It’s Likely Your Child’s Behavioral Issues And Anxiety Are Gut Related | BIOHM Health

On this episode, Andrea talks to Dr. Nicole Beurkens, an expert in evaluating and treating a wide range of developmental and mental health issues in children. They discuss how the majority of patients she sees are dealing with gut issues - even if they’re not exhibiting gut-related symptoms and she seamlessly breaks down how the gut and brain are intricately connected, plus what parents can do to facilitate a healthy gut in their kids. Transcript: Andrea Wien: Welcome back to The Microbiome Report, powered by drmicrobiome.com, a site packed with cutting edge research and information all about the microbiome. I'm Andrea Wien, and on today's show, I'm talking to Dr. Nicole Beurkens, an expert in evaluating and treating a wide range of developmental and mental health issues in children using food, targeted nutrients, and healthy lifestyle strategies. A unique combination of psychologist, nutritionist and special education teacher, Dr. Beurkens has over 20 years of experience supporting children, young adults, and families in improving brain function naturally. She also has a doctorate in clinical psychology, a master's degree in special education in nutrition, and is a board certified nutrition specialist. She's the founder and director of Horizons Developmental Resource Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and is a best selling author, award winning therapist, and published researcher. Today we're talking about something that parents all over the country are struggling with, behavioral and mental health issues like anxiety in their kids. Dr. Beurkens talks about why more children are exhibiting problems that range from food intolerances to autism, and connects the dots on how a child's gut, and brain health are intricately linked. She answers questions like whether temper tantrums are indicative of a bigger gut problem, and whether kids can have gut issues without experiencing any GI symptoms. If you're a parent or a parent to be this is one episode that you absolutely cannot miss. Dr. Beurkens, thank you so much for joining us. Dr. Nicole Beurkens: Such a pleasure to be here, thank you. Andrea Wien: How did you get interested in this connection between gut health, the microbiome, and childhood development, specifically, mental health? Dr. Nicole Beurkens: Yeah, it's an interesting story. I have sort of an unusual combination of backgrounds. I started out as a special education teacher working with kids in the mid '90s with pretty significant neurodevelopmental issues. Things like autism, severe ADHD, those kinds of things, and back then those issues were not nearly as prevalent as they are now in kids. But, I had training in various educational and child development kinds of modalities, but kept sort of noticing this thread of a lot of these kids had physical health issues too, and that just kind of was a little blip on my radar at the time, I thought, "Oh, that's interesting." And, didn't think too much about it. And then, went on and got a doctorate in clinical psychology, really focusing more on private practice of working with families, being able to do diagnosis, and treatment, and those kinds of things, and so, got a whole nother realm of tools in my tool belt for working with kids, and families around various types of cognitive behavior therapies, and psychological kinds of interventions, and that was all great, but then, began to see even more of this thread of seeing all of these kids, and there's commonalities here in physiological things, lots of kids with constipation, IBS, major sleep problems, reflux, picky eating, allergies, all these things, and as I really got into working more and more with kids with a wide range of not only the neurodevelopmental, but also, more of the mental health, things like bipolar, anxiety, depression, those types of things, I thought, "There's really something to this." There's just too many of these kids who also have these co-occurring like gut issues, physiological things, and at the time, I was also looking at things for my own children. I had a son with pretty severe eczema, and a young daughter who was really struggling with some various types of behavioral challenges, so that all kind of came together for me. I started looking at the research, started learning more about the gut brain connection, and started to put these pieces together of, "Oh, wait, this is not just sort of an interesting thing I'm observing. This is really something that is relevant, and something that we're seeing across the board of these significant connections between what's going on in the body, and then, what's going on in the brains of kids, and how they're developing, and how they're functioning." Read More: https://www.biohmhealth.com/blogs/pod-cast/episode-21-it-s-likely-your-child-s-behavioral-issues-and-anxiety-are-gut-related This episode of The Microbiome Report is powered by drmicrobiome.com, the website of microbiome researcher Dr. Mahmoud Ghannoum.