Today’s post features a few key takeaways from a recent Wellness Your Way podcast interview.  Find the full episode here and be sure to subscribe to Wellness Your Way so you don’t miss future episodes!

Guest Bio: Dr. Cori Stern

Dr. Cori Stern has been helping people restore and optimize their health naturally since 2001. Her passion for alternative medicine grew out of a sick childhood characterized by a very poor diet, incessant chronic infections, and never-ending cycles of antibiotics. At the young age of 15, she decided to take her health into her own hands and began self-studying topics like the gut-brain connection, toxins, and how diet impacts a person’s overall well-being. Later in life, upon re-realizing her childhood dreams of helping those who suffer heal naturally, she decided to become a chiropractor at 32 and graduated at 37. She now assists people all over the world with overcoming health challenges and advocating for their healthcare. Dr. Cori Stern oversees a busy private practice where she also educates other chiropractors on how to achieve optimal results with their clients. She is the creator of the Dr. Cori Stern – Take Control of Your Health YouTube channel known for its bite-sized information on a wide range of modern health topics.

Top Insights from Dr. Cori Stern’s Interview

1. The mainstream advice in the late 20^th century was that “fat is bad.” This is blatantly wrong.  Your body requires fat to operate appropriately. The “research” that saturated fat clogs arteries and causes heart disease has been completely debunked.  Instead, now we know that things like sugar, which cause inflammation, cause damage to the lining of your arteries.
2. Think of the lining of your arteries like a road. When the road is nice and smooth, anything can move across it easily.  So when your arteries are smooth, you eat fat and it passes through without issue and goes to the places that need it (like your brain and eyeballs).  But, if the road is damaged with potholes, things get stuck.  In your arteries, the stuff that gets stuck is fat or cholesterol, and this causes plaquing of the arteries.  But the underlying cause is not the fat or cholesterol; it’s the potholes!  The potholes are caused by inflammatory foods (like sugar and commercially made fats) and toxins.
3. Commercially made fat is very inflammatory. Real fat comes from plants and animals, like nuts, olives, avocados, raw milk, and meat. Our bodies require these to be healthy.  Commercially made fats like seed oils, corn oils, vegetable oils, margarine, and more are made with toxic ingredients like hexane, which are bad for us.
4. Cholesterol is an essential nutrient. 60% of the cholesterol in your body is in your brain, and you will develop dementia if you don’t have enough cholesterol in your brain!  Your hormones are also dependent upon adequate cholesterol.  If the lining of your arteries is not damaged, cholesterol is no problem.  For more on how to manage cholesterol and whether you need to, see this post.
5. Toxins impact your organs directly. Your liver is the primary detox organ, and gets overloaded easily when it has too many toxins to filter through.  Your kidneys and bowel also play major roles, and when we get toxic exposure from so many sources as we do today, they get overwhelmed and cannot keep up.
6. We get our highest exposure to toxins from food. Real food is things that grow in the ground or on a tree or have a mother and have been minimally processed, like meats, vegetables, fruits, and nuts.  Minimally processed foods are cooked, sprouted, fermented, or cut.  Anything else that has been processed further is almost always loaded with sugar, chemicals, food dyes, enhancers, and preservatives, and this is what overwhelms our organs.  Even some real foods, which have been sprayed with pesticides, herbicides, and glyphosate, or animals that have been given hormones and antibiotics, can be sources of toxins.
7. Everyone can benefit from some form of detox. Sweating through exercise or sauna is a wonderful way to detox regularly.  Often, we don’t realize that we feel the impact of toxins until we don’t have them, and over time, they build up and cause chronic issues.  Ensuring that we’re getting rid of them regularly is critical.
8. When you are not emptying your bowels on a regular basis, you’re holding the toxins in for longer and they recirculate. Having regular bowel movements is a critical form of detox.
9. The goal is not to get rid of stress, but to be able to handle stress better. Chronic stress, if not handled properly, can cause high blood pressure, heart damage, headaches, adrenal burnout, digestive issues, and more.  Minerals help our bodies deal well with stress, and our soil is where we’re supposed to get minerals, but our soils are depleted of minerals.  Often we need to replace them (Megan recommends this replacement).  We also need to implement some kind of stress management practice, like deep breathing. Here are Megan’s top recommendations for breathing exercises to relieve stress!

Want to hear the full episode, including how Dr. Cori’s sick childhood led her to decide to cure herself at age 15, the one book that changed the course of her health and career, how mercury fillings cause your salivary glands to go awry, where (and how!) Dr. Cori recommends getting the best quality foods, why walking into a store with tons of products is stressful to our bodies, how to reduce toxins in your life, and so much more?

Head over here to catch the full episode with Dr. Cori Stern!

Now it’s your turn!  What is one thing you learned from this interview?  What’s one thing you’re committed to changing after learning from Dr. Cori Stern?

🎙️ Want to hear about this topic in audio format? → Check out the podcast episode here!