To set your body up for healing, it needs to feel it is safe. Safety signaling frees up “bandwidth” for your nervous system to repair and reset. Dr. Olivia Lesslar is a medical doctor who specializes in neuro optimization. Today, she explains how to make space for your body to heal with safety signaling. She offers concrete tips that she has successfully used with her own patients to get them into the parasympathetic healing state, like scanning the horizon and eating meals at the same time everyday. She also tells the story of her own journey and how safety signaling helped her body heal on multiple levels.
Visit Olivia’s website: drolivialesslar.com – https://www.drolivialesslar.com/
Go to westonaprice.org for more resources – https://www.westonaprice.org/#gsc.tab=0
For our resources in Spanish go here: WAPF en español – https://www.westonaprice.org/espanol/#gsc.tab=0
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Episode Transcript
Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda
.To set your body up for healing, it needs to feel safe. Safety signaling frees up bandwidth for your nervous system to repair and reset. This is episode 464, and our guest is Dr. Olivia Lesslar. Dr. Olivia is a medical doctor who holds several positions with innovative forward-thinking international clinics and institutions. She’s the Medical Director of Functional and Longevity Medicine at Cingulum Health, a neuro-optimization clinic.
In this episode, Olivia stresses the importance of safety signaling for improved health. She explains what it entails and why it’s important along with its benefits. She offers specific tips also for how to use it as she has used it with her own clients. She suggests that we scan the horizon, for example, and set up a regular time to eat each day. Incorporating simple steps like these has profound effects even in the most complicated cases. I’m talking about patients with 8 to 10 diagnoses.
Olivia should know what is required for healing. She herself once had anxiety, depression, and asthma, which she was able to overcome by increasing her own body’s sense of safety. Before we get into the conversation, I want to remind you that the Weston A. Price Foundation offers resources in Spanish. We’ve got brochures, an Instagram account, and the Tradiciones Sabas Podcast with hosts Annette and Alberto. Go to the section on our website that says WAPF En Español to find all that we have offered. Esos recursos los publicamos para que los sy fruten y comparten. Enjoy.
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Visit Olivia’s website
Go to Weston A. Price Foundation for more resources
For our resources in Spanish go here: WAPF En Español
Check out our sponsors: Paleovalley and Optimal Carnivore
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Welcome to the show, Olivia.
Thank you so much for having me.
We have never had anyone quite like you on the show who is an expert in psychoneuroimmunology. Can you even break that down for me a little bit?
You had plenty of people on who are experts at this, but they probably didn’t call it that. Psychoneuroimmunology is the intersection point between psychology, behavioral sciences, nervous system, immunology, and endocrinology or hormones. The idea is that understanding each of these different spheres will affect other spheres and it may not necessarily be as overt as you think it would be. For example, sleep, which is a behavior, can affect your immune system. We know that. We know that the nervous system can affect the immune system. We know that the immune system can affect your behaviors and so on and so forth. When you see this, especially through an evolutionary lens, you are able to give patients lots of different push points to be able to change outcomes.
You also have told me that you refer to yourself as a general doctor. Why do you do that?
I’m a generalist, and I’m a very proud generalist. I don’t have a particular specialty. I’m not an endocrinologist as such, a respiratory physician, or anything like that. I like being a generalist because I want to be across all fields, all pathologies, and all organ systems. If we are truly trying to understand a patient as a whole, then that is something that we have to embrace.
We are done with worshiping specialties because the specialties, unfortunately, haven’t been talking to each other. They’re relying more on the general practitioner trying to pull it all together. These doctors tend to be underpaid and don’t have enough time. Before you know it, t hese patients are being bounced between all these different specialties and put on all these different medications. They wind up becoming a sum of their parts as opposed to being a whole person. That’s why I like being a generalist.
You’re exactly right. I remember my father-in-law was sick with something. They sent him, let’s say, to the ear, nose, and throat guy when perhaps the root issue had to do with another part of his body. There was no one looking at the whole situation.
ENT is something that aggravates me. I see many young people still having tonsils and adenoids chopped out because of “chronic tonsils”, let’s say. The evidence, for example, of vitamin D being correlated with tonsil size is huge. If you’re looking at the patient’s diet and behaviors like sun exposure and that kind of thing, you might be able to get on top of tonsillitis, for example, large adenoids, or something like that as opposed to going straight to the knife. It surprises me that ENT surgeons still aren’t talking to their patients about that even though the evidence is sufficient. If you go to PubMed and Google vitamin D and tonsil size or tonsillitis, it’s all there.
I know you’ve seen a lot of patients. You enjoy the most complicated cases. Can you tell me the story of what you call an index patient? It’s someone who taught you something that was maybe the opposite of what you had presupposed.
I love my index patients because the index patient humbles you. The index patient is someone who responds to medications, interventions, or whatever it is in a unique way and opens a door to knowledge and wisdom. Hopefully, when you see it, you will be able to change and pivot how you are practicing medicine. I love my index patient.
There was a 60-year-old female who had been referred to me by her allergist. She had compounding allergies and it was getting worse so much so that she was down to three foods that she could eat, boiled chicken, boiled potatoes, and boiled peas. That’s it. She was getting overt symptoms when she ate anything else. She was getting angioedema, which means she was getting swelling of the lips, urticaria, rashes, and itching. Her blood tryptase was through the roof. Her whole blood histamine was through the roof. She was becoming allergic to everything. She’s getting migraines from chemicals and perfumes. It was a miserable existence.
She was quite emaciated by the time she saw me. At that time, the allergist thought that I was going to be able to do IV vitamins. I don’t think he really understood what I did. I did what any, I hope, good generalists would do or good doctors would do, which is listen to the patient and talk to them. In talking to her, I also noticed that I could see fillings in her teeth.
I said, “You’ve got osteoporosis,” which is in her medical history. I said, “We can also assume that the teeth, which are bone, are also getting a bit more porous. Therefore, it might be that the mercury is leaking. Why don’t we at least take that off the table?” This is where the healing journey begins because she said no. I said, “Why do you not want to do that?” It transpired. She opened up and said it was because when she was a child, her father abused her in her mouth, so she didn’t want anyone near her mouth.
It got me thinking about threat receptors. That’s the research that I like to do, specifically transient receptors and potential ion channels. I was thinking about how from a psychological perspective or trauma perspective, all the threat receptors in her mouth were already upregulated. They were already twitchy because of what had happened when she was younger. There must have been other things such that the brain was tagging all the food coming through, thinking that those might be threats too.
Eventually, she agreed. We found a very kind dentist with small hands who let her daughter stand in the room with her holding her hand. She played her favorite music. After she was done, they had a little cake for her in the staff room. They removed all four fillings in two sessions. Indeed, two were leaking. At the six-week mark after this, she came back to see me for what I thought was a consultation, but it wasn’t. She walked in with a big smile on her face and said, “I’m here to ask you to guess where I’m going.” I went, “What?” She’s going to a food festival with her friends. That was it.
In looking back over the case with the allergist, we hypothesized that the threat receptors in her mouth were already very twitchy and upregulated and the mercury that was leaking was tripping those threat receptors. The brain trying to figure out, “Why are these ion channels being activated?” was tagging everything that went through past her lips. When we removed that, which was tripping the system, the brain was able to reset, and she was fine.
It’s interesting because when I first met you, I thought you were a practitioner who was trying to help people understand the psychological roots of their illness. If people simply perceived their health differently, they would improve. It’s not quite like that, is it?
No, but that’s super important as well. Both of us agree on how important mindset is, reframing pathologies, and reframing issues, but no. It’s a lot more complicated than that. That’s why psychoneuroimmunology is about using one system to affect another. In this case, her immune system was affecting her behaviors. Her immune system was affecting her nervous system. Once that, which was tripping the immune system, is fixed, her nervous system and her behaviors could change.
Can you tell me another story of an index patient? I find this fascinating.
This is a favorite of mine simply because this patient of mine wants to tell her story. She says that anybody who wants to contact her, she will speak to them. She was a 34-year-old female from the UK. She’s a London patient of mine who has moved to Florida. She’d been sick for thirteen years with colitis. It wasn’t ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease. It was colitis of unknown cause. They weren’t able to give it a proper label.
It was debilitating. She couldn’t eat many foods. She was constantly bleeding and in a lot of pain. She was in the NHS system at the time. The public system means that it was all drawn out a little bit, to be honest with you. She went through a lot of medications and so on and so forth. Eventually, they told her that they had to cut her large bowel out. That’s when she found me because her husband’s friend knew of me.
As you implied earlier, often, surgeons or specialists will go right to the knife for the solution.
Can you imagine cutting large bowels out of a 34-year-old? It’s devastating. We had a good old chat. It was interesting. When you go back in history to the roots of when her issues all first started, you go beyond the colitis. I was like, “What happened before the colitis? What happened before that?” and so on and so forth. We have normalized diagnoses in our society. We’ve normalized pathologies. You have a 34-year-old coming to you with 8 different diagnoses and several medications. We think that that’s normal. It goes all the way back to when she was younger. She caught her father cheating and she had to be the one to tell her mother. There was this issue with food back then. The mother would eat her problems and so on and so forth.
I’m a fan of German New Medicine. There’s something to it about how the body tends to physically manifest psychic hurt in some way, shape, or form in any way. She talked about having really bad back pain, for example, when she was in France on a school trip. We talked about that and what was happening with the family at the time.
In fact, a lot of doctors know that back pain in their patients, especially when we’re not talking about a bulging disc, for example, is related to some sort of issues in the home and emotional stuff. She said she didn’t feel supported by her family. She’d been put on this trip to France with the school but hadn’t been given enough money because there were issues in the home between the father and the mother at the time and so on and so forth. She didn’t feel supported.
I said, “This is not what I’m saying. German New Medicine says this. Chinese medicine says this. Ayurvedic medicine says this.” She started to re-think all the different issues that she had, the urinary tract infections, the food allergies, the skin problems, the alopecia, and so on and so forth. She started to say of her own volition, “My body’s trying to protect me. It’s trying to talk to me.” She does this really cute thing where she taps herself on the head and goes, “Good body. Thank you, body.” That was it. It was that one consult.
Three weeks later, I happened to be in the UK. At that time, I was in Australia, and three weeks later, I was in the UK. She bounded up and was like, “I can eat anything I want.” I never expected that. I didn’t expect any of this from both patients. That’s why they teach you something. It’s so profound when the patient feels safe, when the patient reframes, when the patient stops fighting their body, when the patient starts loving their body, or when the patient starts embracing compassion and self-forgiveness. She’s a huge index patient for me.
The patient feels safe when they stop fighting their body and start loving it. They should start embracing compassion and self-forgiveness.
Help me and help the reader understand how we can start to maybe tune in more to our body so that we can feel safe and more in harmony with it. Help us see even the symptoms as perhaps a sign of the direction in which our body is trying to help us heal.
The medical fraternity has done quite a big disservice because I feel that we are one of the people who have been stoking this idea that a symptom needs to be quelled or a symptom needs to be cut out, burned, or medicated. That’s because then, we have fostered three generations of people who can no longer read those symptoms. They no longer see symptoms as a way for the body to communicate. They no longer see symptoms as the body trying its best.
In fact, I’ve started to look at symptoms as, “My body’s working.” We’ll probably get into it, but I used to be very sick. When I started to see things differently and helped my patients not only try to dampen the threat signaling but also increase safety signaling, they did better. How do they do that? Threat signaling is going to be anything where you don’t feel safe. For some patients, that could be certain foods. Certain foods are going to trigger them, whether it’s oxalate-heavy foods, histamine foods, or whatever it is.
In context, you also have to see that a lot of the time foods can trigger you because those threat signals are up. It is why patients with issues with digestion or whatever it is will tell you it is worse when they’re stressed. The corollary must be true. It’s better when you are happy, safe, satisfied, or whatever. It’s about understanding how to manipulate the entire situation.
The psychoneuroimmunology means that you can try and use behavioral sciences. You can use your psychology, hormones, and so on and so forth. We are friends with lots of hormone doctors. They talk about how all these other symptoms that you sometimes think aren’t related to hormones get better with hormones. That’s the whole point of having all these different push points. Trying to deal with the threat signals, whatever those may be, increasing safety signals is very simple.
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Coming up, Olivia breaks down the five basic threats that humans perceive and how to address them through safety signaling.
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Increasing safety signals is going back to evolutionary science. There are three basic ones, and that’s light, nutrients, and temperature. From an evolutionary perspective, there are five threats. Those are a plague, famine, winter, predator, and damage to your eight senses. Any issues with these five things are going to send you on high alert. If you know that those 5 things can be a problem, feeding the safety of those 5 things is going to help you with the situation.
Predator, for example, is anything where you feel unsafe, even anything that’s going to spike your cortisol or adrenaline like losing your car keys, for example. We know to do some deep breathing, for example, or change your behavior. Know that you put your car keys in a particular place every time. Little things like that help to increase safety signaling.
I always say to my patients, “It’s really important to get out into wide open spaces because only apex will do that. You don’t care if another apex predator can see you from the hills. You are going to be in a wide open space, chest up, head up, arms open, and palms out because you are not harboring a weapon or anything like that. You use your head, moving it side to side with your eyes scanning the horizon.” The fact that you can look around for threats puts your nervous system at ease. It is the fact that you can look, see, hear, and touch.
It is why when we wear shoes all the time, these sensory deprivation chambers, your brain doesn’t get information from that, which is always meant to be in contact with the ground. That sets a lot of people’s nervous systems on edge. The fact that we’ve always got our heads down, looking in one direction, i.e. our laptop or our phones, also gets the nervous system really agitated. It’s saying subconsciously, “You haven’t looked around for a while. You haven’t looked to see if there’s a threat.” The very fact that you can turn your head puts a nervous system at ease.
I have another index patient. He was already on edge with other things. He had some issues. He had to go into a neck brace for a little bit, and the neck brace completely broke him. He wound up with a panic attack because of it. Everything fell apart having the neck brace because he couldn’t look around. He even said that when he put the neck brace on, his eyes kept darting backward and forward as if he were like a scared animal. When he took the neck brace off, he was able to move, and that was the start of his healing journey.
This is so fascinating. I want to apply some of the things you’ve said in terms of increasing my own safety signaling. I wonder if there are other simple things that you’ve shared with your most complicated cases that might surprise the reader or me.
I’ll take a particular patient. This is exactly the formula that I gave her. I wanted her to have more animal products. In fact, I put her on a carnivore diet. The reason is because meat or carnivore, nose to tail, that’s a time of plenty. You are not in winter. You are not eating root vegetables. You are in a time of plenty. You are going to have very regular meals because the body loves circadian manifestations of whatever. It doesn’t want to have to worry about that next meal.
We’re talking about someone whose nervous system is on the brink. You can take from this what you want, but in her case, I wanted her to eat like clockwork. It’s one less thing for the nervous system to think about. It could redirect its energies to other things. She was eating regularly. She was waking up at the exact same time. She was going to sleep at the exact same time. It was taking away any of these sorts of stressors. She was exercising at the exact same time. She wasn’t doing hardcore aerobics. I don’t want your body to think in any way, shape, or form that you’re running from something or you’re putting up a fight. It was all very much resistance, yoga, and that kind of stuff.
In her case, I wanted her to drink mineralized water. My favorite is Vichy Catalan. It’s got quite a high amount of natural lithium in it, for example. The fact that you are able to somehow source good quality water means that it’s not winter. It’s flowing water with life in it. I put her on some supplements, but I only put her on food-derived supplements because that’s important. Food-derived supplements carry with them, I feel, an energy to it. Your body recognizes it. I know that some people will argue with that point, and that’s fine too. I use synthetic supplements all the time, but in her case, I wanted to get right back to basics.
The prescription for her as well was to have a lot of intimacy and a lot of touching. It was being held with someone that you have already made a vow with and trust in their room, which is meant to be this safe space as well. All the electronics were taken out of the room. You are not to be distracted. This is meant to be your haven. Her husband was very happy about that.
The prescription was intimacy, being held, and also not when to eat and what to eat, but how to eat. Start every meal with gratitude. Christians have it right with the prayer. It is making sure that you are preparing your body to receive nutrients. T hat’s why I’m not particularly fussy with other patients about whether or not they have alcohol or what they eat.
When you eat in a parasympathetic way, I have seen patients do a lot better than patients who eat the perfect food but they’re almost orthorexic about it. They’re like, “How many calories is this? Is it organic? Is it this? Is it that?” They get so riled up about that that they don’t eat in a parasympathetic way. That was this particular patient’s prescription.
When you eat in a parasympathetic way, you do a lot better than those who consume better food but are almost orthorexic about it.
It makes me think of Steve Jobs, the guy who was the head of Apple and started all that years ago. He used to only wear a black turtleneck and jeans. This was basically his uniform because he was trying to have one less decision that he had to make every day. It seems to me that someone who feels off balance in any way could benefit from having these rhythms of how they’re going to live, what they’re going to eat, and what they’re going to do and bring them a sense of safety and security.
It’s trying to free up bandwidth for your nervous system and immune system to focus on what it needs to focus on. This is why women tend to be afflicted by “autoimmunity” more than men, for example. Women seem to have more of these chronic complex conditions like endometriosis and PCOS. A lot of it does have to do with the fact that women are givers. Women are constantly looking around them, being hypervigilant, having to plug all the holes, having to keep 1,000 lists in their heads, and giving. Where you place your attention is where your energies will flow. If your attention is constantly outside of your body or outside of you, you’ve got no bandwidth to look after what’s inside.
In LA, I had another patient where in three hours, we went right back to birth, like what was the situation she was in then and so on and so forth. She had an amazing memory. Every year, what new thing cropped up, what hurt had happened, what she was harboring, and all the rest of it. You come to the modern day where she’s racked up with 8 or 10 diagnoses. Autoimmunity is one of them as well as pain.
When I was observing her and her family, she gives. She kept making sure that everybody’s got food on their plate before she put food on her plate. That’s happening at a physical level as well because the body is not going to dedicate any bandwidth to healing when it feels that it needs to be looking after others and preparing for fight-flight.
It’s got other priorities. I want to pivot. You alluded to the fact that you had a health crisis. You’ve had a health journey of your own. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
From birth, I had terrible hay fever and terrible asthma. I struggle with exercise not because I can’t do it, but because a doctor said to my mother when I was very young and I was there in the room, “She gets exercise-induced asthma, so she cannot do exercise. I’m going to give you a note so she doesn’t have to do physical education at school or she’ll die.” That’s in my subconscious, and I really struggle with that. I had severe asthma, and then I had constant tonsillitis. I had chronic urinary tract infections. I’m getting older. It was then polycystic ovaries, infertility, anxiety, and depression. I’ve always been quite an active, happy, and energetic person, but I struggled with these things. I accidentally got better.
I’ve never heard anyone use that phrase before. You accidentally got better.
I was in a happy, safe relationship that was new and I had a job that required me to be quite regimented with my time. Me and my new partner decided to try incorporating more vegetables and fiber into our diet. On the weekends, we would go to a farmer’s market. It was a date thing. We buy all these veggies, come home, and then we cut them up into big chunks into these plastic containers in the fridge. When we come home from work, we get olive oil, pepper, and salt in the oven, go and be intimate, come out, and dinner is ready.
It’s interesting because I’m very for animal products and all the rest of it. I would never dream of cutting up vegetables three days before I use them. That’s how important the safety signaling was, how important that rhythm was, and how important that I allowed my body the bandwidth it needed to repair and reset.
In that case, I was happy I was being held in a safe way. I was eating regularly and eating good quality produce, whatever that is. At the time as well, I started on this gut-soothing supplement as well. It had larch, peppermint, marshmallow root, or something like that. It became a ritual. I would have that every morning for three months.
One day, I realized that I didn’t have any issues that I normally would. My tonsils weren’t itchy or painful. I hadn’t had a urinary tract infection in three months. I stabilized my weight. I was fine. I didn’t have any signs of insulin resistance. I was fine. I had no anxiety, no depression, no asthma, and no hay fever. I used to live on Ventolin. You know how much I travel. I don’t even have a Ventolin on me. There was something to it.
To be fair, the other thing was that I got Invisalign as well for my teeth. Since I had this thing in my mouth, I was subconsciously biting down on it all the time, which meant that I retrained myself as a nose breather. I used to be a mouth breather. When you breathe through your mouth, you activate the sympathetic nervous system. I was activating my parasympathetic nervous system. I was breathing better. That helped with my “throat tonsillitis”. It was a very short but intense period of safety signaling and my body went, “Thank you. That’s it. Reset.”
I have a couple more questions before we close. The first is before we started recording, you said something to me about not wanting to refer to any patients as having dysregulated nervous systems. I feel like I see dysregulation all around me. Why do you not want to label it as such?
When you reframe pathologies, part of it includes helping the patient understand and give gratitude for the symptoms they’re experiencing. It tells me that the body is working. It tells me that the body is asking for help. Also, I use this analogy. If you see a hill and there is a truck curdling down, jack-knifing all over the place, and there is this horrible sound of screeching brakes and what have you, people are going to say, “That driver is terrible and dysregulated.” All these nasty things that you’re going to call the driver. It turns out that the brake fluid is low. It turns out that the logs in the back of the truck weren’t strapped down that well and he’s trying to compensate. You then realize, “The driver’s doing his best with what he has in the situation he’s in.”
That’s how I see my patients with a lot of their illnesses, diseases, and symptoms. I see a nervous system, an immune system, and an endocrinological system working as best as it can under the circumstances. Since we are so rich with so many facets, it’s also in the context of your history and your parents’ history, the epigenetics.
I see beautiful symphonies when patients walk in. I don’t want to be cheesy about this, but I really do think that patients who have symptoms are lucky to a certain extent because their bodies are still talking to them. When patients don’t respond to things, when they start to flatline, or when their body gives up, that’s when it’s scary. I don’t like using the word dysregulated. It’s more about the fact that we need to help the body pivot their symptoms abate so that they can live their best lives. All these symptoms are like sticks in the ground to help us find our way.
I love that. I feel like we should all be patting ourselves on the head and saying, “Good job, body. I know you’re with me. You’re on my side. You’re not against me.” This has been a marvelous conversation. I want to pose to you the question I like to pose at the end. If the reader could only choose one thing to improve their health, maybe to bring about that safety signaling , what would you recommend that they do?
A lot of it has got to do with self-compassion. In my head, I was running through sunlight exposure, which I love, better sleep, which I need, and being away from my phone more, which I desperately need. It goes back to self-compassion. I’ve seen remarkable things with self-compassion. When you don’t get out into the sun or don’t get off your phone, then you say to yourself, “That’s okay. I’ll try tomorrow.”
Self-compassion also means having enough wherewithal to carve out space for yourself and start looking after yourself. It’s not thinking that looking after yourself means that you’re selfish or using these other non-self-compassionate words. Self-compassion also means that you start to realize that your body is part of you and not fighting against you. W hen you start seeing yourself as one integrated whole, you start to embrace it. You start to thank yourself and love yourself. That’s self-compassion. Only when we start looking inward can we help others as well. Self-compassion is the thing that I feel is going to be the biggest bang for your buck.
Only when we start looking inward can we help others as well.
Thank you for pointing us in that direction. Everything in this conversation led us back to that point. Thank you.
You are welcome. Thank you so much for having me.
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Our guest was Dr. Olivia Lesslar. You can visit her website, Dr. Olivia Lesslar, to learn more. You can find me at. For a letter to the editor from a journal, “This is a report from New Zealand. I want to let you know where my family and I are after the December 2019 raids on raw milk farms in New Zealand. Eight cars, the Ministry of Primary Industry or MPI, the Serious Fraud Squad, and our local police charged up at our drive at 9:00 in the morning. It was the most grueling day of our lives. They sure were intimidating, but we stood strong in that we had not broken any law. In our house, the only true law is God’s law.
They have achieved their objective of removing so many sources of real food from so many good people. We have been avoiding regular mail communications for a very good reason. We battened down the hatches and trusted no one until this battle was over. We were originally charged with the selling of raw milk, but as all of our donations were donations to a charitable trust, they couldn’t make that charge stick. Instead, they came back at me for promoting an “unsafe food item”.
The irony of the situation was we had been seeing the writing on the wall and had gone from supplying raw milk only to charity members to supplying the bulk milk company. On the day of the raid, when one of our sons at the shed was questioned as to what we do with our milk, he strung them along. He said, “The cows come in full, ever-eager to donate their milk and return to a paddock of lovely grass to repeat the exercise morning and night. The milk goes into the big vat, and then in the night, this big tanker lit up like a Christmas tree comes and takes the milk off to the treatment station. Each month, we get a good payment into our bank account.” To say the guy from MPI was annoyed was putting it politely.
Months later, in December 2022, we finally got through the mini court hearings and the comings and goings with lawyers all interrupted by our lockdowns to have me finally found guilty of the charge. The ensuing fine is minimal in light of the possible fine I could have received. In my defense, I gave my life history of half a century of teaching new breastfeeding mothers to mothers as their children grew up and adults themselves all along the lines of health, not through supplements, but from a diet of traditional tried and tested eating habits.
My Māori judge would’ve been a true hypocrite if she had fined me heavily as everything I wrote in my affidavit is exactly what the Māori cry out for in their people needing to return to the eating ways of their ancestors. They wouldn’t let me spread the payment out over ten years. I don’t think they believed I was good for that long. I have five years of deductions from my pension.
The biggest loss is all of our lovely friends who partook in the beautiful raw milk. We are hearing stories of how they and their families are not coping health-wise with the removal of it from their diet. There are a few farms that have braved the legalities and registered into the government control system, but only to drop out over the cost of the system. In the early days of our struggles, I contemplated getting a T-shirt printed RMF for either Raw Milk Fan or, for me, Raw Milk Felon. My sincere thanks for all the good work that WAPF formulates. The journals are amazing.”
This is a letter from Allison from the WAPF Chapter in Auckland. Allison, thank you. Thank you for your work over the decades and for staying strong in the face of these unjust accusations. Thank you for doing your best to provide people with healthy raw milk and for keeping them close to their traditions. We’re trying to do the same thing over here. Thank you so much for writing your letter. Thank you to all of you for tuning in. Remember to keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun.
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About Dr. Olivia Ly Lesslar
Dr Olivia Ly Lesslar is a medical doctor with a background in International Relations. She has completed postgraduate studies in skin cancer medicine and clinical nutrition management. She has an interest and expertise in preventative medicine, psychoneuroimmunology, longevity and complex conditions like neurodegeneration, cancer, and allergies. Her unique skill set is in problem-solving multisystem, chronic conditions and keeping up-to-date with non-pharmaceutical interventions.
She holds several positions with innovative, forward-thinking international clinics and institutions, including LifeSpan Medicine (LA), Queensland Allergy (Aus). She is the Medical Director of Functional and Longevity Medicine at Cingulum Health – a neuro optimisation clinic where she advises on programs of synergistic neuroplastic interventions. She is the Resident Medical Consultant for CFS Health and is the Chief Medical Officer at Atlus – an Australian medicinal plant medicine clinic.
She is an Adjunct Senior Lecturer with Griffith University’s National Centre for Neuroimmunology and Emerging Diseases. Dr Olivia has lectured at Oxford University and Berkeley University on psychoneuroimmunology.
In 2021, Dr Olivia was featured in NYC Journal 50 under 50 for being an industry disruptor and leader in the field of integrative medicine. She is on the Medical or Clinical Advisory Boards for: Oxford Healthspan (UK), The Naked Pharmacy (UK), The Human Regenerator (Germany / UK), Holistic Health Institute (Aus), The Darbon Institute (Aus), Simplr Health (Aus), Humans are Good (USA), Egoo Health (Denmark), and she is a Trustee of the British College for Functional Medicine, where she serves as Research and Events Lead.
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Megan Foster says
When I was a kid, I noticed that if I panicked about a bee sting (or my mother did), the reaction was worse than when I didn’t panic. Later, when my children got a bee sting, I didn’t make a big fuss and flap about the sting, but kept calm and applied baking soda, treating it like a minor mishap, like a prickle from a rosebush. They didn’t panic about it or stress, and only reacted with mild itching.
However, I wish I could say that this worked with my adult-onset allergy to shellfish, which I enjoyed eating but suddenly developed a response to for no apparent reason.