube video, but it was, people were so pissed. Cause I screenshotted the two different placentas and just posted it on Twitter. Um, but it seems like that color, that, that difference just based off of the food you're eating and the placenta color, it's, it's insane. Yeah. It's incredible.

I'll have to watch it. Yeah. What, um, what do you recommend in terms of blood work for people to just start to get in tune with some of these? biomarkers and understanding where your hormones are at and understanding [00:13:00] where you are at in terms of different nutrients and minerals that you need to be potentially supplementing with or foods you need to be focusing on.

Good question. Um, this is also an area, thankfully that has grown up a lot in the last 15 years. I know when I first started wanting to get those labs, It was not really available at all without a doctor. It was hard to even get the ones I wanted through a doctor. Um, even with a thyroid component, they would test only a couple markers and not the one, the other ones I wanted, like antibodies and say everything was normal.

And I think also that's important to realize anytime you're talking about labs, realize. A, they can change and you can improve them, like a lot of that is within your ability to improve. And B, the ranges that are defined as normal are simply the averages of people who get those lab tests. So that is not optimal.

And I think this is where, even if you're able to get the test, you want to be aware that just because something is in the range on the test, it may not be the range that you optimally want to be in, uh, or that if it's in the range, that doesn't necessarily mean something [00:14:00] is not going on in the body. And thankfully, there are now amazing doctors who To kind of take that holistic approach and are understanding those lab values in a much different way.

Um, there's a company I've been using called function health. That lets you get those labs really inexpensively on your own. And that also has, um, some great medical advisory board on staff to help interpret them, but also uses adaptive AI to. Give you recommendations based on your specific labs and any inputs you put in about your diet or your wearable data or whatever it may be.

And so I'm really excited to see companies like that, putting that information in our hands. I just feel like if you are really ill, maybe try some foundational thing before you go get the labs. If there's nothing acute. Like if you're not having an acute problem that requires immediate medical attention, maybe try to build that positive feedback loop a little bit first, because when you get labs that look really bad, it can be really disheartening and alarmist and put you in a stress state.

And so maybe try to build first and then get labs as a metric of [00:15:00] improvement and progress versus using it as a way to go looking for more problems. If, if there are things within your control that you can start shifting first. So yeah, after getting your labs done, Katie, do you have a perspective on just like supplementation in general versus real foods?

And the reason why I say that is it seems like there's two camps of people where it's kind of like the real food purists that say, Oh, you should be able to get everything you need in the form of real foods. And then there's kind of more of that biohacking community where they're spending like 10, 000 a month on supplements, which seems a little bit extreme.

But I think probably the middle is somewhere that blend between the two. And I feel like that's probably the camp that you fall into. Um, Are there any supplements that you've really benefited from taking that you kind of incorporate as part of your, your daily routine? Yes. And that's such a great point.

I feel like there are some polarized camps and I've seen the progression in the last decade, at least of even some that used to be very firmly food only like Chris Kresser, who has done a lot of amazing research. He now has said recently on my podcast, It's not possible to [00:16:00] get everything you need from food anymore.

You would have to eat so much. You would be in such a calorie surplus. It's truly not possible anymore. And so you're right, I think the balance is somewhere in the middle. And I do think this is an area of personalization where you're gonna You can take some blanket recommendations and then build through experimentation to what works best for you.

Um, also this is an area where I always like to preface by saying. Approach everything with curiosity, but question everything. Even me, especially me, any expert you encounter, don't take their blanket recommendation as truth, figure it out for yourself. So with that caveat, I'll say I noticed I feel a big difference when I really optimize minerals, because those are again, building blocks of hormones.

And so I do a lot of magnesium, but also trace minerals. Another one that was helpful for me was silica, which is also largely missing in the modern diet, but it's helpful. People think of taking calcium for their bones or collagen for their tendons, but silica is actually part of the matrix in which those things exist.

Cause bones, especially if you think [00:17:00] of just calcium. A piece of chalk is made of pure calcium and it's hard, but it's brittle. Silica is the matrix that that can attach to that allows it to have both its strength and its ability to function with movement. And so since I'm doing a lot of athletic stuff, I do a lot of silica to make sure that that matrix is strong and hopefully avoid any kind of injury.

Um, I also do supplement with some plant minerals as well, as well as methylated B vitamins, which for my genes are typically very helpful. And then for mental focus, I do several different forms of choline. So I do phosphatidylcholine. I do alpha GPC. Um, I've experimented with others as well. I find like a lot of those things are largely missing in the modern diet as well.

And then pretty much beyond that, I try to cycle everything. So I also don't think It makes sense biologically to take everything every single day. And so I either take the weekends off of supplementation or I'll cycle things in and out just to get the body what it needs, but not get it to a point of downshifting any endogenous production of things because it's always [00:18:00] getting what it needs from outside.

Have you gone down the peptide rabbit hole at all in terms of, uh, you know, some of the. The new advancements in terms of, uh, I would kind of consider it supplementation, but just a bit more specific. Um, have you gotten on that rabbit hole at all? Yes. And I think there's categories there as well. Cause I mean, peptides are simply chains of amino acids that are short.

So if you're eating a nutrient dense diet, you are getting some of those basic components pretty well. Um, I do supplement with oral aminos, which have a lot of those components in them, and I also. I am a proponent of creatine. I know that's can be a controversial one as well. Um, as far as injectable peptides, I've experimented with those some, especially in, um, like acute injury recovery when I've worked with athletes and in experimentation with myself and the data on some of them is pretty strong.

I know they're also in a kind of, um, Unknown point right now with FDA and availability to get them, but I've personally done both oral BPC, which has a lot [00:19:00] of evidence supportive of gut health, potentially, but I do know if you're taking BPC orally, it's mainly targeting your gut. And that one is also some functional doctors will give it in an injected format, which that can target tissue recovery and seemingly shorten the duration of injury recovery.

for a lot of people. And then there is a whole world beyond that. And I think we are just now starting to get into that. Um, I've experimented with some, my one caution with peptides and especially anything injectable is again, just the idea of, are you short circuiting the body's natural mechanisms or are you working with it?

I think if we're working within the body's natural mechanisms, they can be really profoundly helpful. And especially if you find someone who really knows what they're doing with peptides and can tailor them to you, they can have a really dramatic effect really quickly. Um, I'm more cautious with, I know there's a trend right now, and this will be controversial to even bring up, but with things like semi glutide, because I feel like that is one that is potentially, uh, bypassing the body's natural mechanism, and that it does have [00:20:00] potentially a downline cost.

So we're seeing a widespread societal experiment with people dropping tons of weight from Osympic, but the statistics I'm seeing is as much as 30 percent of that can be muscle. And we know that muscle is the organ of longevity and that the more lean muscle mass you have, in general, the less risk of all cause mortality and the better that you age.

And so to me, if we're using a peptide to bypass the body's natural Mechanisms that is also potentially leading to muscle loss, things like that we would want to evaluate very carefully. Yeah, the conversation around Ozempic is one that I've been following, and, um, it, it really, like, people like Callie Means, I think, have done a good job of pushing back, and there's a lot of really strong and compelling information, much of what you just said around the fact that it's not necessarily just fat loss, it's actually muscle loss as well.

Which for anyone who follows Peter Atiyah's work or all these, all these longevity experts, they talk about muscle being a core [00:21:00] component of longevity and aging properly. So to me, there's definitely red flags around just the broad acceptance of Ozempic. And then it's also like, for me, quite concerning.

Like a company like Weight Watchers is now shifting their entire model Away from, you know, tracking foods and journaling and recommending like real Whole Foods diets to, uh, find weight loss solutions to now pushing Ozempic. Like that's a big shift in the philosophy around weight loss. Yeah, absolutely.

And I think it is a huge social experiment that we're going to see how it plays out in, in 10 years. And I hope for all the people trying it that it turns out well. Um, but it just seems like the body has those mechanisms in place already. So if it's possible, and if you're not in such an extreme situation where that's medically recommended, why not try to make use of the body's natural process that does the same thing first before you would jump into something that might deplete your muscle [00:22:00] mass.

I don't know a single example of bypassing the body's natural mechanisms ever working. I don't know, but I will, I will tell you BPC one 57 is pretty incredible. I had, I've never had a super severe flare up since I got healed from ulcerative colitis, but I did have a mini flare last summer and I got my blood work done through a blokes, which is a male hormone and telemedicine company.

And the doctor got me on BPC one 57. And I will say, you know, I, I did have some bleeding and I took blokes for about a week and within seven days, my bleeding stopped and I was able to get out of that flare. Obviously I was also like strict carnivore, bone broth, eight hours of sleep. I was doing a lot of other of these modalities, but.

Um, it works super, super well for me. So it's going to be exciting to see if these things get more accepted with patients with autoimmune diseases or gut issues, how is that going to be able to be, um, additive and help get patients in a remission potentially faster than what they're currently experiencing, or maybe exposing them to a world where they don't have to just get hopped up [00:23:00] on prednisone and some of these like damaging steroids that a lot of people are getting on that when they get sick.

Yeah, such a good point. And BPC has a pretty awesome safety profile as well. And that's one like you, I hope that we see more use of, um, I feel like for a lot of the other ones, at least start with the physiological ability to do those things yourself first and see how that works, um, experiment with cycling in and out of ketosis and getting your hormones in the correct range and see if you feel substantially better just from that, before you bypass those mechanisms.

That's awesome. Katie, is there anything that you're working on right now that has you excited or that you would like our audience to, to hear a little bit more about? My large focus is primarily my podcast right now as well, just cause I get to talk to such incredible experts and I feel like bringing all those voices to the conversation that again, listen to them with, uh, A critical ear and with curiosity and take what benefits you and leave what doesn't.

Um, it's just a side project. I'm building out an in person wellness space where I live, which I'm really excited about. It'll [00:24:00] have a lot of the biohacking components. And then hopefully this year, I'll finish up a few books that touch on a lot of these things because I get so many questions now about.

The Hashimoto side and about the mindset side. And so I'm trying to unite those in one place, but, um, in general, I would just love to see people on the podcast and to hear from people there. And that's kind of my primary wellness mama focus. Amazing. That's awesome. That's so cool about the in person space too.

We've been thinking more about this. I think the goal is to make, make, make, make money, build a business online, and then take that money and actually invest in local communities and spaces. And I think that's really how we scale this thing. Like anytime we've ever done something in person, just the connection you build, it's just irreplaceable.

So it's so cool to hear that you're going to be doing that in Florida as well. Well, and that's something we didn't even get to delve into in this conversation, but I also have this saying that humans are nutrients. And I think a lot of us are human deficient, community deficient, especially after the last few years.

And so it felt really important to me to build a place where in person community could happen. And I think that's [00:25:00] also a component. I know it's his own whole conversation, but, um, Of blue zones, because when you actually isolate the data, a lot of the claims made about blue zones and what they do that leads to their longevity are not true.

And then there's some funny ones, like a nicotine connection that might be related to longevity, but what they do all have is community. And we don't have that as much in the modern world. Well, like a lot of us may be sauna, but we don't sauna together, or a lot of us eat healthy, but we're not eating with other people that we love all the time.

And so I think when there's a chance to build. community into your into your life and people with that you're in proximity with that actually is very health supporting and often overlooked as well. Um, so I just love to always mention that humans are nutrients too. I love that. Yeah, it really touches on this spiritual component that we we touch on a bit with the show is that, you know, you can't really replace that human connection and just like the feeling of interconnectedness and good conversation and support that I think we naturally provide for each other like we can either be sources of stress or sources of [00:26:00] reducing stress.

And I think when you're doing that stuff around food and Uh, these like healthy habits is usually, um, a source of reducing stress and, um, you know, having those memories that are really worthwhile. So maybe next time we have you on the show, we'll have to do a part two just on humans or nutrients. I love that concept.

Oh, I would love that. We'll get some nutrients in when you come to Austin in early March, hopefully, right? I can't wait. Um, but no, we, we appreciate it so much. We're so grateful that we got to meet you. And like I mentioned, you know, we've been fans of your stuff for a really long time and just very grateful that there are people out like you out there that are really promoting the content that people need to hear and giving people.

Inspiration and hope that they can heal and we can really fix the direction of the food system. So just so appreciative of you taking the time to do this and just appreciative for everything that you do. Well, thank you so much for having me and like I said I'm a huge fan of noble because my kids love it and it's a super micronutrient dense food That's easy to [00:27:00] get in.

So I love the work you guys are doing as well and love your podcast as well Thanks for having me. Thanks so much katie