Hey, Welcome to the official transcript of my very first podcast episode. Words can’t explain how I’m feeling right now. Proud, excited, terrified. I hope you enjoy listening and learning as much as I enjoyed learning and creating!
0:04 Thanks for joining me on incredible Family Health with Cheree Sheldon. I’m a naturopath, nutritionist and chef. But my most important role is Mum. I want to focus on getting your family healthy. I’ll do this by sharing tools and strategies I’ve learned to benefit my family’s well being and pass them on to you. You’ll also gain incredible insights from other professionals and parents who can help you live healthier lives.
Hello, welcome to incredible Family Health with Cheree Sheldon. I’m Cheree Sheldon, I’m a mom. I’m a naturopath, nutritionist, I also used to be a singer! And I love talking about family health, kids health, babies, parents, pregnancy, postpartum mental health, all of that stuff. And for me, it all ties in together. As part of my podcast series, I’m going to be asking every guest a series of quickfire questions. What advice would you give your kid self? What’s the best parenting tip you’ve ever been given? And, What song is guaranteed to get you in a great mood?
To start with here’s my answers: the advice that I would give to my kid self would be stop comparing, and just chill into yourself. I think as a kid, comparing yourself and trying to be like, like others to fit in, or finding yourself. It’s It’s such a big journey. So what I would tell my kids self would just be be comfortable in your own skin.
What’s the best parenting tip I’ve ever been given?
That’s hard. I’ve been given a lot of weird and wacky ones. But I think the best one would be just to follow your heart and just to be present in that moment. And since I’ve been trying to do that be really just present with heart. It has made a big difference to everyone’s moods and how I parent,
And what song is guaranteed to get you in a great mood? Well, it really depends what mood I’m in in the first place. But I love a good, massive sing. So if I’m in a bit of a down mood, I can put on a big huge power ballad and sing my heart out. And it will really really lift it and technically speaking, that’s because I’ve activated my Vagus nerve. But it’s just about emotions really. And I loved music as a tool to get emotions out and to let emotions in. And one of my favorite favorite songs to sing of all time is The Story by Brandi Carlile, I just adore it. It’s such a big song. It’s got such a powerful message. And it is guaranteed to give me a good mood.
2.40 This is episode one. So excited, I can’t explain how excited I am. And for me starting this podcast has been a big, big journey. It’s been on my to do list for a long time. And I am doing the “practicing what I preach thing”, which is role modeling for your child. And I want to show my kids that you can do anything. So I’m a busy Mum, I’m a nutritionist and naturopath. I work for a company at the moment where I’m on the road. And I do big trips away from my family. And I don’t have time to add another project into that mix. However, things like this are important to me, they’re important to personal growth, they’re important to my professional development. And I don’t want to have to sit on the to do list, the wish list, for another five years, and then go, Oh, I wish I could do that. I wanted to do that and feel like I’ve missed out. So me time, as we’ll learn on this podcast is pretty important to being a balanced parent. And this is my me time. It’s a project that’s pretty important to me. So I have literally hundreds, maybe not that many, but I have lots and lots of scribble books, notepads everywhere with all of my business ideas, and so many podcast episodes plotted out and written out that have popped into my head along the way to get here. But it’s that whole, where do I start? Where do I start? And so for me, I’m going to start at day dot.
What is day dot? It is preconception care. So to be for me, a healthy parent, we need to look at what’s going on before conception. And I’ll explain to you why. And for those parents that are sitting there going, Okay, well, I’ve already had kids, how is this relevant to me, fast forward, what I want you to know about day dot is that genetic expression that happens because of what’s happening in that preconception and that time of conception period, and how it impacts a child’s life later on down the track. So you can sort of go I can understand why things are happening to my child now, because of what was happening during my pregnancy, or during that preconception period, or even what was happening during your mother’s pregnancy. So genetics are pretty amazing. I love nutrigenomics. So that’s when nutrition and genes interact. And there’s another term called epigenetics. And that’s when the environment and the genes come by and to express both are really, really important when it comes to preconception. So when we’re preparing to conceive, both parents contribute, right, we all know this, the egg and the sperm do the little dance, they joined together and they create a beautiful new being. However, in the three months building up to that conception time, that moment of fireworks, that is when that egg and that sperm deliver their messages, or they build the messages inside them. And whether we want a child to have a message of anxiety, or higher risk of obesity, or whether we want them to be super chilled, that makes a difference to what their parents were doing. At that stage. It, it’s amazing. It really is. So we want to talk about optimizing our health during that time period. And planning for successful pregnancy. Often, we get to that point where we’re like,
6:35 Okay, I’m ready for kids. Now let’s just rip off the contraception and go for it. However, I really want to be mindful about all of this and put out there into common place in our society, that when it’s coming time to go, Okay, I’m ready to be a parent to go, Okay, what habits Do I need to lose in my life? Is it soft drinks? Is it smoking? Is it alcohol, fast food, all of those things that can really really damage our DNA, particularly the egg and the sperm, they are so delicate, and they require a lot of love and a lot of nutrition. So what we want to do is focus on changing their lifestyles and having this beautiful, nutrient dense diet and creating great habits like mindfulness, and exercise, and, and making that part of our lives at that point. And what’s like, what for me that’s going to do is just create habits right there and then and set you up to be just amazing parents role models from day dot. So, by optimizing your health preconception at day dot, you reduce your risk of gestational diabetes, of preeclampsia, of birth defects, of miscarriages, of preterm labor. You increase the success rates of natural conception, of natural birth of, of IVF success. So by ensuring your nutritional needs are met, for example, zinc, selenium, vitamin C, iron, iodine, they make a difference. There’s a term in the fertility circle called sub fertility. And that’s when a couple are having success at falling pregnant, but there’s no major reason that they can find for it. And often, they can link nutritional deficiencies in with this sub fertile population. So they know that vitamin D deficiency is linked to in their iodine deficiency. So, again, if you go and pop onto your GP and just go, look, we’re thinking about having a baby. Can you test just my basic nutritional panel here and have a look whether you need things and and target in your diet or target supplementation along with a great naturopath or nutritionist, and that will really, really make a difference.
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9.21 The other thing that I want to get into in this episode is a thing called mthfr. And a lot of couples don’t know about what this is until they start having issues with fertility in that preconception sort of period. And then they might find out that that’s the reason why they’re either having recurrent miscarriages or they’re not falling pregnant. So let me talk about this. What it is it is a gene. Everybody has, you know hundreds of thousands of enzymes in our body and those enzymes do particular jobs at breaking things down. And they controlled by a gene. So mthfr means methyl-tetra-hydro-folate-reductase. And all it means is it’s reducing one form of folate to another form. That’s its job, it’s only got one task. However, the task that it does is part of a greater pathway called the methylation cycle. And that really, really does make a difference to a lot of health conditions. But we’re just really going to talk about the fertility and health of our child in this instance. So how do you know you’ve got it, it’s a simple test that you can get done, a lot of GPS may not know about it or may not think it’s valid, but you can go and see a naturopath or an integrative GP, and get tested for it, it’s really good to see in a big panel of other genes and not just this one thing. Now, it’s not a disease, it’s not a diagnosis. What it is, is if you’ve got a polymorphism on this gene, and that means it’s just not functioning at 100%. of its capabilities, there’s a couple of different polymorphisms that you can have, you can have one copy of a gene, you can have two copies of it. And these effects effectiveness.
11:20 So I have what we call a homozygous c 677t polymorphism on this gene. And that means my gene only works at about 30% of its capability. And for me it, it really did affect my fertility, I had recurrent miscarriages. And then after we sort of we thought we’d beat these early miscarriages, I lost a baby at 32 weeks. And it was because of how this gene works in my body. So I am really, really passionate about getting this information out there. So you can have that knowledge and know how to help. And it’s not a treatment, but work with this effectively with your body and make your body override this polymorphism it’s like a switch a light switch, and often will go, Okay, we’ve got this polymorphism we’re going to dim the lights, we’re going to make it not work effectively. But we can override it, and we can turn the lights up by supporting it. And we do that with nutritional medicine. So what we call cofactors, we need to target with cofactors. And for you going okay, I don’t know what that means. It means all the nutrients that will support this one genes job, they might be things like magnesium, zinc, selenium, all the other B vitamins apart from being iron, which is fall late, and we’re going to use them and make sure that they’re in really high amounts in our diet. And also, in that preconception period, probably use a really, really good quality supplement to make sure that we’re meeting our needs and optimizing our needs at that point. By doing this, we will reduce our risks. And we will hopefully give that message to this new little beam that’s going to come into creation that they can be born with their lights on. And they won’t be given that same genetic expression of lights out. Does that make sense? I hope it’s gene expression thing can get really quite complicated. And mthfr is linked with a lot of health conditions. So when I first learned about it, I was studying kids with autism, and it was linked with that. And then it’s linked with stroke. And my grandfather had a stroke. So I was like, Oh, that’s interesting. And then it’s linked with other cardiovascular risks clotting things, things like DVT. And I was like, Oh, that’s interesting. And then all of that fertility side that it is linked with is just amazing to me. And I saw it over and over in my clinical practice when people would come in to get help with falling pregnant. And we test for this gene and they would come up with a polymorphism. And so if we supported it correctly, that they would end up having a healthy pregnancy and beautiful babies at the end of it. And my health journey was the same as well. So after we lost our baby Erica, that was when I found out that I had this gene. So afterwards when we were like, okay, we’re ready to try again for another baby. We changed what we were doing. So I really, really targeted nutrition and I really, really targeted supplements changed lifestyle habits even more and Even though my next pregnancy was deemed very high risk, we had a beautiful healthy baby and sages now, three and a half. And you’ll hear from Sage in a few episodes of some of her health journey as well.
15:14 Do you want to feel awesome again, making sure you’re showing up daily for your family and also helping them be the brightest, happiest versions of themselves. I’m glad you found incredible Family Health. I’m Cheree, a naturopath here to meet you where you’re at. No judgment, no preachy diatribes. Just a safe space for you to drop in, and level up your health journey with your family.
15.27 So I hope I haven’t blown your brain up on the very first episode, but preconception care for me is so, so important, and I just wanted to share how important it is to get that feeling of what you’re doing now, impacts long, long term. It really, really does. And there’s amazing research to show that the genetic expression carries over from generations. Sometimes I wonder whether my chemical sensitivities that I have why I’m really sensitive to smells and can’t really do food chemicals, stems from my grandparents, working in cotton fields and getting drenched with DDT from planes going overhead, multiple times. And it didn’t really impact their genetic expression at that moment. But generational, it has changed the expression, perhaps. So I want to thank you for listening. And next time, Episode Two comes around. I’ll be talking about living with a child with anxiety. I hope you can join me then. Thanks.
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