Optimize Your Health with Small Steps: Emily Gold Mears Reveals How

Emily Gold Mears had always been passionate about science and healthcare literacy, but it wasn't until she delved deeper into her own health that she discovered the unexpected: personalized solutions are key to optimizing one's wellness. As she uncovered the power of functional medicine and lifestyle adjustments, Emily's journey highlighted the need for a collaborative approach to healthcare, empowering individuals to take control of their well-being. Show Notes | Transcript We each know how we respond to everything; the doctor doesn't know those things. One has to at the very least collaborate with their doctor and ideally do a lot of due diligence and additional research. - Emily Gold Mears Emily Gold Mears is a citizen scientist, biohacker and author of Optimizing Your Health: An Approachable Guide to Reducing Your Risk of Chronic Disease. A former attorney, Gold Mears shifted her advocacy efforts to seek information on optimizing one’s health through extensive research analysis in science and medicine. Her research focuses on the intersection of functional and allopathic medicine, and the critical requirements for individuals to become their own healthcare advocates. In this episode, you will be able to: Discover functional medicine's powerful influence on uncovering chronic diseases' root causes. Uncover the essential role sleep, nutrition, and gut health play in preventing disease. Learn about the potential negative effects LED light bulbs may have on your sleep and biology. Implement small, incremental steps that can drastically impact your overall health and wellness. Related Live. Love. Engage. episodes you may enjoy: Culinary Medicine & Mindfulness with Chef Dr. Mike In this episode, Chef Dr. Mike shares why beating yourself up about making bad food choices is unproductive. Creating a Healthy Life and Business with Thom King Learn why Thom King started a company that offers a healthy, more natural alternative to sugars. Shape Up after 40 with Nicole Simonin In this episode, Nicole explains why she is so passionate about helping women over 40 shape up. Resources: Connect with Emily here Find Emily on Facebook, Instagram & LinkedIn: @emilygoldmears Join the Soulful Women's Network here Send me a message here ☕ Support the podcast here ❤ Love this episode? Leave us a review and rating here Connect with Gloria: LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter TRANSCRIPT Gloria Grace Rand: Namaste. I am so glad to be with you for another episode of Live Love Engage, and I've got a lovely guest with us on the program today who we're going to meet in a second. But her name, let me introduce you to her first. Her name is Emily Gold Mears and she is a citizen scientist, biohacker and author of optimizing Your Health an Approachable guide to reducing your risk of Chronic disease. She's also a former attorney, but she shifted her advocacy efforts to seek information on optimizing one's health through extensive research, analysis, and science and medicine. And her research actually focuses on the intersection of functional and allopathic medicine and the critical requirements for individuals to become their own healthcare advocates, which I think is really important. So I want to officially now welcome you, Emily, to lie, love, engage. Emily Gold Mears: Well, thank you, Gloria. It's nice to be here with you. Gloria Grace Rand: I am very interested in what you have to say. We actually met a while ago at a publicity summit where you're promoting your book. I was intrigued by your background and everything, but I would love for you to share with our audience first a little bit about your journey. So you started off in life, I guess, as an attorney, and now you've sort of shifted your focus. So I was wondering if you could share a little bit about what prompted that. Emily Gold Mears: Well, yes, I did practice law for a while. I must confess, I did not love the practice of law, but I did it, and I always loved science and health and medicine. And I observed many years ago that in our country, we have a real science literacy problem. And this was only magnified by the pandemic, and it became very clear by the pandemic that we have one. And I have been affiliated with a number of organizations for years who give presentations and seminars, and I have been trying to persuade them for ten years that they have to do better with their science presentations because we need to educate the public about science. I was largely ignored, and everyone is very interested in global politics, which are interesting and are important, but one can do more than one thing. And the pandemic really highlighted all of the junk science that was being promoted. And if people were paying attention, they saw that the different reactions to the COVID virus had a lot to do with one's underlying health condition. And I thought, okay, I need to share the information that I've learned. And I had already become a healthcare advocate and a science advocate, and I researched and learned so many really interesting things that one can do to optimize their health. I thought, I need to share these things because many of them are free or low cost. And so therefore, there isn't a lot of financial incentive for the business community or the healthcare community to promote many of these things. But people need to know. I mean, the American public is getting sicker and sicker by the day. A recent statistic put out by the CDC shows that lifespan is declining, and that's all an indication that the current approach is not working. And I think that I've found a better approach. So therefore, I'm trying to encourage people to become their own healthcare advocate and at the very least, collaborate with their healthcare professional. Gloria Grace Rand: Before we get into the specifics of your book, I would love for you to explain a little bit, because I kind of have an idea, but there may be, I'm sure, others also listening and or watching who may not be sure of what it is. In your bio, it mentioned that you focus on the intersection of functional and allopathic medicine. Can you share what is the difference between those two? Emily Gold Mears: Indeed I can. Yes. Allopathic medicine is just another word for conventionally trained doctors. When people go to medical school, they're trained in a very specific way that is referred to as allopathic medicine. Many of the medical schools are sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry, and many of these doctors are taught a certain way, which usually is according to the standard of care, which means that they are promoting the one size fits all healthcare approach that our United States healthcare system promotes. And it turns out that's not really working for most of the diseases. Now, if one is in a car accident or breaks a bone or has an acute infection, I encourage them to go straight to their conventionally trained doctor because they're well equipped to treat them and treat them effectively. But unfortunately, what is going to kill most of us are these chronic diseases: cancer, cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative disease, autoimmune disease. And thus far, in my opinion, the conventionally trained or the allopathic approach has not been quite as effective as it needs to be. And functional medicine looks at the source of the issue. Rather than treating the symptoms with a pharmaceutical or something else, a functional medicine doctor tries to determine, why do you have this? What is the source of your autoimmune disease? Why did you get cancer? And most of these diseases are multifactorial, but most of them, contrary to popular belief, have a very small genetic component, maybe 10%, and they have an enormous environmental and lifestyle component. And that's good news, because that means that we can take charge. We can alter our environment and our lifestyle, more our lifestyle than our environment. But there are things we can do about our environment that will improve our health and reduce our risk of getting these diseases. Gloria Grace Rand: Thank you for, number one, for explaining that. And that is what I had suspected, and I know that I've found that to be the case as well. I know I'm very grateful. And also, I think part of it is just the way, part of how I grew up in that watching my mother take all of these pills for all of the different disorders and things that she had high blood pressure and heart disease and diabetes and things like that. And I was like, I don't want to do that. I don't want to be that as an adult. And thankfully, I have not had to do that. I only might take a vitamin here and there or something. And I agree that American medicine is really great at fixing bones. I broke an ankle once and I definitely went to the emergency room and got it taken care of and very happy about that. But you're right. I think it's so much that these other things that there are other factors. Can you maybe elaborate a little bit? Because you talk about lifestyle and environmental factors, maybe share I don't know, what have you found? Maybe kind of like maybe the top couple of things that people need to be aware of in order to optimize their health. Emily Gold Mears: So the top things, the most important things, are those which people have heard a lot about. And I would put sleep at the top. If one has dysfunctional sleep, which many of us do, they're going to have a tough time optimizing other things. And there are many ways that people can optimize their sleep. As we get older, we just don't sleep as efficiently or as easily as we did when we were younger. But it's critically important to take the steps to improve their sleep. And some of those are very easy. And I would recommend not taking any of the pharmaceutical sleep aids because that just causes other problems....