Functional Nutrition with Gabrielle Grandell

Welcome, everybody, KBMD health family and gut check project fans. We are back now with episode number 37. And we have an incredible guest. This is Gabrielle Grandell. She's gonna be joining us here in two minutes. But of course, this is the gut check project with your host, Dr. Ken Brown. Can you want to introduce Gabrielle for us?

Yeah, absolutely. I'm so excited about this. We were introduced through a mutual friend Gabrielle Grandell. She is currently practicing at living well Dallas, a certified health coach certified in functional med as well. And she calls herself an integrative dietitian. Why am I so excited about this because I would love to be sending her people like all day long. This is so cool. And my goal is that she has enough fun that she's a recurring guest slash co co host, because I think she's gonna really elevate all of our games and fill in a lot of gaps that that I need some education on because even though I got a degree in gastroenterology, we do about this much nutrition and I'm learning about it a ton. So thank you so much for joining Gabrielle.

Hi, everybody. Glad to be here. Thank you guys for having me on. Looking forward to chatting today.

Definitely. So Gabrielle, you are at living well Dallas, correct?

That is correct.

So tell us a little bit about what it is you do at living well Dallas because I have a feeling that with your experience, something that Ken and I've talked about is how we see there is a stark difference between our allopathic ideas behind nutrition and the approaches to nutrition. But really, there's this whole other world that's really started to gain steam, even though it's been around for a few decades. And that's the functional medicine approach to nutrition and how to help out with patients who have some some pretty hairy questions. So kind of tell us a little bit about living well Dallas and what you do there.

Yeah, thank you. So living well Dallas is the first Functional Medicine Center in Dallas. Oops, I hit some thing here on my screen.

It's okay. We all, sometimes we always do things.

So it's the first Functional Medicine Center in Dallas. And so functional medicine, right is is about thinking about the medicine sort of why. Why are things happening? Why? Why are these symptoms talking to us? And not just what is going on? But why is it happening and what can we do about it? And so functional medicine is, that's, you know, there's lots of different providers in the center that offer help and treating the whole person because it might be different, different things that they're dealing with, that they need support in. But where I come in is helping people with showing them how nutrition and what they're eating, their lifestyle, their environment, how all of that is helping or hurting them. And so most of the time, what's going on with these folks, whether it be digestive concerns, or headaches or hormonal issues or blood sugar dysregulation, we see all different kinds of people. But the different symptoms that they're experiencing, are usually as a result of what they're putting in their body and what they're putting around them, right, which is nutrition and lifestyle and you know environment. So I help people we have when they when people come in, they fill out a good deal of paperwork, which gives us a really good understanding of their history, kind of their goals, their readiness, we have a readiness assessment, which is really nice to try to gauge where people are coming from in terms of if they're ready to change their diet or their exercise or their sleep patterns or whatnot. We have them fill those things out. That gives me a good understanding of how they came to us and what they're ready to do what their diet history is like. Again, their environment, relationships, things like that purpose. And so we have them fill those things out. And then I'm going to go through that with them in their first visit. And we're going to talk about all the different ways that their body is speaking to them. What has worked before, what hasn't. One of the main differences, I think, between allopathic and functional for what I do is the amount of time that I'm spending with people. So before I was at the center, one of my other positions was at the hospital doing Clinical Nutrition and seeing, you know, 25 to 30 people in a short period of time, all over the hospital,

Which so you were in a major hospital

BUMC at Baylor University Medical Center. Yeah, in Dallas, which

So, I love this. So you went and the reason why is Eric's heard me complain about this. And I've talked to my patients about this. Whenever I do hospital work, I am just absolutely shocked at how many bad things we do to patients. Like, let's not let them sleep, let's check their blood glucose at 2am. And no results. Let's do vitals just so that we can check a box. And then somebody that's in the cardiac rehab unit, they're eating their cardiac diet, which consists of pancakes, syrup, you know. 

But, it's low fat!

Oh, it's just as long as it's low fat. Yeah, exactly. So that's awesome. I did not know that you did that. This is this is fantastic. Okay, keep going. I didn't mean to interrupt, but that is that that shift of being a nutritionist in a hospital system to doing what you're doing is you cannot get more polar opposite.

And Gabrielle before you have to go too deep on on why I completely feel like the association for what Ken's looking for for his patients. And then what it is that you provide the audience may or may not realize that allopathic medicine itself is just traditional medicine as we view it today. And even though the word itself means scientifically based, I think that what has really appealed to Ken and me and others, like, like all three of us is that functional medicine has not forgotten the ideas behind applying new science to improve upon old methods. And the intake that you're talking about, traditionally, 15 years ago, there wasn't always a nutritionist who was experienced that took the time to one on one walk a patient through what's affecting them generally. I'm sorry, specifically, they were more general in approach.

Very yeah, nothing was was individualized. And you know, I think that I don't think there should be really a monopoly on who can provide health information and who can help people right...their their husband but hopefully that changes as time goes on. So yeah, so doing the doing the intake paperwork and taking the time is very different than at the hospital where we'd see 25 or 30 people and we'd, you know, it's almost, you know, no disrespect, because I know that there's a lot of dietitians and there's a lot of people in the hospital that are making a difference and, you know, really helping out but it's almost like glorified lunch ladies, like we don't we're talking about calorie counting, we're talking about, you know, tube feed all this stuff is important, but what about the quality? You know, there, there's not enough emphasis on quality of food and again, an individualized approach. And so, so I think that's number one. One of the main differences is just the amount of time so it's like 90 minutes for a first visit. And then after that, which sounds like a lot, but really once you get the people talking and you know you are understanding what's going on And then you start talking about their, their goals and things. Time goes by really quick. I often, you know, struggle with keeping it to that time.

You have...sorry, Eric really quick, just one of the best quotes I've heard in a long time. What I do is I find out what the symptoms are talking to my patients about you said the symptoms talk to us. Way different from my perspective, where you have a symptom, I treat it, it's saying something and we're ignoring what they're saying many times.

Exactly. Yeah. And...