Toxic Psychiatry and How to Have Mental Health Without Drugs

My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph, a pharmacist who specializes in pharmacognosy, which is healing with medicinal plants. Today we’ll be talking about her particular interest in the toxic effects of psychiatric drugs and how she helps people get off them. In addition, we’ll discuss how various natural supplements can affect your mood and feelings for better or for worse. Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy. She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and is the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida. www.botanicalresource.com

LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH PAMELA SEEFELD

transcript

DEBRA: Hi. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio, where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free. It is August 27th, 2014 and I am here in beautiful Clearwater, Florida where it’s a lovely late summer day. The sun is shining, there is no thunderstorm, so we should have no interruptions in our transmission here today – not that we ever do, but sometimes the electricity goes out when we have thunderstorms, so it’s always a possibility. But everything is perfect and smooth today, beautiful summer day.

Today, we’re going to be talking about toxic psychiatry. We’re going to be talking about toxic psychiatric threads, and how you can have mental health without them.

My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She is a pharmacist, who specializes in a specialty called pharmacognosy, which is healing with medicinal plants. So instead of giving people toxic drugs that are made in a laboratory, Pamela, with her pharmacist training, finds things to give people that have the same beneficial effects as drugs, but these plants actually heal you, instead of just alleviating symptoms.

So she works with a wide variety. She is right here in Clearwater, Florida with me. And I’ve been to her. She has helped me tremendously. Actually, I’ve only been to her once. She gave me one bag full of things to take. One of the things that has happened is I have lost 10 pounds in three weeks. That was one of the things I want to do, it’s to lose some weight; and Pamela helped me do that. Before, losing weight was really a struggle for me.

I have another friend whose mother was on a whole lot of drugs for a condition that she has. And Pamela gave her some natural remedies; and right away, his mother started doing better. That’s actually how I found out about her in the first place.

So today, she’s going to tell us about how psychiatric drugs are toxic, how they affect your body. We’re going to be talking about little things that you can do if you have mental health things that need to be improved, how plants can help you.

Hi, Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s great to be here.

DEBRA: Thank you.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Congratulations on your weight loss. I know you’re doing great.

DEBRA: I am doing great. I am doing great. I’m actually…

PAMELA SEEFELD: I’m very happy for you.

DEBRA: Thank you. Actually, I’m going to see Pamela again on Friday this week and I found a whole lot of old blood tests.

She has to look at your blood test because she can tell how your body is doing from looking at the blood test, even if something is coming up, some body condition that’s weakening, symptoms in the future that you’re going to have. She can help you handle that in the past before you can get sick. And so I just gather up all the blood tests I could find, and I’m taking them all to her on Friday. We’re going to go over them and see what we can do next.

I just think it’s fascinating, what you do, Pamela and so needed.

I knowin past shows – you can go ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and see the links to past shows we have already done with her. Actually, she’s going to be on every other Wednesday because there’s so much to talk about on this subject and so much to learn.

But how did you get interested in the psychiatric part of this?

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s a very good question. Just a little brief background, my background is Clinical Pharmacy and Pharmacognosy, which is the study of plant medicine. It’s much different than Herbalism. People that are doing herbal medicine, there’s not really so much of the study of the medicinal qualities and where they go in the body. I also trained in Homeopathic Medicine here in the United States and in Europe.

So I do a broad range of things. I can do pretty much everything. We’ve talked about this, some cardiovascular disease to sleep disorders and so forth, but mental health has always been a particular interest of mine. I have definitely had plenty of time spent up in Washington DC grant reviewing for NIH, which is National Institute of Health. One of my best friends works at the National Institute of Mental Health and I tended to hang around with a lot of the psychiatrists and the people that work in mental health that are interested in other means of getting people well.

So my background is very varied in this. And mental health to me is like the final frontier because a lot of people, when they realize that their mental health is balanced and they overcome insomnia or depression or anxiety, all these things that are really harming people and making them not have their potential, most people’s illnesses really start out psychosomatically as a psychiatric issue where we can use some simple tools, some plants, some vitamins and some simple things that will work just like medicine and get people better so they are not needing medicines in the future.

DEBRA: That’s so great. That’s so great. So then, you were hanging out with people who were looking at these mental health things. And then now, what do you do with this?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Now, I tend to go to Biological Psychiatry. I try and go in there once a year, to their meeting, and see what they’re proposing. And what I have found by learning all these different things – and I actually lecture on this too to the psychiatrists. I do grand rounds.

Grand rounds are like when – like the VA Hospital, I do grand rounds at the VA Hospital. Grand rounds are when the doctors and psychiatrists get together at lunch and they meet in the room and they have a speaker. They do this every week, and it’s called grand rounds. Sometimes, they do it once a month, depending on which hospital institution.

So I do grand rounds, psychiatric grand rounds. We met several times a year. And the grand rounds talk about this is what you give this patient in the psychiatric realm, which are drugs and this is the data that shows that these vitamins or these plants can do exactly the same thing at a lower cost, better outcomes, and less side effects.

My background is very varied in this, but I have done this a long time. I lecture on this quite a bit. But I write new lectures for several psychiatrists that are very good friends of mine that really ask, “Can you please send me those lectures because I’d like to read it.” I really summarize all the data. And that’s what we’re going to do today.

DEBRA: Good. So go ahead and start.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay. I’ll just…

DEBRA: I don’t know what to ask you first.

PAMELA SEEFELD: No, no, no. Don’t worry about it. I’ll just go there and you can interject as you wish.

All right, what we see is that a lot of people – and we were talking about the blood work. It’s nice sometimes that I see people blood work because if you go to a regular allopathic doctor and he’s going to do your blood work – and even pharmacists, when I worked as a pharmacist in their hospital – when you look at the blood work, they only look and see if it’s out of range.

If it’s out of range and it’s flagged, so to speak, then that’s the only time they address it. But a lot of times, people have things that are coming along that I tell people, “In five years, they’re going to give you this medicine. In 10 years, they’re going to give you this medicine.”

So it’s really about preventing all these medicines because people do not want to be medicated. They want natural solutions. And the thing with medicines is that a medication works on receptors. That’s how drugs work. That means this drug, drug X or whatever it is, goes to a protein on a cell and it’s an exact match. It looks just like the configuration of the protein.

And then, when it binds to the cell, it changes something inside the cell, and you get the effects. So you get the anti-depressant effect or you get the anti-anxiety effect or whatever you’re looking for. So when you do this, let’s face it, there’s no solving the problem. You’re just covering it up with medicine.

So what I do is say, “Look, you have some depression and anxiety. There’s nothing wrong with that. Life can be very stressful. Let’s solve what’s going on in the brain, the neurotransmission. Let’s get this solved so that this problem is gone.”

That’s the difference with what I do versus what we do in a pharmacy and medical realm.

DEBRA: That’s totally amazing. That’s just so amazing…

PAMELA SEEFELD: It is! It’s all about solving things, solving problems…

DEBRA: Yes! And that’s the difference in. In the first show that I did with you, during the first break, I looked up the root of the word pharmacognosy because I was curious about that little syllable cog- that has to do with the intelligence. And what pharmacognosy really means is it’s a drug, but it has information. It has intelligence. It does something. This is what’s missing.

This is what’s present in plants, it’s that information. That’s what’s missing in drugs that are synthesized in a lab and toxic chemicals and all these things. It doesn’t have the information part that exists in nature. Is that right?

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. And we tend to take things very simplistic. We don’t think of plants as being intelligent. But they have enzymes in the plant that are identical to what we have in our liver. They metabolize. They’re unique and they can make their own food.

What’s unique about plants is that the reason why they have activity and they have these compounds is they make them to prevent herbivores from eating them. And these compounds are toxic to some animals, but for us, they’re very, very therapeutic.

DEBRA: Good. We’ll hear more about it after the break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a pharmacist. She specializes in pharmacognosy. She’s here in Clearwater, Florida, where I live, but she works with anybody by phone. Her website is BotanicalResource.com. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Pamela Seefeld. We’re talking about toxic psychiatry and how we can help mental health without drugs. So go on.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. So this is what we have to look at. We’re talking about solving the problem. So I think most people would want a solution versus, “Okay, I’m going to give you a medication and this medicine is going to go bind the receptors. It’s going to change the chemistry in the cell,” but after the effect wears off, the problem is still there.

So this is what is different from what I do versus when we’re handing out medications to people. So let me just start with a few simple diagnoses and what we use versus what the doctor would give you.

DEBRA: Great.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So depression. Depression is a very common problem. And depression, we know that when people have excessive amounts of cortisol because of stress – and we all have heard these terms like adrenal fatigue and so forth. The adrenal glands rest on top of the kidneys. When you’re under chronic stress, anxious, stressed at work, stressed at family, things like that, traffic, cortisol is released.

When the cortisol keeps being released chronically all the time – the cortisol is really designed to be there if you have to flee a dangerous animal when we were hunters and gatherers, that kind of thing. But nowadays, people’s cortisol levels are elevated all the time because we’re constantly stressed out, worried, whatever.

So what happens is this cortisol components go in and out of soluble tissues. They can come in and out of the brain. So a lot of people’s depression is a result of excessive cortisol stimulation in the body.

So how does the doctor treat this? What they do is they give what is called the serotonin reuptake inhibitor like Paxil and Prozac and Zoloft. Those drugs are very common medicine.

In fact, do you realize they are so often prescribed that they are in the water supply everywhere in the country? When they actually measure the water, it has the serotonin reuptake inhibitors and estrogen from birth control pills. They’re in all the water. They can’t even get it out of the water anymore.

DEBRA: Which is another reason to filter your water.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly! That’s exactly right. And you know what too? Don’t think that these things are innocuous because there was a study that was recently done about a year and a half ago in Norwood that found that because there was such a high incidents of people using benzodiazepines, which is like Valium and Xanax and Ativan, those drugs, there was such a high incidence in that particular town that it was on the water supply and they were dumping the water into the river and the fishes were being killed. The reason why they’re being killed is because they weren’t fleeing their predators anymore because they were drugged out.

DEBRA: Oh, my God!

PAMELA SEEFELD: Do you want to talk about environmental problem? These kinds of things are happening every day. So these medicines are very dangerous and they have a lot of side effects and people need to realize that.

So if you’re depressed and you go to the doctor and he gives you one of these medications, when you take this, it just allows more of the serotonin or the happy neurotransmitter to be in the synapse in the brain, but it’s not solving anything.

And the problem with taking these medicines is that say, I put you on this medication. Two months later, you decide you don’t want to be on this anymore. You don’t feel good, you feel foggy, you feel out of it, your affect is very flat, you don’t have this experience of joy anymore. So what happens is you try and take it away, but then when you start taking it away, you have withdrawal, you have severe side effects.

We actually know now that the neuron, when you start taking away these medicines, they start to retreat into the brain. As a result of it, you start getting more depressed, more anxiety. It’s like a negative backlash.

DEBRA: Yeah. Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: And so this happens a lot. I did this a lot. I take people off medicines a lot. They come to me saying, “Please help me bridge off of this.”

The difference between going to a psychiatrist and saying, “I want to get off this medication” is that they just start breaking and splitting, but there’s no bridge to solve to get off of it. What happens is whatever was going on in your brain before you start taking the medicines, it’s still present and at the same effect, the medicine, you’re going into withdrawal. So actually you are at a worse stage than you were initially.

So what do we use for someone that’s depressed? There’s a product called OmegaBrite. It was developed by a psychiatrist, Dr. Andrew Stoll at Harvard University. There were double blind placebo-controlled trials against Zoloft. Actually, in the trial, it was better than Zoloft. What do you think of that?

DEBRA: I love it.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah. So, when people come to me, sometimes, people are skeptical. They’ll say, “Well, really? There’s no data on that.” I’m like, “Oh, actually, there are.” I print the studies out of the National Library of Medicine and you can see that these particular products have clinical data that show it’s actually better than the drug as far as the outcome.

So OmegaBrite and something called Cardio B, which is a prescription dose folic acid, which binds to five serotonin receptors in the brain, phenomenal results to get people off of medicines, but also to treat the depression itself.

And the cool part is that both of these products make up the neurons in the brain, so you are solving the problem and you are not just covering it up.
DEBRA: Okay. I have a question for you.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Please.

DEBRA: And we have just a couple of minutes until we have to go to break. I know that people can go through – like something can happen in their lives. Like this morning, I was just feeling stressed about something and I just started feeling overwhelmed and like, “How am I going to get through this?” It was something that because it just seemed like an overwhelming thing to me, but I felt fine. Within minutes, I went, “Okay, so I can handle this.”

But I think that there’s a difference between — I’m asking a question here. There’s a difference between the ordinary up’s and down’s of life, but isn’t there also physical things going on in your brain that cause people to be depressed that has nothing to do with the ordinary up’s and down’s of life?

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right, yes.

DEBRA: So you could, say, try to solve it by not wanting to be depressed or solve the problem or whatever, but if there is something biological going on, then you could go to a psychologist or psychiatrist or a psychic or whoever you want to go to all day long and it wouldn’t solve it because there’s wrong biologically.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. What you’re stating is that organically, there’s something going on in the brain that needs to be addressed. That’s why when you take medication, you actually are not resolving what’s going on in there

And really, when you’re taking omega 3’s and folic acid – and a lot of times too, I’ll even use some products that work on dopamine like SynaptaLean, which actually goes and targets dopamine and brings more dopamine into the brain. When you do this, you’re saying, “Okay, I’m acknowledging the fact that the neurons on the brain are not firing the way they should be and as a result of it, I am feeling very distressed and unhappy.”

Life events can bring upon these things especially because it seems overwhelming that you have to figure out some way to cope with what’s going on, maybe the death of a spouse or something really bad happening.

And this is what I typically see people being put on these medicines. But then after the event has passed, they want to come off of it and those options are not being brought to them. That’s where I see a lot of this.

So looking at that and saying, “Okay. Can I work on serotonin? Can I work on dopamine in the brain and improve my outcome and improve my brain function, and my cognition and memory?”, that’s where these supplements take place.

DEBRA: Okay, we’re going to go to a break and we’ll talk about this more when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a pharmacist. She specializes in pharmacognosy, which is the healing with medical plants. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Pamela Seefeld, a pharmacist who specializes in pharmacognosy, which is healing with medicinal plants.

So even if somebody doesn’t have a mental health condition, like say depression, then there can still be benefits for people from taking certain plants because it sharpens up their brain.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. So everyone has their very own level of comfort of where they are. They know that they’re functioning really high and they’re feeling really great, or they’re having some issues and they’re not feeling so well. We know that these things can fluctuate.

What I would tell people, there’s a few simple points. If you are going to take a supplement, you want to make sure you’re taking the right supplement and something that’s targeted directly towards you feeling better.

For example with the OmegaBrite, OmegaBrite is a type of fish oil. Everybody should be on fish oil regardless, because we know it works on 300 different genes in the body, it helps prevent cancer, it helps for cardiovascular disease, it helps lower triglycerides 30% every month. So that’s just the baseline.

And what I do a lot of times, look, you’re going to be taking Omega 3’ss anyways, why don’t you use one that’s going to be tailor-made for you? If you need more energy, if you have a little bit of mild depression, OmegaBrite is a great product for you.

And converse to that, if you have anxiety, if you worry a lot, Pro-DHA and Pro-DHA1000 works very, very good to keep the anxiety at bay and make you just not worry about things, feel less stressed about things.

And sometimes, I even use both of those. In the morning, I’ll give somebody OmegaBrite. This is what psychiatrists do. They give somebody an anti-depressant in the morning and they give somebody the mood stabilizer later in the day.

Looking to the same thing with fish oil, you can say, “I’m going to give you OmegaBrite in the morning. You’re going to have phenomenal energy. Go work out and just feel great.” And then, as the day goes on, if you have anxiety, you can take Pro-DHA or even some passion flower and they will cut the edge and not feel like you’re so stressed out.

DEBRA: Amazing! I think that there’s a lot of emphasis that we should be able to solve our problems or handle things in life and that there’s certainly benefit to doing a lot of different —whatever is the program that you choose in order to do that.

But I still come back to what I said earlier. If there’s something going on biologically so that you’re not at your optimum, you could be trying to handle a depression when there’s actually no emotional cause of depression. It might be biological.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right.

DEBRA: And it’s important to handle the biological card, and then see if there’s something that you need to take care of emotionally.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct. We just have to think about ourselves. A lot of times, we’re not living in the present, let’s face it. Most people, we’re thinking about a lot of other things. But if you actually practice mindfulness and you’re living in the present and you look at your body, what is your body made up of? It’s made of carbon. It’s made of hydrogen. It’s made of electrolytes, sodium and potassium and magnesium and phosphorous. So all of these different things, when we look at someone’s blood work, what would we be looking at? We’re looking at all these chemical components that are in somebody’s body.

We forget that we are made of the earth. We are made of all these things around us, water and oxygen. We’re all made of these things, but especially, we’re made of all these metals. A good example is lithium. I use low dose lithium for people as a mood stabilizer. It’s excellent. It works phenomenal. We have lithium in our body. We have all these elements in our body: copper, zinc. It’s in our body.

And these all are called co-factors. A lot of these different things, these elements are co-factors to different reactions of the body. So if you took all the zinc out of your body, your body would fail. You took all the copper out of your body, your body would fail.

It’s really an amazing thing. We say to ourselves, “What is going with this individual? Why are they not feeling well?” And that’s where I like using homeopathic detoxification. When you start cleaning out this basement, so to speak, of all this different stuff that’s going on in your body, you really are able to revise yourself and be refreshed. And these products go into the central nervous system too, so they pull out mercury and lead and cadmium, things that can interfere with neurotransmission. A lot of people, they basically are harboring a lot of these things in their body. And that’s why they’re not thinking clearly.

DEBRA: A lot of those chemicals actually can be—those chemicals and heavy metals, some things can actually be in your brain, which would make it difficult for you to think and feel.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. And that’s exactly what’s happening. That’s why part of my mental health protocol is always to involve using homeopathy to just clean out the body as well, because most people, inevitably, they’re going to feel better. They’re going to lose a little bit of weight, their energy levels are going to improve.

I’ve personally been doing this probably 15 years as far as taking these detoxifications. You just put a little bit of drops in your water. It’s very simple, but it removes nickel, cadmium, lead, mercury and pesticides. You would be surprised how many people have lead and mercury levels that are too high in the central nervous system. When you take these metals into food, they don’t leave your body naturally. That’s really the problem. We want this to be completely taken out.

So what do we want to do? We want to make sure that someone is solving the problem, taking the chemicals out of their bodies, so that whatever is interfering with the neurotransmission is gone. And then at the same time, saying, “Okay, you’re going to need to take some fish oil, some folic acid and maybe some other things for mood-stabilizing. Why don’t we take things that go specifically to your particular needs?”

DEBRA: Amazing! So tell us about some other mental health conditions and what you do for them.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. So if somebody has anxiety – and anxiety is a really common problem – most of the time, the doctors are going to give you something called the benzodiazepine. The benzodiazepines are a class of drugs that are highly addictive. They have what’s called tolerance and dependence.

So you need to give more medicine each time to get the same effect. And when you try and take it away after a period of time if you’ve been on it, you have withdrawal, panic attacks and anxiety. These are very commonly prescribed medications. I can tell you from working retail some time that it’s a fast moving drug, and they’re in huge, huge bins because they dispense hundreds and hundreds of these pills every day.

So people are addicted to this. When you look at benzodiazepines, they work on these particular receptors called the benzodiazepine-receptor. You can take medica-grade passion flower. I use that quite a bit here. It works exactly the same on the same receptor, but it’s not on the receptor all the time.

What’s great about it is I use it as a bridge off of benzos if someone wants to get off of them. But at the same time, you can go on it and you are not going to have tolerance and dependence. What does that mean? It means that if you want to use that once in a while for sleep or anxiety, when you take it, you’re not going to become addicted to it. And if you decide that you don’t need it anymore, you can put it aside, and you’re not going to end up with withdrawal.

DEBRA: That’s really a key difference between taking natural things and taking drugs whatever kind of drug you’re taking.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. It’s a key difference. I like the words you’re using, because it is. If you go for a medication for anxiety, you will become addicted. If you use a natural product that’s prescribed for you in an appropriate manner, you will never become addicted to it. You can use it as an excellent tool, and improve your life tremendously.

DEBRA: I just want to say that I had that experience actually with sugar where as long as I was eating refined white sugar and products that had high fructose corn syrup and things like that in it, all those industrial sweeteners, they’re very, very, addicting.

And it was really, really hard for me to stop eating them. It’s been years now since what I’m talking about here. It was very difficult for me to stop eating them because they are so addicting. But what I did was that I replaced them with things like honey and maple syrup and agave nectar and all these natural sweeteners that were not refined. And it was easy for me to then after a while. I just didn’t even want those sweeteners at all.

I can see the same pattern here, the difference between drugs and the plants you’re using.

We need to go to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a pharmacist. She specializes in using plants, medicinal plants. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, a pharmacist who specializes in pharmacognosy. I love that word every time I say it, pharmacognosy.

PAMELA SEEFELD: There are committees of us around. It’s a really great profession.

DEBRA: I had never heard of it until I met you. It is a great profession. I think that what you’re doing is wonderful. So go on with what you’d like to say. We are in our last segment now. I want to make sure that you get to say everything you want to say.

PAMELA SEEFELD: All right, absolutely. So I want to also put in a word if anyone is on any of these medications, prescription or otherwise or is having some issues as far as they’re not functioning at 100% of their peak and they really want a free consultation, please call my office here. I will definitely go over at what you’re taking and tell you how you can improve on that. It’s (727) 442-4955.

So another good diagnosis that’s very, very common is ADD and ADHD. Let’s face it, every kid is ADD and ADHD. They take a child. You give them sugar breakfast, you send them to school and they’re supposed to sit there and they pay attention all day. This is not how it works.

So what do they normally do? They normally give the kids psycho stimulants like Ritalin. But also, more dangerously, they’re using a lot of anti-psychotics.

Anti-psychotics originally (especially a typical anti-psychotics like Abilify and Risperidone), these drugs are dangerous in effect that they really are designed for somebody that’s hearing voices. They’re not designed for little kids. So we know that this is not the problem. They’re using it for sleeping for adults too.

So what do we do with children that are having some impulsivity issues? I don’t know about you, but when I was a little kid, I was running all over the place tearing up everything. That’s children.

DEBRA: Yes.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So what do we do? Instead of giving them psycho stimulants, we say, “Why don’t I give them some calming, focusing fish oil like pro-DHA, pro-DHA1000?”

Also, they have new studies that just came out that show that zinc is a very, very important co-factor for over 200 reactions in the brain. And kids that have hyperactivity disorder test very low for zinc. The reason why is that zinc gets utilized and used up when kids are eating lots of preservatives and pre-packaged food. And you look at these different kids, most of these kids are eating a lot of things out of boxes.

DEBRA: Yes.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So I usually use low-dose zinc for children along with the fish oils and the detox, to clear all this out of their body. And then, I always recommend exercise. As kids have a way to take their internal energy and externalize it other than causing trouble in school, you see dramatic differences in the way they conduct themselves.

DEBRA: Many, many years ago when I first started doing this work, the thing that was very popular then was the Feingold Diet. It’s about taking out artificial colors and flavors and preservatives because it made children hyperactive. And I don’t hear much about that anymore. I’m supposing that it’s still there. The Feingold Association is probably still there.

You hear a lot about kids taking drugs for these things, but you don’t hear about just something as normal as feeding your children good, wholesome, organic, whole foods that you prepare yourself instead of all these packaged foods that will just completely change their behavior.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Most definitely! There is a program that I was participating in and that I did some talking for called I Love My ADD. And what they did is they take a school and they changed the desks. Instead of the kids sitting, they could have standing desks if they want. So they can stand if they don’t want to sit there all day.

They changed the food in the cafeteria. It was all whole grains and fruits and vegetables and lean meats. They actually baked their bread there. They saw that all the behavior problems went away. Grades improved…

DEBRA: I love it!

PAMELA SEEFELD: Everyone’s better. Yes!

DEBRA: Yeah!

PAMELA SEEFELD: Maybe, the kids doesn’t want to sit there all day. They have desks. Now they have treadmills on there that you can walk on them. This is like the big thing I got out of New York, some of these really trendy places. People don’t want to sit.

So changing the diet, remember I was talking about what your body is made of, the sodium and the potassium. Omega 3’s make up the central nervous system. We’re made of all these things. Remember, you always hear these little tales, “You are what you eat.” Well, actually, that’s true.

DEBRA: Yes!

PAMELA SEEFELD: You need it in your body. If it’s a supplement or food, it’s all the same. Food and supplements turn on genes in the body and you want it to turn on the ones that help you, not the ones that are causing disease.

DEBRA: Exactly.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s what’s really happening, food. This is really coming to be a very unique science. We know that cells signal each other and we know that when you take a supplement and you take food, these things all have healing, restorative properties because they affect the way the genes are turned on in the cell.

And what we want to do is we want to say, “I understand how this works. I am going to customize and tell you how to take these two or three things, so that the genes are going to be turned on in a favorable manner.”

As a result, mental health improved, cognition improves, all these things that people want. People just really need to realize that food is also medicine.

DEBRA: Exactly! I am sitting here with the biggest smile on my face. I’m starting to jump up and down when you said that. Would you just say that again, about the genes?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. Food is medicine. Food actually turns on genes. These genes are favorable and they prevent diseases. And we know now that what we’re really seeing is, “Why is there such a high incidents of breast cancer and cancer in general?”, you know why? Because people are not consuming enough of these disease-fighting property foods.

DEBRA: And what are those foods? What are those foods?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Fruits and vegetables.

DEBRA: Exactly.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Lean meats. But the big things are fruits and vegetables. I’m telling you that two-thirds of your diet should be made of plants.

DEBRA: I’m so happy to hear that because in the last few weeks, since I have been going through a lot of changes in my body the last few weeks and I’m dealing with things, I have gone through a phase where it was like I didn’t want to eat meat, I didn’t want to eat grains. I mean, I wasn’t eating grains anyway.

But what my body was craving were fruits and vegetables, particularly vegetables, particularly raw vegetables. And I’m not saying that we should just all be eating at 100% raw vegetable diet, but the thing is that I was just really getting down to really needing to have at least half of what I eat be vegetables.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Absolutely.

DEBRA: And we don’t think of it that way. And plants have so many wonderful healing properties to them. They need to be organic and they need to be fresh. I’m really getting to this point where I just want to – when I lived in California, I had a garden, and I would just go eat what was in my garden. I just went out in the backyard and pulled the raspberries off the raspberry canes and put them in my mouth. I need to get that here too. And that’s what we should be doing. That’s exactly it.

PAMELA SEEFELD: We know that. Let’s face it. Most of these people that are not feeling well, their diet needs to be improved. But I’m telling you that the cool part about this is if you take supplements along with it too that are specifically targeting certain areas of the brain, your outcomes are going to be even more phenomenal. I really can attest that. The plant-based diet is really the way to go.

But what we want to do is say, “Look at your blood work and see you are made of all these elements. Is there something there that’s making you not feel well?” I see this quite a bit actually where people maybe have pre-kidney problems or pre-liver problems or maybe metabolically they’re having some issues too and they don’t even know it.

DEBRA: Yeah. Well, I am so excited. I can’t wait to bring you my blood test, so that you can look at them over time and see what the trends are. I think this is just so fascinating. And I do see the difference, taking the things that you’ve recommended for me. I mean, just right away, I saw the difference. And I was already doing a lot of good things, eating my organic food, eating a lot of plants – although not enough, I could see.

But I think it’s a process. I wrote a thing for my blog a few weeks ago about how I was falling in love with kale. And when I first started, I didn’t want to eat kale at all. But as I started eating it, your body starts changing and then you want these good things.

And I can see the changes from taking the supplements that you’ve given me that are very, very specific to me and what’s going on in my body.

I just want to also emphasize – and I think that you’ll agree with this – about the necessity to be specific, because I think that a lot of people will just say, “Oh, I think I’ll go on this side or that diet,” or “I read an article that I should take this supplement.” That’s not the way to do it because our bodies are so specific.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right because what happens is most people watch a television show or read a news magazine and they’ll say, “Oh, I heard billberries are good for my eyes. I heard this is good for that.” And a lot of people come to me and they’ll be taking all these stuff. I would tell them, “The big things you have to protect against are cognitive decline, cancer and heart disease. You’re not taking anything to prevent those three things. And if you’re not taking anything to prevent those three things, one of those is going to come.”

DEBRA: Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So that’s why it’s really important to look at what you’re taking. I always say, I really respect people’s time and money. You shouldn’t really take a bunch of things that you don’t need. You should take what you need. It should be customized. And your diet should be cleaned up, if you can possibly do it.

DEBRA: Well, I will say that you gave me things that were very specific to me. They were affordable. It wasn’t like you were getting me something that was $100. Things were $15, $25, things that most people could afford.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes.

DEBRA: They were all plant-based, kind of a whole nutritious thing to take, and they work. They work. So I really encourage anybody who’s listening who is on drugs, number one, to call Pamela. If you’re not feeling well, call Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I can get you feel better. I know what I’m doing.

DEBRA: She does now what she’s doing. I’ve seen this in myself and other people. Her approach is completely different than probably everybody that you’ve ever met and it all makes sense.

So we’ve got less than a minute. So give us your phone number again twice.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. You can reach me at my natural pharmacy here in Clearwater. It’s (727) 442-4955. Okay. So the number again is (727) 442-4955. I would be delighted to help you with any issues you might have, if you want to come off medicine or if you’re trying to avoid medicines altogether. It can be any issues, diabetes, anything you have. I’ll be glad to help you and the consultation is free.

DEBRA: Great. Thank you so much, Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Thank you so much. Have a great time.

DEBRA: She’ll be on again two weeks from today.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes.

DEBRA: She’ll be on again, and we’ll learn more about this fascinating thing. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.

Toxic Psychiatry and How to Have Mental Health Without Drugs

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