Welcome friends to another episode of the Pure Living Family podcast. I'm Shawn Blymiller, your health coach and host. Today we welcome in Dr. Gwen Rosenberg, a licensed naturopathic doctor based out of New London, Connecticut. With over a decade of experience, Dr. Rosenberg specializes in holistic and integrative medicine, focusing on women's health and chronic conditions. Known for her compassionate approach and motto, we treat people.
not patients. She empowers her patients through personalized care, addressing root causes with tools like nutritional therapy, acupuncture, and botanical medicine. We're excited to dive into her insights on fostering true wellness. Welcome, Dr. Rosenberg. Thanks for joining the podcast.
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (00:51.428)
Thank you. I'm so excited to be here and I'm really inspired by the work that you do and your program.
Pure Living Family (00:58.616)
Well, thank you very much. I am very excited and honored that you would join us. My first, I guess, dive into the conversation. One thing that jumped out to me on your website states we use an individualized food first, lifestyle first approach. And to me, that's fascinating. think that's kind of trending now is lifestyle first and individualized personalized medicine.
I'm just curious to know a little bit more about your background as a naturopathic doctor and why you decided to practice this type of medicine.
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (01:35.898)
Mm-hmm, yeah, I've actually been thinking about that question quite a bit moving into this because there's kind of a long story, but I'll kind of keep it to the short story, which is that just for my own self and my own process, I actually was enrolled in regular medical school, ready to go in that direction, and I worked in a small community clinic. one of the things that was really striking to me was just watching how much people were coming back and things were either, you know,
getting a little bit better or sort of getting worse or staying the same. And I sort of got this sense like we were patching up holes on a sinking ship. And really when I think about wellness and I think about wellbeing, I really wanna think about how do we find that flow? How do we get into that place where like the, like more like kind of, how do we, you know.
angle the sails just right, you know, so that we really can be moving forward. And the other thing, you know, kind of simultaneously as I was doing a lot of work in different communities overseas and Africa and Central and South America. And I really got thinking a lot about how the health of a community really depends on sort of supporting what already is like all of the vitality and all of the resilience that's already in a community as opposed to coming in. I was watching a lot of organizations kind of come in and sort of like take over and take control.
really noticed that the work that was a lot more effective was coming in and asking, how can we help to community leaders and to people who really were familiar with the community? And one thing I noticed is that, know, naturopathic medicine really is the latter. So it's really saying to a body and to a person, how can we help? Where do you need some support? Which is really different than sort of a sense of coming in and controlling. And I think in doing that, we're also acknowledging that the body is amazing and complex in ways that we will.
do not understand, do not begin to understand. And when we sort of simplify it into a mechanistic perspective or understanding and try to just sort of force it in one direction or another, we sort of like unknowingly sort of...
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (03:35.099)
take out some of the really amazing resilience and complexity of checks and balances. And I feel this way, know, when you mentioned about the food first, you know, directional, is that I feel this way about just as much about this a little controversial, but about a lot of supplements and kind of heavy duty supplementation as I do about pharmaceuticals is that, you know, a lot of them do really push these pathways and sort of like force certain things and force pathways. And when I think about what is natural medicine, it's like,
For me, it starts with a real trust in the body's resilience and in nature and in really saying, okay, well, what are the obstacles here? What's keeping this person from being able to recover from this? Or what's sort of in the way of that resilience versus asking what's wrong and how am going to fix it? Getting the wrench out.
Pure Living Family (04:34.178)
Well, I love that response for a number of reasons. First, I didn't know you went to Africa and I'm curious to know a little bit more about that. But one thing that you said that I think is empowering is you're enabling people to make decisions for themselves and becoming more of a guide instead of like this dictatorship. And I think that kind of leads us to our next question is like, what is the difference between naturopathic medicine
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (04:56.154)
you
Pure Living Family (05:03.714)
and what makes it different than traditional conventional medicine, and maybe draw from your experience in Africa or any other clinical experience that you've had.
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (05:15.242)
Mm-hmm. I think that there's a lot of difference, but you're really naming one of the primary one, which is that the patient is really kind of in charge of how things go. often when people come in and they kind of describe what's been going on for them, I say, OK, I have three ideas for that view. One of them is like a big homework project. Another one is an herb you can take. And another one is.
you know, a lesser homework project, you know, and I sort of say, well, what are you in the mood for? And sometimes people say, like, let me hear all three and I'll kind of, you know, move, I'll move between those. Like really what I see as my role is to really present people with the options that are available to them to address whatever their concern is. And I also see it as my job to help discern sort of, you know, in natural medicine, there's a lot out there that is...
people actually trying to make a lot of money or kind of, you know, trying to convince people to do something that may or may not actually be effective for that individual. so I see it as my job to also help people discern, you know, sort of what is, you know, really coming from, like a legitimate, you know, sort of source. And I always say that my two legitimate sources are, something that's been practiced by the grandmothers of the grandmothers of the grandmothers or, or, sort of reflects something about our past or our history. Like the fact that we used to eat foods that had more bacteria on them.
We know our food is very clean now. We don't get sort of like those natural probiotics all the time or something that has really great evidence to support it. And specifically, I'm to speak to you like that, safety evidence. So for a lot of the newer things that people are using, I get very concerned and I don't feel comfortable using some of them because of the lack of safety data is that if we're going to try something new and it is very potent, I want to make sure that I first do no harm. Like I want to make sure that it's safe for people. But I do know that for a of people,
who are more coming from a sales perspective that that's not as much of a concern. It's really just like make the sale and then we're done. But from a medical provider perspective, I do have an oath about first do no harm and I have to help people, just sort of let them know. But again, if somebody says to me, hey, I just really want to try this, I'll say, okay, I respect people's choices and decisions. And really because...
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (07:28.194)
Part of that is out of necessity because so much of the medicine I practice actually really does require someone to be a very active participant. So if I do say to someone, like, let's try...
like say your cholesterol is high, let's try adding some more fiber and some garlic to your diet. That's a bigger project than here take this pill once a day. And if a person doesn't like garlic, clearly that's not gonna work. So it's kind of come to that also by necessity, but also because I really believe in the...
bringing dignity and humanity back into medicine in the sense of really honoring that that person is a full person with their own sort of sets of values and priorities. their priority might not be to live as long as possible. Their priority might be to have as high quality of life as possible. And so it's not mine to say whether or not which one we should be prioritizing in certain circumstances.
Pure Living Family (08:29.534)
I love that so much. One of my biggest personal learnings over the last five plus years has been stop outsourcing a lot of your decisions to others and putting the responsibility and the onus on someone else. And I think that is for a lot of people. We go to authority figures to tell us how to live, what to eat, when to eat it. And working at a health clinic for the last year, and that was one thing that was a continual
challenge and conversation with a lot of our patients was they wanted it spelled out and I love what you just stated is it's more empowering. It's an active participation in wellness, right? There is no dictatorship. There is no mapping it out for you. Like you have to figure a lot of it out and play a part in that, which I think is empowering and enabling people to
find their own answers, which I love. So I appreciate that background and kind of jumping in a little bit more into food marble. One thing I read in Young Forever is the first step in optimizing gut health is removing potential allergens and inflammatory foods. And you're here to tell a little bit more about this device and I won't go too much into it yet, but
I found it interesting because in the last year at the clinic, people are spending hundreds, if not thousands of dollars doing diagnostic labs of what are my food sensitivities, what are inflammatory foods. And I think labs and diagnostics can sometimes miss some of those sensitivities. So I'm curious how you came across this device and what jumped out at to you as a practitioner and why you
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (10:05.978)
I'm fine.
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (10:12.378)
you
Pure Living Family (10:27.202)
are excited about this tool.
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (10:29.194)
Yeah, yeah, think, mean, that's such a deep, deep sort of, could go, I was like, oh, I want to go in 10 different directions on that question. But one thing, you know, really thinking about, you know, the avoidance of inflammatory foods and really sort of like making choices about what.
what foods we eat in order to support our health. I had a clinical supervisor who one of the ways that she talked about it was like, with every bite we take, we're either taking in life or we're taking in death, which is kind of a strong wording. But you know what is an interesting thing is just thinking about like when you really.
tune into that, you actually can feel that. Like when I'm eating like, you know, some wonderful vegetables from the CSA, I can just like feel the life of them, you know, like feel the vitality of them and the nourishment that I get from them. You know, where if I'm eating something that is like, you know, a food that's like highly processed and sugary, you know, it might, I might get like a different feeling, like a taste enjoyment, but it's not like a, it doesn't feel like that really literally bringing kind of life into my body. And so I also think about that a lot.
partly because the reason I kind of go in that direction instead of talking directly about labs is because you know I also feel strongly about sort of like helping a person and supporting a person and honing their own intuition because I think we get information overload and like that like you were talking about it's like kind of like you know re-re-re-refocusing you know sort of like our you know our health sort of directional is more internally is this instead of externally.
There's just so much misinformation and just so much information that might not apply to a certain individual online that really sort of honing an intuitive sort of sense about foods and sort of, you know...
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (12:09.242)
doing dietary experiments with different foods to be able to see what works and what doesn't work, what foods make me feel really good versus what foods make me feel kind of tired or like a little like slowed down or gummed up kind of. So that's one thing that seems a little bit, that's a little bit kind of out there, you know, like not very, what is the word? Like not very.
grounded in a statement that might translate easily. But one thing, when I think about food intolerances and food allergies, know...
Pure Living Family (12:31.726)
concrete.
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (12:40.118)
I'm always thinking about why, the why of it, because I don't think we get to be like, this food is inflammatory and that's end of the story. It's like, well, why is that inflammatory? What's happening that created the ability for that food to be inflammatory? I think a lot about things like intestinal permeability or leaky gut, as people call it sometimes. And that has so many different factors. It's like everything from stress to taking antibiotics to taking NSAIDs, which are like ibuprofen and naproxen and things like that.
you know, that all kind of contribute to this, basically where the GI tract becomes a little bit more permeable, that it kind of has holes in it where these proteins can pass to where they're not supposed to be. And then they cause a little more trouble and they cause an inflammatory response just because they're sort of, the immune system is responding to them being like in the wrong place, like a weed, you know, where like a plant is a good plant in one place, but it's not supposed to be in another place. So you go in and pull it out. It's like your immune system.
does the same thing when those proteins are not where they're supposed to be. So a lot of times what I'm thinking about is in the short term, how do we help people find foods that are kind of like their problem foods, their inflammatory foods, but in the long term sense, what I really want to do is say, how do we support your GI tract in, in, you know, sort of having a really good barrier so that, so that those proteins aren't passing to where they're not supposed to be and also to making it less inflammation prone, you know, so how do we, and a big piece of that is the microbiome. So, you know, looking at the microbiome, you know, we have
all these different, you we're learning more and more and more and more every day. Like, it's like, I feel like, you know, the world of microbiome science is just like...
I mean, it just keeps on unfolding in ways, you know, thinking about like post-biotics and how even when you kill probiotics, they have really incredible effects to do kind of a killed probiotics, fecal transplant, like with Thenobiotic and things like that. So anyway, that's just the, there's so much exploding there. But one of the things I think about a lot is the fact that the microbiome is a really dynamic, I really think of it as an organ. So, so in my mind, it's like a separate organ, right? And, and it's a really dynamic.
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (14:47.116)
entity. It's not like you have a microbiome and that's how it is always. It's like, you know, based on what you eat that day, you know, if we do stool testing or something like that. And I've done a lot of stool testing in the past and it's a valuable resource and it's great for identifying certain pathogens and things like that. But one of things I always thought about is like,
I wonder how different it would be if we took the sample next week versus this week, you know? And how are we gonna be planning like a lifelong treatment plan based off of this one little snapshot of something that's actually quite, you know, changeable and dynamic. And that brings me to why I love food marble so much is because it really lets us, you know, be able to be looking at the microbiome.
Pure Living Family (15:09.122)
Hmm. Yeah.
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (15:26.078)
in a way that kind of can be as dynamic as the actual, the organ itself. So looking at how it changes when we eat different foods and being able to sort of see how different interventions change our microbiome, particularly like how many bacteria we have that are producing methane is a big one. So methane producing bacteria are problematic in a few different ways. One of them is that they can be kind of inflammatory, but another is that the biggest one that we kind of see clinically is that
They slow down motility. they actually cause constipation by sort of anesthetizing these like motor complexes that are the places in the intestine that sort of trigger the muscular contractions that move stool through the bowel. And also in places like where the enzymes come down out of the pancreas into the gallbladder and then where the gallbladder then moves those enzymes into the intestine so that it can help us digest our food. The methane itself
actually slows that all of that from happening. And so can we have less enzymes helping us to break down our food, we have less movement of the stool through the bowel. And now we have kind of multiple problems, right? Because we've got, you know, less absorption happening because that food isn't fully broken down. We have, you know, more, more growth of those, those, you know, potentially pathogenic bacteria because the stool is kind of hanging out longer. You know, we have people having, you know, more trouble with getting more fiber in their diet.
Pure Living Family (16:29.08)
Yeah.
Pure Living Family (16:50.765)
Mm-hmm.
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (16:55.792)
So they're eating less of those healthier foods because they can't tolerate as much fiber so When I when I first started with food marble, I was like, my goodness like it finally happened, you know because you know SIBO and emo are a big deal and I've I went to like the first SIBO conference ever in 2011 in Portland with all like the people who are the big names in SIBO now and And it was it was so fringy and everybody was like all these these NDs are crazy Like what are they talking about? And now it's like
Pure Living Family (17:07.736)
Hmm.
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (17:25.792)
very standard of care. So Food Marvel is actually used by a lot of big hospital systems and big GI practices and you know basically what happened was once rifaximin became approved as a treatment for SIBO, suddenly SIBO awareness really really expanded and I think that the company sort of made that happen. So anyway all that to say that
I was really fascinated by SIBO as this concept. SIBO is small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. And that's where, you know, in a person's small intestine, they have an overgrowth of bacteria that causes bloating, especially like a very painful daily bloating. Whenever somebody tells me that pretty much every day their stomach hurts and they're bloated, I think about SIBO. When somebody tells me that that happens intermittently, I'm thinking more about a sugar intolerance where their body's having trouble breaking down as particular sugar, whether that's the one that people are most familiar with is lactose intolerance.
Pure Living Family (18:19.214)
and
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (18:20.686)
So where it might be food related, but if it's daily, I really do think a lot about SIBO or EMO. And then if it's more constipated related, we think about methanogens. if it's more kind of diarrhea related, we think about hydrogen producing bacteria. And so basically, I was really aware of this condition, but...
The testing was really pretty limited. had two options. One was to go into a doctor's office for three hours to do the testing. The other one was to do a send out test where you have to blow into a bag or a tube. And then it cost about like, know, 200 to $300 and you know.
There was a lot of complications there, but per test. So then Food Marble comes around and actually I met the representative at a conference and I was like, I just like walked up and I was like, you did it. You did the thing I've been dreaming of. He was like, we did it. And the backstory there is that the CEO is an engineer, a biomedical engineer.
Pure Living Family (19:14.872)
haha
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (19:23.16)
I hope I got that right. But his girlfriend at the time, now wife, had terrible IBS. And so he was like, well, let me see if I can make something that will help you. And he sort of accidentally made something that the whole world has been waiting on. Other people were trying to develop it, but he pulled it off. so yeah, so it becomes a very, very useful tool to help us identify not just is there SIBO and EMO, which is what hydrogen methane breath testing could do in the past, but...
how is a person responding to different foods and how can we use our objective data around those responses to help them discern which foods are causing their problems. know, yeah.
Pure Living Family (20:00.119)
Yeah, so you said SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, and you mentioned EMO, and I know IBS, irritable bowel syndrome as well. What's EMO? Can you define that?
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (20:11.13)
emo is intestinal methanogen overgrowth. So the reason it doesn't have an S at the beginning is because methanogen overgrowth anywhere in the bowel can cause quite a lot of trouble. So even if it's in the large intestine, it can cause trouble. So that's why it doesn't have to have the S on the small intestinal.
Pure Living Family (20:31.95)
Perfect. Okay. And so just to rewind real quick to help summarize everything you just said. One thing that I think is interesting, Dr. Deepak Chopra, I just listened to a podcast he was interviewed for, and he says that our organs, like they replenish themselves every three months. And I think that's fascinating based on this conversation because what we eat actually causes that replenishing and
rejuvenation of our organs. so a couple of things you had mentioned like lactose intolerant and that's more widely known by everyone publicly. But that was one thing that I learned over the last year as well as like just because you're intolerant to food right now doesn't mean that you can't do work to become tolerant. And that's what you're saying as far as like the enzymes getting the proper enzymes or the proper bacteria, because there's these
non-human cells or these non-human organisms that help us break down our food and they become like these assistants in the digestive process. And so I think you kind of talked through that really quickly through that summary, which I appreciate very much because you're investigating the actual gas exchange. You mentioned methane, but there's also hydrogen, right? So you're looking, you're hoping for hydrogen versus methane. Is that a good?
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (21:59.375)
Mmm!
Not necessarily. I wouldn't say quite that. It's more of like there's two different ones. I kind of emphasize the methane because it's a little bit more clear cut. So hydrogen is one that it kind of, does go up and down quite a bit more, you know, just kind of in general. you know, normal fermentation will also create some hydrogen. It really is more of a problem for people when it's in excess or when it's being produced in the small intestine. Because when it's being produced in the small intestine, it gets very painful because the small intestine will get, you know, really, really expanded and it gets just pain.
When it's being produced in the large intestine, know, our best bacteria, our hydrogen producer, you know, some of our best bacteria are hydrogen producers, so it's not like we want no hydrogen. So hydrogen has a little bit more nuance to it, you know, sort of about like quantity that's being produced, but also timing. So whether or not if a hydrogen peak is happening a little bit later after eating, it's less sort of like pathological or problematic for people. They might have a little bit of gas, but they won't have that kind of painful bloating.
And I always say, eating lots of vegetables and wonderful high fiber foods.
we are going to have some gas and that's actually a good thing, know, like the old bean song, you know. It's a good thing, you know, but I think that, you know, it's, you we're not, no gas is not our goal, but that kind of, you know, how do we have sort of, you know, uncomfortable bloating, no kind of chronic gas that's problematic. And actually the hydrogen gas that's from the good bacteria is often not very smelly at all, whereas like the gas that's coming from the more sort of problematic.
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (23:36.768)
bacteria tends to be the really smelly, more smelly.
Pure Living Family (23:41.167)
That's a fun conversation to have with families. Okay, so let's talk about the practical application of how does food marble work, right? So you have this device and talk about how do you use it to track all of this gas exchange and interactions happening in the gut.
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (24:01.814)
Okay.
So there's kind of two different sort of categories of how we can use it. And I'll just kind of gloss over them, the, sort of give a quick intro to them is one is challenge testing and the other is post-prandial breath testing, which is like just eating irregular foods and then breath testing afterwards to see what happens. So challenge testing is kind of like the diagnostic gold standard for breath testing, for testing for SIBO, EMO, and sugar intolerances. And almost the only reason that that's like the only thing that we
know to do is because of the limitations of the previous technology is that, you know, we weren't going to have people coming into a doctor's office, you know, every day after every meal. And we also wouldn't be having people send out breath test, breath bags and paying $200 a day. so this was really the technology sort of allows us to think about breath testing in a different way too. So challenge testing used to be the only one. It still is really great for kind of getting the most clear cut information. So, you know, a lot of times what I'll do,
is kind of use it to confirm what I suspect. I always start with like a SIBO test or an EMOT test just to make sure that like that's not part of the picture. But then then we have this post-prandom breath testing which is the other category which is where people eat food and you sometimes we just have them eat their regular diet. Sometimes we do like different dietary experiments like like let's have you not eat fructose today. We'll see if that chronically high hydrogen level finally comes down you know. We can then we can tell that that person might be having a trouble digesting fructose. Similarly
we can say, we're not quite sure if it's sorbitol, which is a...
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (25:38.285)
Actually one that a lot of people who think that they're, know, and have like food allergies or inflammation from food, it's actually that they can have something like a sorbitol intolerance where it's kind of subtle. It's sort of just in like, you know, tree fruits and things like that. But it's, but it can kind of present with like intermittent discomfort and can be in a lot of the same foods that people sort of identify as being their quote unquote inflammatory foods. And it's important to kind of note that what we're talking about there is not actually an inflammatory response. It's really a, a,
What's happening is that the sugar doesn't get broken down during digestion and so it doesn't get absorbed. So then it continues down the bowel and it does a couple of things, is one is create more gases because the bacteria get to eat it instead of it being digested earlier on and being absorbed. And the second problem is that it creates a situation where the water kind of gets drawn into the bowel so that you get more looser stools. So it's a little bit different than inflammation, but a lot of times what is actually sugar intolerance gets misidentified.
Pure Living Family (26:32.632)
Yeah.
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (26:38.308)
inflammation and like you said about intolerances are really like the inflammatory response is changing. It's also true of the sugar intolerances. Some of them are actually hard to change and what we do need to do is give people an enzyme to help break it down or have them eat less of that sugar so that their body can manage it and sometimes what we need to do is just sort of like help heal everything and then they do better with that with that sugar because that
I'm like, how far should I go down? I will say it. If you heal the lining of the small intestine, that's where a lot of those enzymes are created. And so a lot of times they can actually tolerate that sugar better after we do some work on the bigger picture.
Pure Living Family (27:20.02)
Awesome. and what the way I see it is what you talked about at the beginning is with naturopathic medicine is empowering individuals to have information to make decisions for themselves. And so that's what the technology I see is doing with food marble is, especially if you're tracking your meals. And the part of that I think is fascinating that comes with the actual product is you have like a digital
dashboard to track your food intake over time. And then the actual metrics, the graph will show you what sort of inflammation markers or what sort of bodily reaction that you're having. So then you can start making more educated, more targeted decisions to help your body to, like you said, the intestinal lining heal itself so it's not fully inflamed.
So you start feeling better, you're not having as many loose stools, but then also that you're absorbing more of your nutrients from the foods you're eating. So that part I think is super fascinating as far as like looking at the dashboard and having technology as a guide to help you live your best life. So I love that. And I'm curious just from your clinical experience, if you have like real world examples of clients.
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (28:44.73)
Good.
Pure Living Family (28:46.454)
and what it's done for them.
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (28:48.64)
Mm-hmm, absolutely. Yeah, so there's so one one big thing that I've seen is that you know for people who have had really chronic bowel issues their whole lives that often we get to really get down to the To the heart of it. So I'm thinking about specifically a patient I had who but by the time she came in to see me she was like
I can eat like four foods or else I feel terrible. my whole, like I just am in so much pain. I can't even leave the house. I have diarrhea, all the things. And so what she was on was a very restricted low FODMAP diet, which a lot of people are familiar with, but I'll just kind of do a quick overview. So basically it's a diet that avoids all the fermentable carbohydrates. so fermentable means that your bacteria eat them and then make gas out of them. And so, but also too, those bacteria, like we were talking about before,
so many other great things for you like they produce sartain fatty acids and they and so many and so many metabolites that we don't even know what they do but they clearly do something good because we know that when those bacteria absent that people have problems everything from like modulate anxiety to modulate weight gain to prevent diabetes you know there's so many things we're learning about these metabolites that are made by these bacteria but we have to feed them for them to do that right and we have to feed them the foods that they like which are these fermentable carbohydrates but
Pure Living Family (30:04.888)
Yeah.
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (30:05.784)
The flip side is when people have chronic bloating and pain, if we put them on a low-fibre MAP diet, a lot of times that takes care of it, reduces their symptoms. And for a lot of people, that's the only way that they have of really managing their IBS symptoms. And that for some people means the difference between them being able to leave the house, like this woman I'm talking about. If she were feeling like that, she couldn't really leave the house. was very debilitating to her. She missed some very important family social events and things like that because she was just feeling so awful.
And I think, you know, so then they have this low FODMAP diet, it's like, wow, that's great that it manages their symptoms and it's wonderful because that allows them to then leave the house. But in a bigger, like the whole arc of their health kind of picture, you know, that's not really a good diet long-term, you know? So it's not like, because you want those good bacteria to be fed and taken care of. And also because, you know, it's very restrictive and I really do feel like...
Pure Living Family (30:51.736)
Mm-hmm.
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (31:00.15)
I don't like to have people on very restrictive diets for very long because it does affect their lives and their social connections and things like that. I like to have them be able to have the flexibility. I always think of health as being resilience and flexibility. To be able to have the flexibility to eat foods at different times that might not be part of their normal diet.
Pure Living Family (31:07.522)
Good boy.
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (31:22.808)
So anyway, this woman with the four foods, so what we were able to do was instead of having it so that she couldn't eat any FODMAPs, we were able to actually identify that what she had was what's called congenital sucrase isomaltase disorder or deficiency, sorry. And what that means is that she can't break down sucrose, which is table sugar, right? Which is in...
everything right like ketchup and know, like if you're paying attention to sugar like it's all over the place and so you know and so that's so soon as we figured that out what she could do is be on a much less restrictive diet. So all she had to do was like avoid sucrose but it meant that she could eat, you know, all kinds of vegetables and so now you know her diet gets to be very varied and she's able to to manage her symptoms really well and there's also an enzyme specific to that called sucrate which actually
Pure Living Family (31:44.408)
from
Pure Living Family (32:02.83)
Mmm.
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (32:13.11)
replaces that missing enzyme for people who don't have it. And so that kind of ability to identify, to sort of really discern which FODMAP is a problem for people, where are they having the problem with intolerances, is one of the best things, the biggest practice changing things Food Marvel can offer.
Pure Living Family (32:33.102)
Well, I love that very much and I think you gave us a really great overview of gut health and enzymes and microbiomes helping us to digest our foods and how to address SIBO and I just learned about EMO today so thank you for that. So just keeping in mind to maybe close it out for today's quick lesson is keeping in mind our audience's parents of special needs kids and
A lot of times what we remind folks to do is to take better care of themselves so they can take better care of the special souls that they care for. So with those folks in mind, maybe one final thought you have for them of like how the food marble and how naturopathic medicine can help them more fully show up for themselves, more fully provide nutrition and energy to themselves so they have more to give to their kids.
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (33:12.538)
you
Pure Living Family (33:32.962)
Final thoughts for them of how naturopathic medicine and food marble can maybe help them?
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (33:38.731)
Mm-hmm. I just want to say that that's part of the work that you do that inspires me the most is really that sort of like that message and that that support for families and parents, know of you know, especially needs kids that that really like your health is also very central to the well-being of Your whole family and I really I really think about that is like a family is an organism You know, it's not just like we're separate organisms We all are also are a unit organism and and really that resilience that comes from from people taking care of their health and how that that
helps through really hard times and through challenges, you know, when people have the opportunity to really support their own health and resilience. And I think, you when I think about, you know, food marble and specifically how it can help families, you know, who do have a lot going on and it's not like they can do, it's a lot harder to do these bigger projects. What's nice about food marble is that it kind of, you can use it to just sort of collect the data and it'll come out and be like, hey, you know what, like every time you eat watermelon or, know, like it looks like
having a sorbitol problem it'll actually kind of give you like some if you use the Directive Consumer app it does give you some more like kind of guidance about that so it's sort of it makes it like a little bit less labor-intensive and then also but also gives you really useful information that then you can use so that you don't have to have as much of a restrictive diet but still get to feel well and you know you can really kind of identify without having to do a whole lot of extra legwork so I feel like
that's always my project is to be like how do I give give you the support with as little homework as possible you know like especially for folks who are you know in all kinds of family situations that that you know sort of require more of their energy and attention so yeah.
Pure Living Family (35:21.708)
Yeah, I love that approach and the way I've learned to phrase it is what is the most effective and least invasive and the least expensive way of doing that. And that's what I love about Food Marble and why it excites me because it hits all of those categories. And like I mentioned, lab diagnostics can be hundreds and hundreds of dollars to identify what are the triggers.
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (35:29.018)
Mmm.
Pure Living Family (35:46.747)
And I think for 299 is the cost of this device and we do get a 15 % discount for our followers and we'll link that in the show notes. So it comes out to 254, I think was the total, but that also comes with the direct to consumer application that then tracks it and you're able to have a food journal in addition to that. over time,
it'll give you guidance of how to improve your diet and maybe what some of the inflammatory actual triggers are. And so it's great guidance. So I really appreciate you coming on the podcast and educating us on Food Marvel and taking the time to really support the patient population we care about. Thank you so much. I love your passion in teaching folks about.
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (36:37.934)
Thank
Pure Living Family (36:39.49)
gut health and enzymes and microorganisms. So again, thank you so much for joining. Any final thoughts before we end today?
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (36:48.238)
No, I just want to say thank you. I really enjoyed our conversation and I really enjoyed the opportunity to support the work that you're doing. Yeah, thank you.
Pure Living Family (36:55.832)
Well, awesome. Well, maybe we'll have you on the show later on again. But again, thanks so much for your time today.
Gwenn Rosenberg, ND (37:00.933)
Thank you.
