Be Organic Podcast Season 3, Episode 6 – An Ear For Parents, A Voice For Kids – Managing Inflammation

Chronic illness in children is on the rise, and many moms have had to take their child from doctor to doctor trying to get to the root of an illness. In today’s episode, Kat sits down with Dr. Sheila Kilbane to discuss how integrative medicine and nutrition changes can help with these illnesses, especially for children.

Listen to learn about 5 main triggers of inflammation, how processed foods and environmental toxins increase inflammation, how to heal and protect the gut, and more. Kat and Dr. Kilbane also dive into the world of supplementing and how to monitor your children for symptoms so that you can catch inflammation problems early on.

TIME STAMPS
1:35 Why Chronic Illnesses Is On The Rise In Children (jump to section)
4:12 Processed Food Builds Up Generationally (jump to section)
6:01 How To Manage Inflammation as it Relates to Pediatric Health (jump to section)
9:52 Kat’s Child’s Experience with Toxin Injuries (jump to section)
10:52 Early Signs of Inflammation to Look Out For (jump to section)
12:43 Leaky Gut (jump to section)
15:51 Allergies and Asthma as an Inflammation Response (jump to section)
19:21 It’s More Than Just Food: Environmental Toxins (jump to section)
22:36 Supplements (jump to section)

Transcription Below

 Kat Eckles: Dr. Sheila Kilbane MD is a board-certified pediatrician who trained in integrative medicine with Andrew Wheel MD and is a bestselling author. She uses the best of conventional and integrative medicine to identify and treat the root cause of children’s illnesses. Her goal is to help children reach optimal health so they can thrive. Using her seven-step process along with natural and nutritional therapies, Dr. Kilbane helps significantly improve or resolve altogether childhood illnesses such as colic, reflux, eczema, recurrent ear and sinus infections, asthma allergies, constipation, loose stools, and other GI issues such as abdominal pain. 

In addition to seeing individual patients at her private practice in Charlotte, North Carolina, Dr. Kilbane gives educational lectures to parents and healthcare professionals around the globe and offers online education courses. Wow. You’re doing awesome things, and we’re so thankful to be able to have such a powerful force on our podcast today, and right here in our backyard, Charlotte. Thank you so much, Dr. Kilbane. We’re so excited to have you. 

Dr. Sheila: Oh, thank you, Kat. I am super excited to be here and the work that you all are doing is amazing. Thank you for all that you are doing. 

Kat: Aw, we appreciate that. Well, I have five kids, so I know all about all these things: colic, reflux, eczema, ear and sinus infections. Of course, being in the natural world, I know a lot about the great ways that integrative and traditional medicine can work together to solve these. I’m really excited to dive in here.

Dr. Sheila: Yes, me too. 

Why Chronic Illnesses Is On The Rise In Children

Kat: Sadly, chronic illness in children is on the rise. I think they say up to 50% of kids currently have chronic illnesses. Many more have had to take their child from doctor to doctor trying to figure out what’s going on or what’s the root because of some of these illnesses. What are some of the things that you’re seeing? What responds really well to integrative medicine and nutrition changes?

Dr. Sheila: Yeah, chronic illness is definitely on the rise, and we could talk for hours on the why, but what I think is happening is we’re giving our kids a lot of things that aren’t really food. We have a lot of things in packages, and we have a lot more toxins and environmental exposures that we’re getting more than ever before. Herbicides and pesticides are a very big component of commercial farming. We’re literally spraying these plants, the plants absorb these herbicides, and that can change what’s happening with our gut. 

I know you have a very educated audience, but we have our gut. Our GI tract is teaming with bacteria, and when we’re putting things in, it’s the soil of the earth and we need to be eating fiber, plants, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds. That is going to feed that good, healthy bacteria. What’s happening instead is that we have a lot of processed packaged foods that don’t have much fiber. They don’t have those nutrients that real food has. 

We’re not feeding the bacteria what they need, and then we’re adding these foods that are doing further harm to the bacteria and to the lining of our gut. Then, we’re not able to digest and absorb our nutrients effectively and efficiently. It’s kind of a downstream effect, but what I affectionately call overfed and undernourished. That just leads to the illnesses that you talked about, that are really the ones that respond well to integrative medicine and to nutrition changes.

There’s an underlying inflammatory component that we can talk about. Does that make sense? It’s because people always want to know, why is this happening? Why is this happening with my kids?

Processed Food Builds Up Generationally

Kat: Yes. I think this generation of kids, probably even more than my generation and certainly my parents’ generation, from the get-go and during pregnancy, their parents have been fed all these processed foods. It’s like a buildup. I think that’s why we’re seeing it younger and younger because I know a lot of people argue that “I wasn’t eating organic food and my parents weren’t.” You almost didn’t have to as much back then. 

Right now, this generation has been bombarded with Chick-fil-A three times a day. I have teenagers in my house all the time, I’m like, “Stop eating cookout and Chick-fil-A for your four meals a day.” That never happened in even my time. I just think that it’s more and more of the processed food coming in, which is really the problem.

Dr. Sheila: Yeah, a hundred percent. That’s what we talk about often, and we will say that we are now having the first babies of moms born where high fructose corn syrup was in the picture. Roundup, which is the herbicide that’s used in commercial farming is used, and a lot of people have it just around their house. Exactly. I agree a hundred percent. I just think that we’re changing what we’re putting in our bodies, but we’ve also changed the diversity of the bacteria in our gut. 

Kat: Yes. In your book, Healthy Kids, Happy Moms: 7 Steps to Heal and Prevent Common Childhood Illnesses, you outline the triggers of inflammation, and I know you just mentioned the concept of inflammation and illness. Can we get into this a little bit more and explain how that inflammation relates to pediatric health? 

How To Manage Inflammation as it Relates to Pediatric Health

Dr. Sheila: Yeah, so I explain inflammation the same way I would explain a sprained ankle. So, what is inflammation? Say you sprain your ankle, it blows up like a grapefruit, and the body is sending a bunch of white blood cells to that area in order to heal the damaged tissue. That’s what we need, inflammation to a certain extent. What’s happened is we have a lot more inflammation, a lot of it from the food that we’re eating and things we’re being exposed to than we ever used to have. If we have a lot of inflammation, that is going to lead to symptoms. 

If you think about a cup of water overflowing, the overflowing is the symptoms. The runny nose, eczema, reflux, allergies, asthma, constipation, or loose stools. If we look at what the triggers of inflammation are, there are five main triggers of inflammation: It’s food, environmental allergies, environmental toxins, infectious diseases, and stress. Stress can be physical and emotional. Those all equally weigh into our inflammation, and it’s the way that those things interact with our genetics. We all have our certain genetic makeup. It’s the way that we interact with all of these things. 

I’ll use allergies as an example. Say your child has allergies to tree pollen and they have really bad allergies in the springtime. If we look at them and say, “Johnny also has some bumps on the back of his arms, he’s got some dark circles under his eyes, and maybe a little bit of constipation. Well, maybe he’s got a dairy sensitivity.” If we pull dairy out of his diet because we know we can’t dig up all the trees, we decrease this cup of inflammation to where it’s maybe only a fourth or a half cup full. In the springtime, when we get that seasonal variation and the tree pollens come out, his glass may go to where it’s three-fourths full, but it may not get to overflowing. He may have fewer allergy symptoms during that time of year because we’re controlling his inflammation better. 

We do need inflammation to a certain extent. If you cut your finger, you need cells to go to that area to stop the bleeding. We need it to a certain extent, but what’s happened, and you can see it on somebody’s face, especially in the US with people who look kind of puffy. All those symptoms, that list of things, you can see in people, including being overweight. If we really work to decrease that systemic inflammation, then our bodies start to function better. Our immune systems start to function effectively and efficiently, and we start to break down and absorb the nutrients from our food more effectively and efficiently.

We get these lovely shifts in health. It’s just by being pragmatic and looking at what is right for your child and your family’s systems. That’s what I walk through in the book. I go step by step on how to do that. Does that make sense? 

Kat’s Child’s Experience with Toxin Injuries

Kat: Yeah, that totally makes sense, and that’s great. My youngest was really ill when he was younger. We’ll call it an environmental toxin issue, but he got really sick. It’s looking up to when he started displaying crazy symptoms, which were awful GI, fevers, et cetera, et cetera. I remember even early on, I was seeing really low temperatures, even rectal temperatures. They were 95 and 96 degrees, really that was concerning. That was the first sign of inflammation for me. Like you said, we could see some skin stuff and some slight GI stuff. Then it was confirmed when his symptoms got crazy and his set rate and his C-reactive protein were off the charts. What are some of those early signs of inflammation that parents could pick up on before it gets to the point where you’re seeing those crazy blood work numbers? 

Early Signs of Inflammation to Look Out For

Dr. Sheila: Yeah. Thank you for sharing that because that’s such a good example of how it just starts on gradually and then it snowballs. In conventional medicine, we call these signs of inflammation. We call it the allergy march. We just never learned it in terms of inflammation. The kids start off and they might be colicky, they might have a lot of gas, and reflux. Then we start to see things like eczema, we see bumps on the cheeks and on the back of the arms, mouth breathing, and snoring. They might start to get fatigued. Their little cheeks might be bright red. Then we can have that chronic runny nose, constipation or loose stools, and belly pain.

If we back up and say, “Okay, we’re getting some inflammation, and we don’t have defenses in the body.” One place is inflammation everywhere, and that’s where you start to see the neurologic-type things happening. When I say neurologic, I just mean things like mood swings and behavior meltdowns. If you have a child who has constipation, when they get to day three or four of not having a bowel movement, typically you’ll see their behavior shift. They’ll handle transitions poorly, they’ll have more meltdowns, and they might not sleep as well. That’s what I explain in the book, and we have all these great graphics that we created. 

Leaky Gut

There’s something called the leaky gut. I know many of your listeners would’ve heard of this, and literally we talk about it. The cells along the GI tract should have these nice tight junctions. They should be right next to one another, and that plays a big role in how our body is handling food if we start to have a lot of inflammation. If we’re eating a lot of artificial dyes, colors, sugars, and maybe foods that don’t work with our system (for some people that might be dairy or gluten), we get inflammation along our GI tract. The cells start to come apart, and then we start to absorb proteins and other particles from our food into our bloodstream that we shouldn’t necessarily be absorbing. That triggers that cascade of inflammation, and that’s where we start to see these skin changes. 

Sometimes the behavior changes and the GI changes, so we just have to work. We have to be super diligent about restoring good GI function because that is what will lead to the rest of the improvements. We joke in the practice that we focus on high school biology and we always talk about cellular health. We need good, healthy fats, and that’s what makes up our cell walls. If we’re talking about how we want a good, healthy GI tract, a good nervous system, and good skin, we need to have good, healthy individual cells. That’s also why nutrition is so important. Most people don’t realize that in medical school, at least when I trained, we got almost no nutrition training. Which is kind of crazy to even say that, right? We learn the extremes. If you have a significant vitamin C deficiency, you get scurvy, but we really didn’t learn how to actually eat. That’s the snowball effect when one thing goes wrong. That’s where integrative and functional medicine are really powerful because we study how everything is related.

In conventional medicine, we more so look at things. We have a GI doctor for the gut, we’ve got a pulmonologist to listen to for the lungs, and we’ve got a dermatologist for the skin. One of the reasons I went into integrative medicine is because I kept seeing kids, and they would do the rounds. They would go to dermatologists for their eczema, they’d go to a GI doctor for the constipation, an allergist for the chronic runny nose, and sometimes a pulmonologist for their asthma. When you look at the big picture of things, we can start to put the pieces of the puzzle and just gradually work to decrease that systemic inflammation.

It doesn’t always mean everything goes away perfectly, right? It just means that we get things under control, and when we need medications, absolutely we use them. That’s why I love integrative medicine. It’s because it’s combining the best of conventional and integrated for more natural therapies. It’s always about the blend, it’s about cellular health, and it’s about looking at all of the pieces of the puzzle. 

Allergies and Asthma as an Inflammation Response

Kat: Absolutely. I love that you mentioned allergies and asthma as an inflammation response because I think there are so many parents, myself included for a long time, that didn’t really understand that. You think it’s more of a condition or a windpipe issue, but those things can really be fixed by getting the inflammation down and some lifestyle changes.

Dr. Sheila: Yes. With asthma, that was one of the illnesses that early on I started to realize, because what was happening is, I would always listen to moms. I had one mom who said, “You know what, Dr. Kilbane? The baby had eczema and recurrent ear infections.” She said she was still breastfeeding. She said, “I took dairy out of my diet and his eczema improved. The ear infection started to lessen, but he was still getting them.” Then we figured out that eggs were also a trigger for this little boy’s eczema. We kept dairy and eggs out of his diet, and the eczema completely went away.

I started really early on doing more of cleaning up the diet, then removing dairy, and just seeing so many of these issues either melt away or improve significantly. Asthma was one of them. With asthma, eczema, and all these things, the kids have almost a hyperreactive immune system. They get exposed to whatever their trigger is, whether it’s a virus or an allergen. They get this big whoosh of white blood cells that goes to their lungs and tickles the little airways. 

Our lungs are like a bunch of tree branches, kind of an upside-down tree, and there’s muscle around each of the tree branches. You could think of it like a straw. These white blood cells go, they tickle the muscle around the straw, and then it constricts. Now we’re breathing out of a really thin coffee stirrer instead of a big, thick straw. 

What we do in conventional medicine is use steroids, and the pharmaceutical industry understands inflammation very well. Many of our medications are aimed at decreasing inflammation, right? With steroids, we have them inhaled, we squirt them in our nose, we give them iv, and we do them topically. 

In integrative medicine we say, “Okay, can we decrease the inflammation in other ways?” One little boy had a dust mite allergy. He was sleeping on a mattress that had been his uncle’s from when his uncle was in college. We threw away the mattress, took dairy out of his diet, and he was like a different kid. He wasn’t breathing out of his mouth anymore. He wasn’t needing to use albuterol any longer. If we decrease that inflammation internally, we often are less reliant on the medications. 

It’s More Than Just Food: Environmental Toxins

Kat: Yep. That makes so much sense. I think that’s actually a really good point I want to highlight too. I think in the wellness world, we over-focus on food, diet, and nutrition. Of course, that’s what I do, I fully believe in it. Those things like the dirty mattress and maybe some of the environmental toxins in the home, they’re so important and they’re so overlooked sometimes. I think it’s just because some people are unaware. 

I can’t tell you how many people I walk into their house, they have those Bath and Body Works or whatever fragrance things, and they’re saying that their kids are sick all the time. I’m like, “Let’s just get rid of those, and I bet you’ll see a 70% decrease in their symptoms.” Just because they’re constantly being hit with that fragrance. There are so many things like that: mold in the home, old mattresses, or fragrances. Just any little changes like that in the household. Things that have just as big, or maybe more of an effect on the body than food.

Dr. Sheila: For sure. Shortly out of residency, I saw one of the worst cases of eczema that I’d ever seen. At that point in time, I was not clued into all of these things. Luckily they saw a really wonderful dermatologist who figured out it was the Glade plug-ins the mom was using. We have to think about it. If you go into your bathroom, you can see the colorful fragrant array that most people have in their bathrooms. That’s down the line. 

We start with the main things, because I always say to families, “If I told you everything I wanted you to do right now, you would run screaming out the door.” We have to start with one place and do one thing at a time. Usually, in the later stages, we start to talk about cleaning products, beauty products, what are we using as our deodorant, and all that kind of stuff. That’s where the book is really helpful for parents, is that I give you step-by-step instructions. 

Even with the food, we’re just going to start with the mini cleanse for kids. The first thing we do is just decrease the sugar drinks. If they’re doing sodas, a lot of straight-up fruit juices (not the kind of juice that you would get in your store, but if you’re getting it from the grocery store), and juice from concentrate, one cup of juice like that has about as much sugar as a cup of soda. The amount of sugar that’s in two sodas, which would be about a hundred grams, suppresses the immune system for up to five hours. Just by decreasing the sugar, it’s like taking a boot off of the immune system. Deb, our integrated pharmacist in our practice, I love how she describes it like that. 

Supplements

Kat: I love that. That’s so good. Before we wrap up here, let’s talk about supplements real quick, because I call myself the supplement queen. I have every supplement known to man in my huge cabinet at home. I would love to hear about your approach to supplementation in kids, if there are any generic ones that you recommend or you don’t recommend at all, and just how you go about supplementing with children. 

Dr. Sheila: Yes. The first thing I say is until you know exactly what you’re going to do with supplements, I don’t recommend using them because supplements are definitely not all created equally. You can get a lot of junk in supplements, especially for kids, because in order to make them colorful and to make them tasty, they often will add a lot of things in them. That is the first thing, but the second thing is I definitely use supplements in the practice and the focus is on digestion. 

I have a very specific way that we do it that I outline in the book. We start them one at a time for about five to seven days before starting the next one. The first thing that we do is a probiotic. I made a list, and your listeners are welcome. I wrote a supplement guide. If you go to sheilakilbane.com/supplementguide, it gives the list of everything. I go through the brands and the dosing. 

We start with the probiotic, and we actually do it at the start of breakfast and dinner. The goal is to support that digestion and to keep the inflammation at a minimum during the meal. Then we do a digestive enzyme at the start of breakfast and dinner, and then we go on to add the other ones in. 

I talk about omega-3 fats, which we get from things like salmon, chia seed, flaxseed, hemp seed, a little bit of blueberries, and walnuts. Those are foods that a lot of kids are not eating regularly. If we’re not eating enough, then we would do an omega-3 fat, which you can do a fish oil or you can do it in a more vegetarian-based one. I will do Vitamin D in the wintertime only. Then, I use either whole food supplements or a multivitamin-mineral.

Again, I created the download handout so that when I’m doing talks or anything, people don’t have to worry about madly writing down the dosing, brands, and all that kind of thing, but that’s how I do it. Once the kids are in balance, we can shift the supplements a little bit. I have it right in the book. I have the supplement roadmap. Typically, even if you’re pretty healthy eaters, I do recommend a minimal number of supplements because the reality is kids are not eating. The stats are quite shocking. Over 90% of kids don’t eat an adequate amount of vegetables per day, and I think it’s about 65% don’t eat the number of fruits that they need in a day.

Kat: It’s crazy.

Dr. Sheila: Right? We have just gotten onto this path of eating carbs, right? It’s the easy stuff, right? Especially if you have a picky eater, that’s what they’re going to want to eat. 

Kat: Well, awesome, Dr. Kilbane. This was a blessing to be able to talk to you. Like I said, over the years, I’ve just heard your name mentioned many times in many of my circles. I just feel grateful that you gave me some of your time today in between patients. Before you run off to help someone else like you always do, I would love for you just to tell us where we can find you, your Instagram, your website, your book again, and any other information you have where people can find your knowledge.

Dr. Sheila: Yes, and thank you. I so appreciate your sharing all this information and all the work you do to get this information out. My website is sheilakilbane.com. If you go to sheilakilbane.com/book, we’ve got a lot of great free downloads that are adjuncts for the book. If there are any practitioners listening, we’re going to put a link up on the website that you can order the book in bulk if you want to give it out or sell it to families. We’ve had a lot of physicians reach out and say how much they liked the book. We have one ENT surgeon who was ordering a hundred of them so that she could give them out to her patients.

Anyway, so there’s that and then Instagram and Facebook are @SheilaKilbaneMD. Our companion online course to the book will be out probably in the next three to six weeks. We have a closed Facebook group, Dr. Kilbane’s Healthy Kids, Happy Mom’s Book Club. That’s where you can go, get support, share wins, and things like that.

Kat: I love that. That’s awesome. Well, like I said, thank you again for your time. It was very appreciated. I can’t wait for our listeners to catch up with all the stuff and all you’re doing. I know you’re going to help a lot of moms with this, and I’m just grateful for all you do. Thanks again. 

Dr. Sheila: Oh, thank you, Kat.

Kat: Thank you so much for tuning in today to Be Organic. We’re so excited for you to become healthier in body and stronger in spirit. 

Landon Eckles: So if you like what you heard today, please be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts to never miss an episode. 

Kat: We’d love to connect with you over on Clean Juice’s Instagram. Give us a follow, and slide into our DMs with any suggestions for guests or topics that you might want to hear more about. 

Landon: All right, y’all. Thanks for listening. Have a great week and remember to be organic.

Kat: Just a quick legal disclaimer, we are not doctors. While we absolutely love discussing wellness and nutrition with our expert guests, you should always talk to your physician or other medical professional before making any dietary or lifestyle changes. They can assess your specific needs and come up with a plan that works best for you.

In addition, this is for educational purposes only. Clean Juice Franchises are only offered by delivery of a franchise disclosure document in compliance with various state and federal laws.