The Root Cause Medicine Podcast is a weekly one-on-one conversation with renowned medical experts, specialists, and pioneers who are influencing the way we look at your health and wellbeing. This week we’re joined by Dr. Jill Carnahan, a Functional Medicine Expert and Founder and Medical Director of Flatiron Functional Medicine. In this episode of The Root Cause Medicine Podcast, Dr. Jill Carnahan shares her health journey through breast cancer, mold, toxicity, and trauma, while giving you guidance on where to start on your own journey. Key Takeaways: 1. Why does a disease start in the soil? Over the years, poor soil management, environmental changes, and chemicals are leading to the depletion of nutrients in the soil and human body. For example, the magnesium in an apple today is about one-fifth of what it was 50 or 100 years ago. We might be eating good organic produce, but it's depleted in nutrients that come from the soil. Those depletions and chemical applications like glyphosate pull out minerals that we need to live in a healthy manner. The corn and soy survive, but all the weeds and growths around them die because they're minerally depleted. Glyphosate kills minerals our microbiome can't survive without, as well as bifidobacteria and lactobacillus, allowing things like clostridia to cause various disorders. So we have this imbalance of microbiome based on the stuff that's applied to our soils, affects the gut, and the immune system gets the wrong signal and starts to attack our bodies. 2. Your liver can't do everything by itself - you have to help it. Our liver was designed to detox. We were created that way, and we have everything we need in our bodies to detoxify. However, the environmentally toxic load is increasing exponentially every year with chemicals that we have no idea how they work or how much toxicity we're taking on. And as this toxicity increases, we are losing our margin. If you think of it as a bucket analogy of how we detoxify, we all are born with a bucket that fills up with chemicals. As the toxic load increases, your bucket fills up, and your liver can do the job to a certain point. But when your bucket is full, the water level starts to spill over, your toxic load increases, and your liver gets behind it and can't keep up anymore. So your liver needs more nutrients like B vitamins, glutathione, and alpha-lipoic acid. 3. Breast cancer causes When it comes to breast cancer development, the hormone estradiol is often blamed but we know gut health, infections, inflammation, and toxicities from chemicals like pesticides and herbicides absolutely play a role. Toxic emotions, trauma, and stress can also trigger a bodily response and affect your hormones and metabolic health. Dr. Jill is a well-known Functional Medicine Expert who uses functional medicine to help you find the answers to the cause of your illness and the nutritional and biochemical imbalances that may be making you feel ill. She is the Founder and Medical Director of Flatiron Functional Medicine and Chief Executive Officer of Queen of Grace Productions. Her new book, Unexpected: Finding Resilience through Functional Medicine, Science, and Faith, will come out soon. She is also an international speaker, author, blogger, IFM Educator at the Institute of Functional Medicine, and Director of Functional Medicine at Resilience Code.