Dr. M's Women and Children First Podcast

Today on Dr. M’s Women and Children First, we welcome one of the most important voices in modern child development and behavioral science, Mona Delahooke. Dr. Delahooke is a licensed clinical psychologist, internationally recognized speaker, and the author of groundbreaking books including Beyond Behaviors and Brain-Body Parenting. Her work challenges one of the deepest assumptions in modern parenting and education: that difficult behaviors are simply choices to be corrected. Instead, she invites us to ask a radically different question, what is the nervous system trying to communicate? This conversation sits right at the crossroads of neuroscience, attachment theory, polyvagal th...

Creatine and Microbiomes A new 2026 Cell Metabolism study explores a compelling and increasingly central idea in modern biology: the gut/brain/immune/metabolism axis is not just associative, it is mechanistic. Specifically, Dr. Lu and colleagues investigate how the gut microbiota can directly influence depressive behavior by reshaping systemic and neural metabolism. This is another in a long running list of papers describing the amazing work that bacterial commensal microbes do for us. In this case, our minds and moods. "Although peripheral-brain crosstalk regulates energy metabolism, its role in depression remains unclear. Here, we used metabolic profiling to reveal elevated...

Welcome back to Dr. M’s Women and Children First. Today’s conversation moves into one of the deepest layers of human development: attachment, relationship, and the way early experiences shape the architecture of our emotional lives. My guest today is Duey Freeman, a licensed therapist, teacher, mentor, and internationally respected voice in attachment theory, human development, and relational psychology. Duey has spent decades teaching therapists, graduate students, and helping professionals around the world, developing a practical framework for understanding how connection, or the absence of it, shapes the nervous system, identity, and the capacity for intimacy. He has logged near...

Screenshot Magnesium Magnesium is a major cofactor in over 300 enzymatic reactions in the body, less a supplement than a piece of physiologic infrastructure. It is required for energy production (ATP), insulin signaling, protein synthesis, blood pressure regulation, and proper muscle and nerve function, essentially touching every major system we care about. And it goes deeper: magnesium is necessary for the creation and protection of DNA and RNA and for the production of glutathione, one of our most important intracellular antioxidants/detox mechanisms. About half of our magnesium is stored in bone and most of the rest in soft tissues, with...

Covid 6 Years Later What Should We Remember The COVID Post-Mortem: What We Missed (and What We Still Can Fix) We ran the largest public health experiment of our lifetime. We failed. Not everywhere. Not always. But in the places that mattered most, children, truth, and upstream health, we got it wrong. And if we don’t name it clearly, we’ll do it again. The First Mistake: Forgetting the Child When the world shut down, we told ourselves it was temporary. Two weeks. Flatten the curve. Regroup. Then two months became a season. A season became a year. For some kids...

Welcome to Dr. M's Women and Children First Podcast. Today’s conversation is a little different. Six men. One table. No scripts. Just a shared commitment to something that doesn’t come with a manual—fatherhood. We’re talking about what it means to show up as a dad when you’re tired, when you’re stretched thin, and when the stakes feel higher than anything else you do. And we’re grounding that conversation in the ethos of F3 Nation—fitness, fellowship, and faith—where men gather early, push each other physically, and, more importantly, build something deeper: accountability, purpose, and commu...

Brene Brown - Leadership Tools to Teach Your Children and SELF “Stand firmly enough to lead, loosely enough to listen.”  Strong Ground by Brené Brown published in 2025 Breaking down this new book by the excellent Brene Brown, we find that strong leaders don’t eliminate tension or risk. They hold it. And this is key! What does the hold look like? How does it show up to the team? The theme in my mind is "toughness with tenderness" Clarity is kindness. Vagueness is avoidance dressed as politeness. You can be both confident and uncertain. That’s not weakness, it’s reality. Valu...

Nothing in biology is random. Not growth. Not metabolism. Not disease. What we will explore today is the reality that the earliest inputs in life: nutrition, environment, signaling, don’t just influence outcomes… They shape them. They write the first draft. And if you understand that, if you truly let that land, then everything about how we approach pregnancy, childhood, and prevention begins to shift. From reaction…to intention. From downstream management…to upstream design. Why This Conversation Matters This episode is not just another discussion. In many ways, it is ground zero. Because if you don’t understand this layer, the...

THE FUNCTIONAL MEDICINE STORY DR. JEFF BLAND  "Change occurs from the outside in" Dr. Bland Medicine has a habit of believing it has arrived. Every generation of physicians looks around the room, surveys the white coats and microscopes and MRI machines, and quietly assumes the puzzle is mostly solved. History laughs at that assumption. The truth is that medicine is always mid-sentence in a very long story. Dr. Jeff Bland has spent decades helping rewrite that sentence. In a recent conversation on The Root Cause Business of Medicine Podcast, Dr. Bland’s life work comes into focus. Not as a rebe...

Elk Antlers - What a Story  After returning from Jackson Hole, Wyoming this week, I was struck by the beauty of the Elk refuge, a place where thousands of elk relax in the winter lowlands. Staring at them, I pondered a question: why do the elk shed their antlers yearly? Seems like a lot of wasted energy in a resource scarce world. The answer, mating. Nature has a peculiar sense of theater. When reproduction is the goal, evolution doesn’t whisper, it builds costumes, props, and entire stage productions. Sometimes expensive ones. Across the mammalian world, attracting a mate often requ...

Screenshot On today’s episode of Dr. M’s Women and Children First Podcast, we welcome Halie Hauser, a pediatric clinician, storyteller, and quiet architect of early childhood connection. Halie is the creator of Storytime Explorers, a storytelling platform designed for toddlers and preschoolers that sits at the intersection of language, emotion, and human development. With a Doctor of Nursing Practice focused on pediatric primary care, she brings both clinical depth and creative intuition to the way she reaches children—and just as importantly, their parents. \ Her work lives in the small moments: friendship struggles, big feelings, daily routines, the courag...

Why Don't They Win  There are moments, usually late, usually quiet, when honest thinking can be had. When you zoom out and see the ecosystem around children not as a collection of caring institutions, but as a set of incentive machines. And incentive machines, unlike grandmothers, do exactly what they’re built to do. MAKE MONEY Tonight I sat with some difficult thoughts about the state of primary services for children in the United States. The deeper I look, the clearer it becomes that money, not well-being, drives most decisions shaping a child’s life. And the imbalance is not trendi...

Finding Relational Balance  Relational balance falters when one person needs the other to feel safe or whole. A parent in a strained marriage or carrying childhood wounds may lean on a child for comfort. The child, loyal and loving, tries to meet that need. Over time, this can harden into dysfunction. Years ago, I cared for a mother and son locked in a budding enmeshed relationship. She could not draw boundaries. She absorbed his pain, projected her own trauma onto him, and smothered him with anxious love and control. She tightly managed his world yet set no limits on how he...

On today’s episode of Dr. M’s Women and Children First Podcast, we welcome a scientist whose work has quietly shaped the cardiovascular health of millions around the world. Dr. Sundeep Dugar is a pharmaceutical innovator, inventor, and industry leader with more than three decades at the forefront of drug discovery. He is best known as a co-inventor of ezetimibe — marketed as Zetia® — a landmark cholesterol-lowering medication that transformed lipid management by targeting intestinal cholesterol absorption. He also co-inventor of the combination therapy Vytorin® (ezetimibe plus simvastatin), expanding treatment options for patients at high cardiovascular risk. For this groundbreaking work, Dr...

Screenshot Literature Review: A) "Establishment of the gut microbiome during early life is a complex process with lasting implications for an individual’s health. Several factors influence microbial assembly; however, breast-feeding is recognized as one of the most influential drivers of gut microbiome composition during infancy, with potential implications for function. Differences in gut microbial communities between breast-fed and formula-fed infants have been consistently observed and are hypothesized to partially mediate the relationships between breast-feeding and decreased risk for numerous communicable and noncommunicable diseases in early life. Despite decades of research on the gut microbiome of breast-fed infants, there are la...

Chapter 4 of Beyond Behaviors is often read as a continuation of the neuroscience laid out in the first three chapters. That’s understandable, but it slightly misses the point. By the time Dr. Delahooke gets to Chapter 4, she’s largely done making the physiological argument. She now pivots to a far more practical and, frankly, more uncomfortable question: What does this mean we actually do as caregivers? This chapter is less about how the nervous system works and more about how we work, how we observe, interpret, and respond to children in real time. It’s a chapter about attunement, not th...

Welcome back to Dr. M's Women and Children Firsts Podcast. Today’s conversation sits at the crossroads of chemistry, skepticism, and clinical innovation. Our guest is Nayan Patel, a pharmacist with more than three decades inside the world of drug formulation and delivery. He is an alumnus of the University of Southern California School of Pharmacy, where he now serves as adjunct faculty, teaching advanced biochemistry and compounding science. Over the years, he has become an international educator on one molecule that refuses to stay quiet: glutathione. Dr. Patel is the founder of Auro Wellness, launched in 2011 with a specific mi...

School Based Nutrition - Why is it happening this way? There is a quiet experiment happening in American childhood, and we should stop pretending it’s benign. In the 1970s and 1980s, when I attended school, school food was far from perfect, but it existed in the context of something essential: it was mostly prepared on site, minimally processed (but changing in that direction) and not laden with additives and chemicals (Yet). Oh, and most children still ate meals prepared at home at almost every other occasion. Dinner wasn’t aspirational or Instagram-worthy, but it was routine. Real food. Cooked by s...

Dr. Carrie Jones, ND, MPH Hormone Literacy Welcome back to Dr. M’s Women and Children First, where we step back from symptoms and ask a more interesting question: how does the female hormonal system actually develop, adapt, and sometimes struggle across a lifetime? Today’s conversation spans that entire arc, from early life, to puberty, to fertility and more with someone who has spent more than two decades living inside that complexity. My guest is Dr. Carrie Jones, an internationally recognized speaker, consultant, author, and educator in women’s health and hormones. Many know her as the “Queen of Hormones...

Screenshot Chapter 3 - Individual Differences Dr. Delahooke starts Chapter 3 by allowing Margaret Mead to remind us that each child is absolutely unique: “Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.” This is more than a witty paradox, it is the hinge upon which all effective pediatric care swings. When we take individual differences seriously as neurobiological fact, we can finally stop confusing adaptive survival responses with defiance, stop labeling children as problems, and begin the real work of supporting the mind body systems that shape behavior from the inside out. Let us review what we have learned in B...

The Year in Review - 2025 Articles and Points of Interest: 1) Microplastics in the Brain - From Science Advances: "Human health is being threatened by environmental microplastic (MP) pollution. MPs were detected in the bloodstream and multiple tissues of humans, disrupting the regular physiological processes of organs. Nanoscale plastics can breach the blood-brain barrier, leading to neurotoxic effects. How MPs cause brain functional irregularities remains unclear. This work uses high-depth imaging techniques to investigate the MPs within the brain in vivo. We show that circulating MPs are phagocytosed and lead these cells to obstruction in the capillaries of the brain cortex...

Today, I’m joined by Dr. Maeve O’Connor, a board-certified allergist and immunologist practicing in Charlotte, North Carolina. Dr. O’Connor’s training reflects both rigor and range. She completed dual undergraduate degrees at the University of South Carolina Honors College with a Bachelor of Science in Biology and a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish before earning her medical degree at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine. She then completed her internship and residency at the University of Texas and its affiliated hospitals in Houston, where she served as Chief Medical Resident. Her subspecialty training in Allergy and Immu...

I think that this is an important time to pause and relook at Polyvagal Theory before continuing with Beyond Behaviors. Polyvagal Theory: Current Status, Clinical Applications, and Future Directions (Porges, S. 2025) "Social behavior and the capacity to manage challenge are dependent on the neural regulation of physiological state." S. Porges   When I dove into Stephen Porges’s 2025 review of the Polyvagal Theory (PVT), I felt like I’d stepped into a crossroads where neurobiology, clinical practice, trauma science, and human experience collide. This paper isn’t merely a summary of three decades of work (all of which I have read); it’s a spi...

This week I sit down with Dr. Stephen Porges, a Distinguished University Scientist at Indiana University where he is the founding director of the Traumatic Stress Research Consortium. He is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina, and Professor Emeritus at both the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Maryland. He served as president of the Society for Psychophysiological Research and the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences and is a former recipient of a National Institute of Mental Health Research Scientist Development Award. He has published more than 400 peer-reviewed papers across several disciplines...

Review of Chapter 2 of Beyond Behaviors by Mona Delahooke, PhD  "Social behavior and the capacity to manage challenge are dependent on the neural regulation of physiological state." S. Porges  Top Down or Bottom Up? "Before We Respond to Behavior, We Need to Understand Its Origin." With a deceptively simple observation, Dr. Delahooke reshapes the entire field of behavioral intervention: children’s actions come from two very different places in the brain. Some behaviors are top-down, intentional, planned, thoughtful. But many, especially the ones adults find most perplexing, arise bottom-up from stress responses generated by the body’s autonomic nervous system. We often...

Today on Dr. M’s Women and Children First, we’re joined by Dr. Sam Yanuck, a clinician-educator who has spent more than three decades translating immunology from the bench to the bedside. Dr. Yanuck has been in private practice since 1992 and is the creator of Cogence Immunology, one of the most widely respected functional immunology training programs in the world. Through Cogence, he has trained over 9,900 clinicians internationally to think mechanistically about immune signaling, chronic inflammation, autoimmunity, and the complex, often nonlinear patterns that define chronic disease. What sets Dr. Yanuck apart is his insistence on precision. His work focu...

Today on Dr. M’s Women and Children First, we’re joined by Dr. Sam Yanuck, a clinician-educator who has spent more than three decades translating immunology from the bench to the bedside. Dr. Yanuck has been in private practice since 1992 and is the creator of Cogence Immunology, one of the most widely respected functional immunology training programs in the world. Through Cogence, he has trained over 9,900 clinicians internationally to think mechanistically about immune signaling, chronic inflammation, autoimmunity, and the complex, often nonlinear patterns that define chronic disease. What sets Dr. Yanuck apart is his insistence on precision. His work focu...

Review of Chapter 1 of Beyond Behaviors by Mona Delahooke, PhD  "When we see a behavior that is problematic or confusing, the first question we should ask isn't "How do we get rid of it?" but rather "What is this telling us about the child?" (MD 2019)  The opening chapter sets the stage for a quiet revolution in how we understand children who struggle. Dr. Mona Delahooke invites us to take a step back from the culturally and medically ingrained belief that children’s outward actions are reliable windows into their inner intentions - or what they really mean and want based on the...

Food in Infancy What do we know? "Humans are the only mammals who feed our young special complementary foods before weaning and we are the only primates that wean our young before they can forage independently. There appears to be a sensitive period in the first several months of life when infants readily accept a wide variety of tastes and this period overlaps with a critical window for oral tolerance. As a result, infants should be exposed to a wide variety of flavors while mother is pregnant, while mother is nursing and beginning at an early age. There also appears...

This weeks Guest is Dr. Jeremy Goldberg. He styles himself as a compassion cultivating day making change agent/empathy collecting not quitting word wizard/chief burrito appreciator aspiring to inspire/struggle overcoming ranter in charge/ferocious idealist/never giver upper/a love bombing kindness pirate. What he really does, in my mind, is write and teach the world to project love and kindness where it is not layered enough. On his website he writes: My mission is to make kindness cool, empathy popular, and compassion commonplace. As part of that purpose, I write articles, send emails, host retreats and workshops...

THANKSGIVING THOUGHTS Every year, as the leaves turn and the air gets that crisp bite, I’m pulled back to 1621 in Plymouth, Massachusetts where a group of English Pilgrims, religious refugees who had crossed an ocean to breathe free, and their Wampanoag neighbors sat down together for three days of feasting. No treaties, no agendas, just gratitude for a successful harvest and the simple miracle that two very different peoples could share a meal in peace. Food and friendship. That was the entire point. At least, that is what history tells us. Fast-forward two centuries and Abraham Lincoln, in the mi...

The Evolutionary Tug-of-War - Inflammation’s Double-Edged Sword "Environmental factors, particularly infections, have fundamentally shaped human evolution by selecting for protective inflammatory response mechanisms that enhance survival. This evolutionary pressure has created a core biological paradox: inflammation is indispensable for host defense, yet its dysregulation significantly heightens disease and mortality risk. This fundamental tension raises three fundamental questions about human aging and immunity: (1) How have selective pressures driven the evolution of mechanisms to balance inflammation's protective benefits against its harmful consequences? (2) Why does substantial variability in healthspan persist despite historically stable rates of aging? (3) Does evolutionary prioritization of reproductive fitness in...

Today’s conversation takes us upstream—to the source—of one of the most pressing and emotionally charged topics in modern pediatrics: the rise in autism spectrum disorders. Autism rates have continued to climb in 2025, but what if much of what we call “the epidemic” isn’t simply genetics or better diagnosis, but a reflection of deeper biological, environmental, and developmental changes affecting the human organism before birth? To explore this critical question, I’m joined by three extraordinary clinicians who have dedicated their lives to understanding the roots of children’s health and disease. Dr. Sandy Newmark, Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at...

Back to Sleep and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) is defined as “the sudden death of an infant under one year of age which remains unexplained after a thorough case investigation, including a complete autopsy, examination of the death scene, and review of the clinical history.” During my time at the University of Virginia, I trained under neonatologist Dr. John Kattwinkel, a champion for newborn health and one of the leading figures in shaping national safe sleep policies. In the early 1990s, he chaired the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Task Force on Infant Sleep Positio...

Today on Dr. M’s Women and Children First Podcast, we welcome Dr. Wayne Koontz, a founding partner at Salisbury Pediatric Associates in Salisbury North Carolina, where he has spent over 5 decades caring for generations of families with compassion, wisdom, and a deep commitment to community health. Dr. Koontz earned his Undergraduate degree and his Doctor of Medicine from Wake Forest University, where his early love of science and service began to take shape. He went on to complete his pediatric residency at Dallas Children’s Medical Center, part of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, where he received outstanding...

Speaking Truth in Love: The Weight of Avoidance in Pediatric Metabolic Health After completing the second round of our Asthma and Obesity Metabolic Pilot Program at Salisbury Pediatrics, I left the clinic reflecting deeply on what I witnessed. It crystallized a truth that is uncomfortable but undeniable: the greatest health threats to our children today are not infectious or accidental, they are metabolic. Diseases once reserved for adulthood: insulin resistance, fatty liver, hypertension, early vascular aging are now appearing in children who should be free to run, play, and thrive. In modern society, conversations about weight and metabolic dysfunction have...

Review Part III - after the Attia Podcast After completing the interview with Dr. William Parker and now listening to Peter Attia's analysis, let us look again at this question. I repeat that the initial question has not changed for me. The first and most fundamental question to ask is this: What is the true value of acetaminophen in health compared with the potential risk if the associated findings are indeed correct? My response to this question has been altered by the analysis so far. I love this from Dr. Attia: "Some people might be wondering, why did you just t...

Welcome to Dr. M’s Women & Children First Podcast, where we engage with pioneering voices at the intersection of science, healthcare, and the well-being of families. Today on Dr. M’s Women and Children First, we welcome Dr. Elizabeth Mumper, a physician, educator, and thought leader whose career has profoundly influenced the practice of integrative pediatrics. Dr. Mumper earned her Bachelor of Science degree from Bridgewater College, graduating magna cum laude, before attending the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, where she received her medical degree. She completed her pediatric residency at the University of Virginia and served as Chief Resident in Pe...

Flu season is around the corner and we should take a look at the virus for preparation purposes. Influenza Every few years, I revisit this virus in my writing, not only to keep it on your radar in preparation, but also because of the significant illness and death it continues to cause. It’s never wise to dismiss its potential impact. Influenza reliably returns each year, difficult to escape even with strict isolation. The flu is different from the common cold in many ways as the flu has: 1) Rapid onset with high spiking fevers 2) Muscle and headaches 3) Little to not sn...

Welcome to Dr. M’s Women & Children First Podcast, where we engage with pioneering voices at the intersection of science, healthcare, and the well-being of families. Today, I’m honored to introduce Dr. William Parker, PhD. Dr. Parker is perhaps best known for discovering the function of the human appendix, but his contributions to science extend far beyond that single discovery. He studied biology and chemistry as an undergraduate before earning his PhD in Chemistry from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in 1992. Since the 1980s, he has conducted innovative research, publishing more than 150 peer-reviewed articles that span immune function, microbiome science...