BONUS EPISODE: Dr. Brooke Goldner, Lupus Conqueror

[INTRODUCTION]

[00:00:20] KK: Hi there. Welcome to Risky Business. I'm Kathy Kaehler.

[00:00:22] BL: And I'm Bliss Landon.

[00:00:24] KK: Welcome to our show. We’re very happy to have you with us.

[00:00:27] BL: Yes, we are.

[00:00:28] KK: How are you, my friend?

[00:00:29] BL: I’m doing great.

[00:00:30] KK: I like your top.

[00:00:31] BL: Thank you.

[00:00:32] KK: Very horsey.

[00:00:33] BL: Well, I am an equestrian.

[00:00:35] KK: Yes, you are.

[00:00:35] BL: You do know this about me.

[00:00:36] KK: I do. I do. I do.

[00:00:36] BL: Yes, yes. With my old geriatric horses in my backyard but –

[00:00:41] KK: Who are so adorable.

[00:00:42] BL: They are and I love them but they're too old to ride now. But that’s okay.

[00:00:46] KK: I miss having horses in my backyard. There's something so magical about that.

[00:00:51] BL: You know what? In the morning, sometimes I go out there. I'll bring my dogs outside, and I'll look up, and they're playing with each other. It’s like I have a little horse show, excavation in my backyard or exhibition. Anyway, yeah.

[00:01:07] KK: Not to mention the pigs.

[00:01:08] BL: Well, yeah. I can’t see the pigs from my backyard but I can –

[00:01:11] KK: I don't know how you can't. They're so huge.

[00:01:14] BL: This is true. But –

[00:01:16] KK: But it’s lovely. But they’re nice.

[00:01:17] BL: The horses are fine, and the way they play, it's like medieval times in my backyard.

[00:01:21] KK: Really?

[00:01:21] BL: Yeah. They're rearing and trying to bite each other. But they're just playing. It’s pretty cool, and there is something about looking at a horse such as very calming and relaxing.

[00:01:32] KK: I love it.

[00:01:33] BL: They're so beautiful. Yeah.

[00:01:34] KK: I love it. I love it. I can’t get enough.

[00:01:35] BL: Even when they’re old. They’re still beautiful when they’re old.

[00:01:39] KK: Well, we're beyond our days of riding.

[00:01:42] BL: Yeah.

[00:01:43] KK: I wish I could ride.

[00:01:44] BL: Most likely not.

[00:01:44] KK: I cannot.

[00:01:45] BL: I know. Me neither.

[00:01:46] KK: I just can look.

[00:01:47] BL: Me neither.

[00:01:47] KK: And pet their noses.

[00:01:49] BL: And feed them carrots.

[00:01:50] KK: Yeah. Well, anyway, we have a really great show for you guys today, and this is a subject that you do hear about and many because there are a lot of people who are affected by lupus. But you may not know what happens to you, what it feels like, how you know you have it, what happens if you do have it. That's why we're very excited to talk about this today because we have somebody who has an extraordinary story. I think, again, knowledge is key to so much, and we're just really excited.

[00:02:30] BL: Well, and it's Lupus Awareness Month.

[00:02:32] KK: That it is, so even more important to get this word out. We’d like to welcome Brooke Goldner. She's a medical doctor, a plant-based healer. That I'm very excited to hear about.

[00:02:46] BL: Me too.

[00:02:46] KK: And an author. Welcome to Risky Business, Brooke. How are you today?

[00:02:51] BG: Doing good. Thank you.

[00:02:53] KK: Fantastic.

[00:02:53] BL: Welcome, Brooke. Welcome to our little show we have here. So you actually had lupus at one time?

[00:03:02] BG: Absolutely, yes. I was diagnosed with lupus when I was 16 years old.

[00:03:06] BL: Wow.

[00:03:06] KK: Oh, my gosh.

[00:03:06] BG: Back in the day. Yeah.

[00:03:08] BL: What were your symptoms? Like how did you feel them and how did you know there was something wrong?

[00:03:12] BG: That's the thing about autoimmune diseases and lupus is oftentimes you don't really put it all together that something's wrong right away because things kind of sneak up on you and you justify them. So what happened to me was at 14 years old, I started getting really bad migraines. But people in my family get migraines, and these are bad. I mean, my mom would have to pull over, and I had to vomit out the car while we’re turning, and for three to four days just really sick with it. They did all the tests. My mom was diligent about bringing me to the doctor, and I remember they did the EEG and the MRI and the CAT scan. My parents said, “Well, they've proven you have a brain but they can’t still figure out what's wrong with it.”

[00:03:53] KK: But what's  wrong?

[00:03:55] BL: Yes. It was a lot of sarcasm, New York family. Anyway, they kind of put that aside and said, “We don't know why you're having this. We’ll give you medicine for pain.” Then the summer when I was 16, before I started junior year of high school, I started getting joint pains in my knees, in my shoulders. But the weird thing was it would move around, and pain doesn't usually work that way, where one day my shoulder would hurt so much. I couldn't raise my arm. It's so bad. It's going to take me like two weeks to heal this. Then the next day totally normal, but it's the other shoulder. I thought in my mind, “Maybe they were wrong about that MRI. Maybe there's something missing. This is weird.” Right?

It was a wandering joint pain, which actually is very common in lupus, a wandering pain. But it feels like the worst pain you ever had, like you sprained your joint, and then the next day normal. So that was very weird. Then I started getting rashes and I had a rash across my face when I go in the sunlight. These things just started to accumulate, and one day they all came together. I had just gone to the pool all day with my best friend, and a lot of people with lupus, including myself, are very sensitive to the sun. So I was in the sun all day. By the time we left the pool, I had a raging migraine and I was feeling really achy. Then I went and threw up because of the migraine. When I came out, my rash on my face was really white.

[00:05:17] KK: Oh, my gosh.

[00:05:18] BG: My dad looked at me and went, “Something's wrong here.”

[00:05:23] BL: I think.

[00:05:23] KK: You’re not looking good. I think there might be something wrong.

[00:05:27] BG: He was right on top of it. Yeah. But, I mean, I had gone to the doctor about my knee pain, and they said, “I don't know. Maybe it's because of volleyball.” I'm like, “I sit bench for volleyball. The coach never put me in the game ever. I would have to beg to get like one turn.” So, I mean, but something for pains [inaudible 00:05:44]. But finally, when that happened, they called my doctor. I met them in the ER. When she saw it all together, she knew very quickly that it was lupus. But the surprising thing then, okay, I knew I had rash. I knew I had joint pain. I knew I had migraines. But when they did my blood tests, it turned out I was already in stage four kidney failure.

[00:06:00] BL: Oh, my gosh. It affects your kidneys. I didn't know that part. Wow.

[00:06:04] BG: Well, yeah. Autoimmune diseases can attack different organs, so your own immune system starts attacking your body, right? Instead of like a virus, for example, that you want it to attack. With lupus, it can attack any of your organs. It can be kidney, hearts, lungs, brain. When they did the testing and they saw my blood tests that my kidney was failing, so the next day, I'm in surgery getting a kidney biopsy. The day after that, I'm sitting in front of a nephrologist, who actually said – It was my mother and my grandmother sitting with me. He actually said that because my kidneys were so severe, I had six months to live.

[00:06:39] BL: Oh, my gosh. How awful.

[00:06:42] BG: Yeah. [inaudible 00:06:42].

[00:06:43] KK: I’m just in shock.

[00:06:45] BL: You're like 17 at this time or 16?

[00:06:47] BG: 16.

[00:06:48] BL: 16 at this time still. Wow. Oh, that's terrible.

[00:06:50] BG: Yeah. It escalated quickly. It was just kind of like, “Okay. Aches, pains, that kind of thing.” Then he literally said, “Yeah. Unless you do some experimental treatments,” which at the time, they didn't have all the fancy drugs they have now, which really haven't made that much difference in outcomes. But back then it was high dose steroids, which I was on super high doses of steroids. Then they did chemotherapy as an experimental treatment because what they knew at the time was when they give chemotherapy to people with cancer, it shuts off their immune system. That's why a lot of times they end up dying from an infection because you know how people have cancer. They can't be around with other people.

So they thought, “Well, if lupus is causing your immune system to attack your kidney, what if we just shut off your immune system on purpose?” Like when your computer gets all fitzy and not working right, you just kind of shut it off. You count to 10, you say a prayer, and then you turn it back on and just, “Oh, look. It's working.” The theory was what if we reboot you. So it took two years of chemotherapy to shut down my immune system enough that my kidney failure stopped.

[00:07:52] KK: Wow.

[00:07:53] BG: Your expression is like, “What is this [inaudible 00:07:55]?”

[00:07:57] BL: Absolutely astounding.

[00:07:58] KK: You know, dumbfounded.

[00:07:59] BL: Wow.

[00:08:00] BG: Yeah. So it is a really horrific illness. There are people with lupus where it only affects just the skin or maybe only joint pain. But for many people like myself, it affects the kidney or other organs. I treated people with brain lupus who are having three, four seizures a day or in their heart or lungs. All of whom are healthy and living good lives now, but it's a very scary illness, and modern medicine can keep you alive. I mean, thank goodness. Had I not had this experimental treatment, I might have had a kidney transplant or died. Because of the treatments they gave me, it kept me alive. I was able to – I graduated top of my class in high school. Because I couldn't go out because of the chemo, so I just read my textbooks. I just like stayed home and read textbook and –

[00:08:40] BL: As they say, how did you become a doctor with all that? I don’t know. So you had nothing else to do but study. Okay.

[00:08:45] BG: Nothing to do. I can’t hang out with my friends.

[00:08:47] KK: Wow.

[00:08:48] BL: Wow. That’s amazing. 

[00:08:51] BG: I mean, I'm grateful to western medicine. It’s one of the reasons I became a doctor was my doctor really did save my life. But it doesn't give you health, and so I knew that I was going to live a shorter life in most of that. Especially when I went to medical school, I really understood that because when I was young, there was no Google. We didn't even have the Internet till I was in college. So that's how old I am, right? But I thankfully didn't have the Internet to tell me how bad I was supposed to feel, and so I plan to life anyway. Then when I went to medical school, I went, “Whoa, okay. This is bad,” and I knew. They told me I could never have children, that I would probably be disabled on my 40s, and I wasn't going to live as long life as other people.

But I figured my family came here as refugees from the Holocaust, and I had a way better life than they did. I had actually a blessed life compared to them. So I always felt very blessed and lucky, and I just figured none of us know how much time we have. I'm just going to live full power, full speed ahead. Let nothing stop me from getting like the most I can out of my life and to give back and have such purpose as I can, knowing that I might have a shorter time to do it than other people. For me, it actually created more intensity and gratitude and excitement about life, whereas for a lot of the folks I see, it actually does the opposite, where they end up very depressed and hopeless.

[00:10:12] BL: Right. It's because they Googled it, right?

[00:10:16] BG: You don't want to Google it. Yeah.

[00:10:17] BL: Yeah. You don’t want to Google when you have a bad illness. Wow. Is lupus hereditary?

[00:10:26] BG: In a sense. The predisposition to get autoimmune diseases are hereditary. But really, most of the things people deal with are right. In families, you'll see, “Oh, everybody has diabetes. Everybody has heart attacks. Oh, cancer, breast cancer, right?” But most of the diseases people get, that's part of our genetics. So your parents have their genes, they shuffle the deck, you get dealt out your hands, and blue eyes, brown hair, predisposition to lupus or heart disease, da, da, da.

But the good news, and that's what I really want to bring to the table, not just the traumas of my history with medicine, but the good news is those genes have to be turned on. I wasn't [inaudible 00:11:03], right? I wasn't born with it. I got a good 14 years before I even started having any pain at all right, 16 years before the kidney started to go. So those genes were dormant, but something triggered them. What I've been doing for the past for about dozen years in my practice is helping people untrigger their genes for disease.

For me, I've actually been completely lupus-free, normal kidneys, no medical problems at all for 16 years in October.

[00:11:32] BL: Wow. Good for you.

[00:11:32] BG: All Because I changed my lifestyle. I changed the way I ate. I didn't even tell you, like in medical school, I started getting mini strokes from blood clots that lupus was causing blood clots, and I started getting double vision [inaudible 00:11:43].

[00:11:43] KK: That's what I wanted to ask you. When did you decide or just kind of became aware that what I'm eating is affecting what I have.

[00:11:59] BG: I wish I could say that I had some kind of brilliant insight. I wish I could. People are just like, “How did you figure this out? Total accident?” Yeah. I mean, and I really tried. I originally decided I was going to be a genetic researcher. I spent three years doing genetic research into leukemia and brain diseases. I thought, “Oh, I'm going to be an expert in genetics and science. I'm going to figure it out.” Then I realized I really miss people. I don't like being in a lab with just the fruit flies, and I'm really clumsy. I broke so many test tubes.

Anyway, so I said this is not me. I'm a people person, I'm going to go into medicine, and then I'm going to do it. Actually, what I decided was one of the best ways I could help people would be to help people with chronic disease live purposeful live, that you aren’t the diagnosis. That if I could do it, you could do it. So I thought if I could help people overcome trauma and emotional pain, I could help them live even better lives, and I could if I became a rheumatologist and gave them steroids or other treatments. So I actually originally specialized in psychiatry and neurology, and I became a specialist in trauma and helping, teaching people fortitude and happiness.

It turns out people who are happy recover faster from illnesses and have better lives. So I became an expert in that or I kind of already was one and then I became a doctor who taught it. I thought that was the path. That's how I'm going to serve humanity. What happened was I fell in love, so that wasn't planned. It just happened and it was right before I'd moved. So I had done all my training in Pennsylvania. I went to Temple Medical School and I did my training in in Pittsburgh. Then I decided I just didn't want one more snowstorm ever in my life.

[00:13:37] KK: Getting out.

[00:13:37] BL: Get out of there.

[00:13:39] BG: I was laying on my back on the ice after I tripped getting out of my car and I was looking [inaudible 00:13:44] and I said, “No more.” So I got my first choice of residency at UCLA and Harbor in California, and I was planning to go. Two months before I leave, fall in love. This guy, my husband, Thomas, he was so amazing. We knew within a month of meeting we're talking about marriage. I mean, it was one of those things where –

[00:14:07] BL: Just meant to be.

[00:14:07] BG: I mean, it was – We’ll be married 16 years also in October and we've still to this day, if we look into each other's eyes for a few seconds, we start crying. We just can't – It’s too much but he’s incredible.

[00:14:20] BL: Wow. [inaudible 00:14:21].

[00:14:23] BG: He’s an incredible human, like the best one on the planet. I'm sorry, everybody, but [inaudible 00:14:27].

[00:14:29] KK: You took him.

[00:14:30] BL: That’s okay. You deserve him. You deserve him.

[00:14:32] BG: He’s mine. I do. I do. But that's one of the reasons I got him is that I believe that. When I met him though and we – At first, I didn't talk about lupus because I don't know. I didn't meet a really hot guy and like lead with the lupus story. [inaudible 00:14:48].

[00:14:48] KK: Scare them a little bit.

[00:14:48] BL: I won’t say that. Say that for the second or third date. Yeah.

[00:14:52] BG: Not even. I wanted to dance and have fun and have experiences and just I was always focused on my life. At that point, I was taking injections every day from blood thinners and I had my other medicines. But I only thought about my illness to take my medicines, and it was gone from my mind. It was like –

[00:15:07] BL: That’s good.

[00:15:08] BG: I have stuff to do. But when he talked about marriage, I was like, “Okay, we got to slow this roll down a second, and I have to explain what's going on.” So I told him. I said, “Listen, I have – I know you've seen me take my medicine. I have this disease, where I can't have your children. It could kill me if I tried. I'm not going to live a long life, and you're going to have to take care of me when I become disabled.” We were 28. I said, “I could get it if you want to not go down this road.” His only other person he ever connected to as deeply as me, maybe not quite as deeply, was his best friend who had died of testicular cancer at 21. For him, like, “Oh, great. I finally open my heart again, and here we go.”

[00:15:50] BL: Here we go again. Yeah. Wow.

[00:15:52] BG: But none of that was said out loud. He just looked at me and said, “You know, I just – I'd rather live a short life with you than a lifetime with anybody else, so we'll just have the best damn life you could ever have.” I went, “Okay, let's get married.”

[00:16:05] KK: You’re like, “Let's do it.”

[00:16:09] BG: So the reason I tell the story was this is when everything pivoted. We decide we're going to get married. Now, all of a sudden, instead of my only goal in life was the white coat, I never thought about the white dress. It just wasn't really on my mind. Now, I'm like, “Oh, gosh. I'm going to get married.” We were going to elope in Maui just with our best friends, people who would cry only. That was my [inaudible 00:16:29].

[00:16:30] BL: That was the requirement.

[00:16:32] BG: Yeah. Not people who were just coming for the free meal but like just the few of us –

[00:16:36] KK: The serious ones.

[00:16:39] BG: My husband is actually – He’s famous for being an expert in metabolism. So at the time I met him, he was training people for – What was cool at the time was MTV. I don't know if anyone watches that anymore. I don't know. But back then, do you guys remember URL or TRL? TRL?

[00:16:55] BL: TRL?

[00:16:55] KK: What's that?

[00:16:56] BG: Well, like MTV’s the Beach House.

[00:17:00] BL: Yes, yes, yes, yes.

[00:17:00] KK: I do remember that.

[00:17:02] BG: Yeah. Well, okay. So my husband was 2003 Hottest Body at the Beach House.

[00:17:07] BL: Wow.

[00:17:08] KK: Look at that.

[00:17:10] BG: Yes. So he is a scientist actually and a specialist in metabolism, and he experimented on himself and made himself a perfection at the time.

[00:17:18] BL: Look awesome. Okay.

[00:17:19] BG: Anyway, he was training people who were on MTV. I said, “Well, I would like to look like an MTV star for my wedding. What woman doesn't want to look like that?” I was overweight at the time. I was eating the best diet to be sick or overweight. It's called hospital food. If you eat that, it’s very good for hospital business.

[00:17:38] BL: Well, plus the steroids and the treatments that you’d been through might have helped you gain weight too, right?

[00:17:43] BG: Yeah. I mean, it was definitely. I mean, in Pittsburgh, when I would order a salad at the hospital, they put French fries on top.

[00:17:51] KK: So let me ask you.

[00:17:53] BG: I'm not blaming my medicine for that.

[00:17:55] BL: Okay. Okay. No, you can’t.

[00:17:56] KK: But let me ask you. Was nutrition on your mind at all? I mean, you're going –

[00:18:00] BG: Never.

[00:18:01] KK: It was I've never.

[00:18:02] BG: Never. 

[00:18:02] KK: Was it still not part of your medical experience and training? It's so –

[00:18:07] BG: It has never been. It has never.

[00:18:08] KK: Never been?

[00:18:09] BG: No. I'm an expert in nutrition and how it affects your cellular function because of the work I've done after my medical training. That was a wild part was people have asked me in interviews many times like, “I'm sure you were still searching.” I'm like, “No, I wasn't searching.” I was trained in western medicine. I knew what I needed was medicine. That was what it was. There was no part of my mind that thought maybe there's something more they didn't teach you. No. Like I said, I was raised by immigrants. We’re very trusting. The FDA will tell us the right thing to eat. The USDA has got it covered. I've now testified to the USDA multiple times, trying to fix the situation. It's not easy to do. They haven't budged yet, but I won't stop. I just trusted that –

[00:18:50] KK: During this time, I was going to say, were your symptoms escalated at all or had they kind of –

[00:18:58] BG: They would come and go.

[00:18:59] KK: They come and go [inaudible 00:19:00].

[00:19:00] BG: The kidney failure stopped with the chemo. I still had some level of evidence of kidney dysfunction. So on my labs, you can see that I had protein lost in my urine that only happens with kidney damage, but I was told that was permanent. Then the arthritis and migraines would still come, but I took medicines for that. I had painkillers for those things. Then the blood clots started in my medical school training, and that I had to take injections for, and they said that was for life.

The reason I changed my diet was because I asked my husband or my husband to be to train me. He said, “Your diet is terrible. I mean, there’s no way.” So I had been a vegetarian since I was a teenager, just because I loved animals. I have no like thoughts about diet being healthy but I still ate tons of eggs and cheese and processed foods and French fries and ranch on the salad, right? But I just didn't eat meat. What he was doing at the time was something that's kind of similar to what paleo is now, but it was before that term came out. He was looking at what nutrients affect cellular metabolism in terms of fitness, like how to lose fat quickly. I gained muscle quickly, that kind of thing.

It was high amounts of raw vegetables, omega 3 fatty acids, high water intake. Then he thought, “You needed to eat meat for protein, but it was like free range only kind of thing.” I was like, “I'm not doing that.” So he goes, “Okay. I've never trained a vegetarian, so I don't know. Just do my diet but tofu or something instead.” He'd been doing that nutrition plan a long time, and people lost weight and looked amazing, got on magazine covers or MTV. But nobody had ever reversed a disease or anything. But the combination of my resistance to eating any meat and his insistence on the raw vegetables and other things, within a couple of weeks, I realized that I had more energy than I've ever had.

I was an intern working 30-hour shifts multiple days a week. Really intense high stress where I was actually the doctor now, instead a med student, so you have to not kill people when you're an intern, a lot of pressure not to do that. It was very high pressure, very little sleep. Yet I had more energy than I'd ever remembered having where I could work a 30-hour shift and go to the gym after, which is not normal if you don't have lupus. So it's going really good. I had no joint pains. I had no migraines. I said, “This is really weird, but I feel amazing.” Then I had just gotten new doctors out in California, and so it took a few months to get all my tests done. When I got my test done about three and a half months after I changed my diet, they were negative for lupus, which is considered impossible. It’s considered – I've been sick for 12 years, kidneys failed, blood clots. I mean, this wasn't like a little trip, a little minor thing. This was a deep dive in the [inaudible 00:21:36].  

[00:21:36] BL: Huge.

[00:21:37] BG: It’s considered impossible, but all the antibodies were gone. My kidneys were normal, no protein in my urine. By the end, they thought it was a mistake. They thought the lab had made a mistake because they had my chart from Pennsylvania, and they went, “This is not right.” So I went and got married, came back, and retested. Now, all my antibodies that were causing the blood clots were gone too. That was 16 years ago, and it's never come back. I had two kids, beautiful kids.

[00:22:02] BL: You got two children?

[00:22:03] KK: That’s so great.

[00:22:03] BG: Yeah. I have two sons. One’s 12 and one's 8. Lupus is – They thought it was going to come back when I got pregnant. It never did. When I had my second child – No, my first child. So this is the thing is even after I felt good in my lab for normal, it still never crossed my mind that I didn't have lupus because I'd had it for so long, and it's incurable, and I'm a doctor, and it's incurable. So I didn't understand why my labs were normal, and I kept taking my medicines for a year after I had normal labs because I didn't know what else to do because I'd been told for life. I finally asked my doctor after a year, “Why am I still taking my medicine?” He said to me, “You're treating my anxiety because I'm scared to take you off.”

[00:22:45] BL: That's so funny.

[00:22:45] KK: Wow. That’s – Okay, I have a question for you.

[00:22:49] BG: Yes.

[00:22:49] KK: What do you attribute the change of diet? What do you think that is in the vegetables? Is it the antioxidants? Is it the dense vitamin? What is it? What do you attribute it to?

[00:23:06] BG: When you're looking at nutrition and disease, there's two aspects you have to consider, right? Are you doing anything that's actually damaging you cells and damaging your immune system? And are you giving your immune system and your cells what they need to repair themselves? The problem that we have in our society is twofold. We have a lifestyle that creates constant damage to ourselves. Poor sleep, high stress, and terrible eating. All right, because it's actually true. You are what you eat. So you're building cells out of your diet. If you're eating what I was eating, which like French fries and ranch, even if you do eat a salad kind of things, high amounts of meat, dairy, processed foods. All that stuff creates inflammation and damage, right? So that's one problem that most people have.

Then the other side is how do you repair the damage. Well, it turns out that we need certain ingredients to do so, that your cells actually know what to do. There's like a little instruction manual, like you get with IKEA furniture. Your cells have that. It tells you damage. It knows what to do but it needs the right tools, right? If you don't have that Allen wrench, I don't care. You're not getting any IKEA bookshelf because nothing's happening, right?

[00:24:09] BL: Right.

[00:24:10] BG: Same thing with your cells. If they don't have the right ingredients, they won't repair the damage. What happens is you get chronic disease, right? Instead of a disease going away, it becomes chronic because the damage continues. There's no one there to fix it, and so it stays chronic. But if you, number one, stop getting sicker, that's helpful.

[00:24:27] KK: Stop the damage.

[00:24:27] BL: That's really helpful. Yeah.

[00:24:29] BG: So self-care to keep yourself happy and lower stress, and don't eat all those things that make you sick, and instead give yourself what it uses to repair itself. So the raw vegetables, my husband was right on track. Raw vegetables, especially cruciferous, the ones that most people don't like to eat; kale, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, all those Brussels sprouts. The ones that people are mean to, it turns out they have what we need. They have the highest dose of vitamins and minerals and antioxidants and other phytonutrients that your cells need to repair damage.

Then you look at things like omega-3s. I use flax seeds, chia seeds. Omega-3s, which most people don't eat any of, are the key ingredient to create your anti-inflammatory immune system. So you're supposed to have an anti-inflammatory immune system that that removes damage and gets you back to baseline. But if you don't have that in your diet or if you're getting too much omega 6 from things like animal products and oils, then you're off balance and you can't repair damage. Omega-3s, by the way, also incorporate into your cell membranes, and they regulate your metabolism. So if you could be exercising and trying your best to eat clean, and if you're low on omega-3s, that one weekend binge is going to bring your weight right back up again because you don't have metabolism.

My husband has a bestselling book called Miracle Metabolism, where he talks about the same process that helps you lose fat also helps you be able to repair damage to your cells from disease, so omega-3s and then water. Water is the key ingredient that actually lets your cells do the work they're trying to do, and most people are extremely dehydrated. I was living on coffee and Diet Coke when I was a med student. [inaudible 00:25:56].

[00:25:56] KK: Except drinking my water.

[00:25:57] BG: Always drink water when I started saying that, right? So most people aren't eating any of that; raw cruciferous vegetables, water, flaxseeds. What are you talking about? Their entire diet is on the inflammatory side, and that's why we have chronic disease. That's why when I work with people, I help them with both things. I use my expertise in happiness and helping them with their self-care and getting their sleep right, and I teach them how to eat those foods that their body uses to repair itself. What's incredible is the results are always the same. People get better.

I had someone in my rapid recovery group that just ended. I have this group where these poor people to work with me every day for six weeks, these poor souls. It’s like the extra mother you never knew you wanted. How did you sleep? What did you eat? Did you have any stress? Did you fight with your husband? Tell me [inaudible 00:26:41]. But this one woman who's had rheumatoid arthritis and lupus for years, she couldn't even close her fist for three years straight. In two weeks, she could close her fist again and had no pain.

[00:26:54] BL: Do you completely eliminate meat for everybody because your husband doesn’t, right? He still eats meat.

[00:26:58] BG: No, he doesn’t. My husband’s 100% eliminated it because at the time, he was still learning and trying to figure out what the key ingredients were, right? He was doing it for fat loss, and meat doesn't affect. You can build muscle and lose fat eating any meat. But no one ever healed a disease doing that if I’m right.

[00:27:15] BL: What about fish? Is fish good for you?

[00:27:18] BG: No, actually.

[00:27:18] BL: No?

[00:27:19] BG: Yeah. I used to think that that might be the one because it has some omega-3, especially if it's wild caught but no. Fish is actually right now probably one of the most toxic because between the mercury problems and then all of the environmental pollution out there from all of our factories, all goes into the ocean and is sitting in the fat of the fish. Then you got like the nuclear waste leak from Japan and all this. I mean, fish is bad news. Yeah. It’s really not.

[00:27:45] KK: Broccoli.

[00:27:45] BG: To answer your question –

[00:27:46] KK: Broccoli.

[00:27:47] BL: Broccoli and kale. Broccoli and kale.

[00:27:49] BG: I saw this meme on Facebook once, and it was so hysterical. Of course, I got tagged in it that said, “What is the answer to eternal health and youth? Please say it's not kale. Please say it's not kale.”

[00:28:01] BL: It turns out it is.

[00:28:02] BG: It's kale, isn't it?

[00:28:03] BL: It’s kale.

[00:28:05] KK: So I have a –

[00:28:06] BG: It really depends. To answer your question with the meat, I mean, I call it I do hyper nourishment. I intentionally overdose people on the raw vegetables and the omega-3s and the water to help their cells empower to repair themselves. If someone's generally okay in their health, and they're just trying to reverse aging, increase energy, have glorious bowel movements, that kind of stuff, add hyper nourishment to your diet. You're going to feel incredible. People who are actively sick, the best thing you can do is stop getting sicker while you're hyper nourishing. So for those folks, I am a lot more strict and say, “Yeah, get rid of the meat and the dairy and the other thing so that you can finish healing before you mess around with your –”

[00:28:41] BL: What about your fruit?

[00:28:43] BG: Fruit is okay. It doesn't accelerate the healing process. So with my protocol, after I had my first son was when we realized that something was weird because I was supposed to have a relapse and all this stuff. It didn't happen. So my husband and I, like I say, he's a scientist as well. So that's when we realized all we'd ever changed was my diet. Some people have suggested it was love. But I was in love for six months without changing my diet and same labs with lupus. It wasn't exactly that, but we try to see what do we do. What do we change?

Then we started looking at – Because I hate when people – They do something and they get better, whether they lose weight or they feel better. Then they just say, “Do what I did. It’s a miracle cure.” But they don't even know if they got better because of everything or in spite of some things. Was it all of it? You know what I mean? That’s not science. Yeah. So we went back to analyze how the different nutrients affects cellular function, immunity, inflammation, and tried to figure out what parts of what I did caused me to recover. Then we spent a year actually testing it on people to make sure all of them would get the same result. Everything we teach is what works every time, and there's no kind of guessing about it.

There are some protocols that help people that kind of accidentally include some of those things, but there's more, like some people get better. Some people get worse. Like paleo, the people who eat mostly veggies, they do a lot better. People eating more meat, they do worse, right? Whenever there's variability, to me, that's not science. It needs to be that every cell requires the same nutrition, and it should work for every person.

[00:30:11] KK: Do you find that people who also have Crohn’s and fibromyalgia, does that kind of – Would you say the same possible results, at least in terms of –

[00:30:24] BG: Absolutely.

[00:30:26] KK: Okay.

[00:30:26] BG: Yeah. It's incredible. I mean, that's what we really discovered is this isn't just a way to get rid of lupus. This is how you optimize your body function, right? I mean, this is – It really is what it does. It's reversing damage to your body. So I've helped people reverse heart failure, diabetes, elevated liver enzymes, or liver inflammation, all sorts of issues and where it's really the same process. When your body stops fixing damage, it actually just works on reversing aging, which is also nice. So that –

[00:30:58] KK: That’s lovely.

[00:30:58] BL: Yeah. Because you know what? You look beautiful and you've been through so much physically, but you would never know it by looking at you.

[00:31:04] KK: You really wouldn’t.

[00:31:05 BL: I mean, I'm sure that has to do with what you're putting into your body as well. Do you have – Have you published a cookbook or any type of book that people can follow your routine?

[00:31:18] BG: I have three bestselling books.

[00:31:21] BL: Well, there you go. Not one but three. What are they?

[00:31:27] BG: Goodbye Lupus was published in 2015, and that is a story of what happened to me and the 6 steps to healing with supermarket foods. That one was actually a bestseller before I even published it, when no one knew who I was. I didn't know what even happened. I just like logged into upload and went, “Oh, my god. Who's buying this?” People were looking for it. So it's been consistently bestseller on Amazon since 2015.

I have a green smoothie recipe book that I had published really just for my patients back in the day, but then I didn't know people were going to find me and start buying that. But I also have free recipes at smoothieshred.com. You don't even have to look for that for green smoothies.

[00:32:04] BL: Smoothieshred?

[00:32:05] KK: Smoothie what?

[00:32:06] BG: Smoothieshred.com. Like get shredded, smoothieshred. That's a website my husband made as a public service. It has green smoothie recipes, videos, exercise. We both donate our information and time to the public. I always say it's because you got to save your life. He says it's because you have to save your wife. My entire political, I teach for free online. It’s in my books, but I also teach it for free online. I'm very active on Instagram and Facebook, YouTube. If you look for it, Goodbye Lupus, because this should be something everybody knows, right?

[00:32:38] BL: Absolutely.

[00:32:39] BG: Goodbye Lupus and then Goodbye Autoimmune Disease. I published last year because one of the problems is people who are otherwise happy, good relationships, they just do the diet, and their lupus goes away, or their rheumatoid arthritis or whatever goes away, easy peasy. Then there's everyone else. There's much higher rates of autoimmune disease with people who have trauma. I mean, some cases up to 60% of people, so it's very high. I realized that I had to do more work to help people with the other side. So Goodbye Autoimmune Disease, I teach the processes that I put them with when they're doing rapid recovery with me to heal their emotional wounds and learn how to be happy while eating the diet. That's what creates rapid results, and it’s also got dozens of case studies in reversing everything from MS to lupus to rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, heart failure, or that kind of stuff.

That was my newest gift to the world, and a lot of people told me that's what they really needed because you can go online and learn stuff about nutrition. But if you learn and you learn and you learn, but you don't actually take action, it's not an information problem anymore, right?

[00:33:41] BL: Yeah, exactly.

[00:33:42] BG: Somewhere else.

[00:33:42] BL: Yeah.

[00:33:43] KK: What would you want to share in terms of just maybe in the Lupus Month? Obviously, we'll put this out, so it's incredible information. But is there a place that we can send people to get more information?

[00:34:00] BG: 100%. If you go to goodbyelupus.com, right on the front page, there's a free gifts area for people to kind of get started in learning what they need to know. What I really love people to know is lupus is a scary disease. It has become more and more common over time because our lifestyles are so bad. But it's not something that you need to always fight forever. There's a lot of hope. People who have lupus call themselves lupus warriors, and I always encourage people. Let's become lupus conquerors because you can do so much more. You can do the things that you need to do, not just to get a good night's sleep, not just to worry about avoiding the sunlight. Getting the sun back was one of the best things that ever happened to me. But learning how to eat right, learning how to take back your health, and also never letting your diagnosis take away your happiness.

I have so many people will tell me, “I'll pursue life and happiness when I'm well.” But one thing I learned from lupus and what my I had learned from my family in the Holocaust is you don't know what tomorrow is going to be, so find a way to make today excellent. Work on your health by eating well and enjoying your life today and also being grateful for everything you have. Absolutely, get the information. Like I said, I share it for free. So if they go to goodbyelupus.com, there's free gifts to get started there. Every day, I'm prolific at teaching online. If you're on Instagram or YouTube or Facebook, you look for Goodbye Lupus.  I'm constantly putting out videos every day to help people stay motivated, stay happy, and get healthy.

[00:35:27] BL: That's great.

[00:35:27] KK: Brooke, you have been a wealth of information.

[00:35:31] BG: Thank you.

[00:35:30] KK: We appreciate every word, really inspiring. Thank you.

[00:35:33] BL: Yeah. Your story just could not be more inspiring, and I'm so happy for you that you've conquered what you've conquered, and then you're helping other people. It's incredible.

[00:35:43] BG: Well, thank you. I feel like that’s what I was born to do.

[00:35:44] BL: Thank you. The world thanks you.

[00:35:47] BG: I was born to do that. I feel like my job is to help other people live their gifts, and so I [inaudible 00:35:51] I did and I'm grateful. I'm grateful for the illness I had and what I've been through because of the ability I have now to help so many people get their life back.

[00:36:00] BL: So wonderful. So wonderful.

[00:36:01] KK: Well, thank you for sharing.

[00:36:02] BL: Yeah. Thank you so much and take care and please come back at another time because it's just so fun to talk to you.

[00:36:07] BG: I’d love to. I’d love to.

[00:36:09] BL: Okay.

[00:36:10] KK: Amazing.

[00:36:11] BG: Thank you so much, you guys. I really appreciate that.

[00:36:12] BL: So inspiring. All right, thank you so much.

[00:36:14] KK: Bye.

[00:36:15] BG: Bye, guys.

[00:36:16] KK: Bye.

[00:36:16] BL: Bye-bye. Bye-bye.   

[00:36:18] KK: Wow.

[00:36:19] BL: Okay. I'm going home and throwing out all my meat and my fish.

[00:36:24] KK: I knew fish.

[00:36:25] BL: I didn't even know. I thought I was being healthy by eating fish. More fish than meat.

[00:36:31] KK: What she was mentioning, mercury and toxic waste. Guess what else? Plastic.

[00:36:38] BL: I know.

[00:36:38] KK: Have a plastic.

[00:36:39] BL: I heard about some big giant trash area in the middle of the ocean somewhere. It's the size of Texas, so I know. My general doctor, he told me a year ago that he went to plant-based and he said he felt great. He looked great. The clock reversed on him. He just looks incredible. He's like, Bliss, you got to do it.” It's so hard to do, but I really want to try to do it again because –

[00:37:04] KK: Well, it’s like our guest.

[00:37:05] BL: I mean, look at her.

[00:37:06] KK: And our earlier guests we were talking about, the brain and practice. It’s like you just – We got to practice.

[00:37:12] BL: We got to practice it. Yeah. I mean, I love vegetables. I'm a huge vegetable person, but my husband isn't, so that's the challenge. That’s going to be the challenge for me is to –

[00:37:21] KK: Well, let’s get her book.

[00:37:23] BL: Okay, I'm going to –

[00:37:24] KK: Let’s do it.

[00:37:25] BL: I’ll get her book, for sure. Amazon.

[00:37:27] KK: Wow.

[00:37:28] BL: Well, that was really inspiring.

[00:37:29] KK: That was really awesome.

[00:37:30] BL: She's amazing. She's wow. All right. Well –

[00:37:34] KK: If you want more information, you can find her at Goodbye Autoimmune Disease, Goodbye Lupus.

[00:37:42] BL: Goodbyelupus.com.

[00:37:43] KK: Check out Instagram, Amazon. That's where I'm going to go.

[00:37:47] BL: I'm going to get her book on Amazon.

[00:37:48] KK: I’m going to go to Amazon. Anyway, thank you so much for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this episode. I know we did, again inspired. If  you've got questions for us, if you have any other ideas or topics that you'd love us to cover, please reach out, riskybusiness@coveragequeens.com. Come subscribe to our YouTube channel here at Coverage Queens, Risky Business with the Coverage Queens. But you can find everything on our website at coveragequeens.com.

[00:38:20] BL: Thank you so much for joining us.

[00:38:22] KK: Yeah. See you next time.

[00:38:23] BL: See you next time.

[END]