Welcome to The Autoimmune Wellness Podcast Season 3: Real Food on a Budget. We’re dedicating this season to discussing an aspect of natural healing that often gets left out of the conversation: affordability. We’ll be chatting with experts and peers from the AIP community about how to best balance money with your health priorities.

This season is brought to you by our title sponsor, The Nutritional Therapy Association (NTA), a holistic nutrition school that trains and certifies nutritional therapy practitioners and consultants with an emphasis on bioindividual nutrition. Learn more about them by visiting NutritionalTherapy.com, or read about our experiences going through their NTP and NTC programs in our comparison article.

Season 3 Episode 1 features an interview with our friend and role model, Dr. Terry Wahls, who is a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Iowa. Dr. Wahls successfully recovered from multiple sclerosis using diet and lifestyle strategies, and currently studies the interplay between diet, lifestyle, functional medicine, and autoimmune disease.

As a medical doctor, Terry has a lot to share in regards to the high cost of medical testing, lower cost approaches, and whether a “real food” approach is elitist. Scroll down for the full episode transcript!

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Full Transcript:

Mickey Trescott: Welcome to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast, a resource for those seeking to live well with chronic illness. I’m Mickey Trescott, a nutritional therapy practitioner living well with autoimmune disease in Oregon. I’m the author of The Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook, and I’m using diet and lifestyle to best manage both Hashimoto’s and Celiac disease.

Angie Alt: And I’m Angie Alt. I’m a certified health coach and nutritional therapy consultant, also living well with autoimmune disease in Maryland. I’m the author of The Alternative Autoimmune Cookbook, and I’m using diet and lifestyle to best manage my endometriosis, lichen sclerosis, and Celiac disease.

After recovering our health by combining the best of conventional medicine with effective and natural dietary and lifestyle interventions, Mickey and I started blogging at www.AutoimmuneWellness.com, where our collective mission is seeking wellness and building community.

We also wrote a book called The Autoimmune Wellness Handbook together that serves as a do-it-yourself guidebook to living well with chronic illness.

Mickey Trescott: If you’re looking for more information about the autoimmune protocol, make sure to sign up for our newsletter at autoimmunewellness.com, so we can send you our free quick start guide. It contains printable AIP food lists, a 2-week food plan, a 90-minute batch cooking video, a mindset video, and food reintroduction guides.

This season of the podcast, real food on a budget is brought to you by our title sponsor, The Nutritional Therapy Association.

Angie Alt: A quick disclaimer: The content in this podcast is intended as general information only, and is not to be substituted for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Onto the podcast!

Topics:

1. Welcome back to season 3 [1:40 ]

2. A little bit about the upcoming season [8:49 ]

3. Conversation with Dr. Wahls about food on a budget [15:06 ]

1. Welcome back to season 3 [1:40 ]

Mickey Trescott: Hey everyone! Mickey here. Welcome back to the Autoimmune Wellness podcast. We are in our third season. How are you doing today, Angie?

Angie Alt: I’m good. I’m kind of in shock that we have been doing this for three seasons now.

Mickey Trescott: I know. It’s been a lot of fun putting everything together. And I think we would go through these long breaks where we’re like; we’d forget about the podcast. We’re like; yeah, we don’t have a podcast. And then we’d start thinking about doing it again, and we’re like; oh yeah, that’s a lot of work.

Angie Alt: Oh yeah, I do a podcast.

Mickey Trescott: We’ve been getting fired up, and we’re really excited to introduce our topic for this season. It’s one that we have been thinking about for probably years now, huh Angie?

Angie Alt: Yeah, we’ve been talking about this a long time.

Mickey Trescott: We’ve been talking about it for a while. And it is Real Food on a Budget. {dun-dun-dun!} We really want to dig in how to make nutrient dense, healing foods accessible for everyone. So Angie, you want to talk a little bit about how we came up with this topic?

Angie Alt: Yeah. I mean, we’ve long been hearing kind of the rumblings from the autoimmune community, the AIP community, that finding a way to make these dietary changes affordable is this big barrier to adopting the protocol over the long term. And those rumblings were pretty much confirmed at the beginning of this year when we ran our giant reader survey. Seriously; thank you to everyone who participated and gave us your feedback. That was very valuable to us.

But no big surprise; you guys pinpointed affordability and accessibility to high quality, healing foods as one of your biggest challenges. So we kind of knew that that was something that was out there all along.

Mickey Trescott: Yep. And some of the specific challenges that we’ve both personally been through at different points in our journey, and things we’ve heard from you guys in comments on the blog and in social media, and in the survey, are things like people that can’t get started just because they literally can’t afford it. They don’t have the current budget for it. Right?

Angie Alt: Right. I mean, it’s hard. It’s a big budgetary move. We definitely felt that in the beginning of our journeys when we kind of shifted our families’ budgets to focus on that. My husband and I sit down and do kind of a big overview of our spending at the beginning of every year from the previous year, and we saw it again this year. Whoa; that food bu