Holistic Approaches to Psychotherapy

Food

Frank McNamara
Cambridge College
 “Health is Integration”
Review

“ …complex systems have a natural drive toward integration.

In this way, parents, educators, or clinicians can see their jobs
as liberating the natural inclination of each individual to move
toward well-being and health – to move toward integration.
- Siegel, Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology, pp. 16-3, 16-4
 Review
Integrated Psychophysiological States:
Behavior, Affect (Feelings) Sensation (the
Body), Knowledge (Conscious Thought)
Emotional states or moods are produced by the various neuropeptide
ligands, and what we experience as an emotion or a feeling is also a
mechanism for activating a particular neuronal circuit – simultaneously
throughout the brain and body – which generates a behavior involving
the whole creature, with all the necessary physiological changes that
behavior would require. - Pert, Molecules of Emotion, p.145
 Review
Overall Pattern: Healthy and Unhealthy States
The world visualized in the healthy pattern feels like one’s home; it is rich
in opportunities, lawfully ordered, and meaningfully related to the person.
The world of neurosis is foreign and threatening, full of obstacles and
dangers, lawless, capricious, a chaos rather than a cosmos.... In the “good”
world it is possible and rewarding to pursue positive goals which one desires
and enjoys; in the threatening world the main concern and joy must be to
escape danger. – Angyal Neurosis and Treatment,
p.101
 Unhealthy Systemic Reorganization

The IFS Model…views a person as containing an ecology of

relatively discrete minds, each of which has valuable qualities and
each of which is designed to -- and wants to -- play a valuable role
within.
These parts are forced out of their valuable roles, however, by life
experiences that can reorganize the system in unhealthy ways.
– Richard Schwartz, Evolution of The Internal
Family Systems Model,
www.selfleadership.org
 Review
Zombie-Like Dissociative States
So-called ‘zombie’ states are characterized by dissociation, in which
the conscious mind appears cut off from the body and from feeling.
That in itself suggests a relative hypofunction of the right hemisphere.
Dissociation is, furthermore, the fragmentation of what should be
experienced as a whole – the mental separation of components of
experience that would ordinarily be processed together, suggesting a
right-hemisphere problem.
–
McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary, p. 235- 236
 Review
Managers, Firefighters, and Exiles

MANAGERS: Most clients had parts that tried to keep them

functional and safe. These parts tried to maintain control of their
inner and outer environments by, for example, keeping them from
getting too close or dependent on others, criticizing their
appearance or performance to make them look or act better, and
focusing on taking care of others rather than their own needs.
These parts seemed to be in protective, managerial roles and
therefore are called managers.
- Schwartz, Evolution of The Internal Family
Systems Model
www.selfleadership.org
 Review
Exiles
EXILES: When a person has been hurt, humiliated, frightened,
or shamed in the past, he or she will have parts that carry the
emotions, memories, and sensations from those experiences.
Managers often want to keep these feelings out of consciousness
and, consequently, try to keep vulnerable, needy parts locked in
inner closets. These incarcerated parts are known as exiles.
- Schwartz, Evolution of The Internal Family Systems
Model
www.selfleadership.org
 Review
Firefighters
FIREFIGHTERS: The third and final group of parts jumps
into action whenever one of the exiles is upset to the point that
it may flood the person with its extreme feelings or make the
person vulnerable to being hurt again. When that is the case,
this third group tries to douse the inner flames of feeling as
quickly as possible, which earns them the name firefighters.
They tend to be highly impulsive and strive to find stimulation
that will override or dissociate from the exile's feelings.
Bingeing on drugs, alcohol, food, sex, or work are common
firefighter activities.
- Schwartz, Evolution of The Internal Family Systems Model
www.selfleadership.org
 Review
A Bulemic’s Sense of Self

Sheila Reindl

Reindl interviewed 13 women who had recovered from bulimia nervosa.

“A person with bulimia nervosa typically fears she is hollow, bad, even
rotten at the core and works hard to avoid experiencing a core sense of
shame….. A bulimic person’s shame may lead her to try to hide not only
her eating-disorder behaviors but also her basic needs and yearnings…
To avoid the shame of expressing her needs and desires, she turns to
food, rather than relationships, for comfort. Isabella recalled ‘Eating was
a way to comfort myself. Instant gratification that you couldn’t find often
in other places.’” – Reindl, Sensing the Self, p. 1-2
 Exiles: Internal Disconnections Review

A bulimic person may be so disconnected from her experience

that she does not even know what she needs or wants. If she
does know, needing something or someone only confirms her
sense that she is weak and inadequate. She believes her needs
are not legitimate… - Reindl, Sensing
the Self, p. 2
…bulimia nervosa serves as both an expression of feelings and
a defense against experiencing feelings, particularly shame,
anger, loneliness, sadness, envy, and guilt. A person with
bulimia nervosa fears, whether consciously or unconsciously,
that painful feelings would be unbearable, even annihilating.
- Reindl,
Sensing the Self, p. 3
 “Firefighters” using food to
extinguish the emotional flames
She tries to escape from the painful emotions and fundamental needs
because to experience them is to feel even greater self-contempt. The
behaviors, preoccupations, and pain of the eating disorder consume
her attention and energy and thereby distract her from or numb her
to emotional pain and its attendant shame and self-loathing.
Isabella remembers, “I was always trying to fill that void with
something. Whether it was men or drugs or food, or activity…. It was
a way to escape from myself…. When I would eat like that, I would
get so foggy and out of it that I would just go to sleep.
- Reindl, Sensing
the Self, p. 4
 The Ideal Self: Review

Alienation from the Authentic Self

• Her thinness can become a source of pride and a basis for her sense of
self…. She cannot yet imagine a sense of worth based in authentic
aspects of herself beyond her appearance, accomplishments, and
ability to please others. – Reindl, Sensing the Self, p. 4

• And, just as he may talk about himself without ‘being in it,’ so he

may work, be with his friends, take a walk, or sleep with a
woman without being in it. His relationship to himself has
become impersonal. – Karen Horney, Neurosis and
Human Growth
 Cultural Influences on Body Image
“…eating disorders may be, in part, an unhappy consequence of
the gross preoccupation of our postindustrial society with
outward appearance as well as its tendency to objectify bodies
and notions of beauty, especially in women.
Rather than paying attention to inner experience and being kind
and accepting of oneself, we tend to condemn ourselves if we do
not fit the established norms of weight, height, and outward
appearance. So we have become a society alienated from our
bodies as they are and in search of some eternal, unaging
ideal…” - Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living… p. 406
 Using Food to Change Your State

Eating holds many different meanings for us. We have emotional

associations with particular types of food, with eating a certain
amount of food, with eating in particular places and at particular
times and with particular people. These associations with food can
be part of our identity and well-being.

– Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living, p. 402

 The Dopamine Reward System

Dopamine is the neurotransmitter the brain evolved to reward you for

good behavior, helping to motivate your drive for things like food,
water, and sex – all necessary for the perpetuation of our species….
The food industry, like the tobacco companies and other drug lords,
has been able to come up with products that tap into the same
dopamine reward system that keeps people smoking cigarettes and
snorting cocaine. – Michael Greger, How Not to Die, p.400
 Increasing Dopamine Levels

Cocaine increases brain levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine by

blocking it from being transported back into the nerve cells that release
it… Like other stimulant drugs—speed, nicotine, and caffeine—cocaine
taps directly into a brain system that, in its own way, is just as powerful
as the opioid attachment/reward system.
–Gabor Mate, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts… (Kindle Locations
2971-2974).
 Dopamine and Opiod Systems in the
Emotional Brain

Indeed, the human brain’s dopamine circuits are no less important

to survival than is its opioid system. If opioids help consummate
our reward-seeking activities by giving us pleasure, dopamine
initiates these activities in the first place. It also plays a major role
in the learning of new behaviors and their incorporation into our
lives. – Mate´, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts (Kindle Locations 2987-2989).
Opioid circuits and dopamine pathways are important components
of what has been called the limbic system, or the emotional brain.
Mate´, Gabor. In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
(Kindle Locations 3046-3047)
 Dopamine Release

There is an area in the midbrain that, when triggered, gives rise to intense
feelings of elation or desire. It’s called the ventral tegmental apparatus, or
VTA. When researchers insert electrodes into the VTA of lab rats and the
animals are given a lever that allows them to stimulate this brain center,
they’ll do so to the point of exhaustion. They ignore food and pain just so
they can reach the lever.
- Mate´, Gabor. In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts… Kindle Locations 2974-2975)

Dopamine is the neurotransmitter chiefly responsible for the power of the

VTA and its associated network of brain circuits. Nerve fibers from the
VTA trigger dopamine release in a brain center that plays a central role in
all addictions: the nucleus accumbens…. – Ibid (Kindle Locations 2980-2982).
 “Euphoria and Elation”
Human beings may also endanger themselves in order to continue
self-triggering this brain area. One human subject stimulated
himself fifteen hundred times in a three-hour period, “to a point
that he was experiencing an almost overwhelming euphoria and
elation, and had to be disconnected despite his vigorous protests.”
– Mate´, Gabor. In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
(Kindle Locations 2977-2980).
 Emotional Eating

“When we asked people “When was the last time you ate to
the point of regretting it?” almost everyone could think of a
time. Then we asked “Why did you eat so much?”
“What we found is that roughly 12 percent said “I
overate because of something emotional,” or “I had a terrible
day,” or “I was feeling down,” or “I was bored.”
Nutrition Action, Interview with Brian Wansink, Cornell U,
author of Mindless Eating – Why We Eat More Than We Think
 Food as a Drug
“She tries to escape from the painful emotions and fundamental
needs because to experience them is to feel even greater self-
contempt. The behaviors, preoccupations, and pain of the eating
disorder consume her attention and energy and thereby distract
her from or numb her to emotional pain and its attendant shame
and self-loathing.
Isabella remembers, “I was always trying to fill that void with
something. Whether it was men or drugs or food, or activity…. It
was a way to escape from myself…. When I would eat like that, I
would get so foggy and out of it that I would just go to sleep.” -
Reindl, Sensing the Self, p. 4
 Dietary Fat
and Dopamine

The brain responds similarly to fat. Within thirty minutes of being fed
yogurt packed with butterfat, research subjects exhibited similar brain
activity to those who drank straight sugar water….
– Michael Greger, How Not to Die, p. 401

The overconsumption of sugar-sweetened foods has often been

compared to drug addition… now we have PET scans, imaging
technology that allows doctors to measure brain activity in real time.
- Michael Greger, How Not to Die, p. 400
 Tolerance and Addiction
A neuroimaging study found that frequent ice cream consumption ‘is
related to a reduction in reward-region [pleasure center] responsivity
in humans, paralleling the tolerance observed in drug addiction.’
Once you’ve so dulled your dopamine response, you may subsequently
overeat in an effort to achieve the degree of gratification experienced
previously… – Michael Greger, How Not to Die, p. 401
 Disconnection from the Real Self
Inadequate nutrition, purging, and excessive exercising can lead
to electrolyte imbalances and low blood glucose levels, which
impair her perception, mental processing, and mood regulation…
The opioids released by the body during purging and exercising
can be, in a certain sense, addicting.
-
Reindl, Sensing the Self, p. 5
 Downregulation in Response to
Repeated Dopamine Activation

It all started with a study that showed decreased dopamine

sensitivity in obese individuals. The more the individual being
studied weighed, the less responsive to dopamine he or she appeared
to be. We see the same reduction in sensitivity in cocaine addicts and
alcoholics. The brain gets so overstimulated that it ends up trying to
turn down the volume…” - Michael Greger, How Not to Die, p. 400
 Love Addiction

In 2006, MRI studies by Helen Fisher and her research team

found and documented various emotional states relating to
intense love correlated with activity in the VTA, which may help
explain obsessive behaviors of rejected partners, since this is
shared by the reward system. – Wikipedia

“Evidence suggests that romantic love is primarily associated with

elevated activity in dopaminergic pathways of the reward system
of the brain.” – Fisher. Lust, Romance, Attachment: Do the Side Effects of
Antidepressants Jeopardize Romantic Love, Marriage, and Fertility? p.247
 The Experience of Attachment in the Body
Attachment is the drive for physical and emotional closeness with
other people. It ensures infant survival by bonding infant to mother
and mother to infant. Throughout life the attachment drive impels us
to seek relationships and companionship, maintains family
connections, and helps build community. When endorphins lock
onto opiate receptors, they trigger the chemistry of love and
connection, helping us to be the social creatures we are.
- Gabor Mate´, In the realm of hungry ghosts, p.162
 The Yearning for Connection
• The struggle for existence at this level is for meaning and
significance of our person. To be, to exist on this level, is
to mean something to someone else…. We are nothing
within ourselves, nonexistent. To be is to mean something
to someone else…. – Angyal, Neurosis and Treatment, p. 18
• Early life experiences within primary attachment relationships
create potent emotional learning in implicit memory, which can
have a major influence on the degree of integration among brain
systems, interpersonal response, personality, and dominant
mood. – Ecker, Unlocking the Emotional
Brain, pp.31-32
 Eating as a Form of Stress Reduction:
Altering the Mind-Body State
“…many people use eating as a major form of stress reduction.
When we are anxious, we eat. When we are lonely, we eat.
When we are bored, we eat. When we feel empty, we eat. When
all else fails, we tend to eat. That is a lot of automatic eating….
We mostly do it to make ourselves feel better emotionally…
…The rewards and treats we give ourselves to feel better
tend to be rich and sweet, such as cookies, candy, cake, pastries,
and ice cream. They are all high in hidden fat and loaded with
sugar….”
- Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living, p. 405
 Stress
“Fight or Flight” (Walter Cannon)
Sympathetic Branch of Autonomic Nervous System:
– Increased Blood Sugar (energy)
– Increased Heart Rate
– Increased Blood Flow
– Increased Respiration
– all aimed at transport of oxygen and nutrients…
– Normal digestion is inhibited
 Stress and Glucose Levels
• In a physical emergency, you want to stop energy storage.
• Activity of the sympathetic nervous system is turned up; activity
of the parasympathetic nervous system is turned down.
• Down goes insulin secretion. The body stops transport and
storage of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats.
• Your body reverses all the storage steps, through the release of
stress hormones…glucose is flushed into the bloodstream.
• “…the hormones of the stress-response cause even more glucose
and fatty acids to be mobilized into the blood-stream...[leading
to] chronic elevation of blood sugar.” (Cont.)
 Chronic Stress
When we turn on the stress-response for months on end, you wind
up expending so much energy that… you tire more readily – just
plain old everyday fatigue. Stress hormones make fat cells
throughout the body less sensitive to insulin, promoting insulin
resistance.
“And insulin resistant diabetes is nearly epidemic in the United
States, afflicting over 15 percent of people over sixty-five. The
disease more than doubles mortality… As such, the impact of stress
in this area is pretty major.”
– Robert Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, pp. 61- 62
 Food Addiction: Positive Feedback Loop

Withdrawal Stress/Depression

Sugar and Fat

Emotional Soothing Consumption

Dopamine and
Opiod Systems
Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead
 Discussion
How might the transformation that Phil underwent be understood in terms
of Internal Family Systems – and Memory Reconsolidation?
– Facilitating holistic transformation vs. incremental or counteractive
change
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
____

1. Orienting to multifaceted aspects of an individual’s experience

(approaches that are phenomenological)
– Nonpathologizing (Coherence)
– Confronting what is
2. Awareness of the body and emotions
3. The creation of mismatch experiences
Group Projects
 The Dramatic Rise in Chronic Conditions
Recently, just within the past few decades, amid all of these
medical advances, something has gone terribly wrong.
In many different ways we appear to be getting sicker…
We are suffering from a mysterious array of what I call “modern
plagues”: obesity, childhood diabetes, asthma, hay fever, food
allergies, esophageal reflux and cancer, celiac disease,
Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, autism, eczema…
These are chronic conditions that diminish and degrade their
victims’ quality of life for decades. The most visible of these
plagues is obesity… In 1990, about 20 percent of Americans
were obese. By 2010, the national average was above 30 percent.
– Martin
• Blaser (2014) Missing
According to the Microbes,
CDC, inp.2017~2018
2 the prevalence of
obesity was 42.4%]
This slide shows the trend in diagnosed diabetes in the United States
from 1958 through 2015. The prevalence of diagnosed diabetes
increased from 0.93% in 1958 to 7.4 % in 2015. In 2015, 2 million
people had diagnosed diabetes, compared to only 1.6 million in 1958.

https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/statistics/slides/long_term_trends.pdf
 Alzheimer’s Disease
“Despite the billions of dollars spent on research, there is still
neither a cure nor an effective treatment for the disease, which
invariably progresses to death. In short, Alzheimer’s is reaching a
state of crisis – emotionally, economically, and even scientifically.
Over the past two decades, more that seventy-three thousand
research articles have been published on the disease. That’s about a
hundred papers a day. Yet very little clinical progress has been made
in treating or even understanding it.”

– Michael Greger, How Not to Die, p. 51

 Why are all these maladies rapidly rising?
These disorders suggest that our children are experiencing levels of
immune dysfunction never seen before, as well as conditions such as
autism… Nor are adults escaping their own share of modern plagues.
The incidence of inflammatory bowel disease, including Crohn’s
and ulcerative colitis, is rising, wherever we look… When I was a
medical student, esophageal reflux, which causes heartburn, was
uncommon. But the ailment has exploded in these past forty years,
and the cancer it leads to, adenocarcinoma of the esophagus, is the
most rapidly increasing cancer in the United States… and it is a
particularly nasty problem for Caucasian men.
Why are all of these maladies rapidly rising at the same time
across the developed world and spilling over into the developing
world as it becomes more Westernized? –Blaser (2014) Missing Microbes, p. 4
 Why are all these maladies rapidly rising?
• The medical establishment has become a major threat to health.
The disabling impact of professional control over medicine has
reached the proportions of an epidemic. Iatrogenesis, the name
for this new epidemic, comes from iatros, the Greek word for
‘physician’, and genesis, meaning ‘origin’.
– Ivan Illich (1974) Medical
Ivan Illich Nemesis, p.11
• The impact of left hemisphere reductionism
• A microbiome altered by modern life.
 The
Microbiome

• An ecosystem of microorganisms living throughout your body.

• “We’re discovering….distinct microbial populations from our skin,
face, nostrils, mouth, lips, eyelids, and even between our teeth.
• The gastrointestinal tract, in particular the large intestine,
however, is home by far to the largest populations.”
– Emeran Mayer, MD
(2016) The Mind-Gut Connection, p. 17
 We’re only 1% human!

The human body consists of…

– 39 trillion microbial cells and 30 trillion human cells
– By that measure we’re 43% human!
– 20,000 human genes, 2-20 million microbial genes
– In terms of genes, we’re only 1% human! We are 99% microbial!
– Rob
Knight 2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlTFbuVvMU0&t=267s)
 A Symbiotic Relationship
The benefits derived by us humans from or microbiotas… include:
• assistance in the digestion of food components out guts can’t handle by
themselves,
• regulation of our bodies’ metabolism, processing and detoxification of
dangerous chemicals that we ingest with our food,
• training and regulation of the immune system,
• prevention of invasion and growth of dangerous pathogens.
– Emeran Mayer, MD (2016) The Mind-Gut Connection, p. 15
• We think of serotonin as being made and trafficked in the brain, but the
neuroendocrine cells in your gut actually make 80 [or 90] percent of it.
– Blaser, Missing Microbes, p. 182
 Beneficial Functions of the Microbiome
And in maintaining such constancy [i.e. homeostasis in the gut],
microbes are crucial. They affect the storage of fat. They help to
replenish the linings of the gut and skin, replacing damaged and
dying cells with new ones. They ensure the sanctity of the blood-
brain barrier – a web of tightly packed cells that lets nutrients and
small molecules pass from blood to brain, but bars the way to larger
substances and living cells. They even influence the relentless
remodelling of skeletons, in which fresh bone is deposited and old
stuff is reabsorbed.
Nowhere is this steady influence more clear than in the
immune system: the cells and molecules that collectively protect our
bodies from infection and other threats.

– Ed Yong (2016) I Contain Multitudes, p. 63

 Why are all these maladies rapidly rising?

The reasons for this disaster [the steep rise in illnesses] are all around you,
including overuse of antibiotics in humans and animals, Cesarean sections,
and the widespread use of sanitizers and antiseptics, to name just a few.
While antibiotic resistance is a huge problem…. [and] as terrible as these
resistant pathogens are, the loss of diversity within our microbiome is
far more pernicious…
I have called this process “the disappearing microbiota.” …
For a number of reasons, we are losing our ancient microbes.

– Martin Blaser, Missing Microbes, p. 6

 Our Modern Lifestyle

Researchers discovered that the Yanomami people have almost

double the microbial diversity of the Americans and between
30% and 40% more than the Malawi and Guahibo groups.
“This suggests that modern lifestyle impacts the biodiversity of
our microbiota; functions that we need are probably lost, such
as proper training for our immune system in infancy,” said
[microbiologist] Domínguez-Bello.
Gut Microbiota for Health
https://www.gutmicrobiotaforhealth.com
Antibiotics And Your Ever-Changing Gut
Feed Your Microbes - Nurture Your Mind |
John Cryan
 Mental Health and the Microbiome
Mental health. The American Gut Project researchers also
examined the gut microbiomes of 125 people who reported having
a mental health disorder, such as depression, schizophrenia,
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or bipolar disorder.
They matched each of these participants to individuals who did not
have a mental health disorder, but did have other major factors in
common, such as country, age, gender and body mass index.
The team found that people with a mental disorder had more in
common with other people with mental disorders, in terms of the
bacteria makeup of their gut microbiomes, than they did with their
mentally healthy pairs… In addition, the research team found some
indications that specific bacteria types may be more common in
people with depression than people who do not have the
condition. https://eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-05/uoc--bdf051118.php
 Factors that Impact the Human Microbiome
1. Diet
[Mycologist and plant pathologist] “James White told me that the Western
diet is a great sterility experiment that has led to a lack of microbial
diversity.” – Eugenia Bone, Microbia, p. 194
The number of plant types in a person's diet plays a role in the diversity
of his or her gut microbiome -- the number of different types of bacteria
living there. No matter the diet they prescribed to (vegetarian, vegan,
etc.), participants who ate more than 30 different plant types per week
(41 people) had gut microbiomes that were more diverse than those who
ate 10 or fewer types of plants per week (44 people).
https://eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-05/uoc--bdf051118.php
 Fast Food Diet
Michael Pollan reports on… his interview with Patrice Cani, a
biomedical scientist… He writes: “When Cani fed a high fat, ’junk
food’ diet to mice, the community of microbes in their guts changed
as much as it does in humans on a fast-food diet. But Cani also found
the junk-food diet made the animals’ gut barriers notably more
permeable, allowing endotoxins to leak into the bloodstream.
This produced a low-grade inflammation that eventually led to
metabolic syndrome.” According to Pollan, Cani concluded that, “at
least in mice, ‘gut bacteria can initiate the inflammatory processes
associated with obesity and insulin resistance’ by increasing gut
permeability.”

– Perro & Adams (2017) What’s Making Our Children Sick? p. 70

 Fiber Intake
Having a greater diversity of gut flora, a greater “bacterial richness,” is
also associated with less body fat and less weight gain over time. The
richest microbiomes ever recorded were those of the Yanomami tribe in
the Amazon jungle who had no previous contact with the modern world.
Traditional societies tend to have more diverse gut flora in general,
and the key is thought to be their extraordinary fiber intakes, which
can reach 120 grams a day, nearly eight times the American average.
Our modern, low-fiber diet is considered a “key reason of
microbiome depletion,” – Michael Greger, How Not to Diet, p. 232
“Here’s a statistic you probably haven’t heard: High
consumption of vegetables may cut the odds of developing
depression by as much as 62 percent.”
– - Greger (2015) How Not to Die, p. 203

Michael Greger, MD
Anti-Inflammatory Diet for Depression
 Diet
…Another research team decided to put a healthy diet to the test in a
workplace setting... A group of overweight and diabetic employees at
a major insurance company were encouraged to follow a whole-foods,
plant-based diet, cutting out all meat, eggs, dairy, oil, and junk foods….
Over the course of about five months, the plant-eating group reported
greater diet satisfaction that the control group….[experiencing]
improved digestion, increased energy, and better sleep, as well as
significant improvement in their physical functioning, general health,
vitality, and mental health.” (Cont.)
- Greger, How Not to Die, pp. 202-203 citing Katcher, et al., 2010
 Plant Based Nutrition and State Change
Based on this success, a much larger study of plant-based nutrition
was conducted at ten corporate locations across the country…
The same resounding success was reported, showing improvements
not only in subjects’ body weight, blood sugar levels, and ability to
control cholesterol but also in their emotional states, including
depression, anxiety, fatigue, sense of well-being, and daily
functioning.”
– Michael Greger, How Not to Die, p. 203 citing Agarwal et al, 2015
 Food and Mood

They took men and women who ate meat at least once a day
and took away their eggs and chicken, along with other
meats, to see what would happen to their moods. Within just
two weeks, the study subjects experienced a significant
improvement in measures of their mood states.
- Greger, How Not to Die, p. 202, citing a 2009 study by Beezhold and
Johnston
Practices that Impact the Microbiome
2. Antibiotics
“I’m not questioning the efficacy of antibiotics on the small minority
hospitalized with pneumonias, puerperal sepsis, meningitis, and other
severe infectious diseases but rather their use on millions of healthy
people with less serious infections and relatively minor complaints,
such as runny noses and skin infections. Tens of millions of these
people, year after year, are prescribed antibiotics in the United States.
The problem… is particularly perilous for our children. They are
vulnerable in ways we never foresaw.” – Blaser, Missing Microbes, p. 65
 The American Gut Project

Antibiotics. The gut microbiomes of American Gut Project

participants who reported that they took antibiotics in the past month
(139 people) were, as predicted, less diverse than people who reported
that they had not taken antibiotics in the last year (117 people).
But, paradoxically, people who had taken antibiotics recently had
significantly greater diversity in the types of chemicals in their gut
samples than those who had not taken antibiotics in the past year.

https://eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-05/uoc--bdf051118.php
 American Gut Project

2014 PRELIMINARY RESULTS

• Antibiotic usage also affects our microbiomes, by reducing diversity

and thereby creating a less healthy gut environment.
• The more different types of plants a person eats, the higher their gut
microbiome diversity.
• Alcohol consumption also affects microbiome diversity-those who
had at least one drink per week had a more diverse microbiome than
those who abstained from alcohol.
 Practices that Impact
the Microbiome
Antibiotics

Antibiotics can enter our bodies not just through prescriptions

medication or deliberate sanitation measures. They can also enter our
guts unintentionally by way of our foods. Because of food production
procedures such as universally treating livestock and poultry with
antibiotics (to treat disease or to promote the animal’s growth), we are
saturating sectors of our food supply with antibiotics.
– Perro & Adams (2017) What’s Making Our Children
Sick? pp. 69-70
80% of antibiotics in US are sold to animal agriculture (Anderson)
 Environmental Toxins:
GMO Farming

Monsanto controls 85-90% of crop production in US (Bush 2019)

Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs)

– Most GMOs crops are modified to resist Monsanto’s
herbicide, RoundUp
Active ingredient in RoundUp: Glyphosate
– originally patented as an antibiotic (Zach Bush 2019)
– 4.5 billion pounds of glyphosate is used every year
around the world (Farmer’s Footprint)
Total area treated of glyphosate applied to cereals in Great Britain
 Glyphosate in our Food

https://archive.senseaboutscience.org/data/files/VoYS/Glyphosate_in_our_bread.pdf
 Glyphosate

New information based on animal and in vitro human endocrine

studies…is showing that even small amounts of exposure to glyphosate
can be harmful. One group of researchers found that glyphosate
augments the growth of human hormone-dependent breast cancer cells.
The Seralini lab found that Roundup was toxic to human embryonic and
placental cells. Another research lab reports DNA damage in fish
exposed to Roundup… – Perro & Adams, What’s Making Our Children Sick, p.
142
 The Impact of Stress on the
3. Stress Microbiome
These molecules [such as norepinephrine] are stress hormones, called
upon as part of the fight-or-flight response…. They act throughout your
body as stimulants, increasing your heart rate and blood pressure.
[The] fight or flight reaction…subdues the gut and the immune system,
which lowers your guard throughout your entire GI tract, potentially
allowing pathogens to thrive… That means that when you’re stressed
and your defenses are down, the odds become better for pathogens to
attack. People who are stressed become more susceptible to infection
and inflammation. That in turn can lead to greater stress, a vicious spiral
that can leave people deeply anxious and depressed.
The evidence is clear: Microbes play a big role in managing your
mood. – Scott Anderson, The Psychobiotic Revolution, pp. 137-138
 T. Colin Campbell

Dr. Campbell has conducted original research both in laboratory

experiments and in large-scale human studies; received over 70
grant-years of peer-reviewed research funding (mostly with NIH),
served on grant review panels of multiple funding agencies,
actively participated in the development of national and
international nutrition policy, authored over 300 research papers
and given hundreds of lectures around the world.
[Trained] at Cornell University (M.S., Ph.D.) and MIT (Research
Associate) in nutrition, biochemistry and toxicology, Dr. Campbell
spent 10 years on the faculty of Virginia Tech's Department of
Biochemistry and Nutrition before returning to Cornell in 1975
where he presently holds his Endowed Chair as the Jacob Gould
Schurman Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry in the
Division of Nutritional Sciences. - http://nutritionstudies.org/
 Reductionism in Nutrition
“We’re brought up thinking of food in terms of the individual
elements that we need. We eat carrots for vitamin A and oranges
for vitamin C, and drink milk for calcium and vitamin D.
If we like the particular food, we’re happy to get our
nutrients from it. But if we don’t… we think it’s find to skip it
as long as we take a supplement…. As it turns out, an apple
does a lot more inside our bodies than all the known apple
nutrients ingested in pill form. The whole apple is far more than
the sum of its parts.” – Whole, pp. 64-65
 Limitations of a Reductionist Approach to
Nutrition
1. Bioavailability: “We can never know how much of a
nutrient to ingest because we can’t predict how much of it
will be utilized.” – Our body decides.
2. The Variability of Foods: “you could hold a peach in each
hand, and the one in your right hand could easily contain
forty times more beta-carotine than the one in your left,
depending on things like season, soil, storage, processing,
and even the original location of the fruit on the tree. And
beta-carotene is far from the only example.” [cont.]
 Complexity
Nutrient Interactions: Interactions among individual nutrients in
food are substantial and dynamic – and have major practical
implications.
Example: “Calcium decreases iron bioavailability by as much as
400 percent, while carotenoids (like beta-carotene) increase iron
absorption by as much as 300 percent.”
– The evidence cited here represents only an infinitesimally
small fraction of the total number of interactions operating every
moment in our bodies. Clearly the common belief that we can
investigate the effects of a single nutrient or drug, unmindful of the
potential modifications by other chemical factors, is foolhardy.
- T. Colin Campbell, Whole, p. 69-71
 Holistic Complexity
“…consuming two nutrients simultaneously typically affects the
utilization of both. This variation becomes orders of magnitude more
complex and uncertain when combinations of a large number of
nutrients are simultaneously consumed (also known as “eating food”).
Now we’re talking not just about three or so different nutrients
affecting each other and the various systems of the body; we’re
talking about all the active elements of a whole food. We simply
cannot know how many kinds of chemicals are consumed in a single
morsel of food or at a single meal or during the course of a day.
Hundreds of thousands? Millions? The complexity increases virtually
without limit.” - Campbell,
Whole pp. 71-72
 Wholistic Effect
…Nutrition is a wholistic phenomenon that can never be fully
comprehended within a reductionist framework. It’s too complex,
with too many variables. – Whole, p. 75
We don’t need to know the effects of single agents on health,
because this is not the way nature works. Nutrition has a wholistic
effect on health; one that we consistently miss and misinterpret
when we focus on isolated nutrients. – Campbell, Whole, p. 87
Wholism…presumes complex models of causation in a way that
suggests simple solutions. (You can’t get much simpler than, ‘Solve
most of our health problems by eating more whole, plant-based foods!)
– Campbell, Whole, p. 77
 Colin Campbell
Why is the Science of Nutrition Ignored in Medicine?
 Breaking the Cycle

Withdrawal
Stress/Depression

Emotional Sugar and Fat

Soothing Consumption

Dopamine and
Opiod
Activation
 Mindfulness/Awareness
Attending to What Is
“Perhaps the best place to begin is not by trying to make any
changes at all but simply by paying close attention to exactly what
you are eating and how it affects you.”

“Experiential philosophy
- Kabat-Zinn, wouldLiving,
Full Catastrophe say…that
p. 402 exactly attending to what
one just now is, changes or moves that. Imposing interpretations and
schemes on oneself is useless…”
- Gendlin, Experiential Psychotherapy, p. 319

As Carl Jung famously observed, ‘We cannot change

anything until we accept it.’ - Unlocking the Emotional Brain, p.53
 Primary Characteristics of Therapeutic
Reconsolidation (the Coherence Review
Framework) -– and Holistic Change
– Understanding that the Whole is greater than the sum of its parts (Coherence)
– Facilitating holistic transformation vs. incremental or counteractive change
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

1. Orienting to multifaceted aspects of an individual’s experience

(approaches that are phenomenological)
– Nonpathologizing (Coherence)
– Confronting what is/Mindfulness
2. Accessing physical sensations (the body) and emotions
3. Creation of mismatch experiences
 Food, and Mindfulness
“…we could be mindful of how we feel after we eat certain
foods or certain amounts of food, and whether we feel differently
when we eat quickly or slowly… We can bring mindfulness to
the attachments and cravings we may have for particular foods,
to what we, as well as our children, will and won’t eat, and to the
habits the family has toward food. All of these areas come into
vivid focus when you bring mindfulness to the domain of food.”
- Kabat-Zinn, Full
Catastrophe Living, pp. 401-402
“Notice how you feel an hour or two after eating. How is your
energy level? Did eating what you ate give you energy or did it
make you feel sluggish? How does your belly feel? What do you
think now about what you ate then?” Ibid, p. 402
 Presence
“Therapist go to the vulnerable parts too quickly – try to change
people…” “Start with curiosity…. As you learn the secret
history of how [the parts] got into that role, then you’ll open
your heart to it and show it appreciation for trying to protect
you…” - Schwartz, interview, Search Freedomain Radio Podcasts
“Retrieve into explicit awareness, as a visceral, emotional
experience the details of the emotional learning underlying and
driving the presenting symptoms.” This is the greater part of
the therapeutic work. - Unlocking the Emotional Brain
 Coming to One’s Senses:
Experiencing a Sense of Self
“The women teach us that recovering is a process of coming to
experience a sense of self. More precisely, it is a process of
learning to sense one’s self, to attune to one’s subjective
physical, psychic, and social experience…In recovering, they
also became better acquainted with and more accepting of the
aggressive, needy aspects of self which they had previously
rejected and tried to keep hidden….”
-
Reindl, Sensing the Self, p. 5
 The (Healthy) Self
“Everyone is at their core a Self containing many crucial
leadership qualities such as perspective, confidence,
compassion, and acceptance…. When working with an
individual, the goal of IFS is to differentiate this Self from the
parts, thereby releasing its resources.”
“Once a person's parts learned to trust that they didn't have to
protect so much and could allow the Self to lead, some degree
of Self would be present for all their decisions and
interactions.”
- Schwartz, Evolution of The Internal Family Systems Model
www.selfleadership.org
 “Health is Integration”
• “ …complex systems have a natural drive toward
integration. In this way, parents, educators, or clinicians
can see their jobs as liberating the natural inclination of
each individual to move toward well-being and health – to
move toward integration.
Dan Siegel, Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology, pp. 16-3, 16-4

• “…when we move energy and information flow toward

something called integration we move toward health.”
- The Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology, p. 1-7