Staying Healthy through the Holidays
Dr. Christine White and Dr. Michael Smith


Welcome to All Things Vegas, Nourishing Self-Care for the Helping Professional. During our time together, we will explore a wide variety of topics relating to self-care, all especially geared to the helping professional. Our guests are all thought leaders and cutting edge providers in their respective fields of endeavor. They will offer not only helpful insights, but practical skills that you can begin to use immediately. Welcome to All Things Vegas, Nourishing Self-Care for the Helping Professional.
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Dr. Christine White is a seasoned naturopathic doctor who's been practicing in Montana since 2002. With a background in family medicine from the National University of Natural Medicine, Dr. White brings a wealth of experience in complex case management, including chronic infections, gastrointestinal issues, hormone balancing, and long COVID treatment.
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Dr. Smith received his medical training from the National University of Natural Medicine in Portland, Oregon. Before that, he completed a master's degree in New York City, where his research focused on epigenetics and neuroscience. Dr. Smith provides comprehensive naturopathic care for individuals of all ages, focusing on neurological, mental health, gastrointestinal hormone, and respiratory conditions.
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I want to welcome both Christine and Michael today to our podcast. This is going to be really fun to have both of you here talking about this whole thing of moving into winter and the holiday season. And how do we keep ourselves above water? Yeah.
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healthy, safe, and happy during the holidays. Thanks for being here. You're welcome. Thanks, Kathy. Thanks for having us. Let's start the conversation about this time of the year and just this whole thing. I think that we've kind of almost built up a collective dread. Give us an overview of this whole idea of the winter, moving into winter, and the holidays. Yeah, I think it's important to recognize that
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The seasons change and amazingly how profoundly the seasons affect us and how we are much healthier if we allow there to be more resonance with us and nature. I've said it before with patients that the nature inside of us needs the nature outside of us.
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And as naturopathic doctors, we're always thinking about that with the healing power of nature, whether that's food as medicine or whether that's using herbs or just simply being outside and connecting with nature.
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And things are changing that it's not as comfortable for some people to be outside with the colder temperatures and so forth. And some people it's harder to do that. I think it's important to recognize how things have progressed. And when I think about seasons, I like to reference the Chinese philosophy, the five element theory.
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that we're moving from this fall, which is the metal element, very much into the water element. And when we talk about water in that regard, we're talking things that are still.
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and not moving and these this frozen water ice on the lake kind of idea of nature. I think that's giving us a hint about what we're supposed to be doing ourselves of hibernating, of cozying up, of wintering in the sense that we don't really do a very great job at but letting ourselves be still. We're moving so much throughout this whole year
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And I know I'm looking at my schedule over the next six weeks, two months, and it's crazy of all the things that I have personally going on. But yet it's a reminder for myself to just be still and allow that stillness to permeate the experience of the season.
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And I think it's also respecting that idea of resonant with the season change, of recognizing that we are mammals, and we do have this tendency to want to come inward at the same time that we're often being pulled outward into social situations, and people end up in this conflict between wanting to be home and either wanting or feeling obligated to be engaged with other people.
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It's a time of year that for many people has some degree of some spiritual roots to it, and at the same time, that can be both centering and grounding, or it can be stress-inducing, depending on where you are in your life and your own life process and your family of origin and what you have going on, and so I just think this concept that Michael's talking about of respecting the stillness, and it doesn't mean that we have to go inward and do nothing, but
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But I think the more we're able to respect that we as the beings that we are have this inclination to naturally want to be more still and reflective. If we recognize that, we can then recognize when we're sort of out of sorts with that.
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and at least name it and acknowledge it and then make some different choices and some different decisions as we go along with whatever it is we're doing between now and the first of the year. Some of the problem, or maybe a large part of the problem, is our conflict with the natural world in terms of how we go about our day-to-day life. Like we're not transitioning through the seasons the way that nature intended, perhaps, in many ways.
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I agree. And in a kind of example of that that I was pondering on in this context, there's an idea that's represented in one of the classics of Chinese medicine that the way we treat ourselves in one season sets us up for the next season. We're always planting seeds now for what our health will be next season. And I've heard this and I looked it up a little bit. I think the research is fairly there.
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that people who are maybe heavy at winter sports enthusiasts, they like the skiing, the snowboarding, all the things, they're always out. They're more prone to seasonal allergies come spring just because they're not allowing their body to conserve and prepare and to be present in the moment and then also to prepare for the future.
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So it's always a balance. It is. Right. It's a natural time for us to rest at the same time that we tend to ramp up some degree of our social interactions. That's where the celebrations happen, and that's where the gatherings happen. And at the same time, we're putting ourselves out there at a time when we can also, if we're not caring for ourselves, be that much more vulnerable, whether we're thinking about it in a Chinese medicine perspective of sort of the cold wind invasion of sort of literally
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you know, getting yourself over chilled in a certain way to simply being in a stressful situation and being exposed to other people and all the viral elements. And now all of a sudden, you know, your entire household is sick for the holidays.
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I'm going to guess there's got to be some ways that will kind of help us find this kind of middle ground. This ability to include more rest because it gets dark. It's dark longer, especially here in western Montana. I think it's an interesting juxtaposition of light and the need for sleep along with our circadian rhythm.
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And I think you probably, I guess, talk about that in previous episodes of the podcast. We have this cycle of hormones in our body that cycles on a 24-hour period where, specifically with cortisol, for example, cortisol rises in the morning. It helps us get up. It's the get-up-and-go kind of hormone, as I often talk about with patients, that drives us, that gets us awake, and then it falls at nighttime.
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And it's also interesting that the normal fluctuations of cortisol balance out with our ability to manage and handle stress. Dr. White and I share patients a lot, and we talk about adrenal function eight times out of ten.
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probably in many cases, as they work with patients on this low adrenal function, their adrenal glands are lower. They're not producing as much cortisol, so they're not able to manage that stress as well as they otherwise might want to or be able to. And that affects their sleep. And there's so much science behind sleep, and I'm not going to dive into that too much right now, but a reminder for all of us of the need for sleep.
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and how it helps us be able to regulate our stress, be able to clear out the gunk that's in our heads every day,
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to shut down, to repower, to be able to focus, to be present with those that we love and care about. And then to recognize that there are those absolute things we can do that influence those hormone levels. And one of the important things about cortisol, you know, cortisol is a hormone that gets a little bit of a bad rap. People sort of think about it as a stress hormone or a hormone that's going to make you gain weight or, you know, keep you awake at night. It's also the hormone that activates your immune system.
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You know, one of the things that happens for all of us is when our bodies detect that there's some sort of an infection present, like a virus is starting to replicate in our system, our cortisol levels will rise as a means of activating our immune system. And so there's that fine balance between activating our immune systems to handle a stressful situation and then have them come down, or activate our cortisol levels to activate our immune system to fight an infection.
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The problem is, is that elevated cortisol levels, so, you know, your nervous system, your sympathetic nervous system gets cranked up. Those elevated levels of cortisol are now going to actually suppress your immune system. So you're in some sort of an event this time of year. It's fun, but it's stressful. Your cortisol levels are up. You're being exposed. And then we throw in this other element when we consume simple carbohydrates of any kind, you
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you know, commonly let's talk about sugar, but it can be, you know, too much fruit juice or however you want to define that carbohydrate. When our blood sugar spikes, our white blood cells are literally paralyzed for a period of time. This is why people who have known blood sugar dysregulation issues are oftentimes more sick.
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because their spiking blood sugars are paralyzing their white blood cell function. So you get yourself out to a holiday party. So it was stressful getting there. You have too much going on for the day. You're excited to be there, but there's a lot going on. You're now exposed to other people, and the first place that you go to, you know, is the fudge and the sugary drink. And now all of a sudden your blood sugar is spiking, your immune system is quiet, and you wonder why three days later you're sick.
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Again, this sets us up for a lot of things that we can do for ourselves. Let's say that I've had a really, really busy week. There's this thing that I really need to go to for a lot of reasons. There's a want to go to it, but there's also like I kind of have to go, right? So I'm kind of
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I think a lot of people find themselves in this like, well, it'll be okay, but I'd really rather go home and read a book or whatever. How could I, as somebody who is a card-carrying introvert, manage that situation? I think the foundation of health, I think, was a Hippocrates that said, let food be thy medicine. So I think here, food can either help us or hurt us. And I think that we want to make it help us more than hurt us.
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One of the biggest ways, as Christine just mentioned, is managing our blood sugar. And it's amazing the research that's coming out about not necessarily what we eat, but how we eat it affects our blood sugar.
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For example, there's a French biochemist, Jessie Enchospé, I think that's how her name is pronounced. She's known on social as the glucose goddess. And I often like to point patients to her and the book that she wrote, The Glucose Revolution, because it really helps paint this picture of all the amazing things that sugar does in our body. Like we need sugar and plants make sugar for a reason.
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but we also can manage how our body processes it. She uses the analogy of Tetris, of putting it in the right place so that it can do the right thing and not overwhelm our bodies. One simple example is the order that we eat our food. When we eat sugar first, so this would be the people who maybe like to have pie at the beginning of Thanksgiving, or have the dessert first, you're spiking your blood sugar significantly.
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And then it's causing all these reactions. And if we have these blood sugar spikes over and over and over again, that's going to cause the immune dysregulation that we just talked about with the white blood cells increasing.
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It's going to impact inflammation, insulin resistance over time. So one simple thing that we can do is simply start with fiber. And the fiber that I'm thinking about is those vegetables. One of the amazing sources of fiber. The fiber in those vegetables goes in and coats the lining of our small intestine.
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Then after that, we prioritize protein and fat. Each part of the GI tract has a different specialty of what is digested there. The stomach specialty is digesting protein. So we eat protein. It's digested in the stomach. It's hanging out for a little while such that when we have that sugar coming in at dessert time, it's going to slow down the digestion in the stomach.
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So it's going to leave and go into the duodenum, the small intestine, a little bit more slowly. And then when it gets to the small intestine, there's all this fiber that's hanging around. So it's going to be absorbed slower. We're going to get this much slower of a blood sugar curve. And we can measure this through continuous glucose monitors and so forth.
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But it's going to neutralize kind of the effect of that blood sugar so we don't get this huge spike. And it's such a simple thing. It's not changing literally anything that you're eating. It just changes how you're eating it. I think it's empowering. So you can say, yes, you can have that dessert, that really good sugary thing that your family member grandma made, family favorite recipe, whatever. Just have it after the meal.
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So the whole theory of I'm going to have dessert first, so I always make sure I have room for it, isn't probably such a good plan, huh? Right. There's some flaws in that plan. And I think what's so beautiful about this, again, when we just think about how to take care of ourselves better, is it is setting an intention. It is being intentional. It is being a little bit methodical. It's pausing before you walk into that vent and saying, okay, remember,
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This is what I need to do in order to feel better throughout this event and to feel better for the days going forward. Just like, you know, the old adage of don't go to the grocery store hungry. How many of us have ever gone to the grocery store hungry and we come out and we're like, whoa, what did I, what just happened to me? And you go home with a bunch of food you like, but it may not have been what you optimally needed. Same sort of thing with going to this event. Don't go in dehydrated.
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Don't go in having had zero, hardly any water to drink all day long. You get to the event and you're handed either the sugary or the alcoholic beverage, and that's now the first thing hitting your system for the first time in four or five hours.
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Go in, get the glass of water, take a pause, go to the vegetable tray, just be more intentional. And I think that's so much about what we're trying to do at this point in taking care of ourselves and taking care of each other and respecting the role of our nervous system and the vagus nerve in everything that we do. It's like give yourself the respect of taking the pause and remembering what it is you need to do.
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to take care of yourself so that when you get pulled into whatever it is you're doing, you're less reactionary and more intentional. Doing what you guys are suggesting in terms of just do it a different way, then I don't have to pack my own meal. And for some people it's also as much as if depending on the sort of event you're headed to, maybe it means that you actually eat before you go to the event.
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You either have something that you brought with you or you stop by somewhere where you can get the food that resonates best with you. You can stop somewhere and have a salad. You can stop somewhere and do something to nourish yourself a little bit and get yourself hydrated before you hit the door of an event so that, again, you're not going in hungry and thirsty and grabbing whatever happens to be the easiest.
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I think one of the things, too, that comes into play, and maybe we can address a little bit of that, is this is also a really emotional time of the year for people. A lot of family stuff going on. Sometimes that has a lot of baggage associated with it. Just stuff. So this whole idea of emotional eating and emotional consumption just in general. Right. It's recognizing that what you just said is true.
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And if you recognize about yourself that emotional eating is present, then can you stop before you enter that family event and, you know, do your own little bit of a five minute meditation before you walk through the door? Can you bring in your water bottle, your calming herbal tea formula that works well for you so we are at least starting off that way? It's like, don't
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Walk into the somewhat emotionally charged for you family event with low blood sugar. Like don't set yourself up for it to be more impactful than it needs to be. And then if you find yourself doing the emotional eating, it's like, okay, you stop, you take the deep breath. You maybe put down whatever it is you're doing and sort of give yourself a little bit of a reset and redirect yourself. And it doesn't mean that you've sort of had to completely sabotage yourself.
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You just recognize where you're at, take a pause, and do something differently. It's interesting to take a step back and look at the neurotransmitters in the brain because we've got serotonin, which is that feel-good hormone. Then we've got dopamine, which is that more of an addictive, craving kind of a hormone. When we eat, we're satisfying one or both of those. I think at this time of year when there's stress, stress,
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emotions are different than maybe they usually are, we are needing and craving that serotonin support. Not to mention the fact that it's now dark, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, and we're dealing maybe starting with a little bit of seasonal depression-y something or other that for many people is a reality. So we're needing this serotonin boost, and where do we get it? It's the Ben & Jerry's half pint in the freezer.
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And whether we are going to a party, whether we're coming home, we're craving that serotonin, that dopamine, so we can have something exciting to look forward to. And all of that is at play.
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Speaking of coming home and the emotional eating, I have this conversation a lot with patients. What is a comfort food to you? What is the thing, whether it's salty or savory or carbohydrate laden or whatever it is, what is your comfort food that when you are not feeling really optimal, you want to go to? And what can you do ahead of time to modify that good old-fashioned comfort food into something that actually treats you better?
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I use this example with people. If it's like if macaroni and cheese is your thing, can you cultivate a recipe where you've substituted the macaroni for cauliflower, created yourself some other sort of a cheese sauce? You've got your bowl of comfort food. It's just a little bit less impactful on your immune system and your blood sugar. If I'm hearing you correctly, it's really kind of knowing yourself well enough to know
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This is potentially a stressful situation for me. There's going to be some potentially some, you know, big emotions perhaps coming up. I know my deal is that when I walk home and get in, you know, I get home, I walk in the door. The first thing I do is open the refrigerator to see what's in there.
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And have something in there. Have something in there that makes you happy. Have something in there that will trigger those serotonin and dopamine receptors in a certain way. Do something that is comfortable and familiar. Just orchestrate it in a way.
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that might somehow be better for you health-wise. Thinking about food as medicine instead of just food is food. If food is medicine and this is the combination of things that you like, then how can you change it so that the next time you get in this situation, you can make a different choice? I think about the amazing book Atomic Habits by James Clear. In it, he talks about how we can make our habits just like this idea of what do we do when we come home from work, from a party, from whatever, and
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And we look in our fridge and he talks about how to change our changing the circumstances around our habits to make it easier. Like by putting a bowl of fruit on the on the on the countertop instead of a plate of cookies or making it harder. Maybe you order groceries online and have it delivered instead of going to the grocery store and being tempted by that frozen treats aisle.
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So there's different things that we can do to make it easy, make it hard. And he talks about many other things as part of that. I think something else I have a lot of conversation with people about a lot is also have things in your car, in your backpack, in your purse with you. It's like when you come out of work or school or whatever you've done all day and you're now in your car, is there something you can have with you in your car? A bag of nuts?
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another half sandwich, a protein bar, whatever it is. Are there herbs and nutrients that you use that you know are calming and soothing to your nervous system? Have access to them so that you can start to change the way your body feels physiologically.
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before you hit the front door or you hit the event that you're going to, instead of walking in the front door and you're feeling a little vulnerable and a little off kilter and you're going for whatever is handy, the Halloween candy left over by the front door or whatever it might happen to be. One of the things that I want to circle back to, and Michael, you touched on this really briefly, and I think we can dig into it a little bit more, and this is along the lines of
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Working with neurochemistry, talk to us a little bit about your suggestions for seasonal affective disorder. That's a great question. I think it's important to first recognize that it exists.
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That when we have the collective lights are dimming, when we go to work in the morning, it's maybe we catch 15 minutes of daylight. We're inside, at least I work in an office all day. Then when I get out, it's dark. And recognizing that that changes the melatonin levels in our brain, which can then affect us.
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how we feel and everything else like that. All these self-care things that we talked about are these foundations of health. I'm repeating what we've been talking about, but how we eat, taking care of our sleep, redressing that, staying active.
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And I know I spoke earlier about like exercising really hard, but that is important even in the winter season. Taking time to be outside on a nice day. There's the word that I love. It's called apricity. And it's meaning the warmth of the sun during wintertime. Experiencing apricity, that feeling when you're outside on a cold, sunny winter day and you feel the sun on your face.
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Feeling that sensation, that can warm us, that can help us feel better. Things like having a happy light, shining that for the first, you know, for a half hour, 60 minutes in the morning can help wake up our brain, get us going, stimulate that cortisol, that awakening response. Help us adapt to this darkening world in a way.
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And I think this gets back to the concept of wintering. It gets back to the concept that Dr. Smith talked in the beginning about respecting the seasons. We can get into a headset where all we are focused on is whatever we think our end goal is. And not giving ourselves credit for being able to pause and say, is there more than one way?
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to meet that end goal. Sort of the idea of cross training in some ways. It's like you don't have to keep training exactly the same muscle groups in exactly the same way
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to reach the physical goal you're trying to get to. If we can behave differently based on the seasons and recognize this is a time of year when we certainly can't just stop going to our jobs and shirk our responsibilities, but we can recognize that maybe this is the time of year, if I gave myself just a little bit more quiet time in the evening, in the evening,
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If I let myself wake up a little bit more gently in the morning, you know, it's amazing the ideas and the things that could come to us when we simply quiet our brain. And so it's respecting that we're receiving information and dealing with information in a different way. It doesn't have to remain the same fast-paced kind of full-out energy we would do during the summer when we have somewhere between 14 and 24 hours worth of daylight, depending on where you live in the
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in the hemisphere that you're in. I'm going to guess that when we're talking about the shifting needs around the seasonal changes, we've talked before about how we can supplement to support our immune system. Does that change? Does our need increase? Does it stay the same? How would you address some of those questions?
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I would speak a little bit to the seasonality of food. So something in naturopathic medicine that we talk a lot about is asking people to eat with the seasons. This may not be the time of year where you're drawn to the great big huge salad at the start of your meal. Well, it's because generally this is not salad time of year. This is a course.
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a cooked, warm root vegetables. This is a soup time of year. So it's contemplating what our food sources might have been like before we had 24-7, 365 grocery stores on many corners and respecting seasonally what we eat. It's also recognizing, and I'm going to let Dr. Smith speak to this a little bit more here in a second, but it's speaking even to the seasonality of the herbs. You know, it's like the pumpkin spice lattes.
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To some degree, there is some wisdom in that formulation in that those spices are energetically, from an Eastern medicine perspective, and even from sometimes a physiologic perspective, they are warming and heating spices. They resonate better with our bodies during a time of year when it's cold. I remember seeing a meme. I think it was in September. Yeah.
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And then this dust storm coming, and then it was just like pumpkin spice, this dust storm of pumpkin spice that's heading our way. And we're in it. We're totally in it right now. We just had the October pumpkin Halloween type of a focus, and now we're more the pumpkin pies things. And –
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We look at those pumpkin pie spices, the ginger, the cinnamon, the nutmeg, the cloves. You could probably throw a turmeric in there for a curry. All of these spices, they're very warming, as Christine just mentioned. They're anti-inflammatory. They help move things. This is...
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to kind of naturally counterbalance the stillness of nature, we need something that's enlivening to stimulate our bodies. And that's what these spices are doing. We talked about blood sugar. Cinnamon is a great source for helping balance blood sugar as well. These herbs are doing multiple things in our body, not just one thing. But they have an amazing impact on us in our...
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stimulating our health and that chai tea is really this formulation we're talking about however it manifests whether it's adding a little bit of pumpkin spice to your oatmeal in the morning or having a warm warming curry at night or whatever it might be there's plenty of opportunities to invite it in would you say that
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In general, perhaps the need because of immune system support around things like echinacea and vitamin C and some of the other more widely recognized, do we need more of that at this time of the year? I would say yes. I mean, I would say generally speaking, we probably need more vitamin C regardless of the time of year. But vitamin C is also one of those nutrients that when our body is using it, we need more.
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So if our body is fighting a viral infection, even if it's something very low grade that may never really manifest in a full-blown cold, your body's still going to use and need more of that. One of the other things, probably the biggest mistake I see people make with herbal medicine is,
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is that conventional medicine has convinced us that we can take one pill for 24 hours, and that's all we need to do for whatever that particular medication is to make us better. Or maybe you have to take it twice a day, but it's one dose or two. Mother Nature did not engineer herbs and the nutrients we extract from them to have that long life in the body.
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So the biggest mistake I see people make is they find the herbal formulation, the echinacea, the elderberry, that they know, they've read about, they know it certainly can help you fight off infection and treat a viral infection. And they take it in the morning before they go to work and they take it in the evening when they come home. That's just not going to get you there.
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These are things that need to be repeated multiple times throughout the day, particularly if you're in situations where you're increasingly exposed. We are also a culture right now that loves gummy everything. You can go to the supplement aisle and everything's been turned into a gummy. Flip that bottle around and look at the milligrams of elderberry or sambuca in that gummy versus if you picked the encapsulated version or even a tincture.
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Like you're going to now eat a handful of gummies to get yourself to the level of an herb that's useful. And what made that gummy a gummy? Sugar. I think I might just add a comment on kind of supplementation with vitamin D that we talked about seasonal depression. Body metabolizes vitamin D in part through the sun. And it's really hard when we are indoors all the time. And when we are outdoors, we're bundled up to our neck, right?
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and even then even sometimes more to stay warm we're not getting a lot of vitamin d
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naturally. There's an app called Dminder that is interesting to look at. You can plug in your location and see it shows you how much vitamin D you're getting. And I haven't checked it recently, but I remember checking at the beginning of the year and it was February 13th that was the day that we could start getting just a fraction of sunlight enough to generate vitamin D.
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We need it. And I think Dr. White, Christine might have a similar experience, but I have not met a patient in Missoula who has a normal blood vitamin D level who's not supplementing. And that affects our mood. That affects our ability to fight infections. It's used for a lot of cellular processes. We need vitamin D. As we're kind of wrapping up here, anything that either of you or both of you want to bring to our attention that we haven't talked about?
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I think the one last piece I would say that harkens a little bit back to speaking about neurotransmitters and the fact that they are extraordinarily involved in our mood and how we feel about things. It's the gut-brain connection. It's the mind-body connection. It is as much what we're doing as it is our perspective on what it is we're going to do. I think the more that you can find...
33 min. 7 sec.
your own joy and your own happiness and whatever it is you're trying to do right now. You're going to support your own immune system to be that much more effective than if you are going forward with sort of utter dread and complete stress about doing something. I mean, I might advocate at that point, maybe I need to stay home.
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Remember that we are these whole creatures and there is this feedback between our brains and our guts. And I think every little decision that you can make, every little change that you can make, even if you...
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stumble and don't do that for the next two or three times you have the opportunity to. Every time you make an intentional shift and you give yourself credit for that, you're building on your own momentum and you're building on your own capacity to sort of heal thyself. I think back to the words of Yoda when he said, do or do not, there is no try. And I
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i i feel as i've gone through my life i've and i apologize to all the star wars fans listening i feel like yoda is wrong this is all about trying this is all about doing your best as christine just mentioned making that intention and doing what we can it's not going to be perfect and those perfectionists out there and myself included we have to accept that fact and we we know that we're not going to get it right the first time
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But it's going to be that effort of trying this over and over again, repeated improvement, that we're actually going to get where we want to go. James Clear in the Atomic Habit talked about 1% better, just 1%. And if we're making those little efforts, we're going to get to our ultimate goal. We just don't need to have the Yoda in our heads telling us that it's all or nothing, that tell us to either doing it perfectly or we're giving up.
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Hey, thank you both for being here today. I really have enjoyed the conversation and I'm looking forward to health and well-being through the holiday season and through the rest of the winter, so thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. All Things Vegas is brought to you by Western Montana Area Health Education Center, working to recruit and train health care professionals, and by the
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We are very grateful for the sponsorship from Natura Health and Wellness Clinic in Missoula, Montana, who is sponsoring a series of six podcasts.