Pulling Back The Veil On Chronic Illness With Dr. Sina McCullough

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In this powerful first conversation, Dr. Sina McCullough shares how she went from a vibrant, athletic life to being so sick she could no longer stand, eat, or care for herself—and how she found her way back.

Despite her PhD in nutrition, Sina spent years searching for answers within the medical system, only to be told her symptoms were “all in her head.” At her lowest point, she chose a different path—one that led her to uncover hidden toxicities, nutrient deficiencies, and overlooked food sensitivities that were keeping her body from healing.

In this episode, she introduces the concept of “The Veil”—the unseen trust we place in our food system—and challenges the idea that chronic illness is something we must simply manage. Instead, she offers a powerful reframe: the body is designed to heal when we remove what harms it and restore what’s missing.

We also explore why diets often fail, the difference between remission and true healing, and the critical role of emotional and spiritual stress in long-term health.

Sina’s message is both sobering and hopeful: healing is possible—and it begins with seeing clearly.

Stay tuned for Part 2.

 

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Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Dr. Sina McCullough.

Welcome to the show. Sometimes the most important health journeys begin not with answers but with suffering. With a body in crisis and with the unsettling realization that the systems we trust do not always know how to restore true health. Sometimes, those difficult roads become the doorway to deeper wisdom, personal responsibility, and lasting transformation. This is episode 580 and our guest is Dr. Sina McCullough.

Sina is a Nutrition Scientist, Educator, and the Author of Hands Off My Food. She joins us for part one of a special two-part series to share the remarkable personal story behind her work. How, despite advanced training and nutrition, she became debilitatingly ill and found herself navigating years of unanswered questions, worsening symptoms, and a medical system that had no real solutions. She also explains the path that ultimately restored her health, what she learned about the body’s capacity to heal and why so many people today are struggling with chronic illness.

This is a powerful conversation about resilience, faith and the hope that healing may be possible even when all seems lost. Before we get into the conversation, censorship is real. Let’s have a direct line of communication. Join our email list and stay abreast of action alerts in your area along with important topics of interest, food freedom, upcoming events and more. Go to Weston A. Price Foundation and click on the yellow button on our homepage to sign up. Now, let’s welcome Dr. Sina McCullough.

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Sina, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

I’m so glad you’re here and I have to tell you that I read your book Hands Off My Food. It’s absolutely fabulous. I underlined absolutely every word of this book. It should be considered a Bible for food and what’s going on in the industry. To start, I want to talk to you about how you were debilitating lately. Can you take us back to the beginning? What was life like for you before you got sick?

Dr. Sina McCullough’s Personal Health Journey And The Limitations Of Western Medicine

Before I got sick, I was so active. I was a competitive athlete for most of my life. I spent ten years in college. I at least had the stamina to get through that. I didn’t have physical limitations. I could mountain bike on the weekends and hike with my dog. Sometimes, I’d cycle 100 miles a week on the road. I was very fit and very active. It was during college that I slowly began to decline. That is one of the most frustrating parts about having a chronic or autoimmune disease.

It is a slow decline. Our Western medical system isn’t well equipped to help people that have these types of conditions. You fall through the cracks. You get pushed from one specialist to the next and they’re trying to give you labels and drugs. Most of the time, they don’t know what the root cause is. They’re not trained to find the root causes. You’re stuck in this endless cycle of being bounced from one doctor to the next. Meanwhile, your symptoms are getting worse and worse.

One of the most frustrating parts of chronic or autoimmune disease is the slow decline. Our Western medical system is often not well-equipped to support people with these conditions.

That was the system that I was in from my early twenties, when I was in college. I sought help for my first medical doctor who told me that they had no idea what was causing the gastrointestinal symptoms I was experiencing. He labeled it as irritable bowel syndrome. IBS is just a catch-all group. He wanted me to take Tagamet, a prescription drug, before every single meal. That was the solution. I was like twenty. Even then I knew that was not the problem.

A lack of prescription drugs is not the reason why I’m sick. We’ve got to keep searching. I asked the doctor, “We need to look. What do you think the root cause is?” He said to me, “We’re not trained in that.” I was like, “I’m going to keep looking for answers then.” I never took the drug. Meanwhile, I kept getting worse and worse. It was in about 2015. I was still in my 30s and that’s when I finally got a diagnosis.

Between being 20 and getting into my 30s, it was a very difficult road because as my symptoms kept getting worse, the medical doctors were less and less helpful. I had five miscarriages and I had a tumor that grew on the white or the sclera of my eye. The eye specialist didn’t know why that was happening but they did guarantee me that it would continue to grow and would cover over my cornea. It would eventually blind me. That was not very helpful.

I had chronic sinus infections every six weeks and bumps on the backs of my arms. Sometimes I would eat food and I was okay. Sometimes, a week later, I can eat the same food from the same brand, and I was so distended that I looked like I was five months pregnant. It was so painful like the cramping, the gas, and the bloating. I would be cramped on the floor because it was so painful. I kept getting worse and worse.

Finally, I reached a tipping point because my whole family ended up getting the flu. I ended up fainting and going into the ER. That’s when I went downhill rapidly. To the point where I couldn’t get off the floor most of the time. I couldn’t stand to make a sandwich or do the dishes. I couldn’t wrap my hand around a cup because it was so painful. My son, who was 5 or 6 years old at the time, he literally would come over. He had a cup with a straw in it and he put it up to my mouth so I could drink.

I spent most of my time laying on the floor. When I took a breath in, it felt like my ribs are going to break. Every time I would chew food, it felt like my teeth were going to fall out. I started to experience muscle wasting like a cancer patient would experience. I lost 15 pounds in a month, even though I was eating almost constantly. I would cut avocado in half, put some real salt on it and scoop it, and eat it all day as I was eating meals and such. I still couldn’t stop the weight loss.

Reaching Rock Bottom And Surrendering To God For Healing

This whole time, the medical system eventually told me they didn’t have any answers. The last specialist I saw said that the symptoms had to be in my head. None of these doctors could figure out what was wrong. That’s when I knew that I was on my own. If we couldn’t figure this out, then I wasn’t going to make it. I was watching between 40 and 60 hours a week of free online health summits. These are like cutting-edge doctors, medical researchers, and practitioners.

 

They were sharing what they were just discovering in their clinic, how they were helping people heal and whatnot. Getting them into what we call remission in Western medicine. That’s what I did. I would lay on the couch or on the floor, most of the time because the couch hurt my body and just listen to all these talks. I started to piece things together but as I said, I couldn’t stop that muscle wasting and figure it out. I had already tried everything I could think of. I’m a trained PhD in nutrition. I had done the GAPS diet, Candida diet, and Paleo diet. I was vegan for a while. You name it. I tried diet elimination reintroduction. Again, I was trained in that.

It helped me figure out that I could eat just a handful of foods. The foods I could eat whittled down to a half a sheet of paper. Foods that we think of as healthy like apples and bananas were making me sick. It was so hard to figure this out. I finally reached rock bottom one day where I was laying in my bed. Usually in the morning, when my husband would go to work, I would get up and I walked down the stairs and laid on the floor. He would set up the computer for me to listen to those online summits.

He would literally have to put food and water on the coffee table for my son and I to eat because it was too hard for me to get up off the floor. This particular day I was too weak to lift the sheet off my body so that I could get out of the bed. It’s like it was just yesterday sometimes. We knew that if we didn’t turn it around, I wasn’t going to make it. That morning, I started crying and I surrendered everything to God. I prayed. I begged him.

I said, “If you will save me so that my children don’t grow up without a mother, I will spend the rest of my life helping the rest of your children find their second chance.” That day, He showed me a different path. From then on, I followed Him. I trusted in Him. It was outside of Western medicine for most part. I just trusted in Him, and now it’s been well over a decade. I am fully healed. I’m not in “remission.” No markers of disease in my body.

I have more energy than I’ve ever had in my entire life. I’m back to mountain biking. I’m back to hiking on the weekends. In fact, I have three kids. I have my third child at the age of 45. She’s the healthiest of all three of my children because I’m the healthiest now that I’ve ever been. I feel so grateful and so blessed. I owe it all to God. It breaks my heart because my story is common now. Seventy-five percent on average of all Americans have a chronic or autoimmune condition. Thirty percent of children also suffer from at least one of these chronic or autoimmune conditions.

It doesn’t have to be that way. That’s my message. There is hope. You don’t have to settle for sick and for remission. We know it’s documented in the scientific literature. I wrote an entire article about this. It’s free on my website. I went through all of these different peer-reviewed published studies documenting one case after the next, one disease after the next that has been reversed. It’s possible.

Sina, you said that there was a time after you surrendered yourself to God and you went on a path to get better. What was that path? What happened?

It was so amazing. If you’ve ever listened to any of those free online Health summits, there’s multiple speakers that you can hear every day. You can’t possibly listen to all of them. What happened was, I saw the name of a speaker and I felt like God was drawing me to that talk. I clicked on it within like five seconds of hearing that man’s voice. I knew that he had a missing piece of my puzzle. Sure enough, he did.

I called and tried to get an appointment. This is before people were doing telemedicine. I was in Virginia and he was in Texas. He had just released a book that was a bestseller. He didn’t have a lot of time. They said his weight to see him was six months. I told the lady, “I won’t be here in six months.” She said, “We’ll put you on a wait list.” A God thing because the next day they called and said, “We had a cancellation. You’re in.” It was incredible because one of my big missing pieces was I did not understand that there were better tests available than what is offered in the Western doctor’s office. I didn’t know about functional testing, for example.

Functional Testing Reveals Micronutrient Deficiencies And Heavy Metal Poisoning

I went through so many tests in the Western medicine. I had breath tests, urine tests, and fecal tests. I had multiple colonoscopies and sigmoidoscopy. I had exploratory surgery. We were doing everything we possibly could think of to try to find the answers. In the Western doctor’s office, for example. The micronutrient deficiency test showed up with zero deficiencies. I wasn’t surprised. I was thinking, “I can believe that,” because I used to formulate supplements.

I knew the best of the best supplements. I was taking a multivitamin and mineral every single day. I thought, “I’m not deficient in nutrients.” I took the functional micronutrient deficiency test and I showed up deficient in fifteen nutrients. Two of them were so severe that I was borderline for pellagra and beri beri. Which are both diseases that lead to death or they can lead to death. They are diseases that were largely eradicated in the United States by the mid-1900s. We’re seeing a resurgence of micronutrient deficiency diseases now because of situations like mine.

That’s just one example of how the tests are being used by most practitioners, and are not adequate. They’re ancient tests. That was one. I tested positive for heavy metals. I had arsenic poisoning, which is surprising because our next water soluble. Usually, you’d be able to urinate it out. I was so chronically inflamed. My detox pathways were partially shut down. They were downregulated. I wasn’t able to detox the way that God designed my body to do.

We think that I developed this arsenic toxic load in my body. Before I started hitting rock bottom and went to an all-organic and all-whole food diet, I was consuming a “gluten-free diet.” I was eating products that were certified gluten-free, thinking that they were gluten-free. Most of those products contain rice or corn but a lot of them contain rice. Rice tends to have a higher level of arsenic partly because of pesticides that have been used in our country and fed to chickens as well. Largely because of these pesticides.

That’s how I got exposed to arsenic. Basically, what happened was I used these functional tests to find the remaining physical triggers that were causing my body to be imbalanced and leading to symptoms of autoimmune disease. They did things like removing the heavy metals from my body and figuring out through testing the final foods I was sensitive to. Supplementing with those nutrients that I was severely deficient in. I tried to get most of them through food but some were severe deficiencies. I did have to supplement. All these different things. That got me into a remission like what Western medicine would define as remission.

I was doing great. The power of the body to heal is remarkable. For example, as I just described. I went from lying on the floor, too weak to even wrap my hand around a cup. The first test results since we got back were from the food sensitivities. I tested positive, the most extreme sensitivity you could have to chicken and bay leaf. Which you wouldn’t think, a spice or an herb. We’re literally developing sensitivities to herbs. There’s children who are sensitive to pepper now and chicken. It’s crazy.

The power of the body to heal is remarkable.

That’s a food that most of us think of as healthy. We tend to rely on chicken broth and that’s exactly what happened. When I went on the GAPS diet, I was consuming a lot of chicken broth and I was making it with bay leaves. I still had other triggers that were not allowing my gastrointestinal tract to fully heal, so I induced a sensitivity to those foods. My point is, once I removed those final food triggers. That’s all I had done at that point. Within three days, I was able to get off the floor. That is how powerful the body is in healing.

I was so surprised in your book when I read that you were in school and getting your degree in nutrition. You knew a lot about it. You knew about the GAPS diet which not everybody knows about. You tried the Candida diet and these other diets. When you would say that they would work for a short period of time and they would stop working. I was surprised, but now, I understand. You had developed a sensitivity to things like chicken or bay leaf.

A lot of people are surprised. First of all, it was surprising even to me and my husband that here I am, the supposed “expert” in food, PhD in Nutrition is the highest degree you can get in food and I went to UC Davis. That’s one of the top schools in nutrition. We’re like, “How is it that somebody with those credentials could almost die from eating food?” That tells you there’s something very seriously wrong with our system, with the educational system, and with our food supplies. That’s point number one.

A lot of people will think, “You’ll just go on such and such diet or even the lion diet and you’ll be healed.” Usually, the people who come to me for help are the ones that have a similar story. They’ve tried all these different types of diets and all these different approaches. Similar to me, oftentimes what I’m finding is, they will feel better for like a week or maybe two. Maybe even a month or two and then they get sick again.

Reframing Chronic Illness As An Imbalance, Not A Disease

In general, that’s indicative that the trigger isn’t just the food. That’s why the path that God showed me is on the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual level. There’s imbalances on all of those levels. When you develop an autoimmune or chronic disease, it’s an imbalance. Ancient cultures call these conditions imbalances. Disease is a Western terminology. If you think of it as an imbalance, all you’re trying to do is bring the body back into balance.

I want to emphasize that because people might think, “That’s just semantics.” It’s a huge difference. Your perception can determine whether or not you fully heal from an illness or you die from that illness. For example, if your friend goes to the doctor, comes back and says to you, “I went to the doctor and he said I have cancer.” How does that feel to you in your body? It feels heavy. You’re sad. You’re like, “I’m so sorry for you. That’s so horrible.”

Cancer is a disease label Western medicine has given us. These labels are associated with their death sentence, or in our culture, the media and medicine push this narrative that you can’t heal from that. The best they can do is manage your symptoms, usually with medications. You’re not going to heal it. You’re going to carry that label forever. You know your quality of life is going to slowly decline. That’s a horrible situation. Now, the same friend goes to the doctor and comes back to you and says, “I just saw my doctor and he said I have an imbalance.”

 

How does your body feel? It sounds much better. That’s how we talk as scientists. Homeostasis is all about being in balance. The body knows how to rebalance itself. It has this ancient wisdom, that God-given wisdom to rebalance itself. What we’re doing is in this pathway that God showed me is we’re trying to remove the toxicities. We’re trying to replenish the deficiencies. That allows your body to harness its natural ability to heal. If you break it down at a basic level, a chronic disease or an autoimmune disease is literally just toxicities and deficiencies.

It’s two sides of the same coin and that’s what we address on the physical level, the mental, emotional, and spiritual level. I’ve worked with a lot of people at this point and the same roadmap works for every single one of these conditions. Whether it’s heart disease, lupus, Lyme, arthritis, and cancer. My son had autism and we fully reversed that. My husband had chronic Lyme, and he had lupus and seasonal allergies. We fully reversed all of those things. My mother had a laundry list of things going on. She had cancer, chronic heart disease, multiple strokes, multiple heart attacks, and grandma seizures. She had type 2, insulin-dependent diabetic, pancreatitis, Hashimoto’s. The list goes on and on.

She came to live with me after her husband died. In eight months, we reversed every single one of those conditions. We got her off every single medication she was on except two of them. One of them was her immunosuppressive drugs because by the time she was willing to let me help her, she had already had a kidney transplant. By the time she got to me, her remaining kidney was failing. We brought that back, we couldn’t get her off that medication because of the transplanted kidney.

The second medication that we couldn’t fully get her off of but we reduced the dosage was her blood pressure medication. Off the insulin, off the thyroid meds and whatnot. This is an important point because the reason we couldn’t get fully off the blood pressure medication is because she was grieving. High blood pressure is a sign of chronic inflammation. Her story to me is one of hope and resiliency because even though she was in this state of grief, in the end, she did not want to continue living after her husband passed.

The body is so powerfully designed to heal that even though she didn’t want to live, every single one of those conditions I mentioned reversed. That’s almost against your will. The body can do it. This fits into how you can get out of remission. Oftentimes, what I see is, you address all these physical triggers and it can get somebody into “remission.” How do you get out of remission? Remission, in my opinion, is a man-made label but remission is a state of fear. It’s because you are constantly afraid that if you eat the wrong thing or if you stress out too much, then the disease can come back.

I refuse to live that way. Even the National Cancer Institute defines complete remission as meaning all signs and symptoms of cancer have disappeared but cancer can still be in the body. That, to me, is not a remission. I said, “I’m going to be fully healed.” I prayed to God about it, and I asked, “How can I be fully healed? I don’t want to live in fear anymore. You tell us not to live in fear. Help me to let this go.” That’s when he showed me the emotional component.

The Essential Role Of Emotional Healing And Stress Reduction For Full Recovery

My mother’s story is the perfect example of that because, in the end, she died of a broken heart. The Western doctors diagnosed her with stress-induced cardiomyopathy. Otherwise known as the broken heart. We know the power of emotion. Emotions can kill you like with my mother. She literally died from the emotions, but emotions can also heal you. For example, in the medical literature. There are peer-reviewed documented cases of spontaneous healing like full remission from stage 4 cancer from somebody forgiving. These large acts of forgiveness.

We know emotions are so powerful. This is the key to fully reversing any chronic or autoimmune disease. If people aren’t comfortable with the word emotion because, in our culture, we’re not taught to feel your emotions. We’re taught to stuff them down and rub some dirt on it. It is hard for people to even sometimes admit that they have these emotions, especially in my experience with men.

Another way of saying it it’s stress. It’s your body feeling stressed or imbalanced. When you have an emotion such as anger. It stresses the body. You can think of that to detach the label of emotions being like a weakness. You can think of it as stress. Even the CDC has said that 95% of all diseases are caused by or related to stress. They’re saying the same thing. We’re saying it’s slightly different.

95% of all diseases are caused by or related to stress.

The Veil Of Unearned Trust In The FDA And Food Safety

You’ve learned so much since this journey. You talk about a veil. I would love for you to tell me what it was like when that veil came up and you were no longer wearing that. What was that veil?

In the book, I describe how most Americans have this veil of unearned trust that has fallen down over our eyes. It started with the birth of the FDA in 1906. Back then, we didn’t have a Food and Drug Administration on this Federal level. We had local agencies like regulations but we also had boots on the ground. You had a farm and then as we started industrialization, people would still go to other farmers. You would be able to see for yourself and verify the food that you are consuming.

As we went toward canned foods and stuff like that, you had to trust the label. Americans were not ready to hand over their food to essentialized government authority. They did not want to do that. There were people in the government like Dr. Harvey Wiley, who had been pushing for the birth of a federal agency to oversee all the food and the American people weren’t willing. Upton Sinclair came along with his book, The Jungle, which is now known to be fictitious but it didn’t matter.

It hit Americans in their stomachs. They were so outraged that they finally caved and they were calling for reform. We got reformed out of fear. The birth of the FDA came out of fear. The media was complicit as well. They put out newspaper articles saying that the safety of our food was “guaranteed.” We handed over the responsibility of being watched dogs over our food to the federal government with the birth of that FDA. It was a passage of two laws that gave us that.

When that happened, Americans stopped being the watchdog. It was like a veil fell down over their eyes. In every single generation, that veil has been passed down like a family heirloom. When we got it, I didn’t even know that I was supposed to be a watchdog over my food. No one taught me that. I would walk into a grocery store and because it’s on the shelf, I would assume that it was safe. I knew we had an FDA, USDA and EPA. They are paid with our tax dollars and they say that their job is to make sure that the food supply is safe.

I assume somebody was looking at that food. I came to find out in my research that’s not the case. To specifically answer your question. I was so devastated to learn the reality of the situation. It took me five years to originally write this book. The first subject that I studied was RBGH, which is Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone. What I was learning was so shocking to me that I ended up writing 115 pages of a single-spaced word document because I couldn’t accept it.

I was going to the original sources. I was calling the Government Accountability Office to confirm what this FDA document said or what this EPA document said. I was like, “This can’t be. This is America.” It was very devastating to me. It was very heartbreaking to me. My voice in the book, the first time I passed through it, was very different. I was very angry because I had gotten so sick and almost died. When I learned about the corruption and the loopholes, the back door deal and the revolving doors, I felt betrayed. I went into a victim space.

I remember coming downstairs one day after learning about GRAS or Generally Recognized as Safe. I was all upset and your husband does not want to talk to you when you’re upset about something. I come down and he’s like, “What’s wrong with you?” I started telling him about the GRAS loophole. He looked at me and said, “Why are you so bothered by this because the patterns are the same? Everything you’re researching is the exact same pattern with every single topic. Why are you so upset about this?” I looked at him and I was on the verge of anger, but tears.

I said, “It’s because they made me sick.” He looked me in my eyes and said, “No, they didn’t. You made yourself sick. You chose to eat that food. You chose to be an uninformed consumer.” I was like, “You just don’t get it.” I walked off and isolated myself in my bedroom. I sat there and calmed down for a minute. I prayed about it, and I said, God, is he right? Show me. I can handle it. Tell me. Is she right?” He showed me he was right.

It changed my entire perspective which changed the solutions. It empowered me. Once you take responsibility for your own actions like I got myself sick. That is one of the most empowering things you could do because you realize, “If I got myself there, I can heal. I don’t have to depend on this medical system that is not designed to help people heal from chronic illnesses. I don’t have to depend on this food supply and this label. I have the power to heal myself. I have the power to move the market to change that food supply.” It was one of the most liberating moments of my life.

We all have to take responsibility for all of our actions. We can’t trust the FDA, the USDA and the EPA to look out for us. In a lot of ways, they’re not even legally responsible to do so. Can we talk a couple minutes about that?

Consumer Purchasing Power As The Solution For Food System Change

Most of us, like myself, don’t know our role in the food supply. We don’t know the role of the FDA, for example. As I mentioned, Dr. Harvey Wiley wanted to get a federal government agency that would oversee our food. He created the Poison Squad, which he got money from Congress. He basically fed them different food additives like formaldehyde and borax. He fed them those additives and increasing dosages and intentionally made them sick.

His point was, “These chemicals make you sick. We should ban them from our food.” It didn’t happen. Again, it was because America wasn’t ready for it. However, what Dr. Harvey Wiley did from those experiments he created our national food laws. They were based on three pillars. The first is the company must prove safety. Though it’s the job of the company. People hate that. We can get into GRAS, too, in a moment.

We’re cover that in our part two, for sure.

The company is supposed to prove safety. The second pillar is that the FDA is in charge of the label and the label must be transparent. That’s the FDA’s job. The third pillar is the consumer is the final judge. We are the ones with our purchasing power that are supposed to decide what is on the market. That’s how it was set up. That’s still how it is now. All three of these pillars have eroded. They’ve all crumbled. We can talk about that in part two, but that is literally your job.

In the book, I quote the FDA. I found this in their documents. In their own documents, the FDA says, “The people are the solution.” They openly state that if we don’t demand safer foods through our purchases, the market has no incentive to provide it. We are supposed to selectively give our consent with every single food purchase. That was my goal. I’m a libertarian and I don’t want to ever tell somebody what to eat or what not to eat.

That is your freedom. You have the right to choose what you put in your body. What I would love to see is people choosing with informed consent. Know what you’re saying because when you buy food, you send a message to the company and to the government. I asked myself every day, “What message am I sending now?”

If we quit purchasing these foods that have all of these synthetic chemicals in them or that they’re made with glyphosate or whatever it be that we feel is harming our health. We can change the companies. Before we wrap up. Can you give me an example of one company that has changed because of consumer demand?

I have a bunch of them in the book because I’m all about solutions and positivity. I call these free market wins. You’ve even had companies like General Mills. They have taken ingredients out. BHT has taken out a lot of products. You have Anheuser-Busch. They found out that a farmer’s crop was being grown next to rice crops that they would use for their beer. They’re like, “Our consumers don’t want our rice in the beer contaminated potentially with your farmer crop.”

In a way. They boycotted. They’re like, “You need to move that out or we’re not going to buy any rice in the state.” They did. They got it moved. Companies will stand up. When they know what the consumer is not willing to tolerate anymore. Companies do stand-up because what matters most to them is the bottom dollar. This is one big reason why our food supply has 10,000 different chemical additives in it and Europe does not. It’s because they have stood up for much longer than we have and said, “We’re not going to eat that.”

Texas passed that law. It’s been challenged now, but they passed that law. They’re like, “If it has any of these 44 ingredients that are banned or warned about in European countries, then it has to carry this label on it.” It’s something like not meant for food consumption or something like that. That’s how we’re getting all these things. It’s because they stood up and said, “We’re not going to tolerate that.” Americans have not but it’s not too late.

All we need is a tipping point. Jeffrey Smith estimates that it’s just 10%. That’s all we need. Glyphosate is still so ubiquitous in our food supply. One of the reasons I believe that Trump was able to move forward with that executive order is to say that glyphosate is now part of National Defense. It’s because not enough people are upset about glyphosate. Not enough people are willing to stop buying foods that have known glyphosate in them. It’s not a midterm election issue.

It’s not a winning issue. I know a lot of people myself in the food movement that are against glyphosate but they’ll still eat conventional food. We have to spend our money and eat principally. That’s how we’re going to move the market. People are all upset about that glyphosate executive order, for example. In my opinion, it is a wake-up call. Number one, this is how dependent our food supply is on glyphosate at this point. Which means that’s how dependent our food supply is on GMOs.

Number two, we don’t have the numbers yet to make it a midterm election or an election issue. We have to be principled. We have to start purchasing and moving our dollars away from glyphosate. The food supply is not going to turn around from a top-down approach. People want Kennedy to be this top-down savior. Comes swoop in and rescue the food supply. I’m hoping by now people are understanding it’s not going to happen and that’s not their job.

Suggestions For Better Health: Choose Organic And Practice Forgiveness

It’s a good lesson that with our purchasing power, we have to be the ones that make changes. Sina, we’re going to talk a lot more about this stuff in part two. Before we end, if you could suggest just one thing that the reader does to better their health. What would that thing be?

Can I suggest two?

Sure, and I’ll probably ask you again in part two.

I’m going to piggyback on what we were just saying. The first one is, if you shop in the grocery store, choose organic over conventional. There’s issues with the organic label. We can talk about that in the next segment if you want. There’s some contamination but it is showing across the board on all these studies that you get less toxic exposure when you choose the organic over the conventional. You will help move the market because you’re sending that message to the companies that you don’t want glyphosate. That’s number one. If you want to be healthier, in my opinion, one of the best things you can do is practice forgiveness every day.

That’s beautiful. Sina, thank you so much for being with us here. I look forward to our next conversation.

Thank you so much.

—

Our guest was Dr. Sina McCullough. To learn more about her work, visit Dr. Sina McCullough and stay with us. This was part one of our conversation. In part two, Sina takes us deeper into what she uncovered about the modern food system. Including pharmaceutical crops, the grass loophole, the hidden chemicals and processed foods, the truth behind gluten-free labeling, and why informed customers may have more power than they realized. If you’re enjoying the show, we’d be grateful if you take a moment to leave a rating or review wherever you read. Your feedback helps others discover the podcast and to become part of this growing community. Thank you for spending time with us. Be well, be nourished, and be free.

 

About Dr. Sina McCullough

Dr. Sina McCullough is the best-selling author of HANDS OFF MY FOOD and co-author of BEYOND LABELS, written with world-renowned farmer Joel Salatin.

She is the creator of the online program GO WILD: How I Reverse Chronic & Autoimmune Disease and co-host of the Beyond Labels Podcast alongside Salatin. Together, they empower thousands each week to reclaim their health, happiness, and freedom.

An expert in nutrition, disease reversal, functional medicine, exercise, and energy medicine, Dr. Sina holds certifications as a Natural Healer™, Master Herbalist, and Gluten Free Society Practitioner.

She earned a PhD in Nutrition and a B.S. in Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior with a minor in Exercise Physiology from the University of California at Davis, where she also taught Biochemistry and Bioenergetics. She later served as Director of Research and Development for a nutraceutical company.

Despite her extensive academic background, her most profound insights came from a personal crisis. After reversing a near-fatal autoimmune disease without medication, she now dedicates her life to helping others find their second chance.

Above all, her greatest joy is homeschooling her three children.

 

Important Links

• Dr. Sina McCullough
• Hands Off My Food!: How to Defend Your Food, Health, and Freedom
• National Cancer Institute
• The Jungle
• Nourishing Our Children
• Weston A. Price Foundation

 

Episode Sponsors

• Four Visions
• Masa Chips

 

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