May 4, 2022 • 35 mins
The experiences we create in baby's space have a profound impact on the way our baby’s brains develop. In this episode, Shazi talks to pediatric neurologist Dr. Suzanne Goh, who explains the fascinating way that our brains develop in utero and after birth – how every connection sets the stage for how we learn. Dr. Goh explains the simple and accessible things we can all do, as parents, to create the most optimal environment for cognition and focus. Shazi also speaks with Dr. Michael Leon, professor of neurobiology and behavior at the UC, Irvine, about the latest research on neuroplasticity – the brain’s ability to change and adapt as a result of experience. Dr. Leon also explains what the latest research tells us about the promising potential of sensory enrichment, and how we can use it therapeutically or even proactively. He talks about how exposure to novelty and "just right" challenges can improve cognition, memory, and even emotional regulation. She also checks in with the Founders of Fatty15, who have discovered the first new fatty acid in 90 years, called C-15 – and they discuss what this discovery means for brain health.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Healthy Baby Show is a production of My Heart
podcast network and healthy baby dot Com. Our experiences are
shaping our brains, so what the brain is exposed to,
how it's engaged, All of that actually leads to changes
in its physical shape, the connections, the structure, and infants
their brains are specially plastic. That's one reason why the
(00:24):
experiences that we create for ourselves and for our children
are really so important. There's so much about having a
baby that I wasn't prepared for, and I feel like
I've learned a lot. I want to let you in
on what I've discovered and save you the time and effort,
give you a shortcut for the hours of research, correspondence
(00:47):
with experts, the roller coaster of it all, so that
you can walk away with new knowledge that you can
act upon. Every episode, this is the Healthy Baby Show.
I'm Chassivas from Today's episode is probably the one I've
(01:10):
been most excited about since I first started thinking about
doing a podcast. Today we get to explore the wonder
of a baby's brain. That voice you heard earlier is
Dr Suzanne Go. She's a pediatric neurologist and founder of Cortica,
a healthcare organization focused primarily on helping children with neurodevelopmental differences.
She spent her life studying the developing brain, how our
(01:33):
environment impacts its ability to make connections. Most importantly, what
we as parents can do to protect and nurture our
children's developing brains to help them reach their full potential.
When I first started Happy Family, that was twenty years ago,
and I started learning about the relationship between nutrition and
cognitive development, like the way we feed the biology of
(01:55):
our brain. But then I became a mom to two kids,
one of whom has autism, and I became hyper focused
on the ways actually our environments, not just the food
we eat, shape how our babies brains developed, And it's
so fascinating And actually think the biggest epidemic of our
time is this loss of cognitive function. We all can't focus,
(02:15):
We have a hard time ourselves staying connected. And then
we're bringing new babies into this world. We're hoping that
they can have a long attention span and be engaged
and be connected, but we're not setting them up to succeed.
And I think with a little bit more knowledge and
preemptive empowerment to parents, we could actually turn that around completely.
(02:39):
The brain starts to develop in utero really early, so
it's thought to begin developing around three weeks, and the brain,
like every other organ, starts as just a few cells.
So it's really kind of an extraordinary thing that something
like two d neurons are formed per minute in utero
during pregnancy, and so when the baby is born there
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are about hundred billion neurons already formed. Sometimes people will
make a comparison about how many stars are believed to
be in our galaxy. And then neurons have to differentiate,
they have different functions in the brain, and then they
have to migrate, they have to move to the parts
of the brain where they're meant to be. And we
can really think of what's happening for the newborn in
(03:24):
their brain as making new connections. That's what brain development
is all about. It's about making connections between neurons. A
single neuron can't do that much on its own. That
has to connect with others, and those brain networks are
what underlie all developmental milestones, all learning, all new skills,
and I think for parents, the key thing to know
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is that when the brain is stimulated in certain ways,
so when a child has certain experiences, then the right
networks form, and that sets the stage really for how
a child will learn and how they'll interact throughout their life.
It's pretty heavy because the first three weeks the cells
are coming together. Many times at that point, you might
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not even know you're pregnant. So let's say that you're
trying to get pregnant or you're thinking about it. What
is the optimal environment for the cells to move the
way they need to move to function? And I mean,
there's so much outside of our control. It's kind of like,
this is biology just unfolding. But are there things that
(04:28):
we can do? There are a lot of things that
are pretty basic for health, like nutrition, things like exercise,
and then things that helped to reduce the state of
stress in general, things like healthy social relationships, community connections.
And one of the things that can get in the
(04:49):
way is a state of anxiety or stress about getting pregnant.
So it's a delicate balance where on the one head,
you want to attend to these things because they are important,
but stress or be overly anxious about them. I asked
Dr Go what she did through her own pregnancies to
lay the groundwork for healthy brain development. I made choices
(05:10):
around my nutrition and diet, but I was also aware
of some research indicating that you might not want to
do more ultrasounds than necessary, so I actually I limited
the number of ultrasounds and I did not do the
three D ultrasounds for example. I also opted out of
that with RuSHA because I was hyper sensitive to making
choices that created as much of a natural environment as
(05:32):
it could versus adding new things. And I think for parents,
knowing that there are things you can say no to,
there will be a lot of information coming to you,
but you have a lot of choices along the way.
Dr Go says it's important for new parents to have
a basic understanding of epigenetics, the ways in which our
(05:53):
environments can change how our genes express themselves. Our environment
and our gene are actually very connected, and the environment
can influence our genes. Now they don't change our genetic
makeup itself, but they change the way our genes function,
which you know influences our physiology. So it means that
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a lot of genetics and what we pass on to
our children from our genes, we can't control. But things
that influence how genes work, like our nutrition, like our
stress level physical activity do directly influence how our genes work.
So one category of experience is movement, So how do
(06:35):
we move in the world. And I really like this
phrase of when you move, your brain changes. It's so true.
So we sometimes talk about enriched environments. A child in
an enriched sensory environment is experiencing things through all of
their senses. We'll be back after a quick break, Welcome
(07:04):
back to the Healthy Baby Show. So an enriched environment
really presents the brain with new things on a continual basis.
Dr Michael Leon is a professor of neurobiology and behavior
at the University of California, Irvine. He's also a leading
expert on environmental enrichment, or the ways in which sensory
(07:27):
environments can stimulate our brains and help create new neural pathways.
It's fine if babies get the same thing every day
and they use age appropriate toys and age appropriate experiences,
and that's great for their happiness and they're bonding with
the parents and just sort of getting through the day,
(07:48):
but they're not given a chance to challenge the brain
to do something new every day. And what environmental enrichmond
does is it presents the brain with novelty, new things
every day, and that allows the brain to challenge itself
and it stimulates what we call neuroplasticity, which is really
just a way of saying the brain develops new ways
(08:11):
of dealing with the world. I asked Dr Leon how
parents could practice environmental enrichment in their everyday lives. There's
probably no better supported phenomenon in the neurosciences than environmental enrichment.
And basically what it is that people notice that despite
the fact that lab animals do great in their box cages,
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they can learn, they can do motor things, they can
have social behaviors. They look perfectly normal. But when you
put them in a larger environment with more things to
do and a great deal of novelty, which turns out
to be critical, their brain has become much more complex,
much more capable. They learn better, their motor skills are better,
They're better at pretty much anything, and even more impressive.
(08:54):
There are animal models of pretty much every human neurological disorder,
so Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, multiple sclerosis, seizures, stroke, toxins, brain injury.
All of these animal models are really good because they
show the symptoms that humans have when they have exactly
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the same changes in their brain, and you see all
of the human like symptoms being expressed when they're raised
in a box gage, but when you move them into
an environmental enrichment situation, they lose many of their symptoms,
in some case all of their symptoms. So just giving
them a little bit more social stimulation, all kinds of
(09:36):
new things to do, changes their brain sufficiently so that
it compensates for these neural problems that they have. I mean,
that's a big well yeah, yeah, And you can actually
see this in humans as well. If there's a problem
in the brain, it develops a workaround, so it uses
(09:58):
other pathways in the rain to make the outcome, the
behavior and the thinking normal again. And so that's why
it's so powerful. Neural plasticity For me, as a mom
to a child with pretty severe autism, who I continue
to believe in every day is kind of like my
saving grace. Like the idea that the brain can adapt
(10:19):
and learn and grow and never stops is really fascinating
to me, but also really comforting because it does give
you a sense that there's hope and we can actually
retrain a somewhat disordered or disregulated or disorganized brain. That's
what's so wonderful about the concept of environmental enrichment that
it works for so many different kinds of things and
(10:42):
in a sense customizes what needs to be done to
the brain to normalize it. Dr Leon says the idea
of environmental enrichment is becoming more mainstream. For example, some
companies have developed sensory enrichment activities and therapeutic boxes of
tools designed for your child's brain. I've used one program
(11:04):
with my son Zane and have even seen firsthand how
it improved its communication. But I also noticed how interested
my younger daughter Asha was in those same exercises and
how they were helping her flex her muscles ahead of time.
We see this often with parents telling us about their
younger kids who are sort of getting this kind of
(11:26):
environmental enrichment with their older kid getting it for some
very specific reason, and the younger kid really blossomed. And
what this suggests to me is that the human brain
needs a lot more stimulation to be optimal than most
people think, but it takes a lot of effort, and
many parents can't do it for that reason. It takes time.
(11:48):
But unlike many of the therapies you hear about, environmental
enrichment is affordable. A lot of the exercises Dr Leon
uses in his lab involve things you already have in
your kitchen. Dr Goh says, in many cases, all you
need to do is head outside. So one of the
things we know from research to is just how beneficial
(12:10):
it is for our bodies when we're outdoors. So there's
an approach now called ecotherapy, which is just about being
the natural environment. So finding ways to have physical experiences
in those environments is really important. There's this adage you
can't teach a drowning man how to read. When is
a baby's brain or child's brain or any of us.
(12:30):
When are we more primed to truly learn to make
those connections in an enriched environment. Yeah, So there's a
term up that I really like, which is ready to
learn state. Basically describes like what is the state of
being this case, let's think about a child, is one
in which they're not overwhelmed, they're not drowning. It means
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it's one in which their basic body mechanisms are secure
and stable and not in a state of just regulation.
Another term use in neurology is a state of arousal.
You know, are they hyper aroused? Are they already on
overdrive and overwhelmed? That is not a good state in
which to benefit from learning environments. And so how do
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you get out of that state? Depends on the child,
but often it's about making sure their basic needs are met.
They're not too hot, they're not too cold, they're not hungry, thirsty,
or sleep deprived, so that basic functions are met, and
that their senses are not being overwhelmed by what's coming in,
and they're not in a state of feeling threatened. We
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think of that sometimes it's a fight or flight state
where they're fearful and on guard. It's hard for any
of us to learn when we're in that mode. On
this topic, I mean, how can we create a ready
to learn state without being so prescriptive. It's more about
like how do we live in that state? Yes, Well,
routines are really important. When I think about a nice
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daily routine, it includes a few key elements movement, things
like nourishing your body, interactions with other people that are enjoyable.
Every day needs to have the sort of flow to it.
I also like to think about sometimes short term stress
is good because it means we're being challenged, maybe we're
(14:16):
learning something new, there's a new demand. But it's really
important that you have the opportunity to recover from that stress.
It's when stress becomes long term, chronic sustained that's really
really damaging. And for children, because they're growing and changing
so much so fast, especially in the early years, there's
a need to find challenges that, yes, may increase stress temporarily,
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but are at the right level for that child's next
step in their growth. The term that occupational therapists use
sometimes is the just right challenge. It's what is the
challenge that does not overwhelm a child but scaffolds them
to the next level of development and their skills. Both
Dr Go and Dr really On talked a lot about stress,
(15:02):
how it can affect a baby's development in utero or
a young child's ability to self regulate. So most people
know that in fetal life it's not good to take
any kind of medicines or drugs or alcohol or anything
that will disturb the development of the baby's brain. But
most people don't know about what is called the adverse
(15:23):
childhood experiences, And this came out of a study of
seventeen thousand developing children, and they just counted the bad
things that could happen to a kid, so verbal abuse,
sexual abuse, physical abuse, isolation, parents who are drug addicts
or alcoholism, kids who have lost one of their parents,
(15:44):
any incarceration, poverty itself, food insecurity, or parents having a
mental problem. And they didn't look at the severity of
it or the duration of it, just whether they had
experienced this or not. And then they looked into their
teen years and adult years, and what they found was
just striking. That is, for every one of these bad experiences,
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the kids experienced really significant changes in their entire life.
And so at one extreme, if they ticked off six
of these things, it cut twenty years off the lifetime
of the individual. I think with four of these things,
you had a thirty two times more probable to have
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problems in school because you couldn't self regulate, you couldn't
stay calmly in your chair. You know, it predicted violence
in their later years, incarceration, dropping out of school, having
problems with relationships, getting into risky sexual situations. Every bad
thing that we see in our culture is probably located
(16:50):
in the bad experiences that these kids had. Early in life.
Doctor Leon did emphasize that there are things we can
do to help kids recover from stressful or even traumatic experiences.
You can have normal, positive experience and that's good, but
you need to do special things to recover from adverse
childhood experiences. And so what you're seeing in many schools
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now is that they are using meditation, which can calm
the system and works very well. Yoga is another thing. Again,
they're using that in the schools, and that also calms
the nervous system. And again it's one of these special
things to do, but it's probably a really important thing
to do. And I should point out not only do
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you have mental problems when you've experienced these things, you
also have physical problems. So these people are much more
subject to cardiac problems and cancer and just a variety
of medical issues that emerge from their early experiences. And
that's probably due to the fact that all of these
things trigger chronic stress. He says. Sensory enrichment, specifically old
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factory enrich men, can help prepare neural pathways that may
have been damaged from chronic stress. Most people think that
the old factory system or the smell system is just
sort of a nice to have system, but in fact
it's probably in many ways the most important sense that
we have, but it's actually critical for the health of
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the brain. It turns out that you can replace all
of the environmental enrichment experiences with old factory enrichment, and
what that means is that every day you give people
many odors to smell. Again, novelty is key, and when
you do this, what happens is that in this case,
the mice have just as much improvement as they would
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have experienced in the entire environmental enrichment situation. And they
saw what the mechanism was, and that was the production
of new neurons in the cognitive areas of the brain.
So you're saying exposure to a variety of smells actually
improves cognition and creates more neural activity. Yeah. So they
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found this in mice, and we took that and did
it with humans, and it turns out that after six
months of olfactory and richmond we found cognitive improvements. And
we also image the brain and found that there was
an improvement in a critical pathway in the brain that
is involved with cognition. And it turns out that the
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more olfactory stimulation that you get. That is, the different
kinds of odorance that you experience each day, the better
the outcome for the brain. And there's one spectacular report
out of South Korea that is just amazing, and that
is they gave people with dementia, that is Alzheimer's disease
forty different odorants to smell in the morning and in
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the evening, and they were able to reverse the memory
problems that these individuals had, and they also were able
to decrease their depression symptoms. So one of the other
thing about the old factory system is that goes to
the emotional systems of the brain, and so they found
striking improvements in both their cognition and emotions. And just
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to make sure everybody understands this, nobody has been able
to treat Alzheimer's disease successfully with anything that has been tried.
There have been hundreds of failed clinical trials using every
drug you can imagine and billions of dollars spent with
very little to show for it. There's no reason to
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believe that we can't get the same kind of improvements
in children that we see in older adults. And maybe
that people just need more old factory stimulations throughout their lives.
You know, if you breathe in deep now wherever you are,
the likelihood is is that you will smell nothing. And
people probably didn't evolve to spend their lives in odor
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free environments. And you need the kind of novelty and
complexity and different kinds of stimulation every day that you
get from olfactory enrichment. So it's not a romantherapy, which
is just using a single odor that people think have
special characteristics. It is the continual experience of new things
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that gets your brain to trigger neuroplasticity or even just
maintain itself. I asked actually on what else he recommends
for parents looking to help their child develop a more
resilient brain. I think my favorite intervention is people having
conversations with their kids. Anything that the kids says cooing
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or moaning or bubbling or burbling. Respond to it as
though they were saying something sensible. And you have these
conversations with the kids over time, and that actually turns
out to have really strong impacts on these kids, And
they've been followed up for ten years and these impacts
continue into their teenage years. What this is showing is
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that it's not so much the words that they hear.
What I particularly like about it is that you're not
going to have the same conversation with the kid every time.
It's going to be a novel interaction, and so I
think what they're doing is triggering the neuroplasticity that you
get from those kinds of interactions. Here's dr Go again.
(22:23):
You know, research has come such a long way. There
could be a really wonderful kind of comprehensive curriculum for
people who are wanting to become parents, and it would
include education around the different domains of development like find motor,
gross motor, social, emotional, language, cognitive, and just a general
overview of what the developmental milestones are in each of
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those areas and the normal range. So, for example, the
age range when children might start to walk can be
anywhere from eight months to eighteen months. That's a huge range,
and so I think even knowing those ranges can be
quite reassuring. But then also for parents to know what
to be looking for and then to know what to
(23:07):
do if they begin to be concerned for their child.
We'll be back after a quick break. Welcome back to
the Healthy Baby show. When Zane was diagnosed with autism
(23:29):
at age two, I had to rethink everything I thought
about brain development and children. That's because the brain of
a child with autism actually develops differently than a neurotypical
child's brain. I asked Dr Goh, what the latest research
tells us about this. So a lot of what we
know about the brain and autism now comes from brain
(23:50):
imaging research that's happened over the past couple of decades.
And there are several different theories, but probably the leading
theory is that the brain and autism is different in
terms of how networks are connected. So our brains have
very highly complex networks, and there are short range networks,
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and then there are connections that connect more far ranging
areas of the brain that are called long range connections.
And so the thought and autism is that there may
be fewer of these long range connections and more of
the short range connections. Their variety of other thoughts about
how the brain might be different and autism, including the
brain's metabolism, how our bodies taken nutrients, convert them into
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energy and then get rid of waste and toxic and
that's happening for the brain and so that is a
very dynamic state. Understanding autism in this way. I feel
like it's very hopeful because those are things that can
be changed. What is the future of treatment for autism?
Do you think that there will be one day a
way to enhance the metabolism of the organ of the
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brain to be able to be more connected. I do.
I don't think it will end up being one treatment.
I think it will end up being a combination of
multiple different approaches, including things like norm modulation, which is
the application of different electrical and magnetic technologies to modify
brain function. It will include things that we currently do,
(25:18):
but we'll find new and better ways to do them
and combine them, like occupational therapy, music therapy, speech language therapy,
physical therapy, behavior therapy. You know, there's a lot of
innovation that is happening, and it needs to happen, you know,
and how those therapies are delivered. I think there's a
role for nutrition, there's a role for medication, and so
I do think the future for autism therapy is finding
(25:39):
out how to use these in combinations. Dr Leon agrees
he added environmental enrichment to that list too, and says
in the future, He hopes we all come to think
of it as an essential part of our daily routines.
Instead of considering environmental enrichment or old factory enrichment as
(26:00):
a medical procedure that is something to do if there's
something wrong with the brain, consider it more as a
public health feature that you do this preventively. That is,
you brush your teeth every day to make sure that
you don't develop the cavities. Just as that is the
case for your teeth, I think it's even more important
that we do this for your brain. We have to
(26:21):
recognize that we're probably being deprived. Our brains are not
getting enough stimulation, and rather than waiting until something goes
wrong or we lose our memory as we age, what
we're probably going to see is that we will have
a preventive public health orientation that allows us to prevent
these things from happening to begin with. As we look
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to the future of ensuring healthy brain development for our
kids and Dr Go touched on this a minute ago,
a fascinating and crucial element will be nutrition. You've probably
heard of fatty assets, but did you know scientists have
recently discovered a new one. Stephanie and Eric Van Watson,
founders of Seraphina Therapeutics, are a physician and veterinarian at
(27:10):
the forefront of this discovery. The new fatty acid is
called C fifteen and full disclosure, I'm a proud investor
in their company because I'm always doing research on new
supplements that can impact brain health and a new friend
introduced me to them, and now my son takes fatty fifteen.
(27:30):
I was working for the CDC and World Health Organization
as a veterinary epidemiologist, helping to set up surveillance systems
for infectious diseases all over the world, and then about
twenty years ago, I was asked by the U. S.
Navy to help start and lead a clinical research program
to continually improve the health and welfare of the Navy's dolphins.
(27:53):
And so as we got to see the journey from
neonates all the way to geriatric we're able to to
discover that dolphins, just like people, as large brained, long
lived mammals, were developing similar chronic diseases, including neurologic diseases
such as Alzheimer's disease. We were able to find a
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hundred molecules that predicted which dolphins would be healthy ages
and which wouldn't. And from there we then moved into
the lab to start evaluating these molecules that are present
both in dolphins blood in our blood, and that's where
C fifteen was discovered. It was one of the top molecules.
Stephanie's team spent the next three years working with C
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fifteen and found that it wasn't just an active fatty acid,
A growing number of scientists have declared it essential. Just
like OMEGA three and OMEGA six, the essential fatty acids
are important in the growth and maintenance of our baby cells,
their neurons, the growth of their white matter, and then
the cell signaling that's required between being all of these cells.
(29:01):
And then for our baby's brains, fatty acids are even
more integral to the growth and connectivity of their brains,
especially when their brains are making over one million or
more neural connections per second and growing quickly, which is
pretty amazing. Studying the dolphins, Stephanie's team was able to
isolate the effects this newly discovered fatty acid was having
(29:24):
on their health. We found that dolphins have had lower
C fifteen in their blood were less healthy When we
put C fifteen back into their diet via high sea
fifteen fish, they got better. Interestingly, in humans, you know,
we've been going through our own forty year experiment with
taking C fifteen out of our diets, and that's because
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our main source of C fifteen is whole fat milk
and cow's milk and dairy. So you in Congress took
an unusual step in coming out with recommendations for people
to decrease their intake of all saturated fats. And our
primary source of saturated pats are whole fat milk and butter,
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and so the purpose of that at the time was
to help decrease the risk of heart attacks that were
happening among primarily men. Those recommendations were made across the board.
Now what's happened since then is that instead of getting
healthier wor seeing an increase in obesity and heart disease,
liver disease called fatty liver disease type two diabetes importantly
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among younger and younger people. And so a lot of
studies have come out since that change that have shown indeed,
even chain saturated fatty acids, the ones that are present
at the highest level in butter and milk like C
sixteen and eighteen do continue to be associated with poor health,
but see fifteen and C seventeen that are these odd
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chain saturated fatty acids, and the president at much much
lower levels have been continually associated with decreased risk of diabetes,
these heart disease, to the very diseases we were trying
to prevent. And this impact of odde chain fatty acids,
including C fifteen on development appears to be due to
improvement in the myle in sheaf. And so it's this
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insulating wrap right around our nerve cells that allow the
electrical conduction to allow our brain to do what it
does basically. And so the studies to date support that
the higher odd chain fatty acids are helping to improve
the quality of that mylen sheath and that then is
helping to facilitate growth of cognitive development and brain health
(31:37):
for the infants. Do we hope that in our near
future we can see C fifteen as a supplement that's
given to all women who are pregnant, lactating, and then
eventually the babies themselves. We do. We spent a lot
of time trying to figure out what would be the
ultimate source of C fifteen, and so, to make a
(32:01):
long story short, we now have a plant source, a
pure ingredient. Our last batch was pure and it's vegan friendly,
meaning we didn't use animal products. It's non dairy. I'm
so grateful you've identified a third essential fatty acid because
it seems like something that can shift the trajectory of
neurological development, that can improve the way our brains age.
(32:25):
What does the future look like in terms of optimizing
brain health for babies and adults. The vision for this
would be that this pure ingredient is used to fortify
foods the same way that we see fortified foods for
the other vitamins and essential fatty acids. The second part
is taking on the continued recommendation that all saturated fats
(32:51):
are bad. If we look at the most recent national
guidelines in the US for nutrition, there are a hundred
and sixty five pages They mentioned the term saturated fats
is bad a hundred and sixty three times. And so
we've done a disservice to public health, to ourselves, to
(33:15):
our children by not seeing the science that's now in
dozens of studies from reputable groups showing that just like
we first thought all fats were bad. We now know
some fats are good, some fats are bad, and now
it's this new frontier of not all saturated fats are bad.
Some saturated fats are good and those are the eye
(33:36):
chain fatty acids, and how can we bring those back
into the world. Well, that's it for this week's episode.
Next week we're going to talk all about gut health
and the microbiome. Gut health is so important because the
microbes in your body can control the way that you
behave in act and a lot of us don't realize
(33:58):
that our gut is like our second brain and if
we actually approach creating holistic health for our bodies through
our gut, we can improve our brain health and improve
behaviors in our children. And it's something I think it's
really cool to share with new parents so they understand
the importance of the early years of how their baby's
guts are developing and why that's so cool. Join us
(34:21):
next time. The Healthy Baby Show is a production of
iHeart podcast Network and healthy baby dot Com, where you
can find a new line of the safest baby essentials.
The Healthy Baby Show is hosted by me Shazivs from
our lead producers, Jennifer Bassett. Executive producers are Nikki Etre,
Anna Stump, Shahsis Fram and James Violett. Mastering and sound
(34:44):
designed by Carl Katel and Dan Bowsa, additional writing and
research by Julia Weaver. Our theme music is by Anna
Stump and Hamilton's Lighthouser. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions
The Healthy Baby Show is a production of My Heart
podcast network and healthy baby dot Com. Our experiences are
shaping our brains, so what the brain is exposed to,
how it's engaged, All of that actually leads to changes
in its physical shape, the connections, the structure, and infants
their brains are specially plastic. That's one reason why the
(00:24):
experiences that we create for ourselves and for our children
are really so important. There's so much about having a
baby that I wasn't prepared for, and I feel like
I've learned a lot. I want to let you in
on what I've discovered and save you the time and effort,
give you a shortcut for the hours of research, correspondence
(00:47):
with experts, the roller coaster of it all, so that
you can walk away with new knowledge that you can
act upon. Every episode, this is the Healthy Baby Show.
I'm Chassivas from Today's episode is probably the one I've
(01:10):
been most excited about since I first started thinking about
doing a podcast. Today we get to explore the wonder
of a baby's brain. That voice you heard earlier is
Dr Suzanne Go. She's a pediatric neurologist and founder of Cortica,
a healthcare organization focused primarily on helping children with neurodevelopmental differences.
She spent her life studying the developing brain, how our
(01:33):
environment impacts its ability to make connections. Most importantly, what
we as parents can do to protect and nurture our
children's developing brains to help them reach their full potential.
When I first started Happy Family, that was twenty years ago,
and I started learning about the relationship between nutrition and
cognitive development, like the way we feed the biology of
(01:55):
our brain. But then I became a mom to two kids,
one of whom has autism, and I became hyper focused
on the ways actually our environments, not just the food
we eat, shape how our babies brains developed, And it's
so fascinating And actually think the biggest epidemic of our
time is this loss of cognitive function. We all can't focus,
(02:15):
We have a hard time ourselves staying connected. And then
we're bringing new babies into this world. We're hoping that
they can have a long attention span and be engaged
and be connected, but we're not setting them up to succeed.
And I think with a little bit more knowledge and
preemptive empowerment to parents, we could actually turn that around completely.
(02:39):
The brain starts to develop in utero really early, so
it's thought to begin developing around three weeks, and the brain,
like every other organ, starts as just a few cells.
So it's really kind of an extraordinary thing that something
like two d neurons are formed per minute in utero
during pregnancy, and so when the baby is born there
(03:02):
are about hundred billion neurons already formed. Sometimes people will
make a comparison about how many stars are believed to
be in our galaxy. And then neurons have to differentiate,
they have different functions in the brain, and then they
have to migrate, they have to move to the parts
of the brain where they're meant to be. And we
can really think of what's happening for the newborn in
(03:24):
their brain as making new connections. That's what brain development
is all about. It's about making connections between neurons. A
single neuron can't do that much on its own. That
has to connect with others, and those brain networks are
what underlie all developmental milestones, all learning, all new skills,
and I think for parents, the key thing to know
(03:47):
is that when the brain is stimulated in certain ways,
so when a child has certain experiences, then the right
networks form, and that sets the stage really for how
a child will learn and how they'll interact throughout their life.
It's pretty heavy because the first three weeks the cells
are coming together. Many times at that point, you might
(04:08):
not even know you're pregnant. So let's say that you're
trying to get pregnant or you're thinking about it. What
is the optimal environment for the cells to move the
way they need to move to function? And I mean,
there's so much outside of our control. It's kind of like,
this is biology just unfolding. But are there things that
(04:28):
we can do? There are a lot of things that
are pretty basic for health, like nutrition, things like exercise,
and then things that helped to reduce the state of
stress in general, things like healthy social relationships, community connections.
And one of the things that can get in the
(04:49):
way is a state of anxiety or stress about getting pregnant.
So it's a delicate balance where on the one head,
you want to attend to these things because they are important,
but stress or be overly anxious about them. I asked
Dr Go what she did through her own pregnancies to
lay the groundwork for healthy brain development. I made choices
(05:10):
around my nutrition and diet, but I was also aware
of some research indicating that you might not want to
do more ultrasounds than necessary, so I actually I limited
the number of ultrasounds and I did not do the
three D ultrasounds for example. I also opted out of
that with RuSHA because I was hyper sensitive to making
choices that created as much of a natural environment as
(05:32):
it could versus adding new things. And I think for parents,
knowing that there are things you can say no to,
there will be a lot of information coming to you,
but you have a lot of choices along the way.
Dr Go says it's important for new parents to have
a basic understanding of epigenetics, the ways in which our
(05:53):
environments can change how our genes express themselves. Our environment
and our gene are actually very connected, and the environment
can influence our genes. Now they don't change our genetic
makeup itself, but they change the way our genes function,
which you know influences our physiology. So it means that
(06:14):
a lot of genetics and what we pass on to
our children from our genes, we can't control. But things
that influence how genes work, like our nutrition, like our
stress level physical activity do directly influence how our genes work.
So one category of experience is movement, So how do
(06:35):
we move in the world. And I really like this
phrase of when you move, your brain changes. It's so true.
So we sometimes talk about enriched environments. A child in
an enriched sensory environment is experiencing things through all of
their senses. We'll be back after a quick break, Welcome
(07:04):
back to the Healthy Baby Show. So an enriched environment
really presents the brain with new things on a continual basis.
Dr Michael Leon is a professor of neurobiology and behavior
at the University of California, Irvine. He's also a leading
expert on environmental enrichment, or the ways in which sensory
(07:27):
environments can stimulate our brains and help create new neural pathways.
It's fine if babies get the same thing every day
and they use age appropriate toys and age appropriate experiences,
and that's great for their happiness and they're bonding with
the parents and just sort of getting through the day,
(07:48):
but they're not given a chance to challenge the brain
to do something new every day. And what environmental enrichmond
does is it presents the brain with novelty, new things
every day, and that allows the brain to challenge itself
and it stimulates what we call neuroplasticity, which is really
just a way of saying the brain develops new ways
(08:11):
of dealing with the world. I asked Dr Leon how
parents could practice environmental enrichment in their everyday lives. There's
probably no better supported phenomenon in the neurosciences than environmental enrichment.
And basically what it is that people notice that despite
the fact that lab animals do great in their box cages,
(08:33):
they can learn, they can do motor things, they can
have social behaviors. They look perfectly normal. But when you
put them in a larger environment with more things to
do and a great deal of novelty, which turns out
to be critical, their brain has become much more complex,
much more capable. They learn better, their motor skills are better,
They're better at pretty much anything, and even more impressive.
(08:54):
There are animal models of pretty much every human neurological disorder,
so Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, multiple sclerosis, seizures, stroke, toxins, brain injury.
All of these animal models are really good because they
show the symptoms that humans have when they have exactly
(09:14):
the same changes in their brain, and you see all
of the human like symptoms being expressed when they're raised
in a box gage, but when you move them into
an environmental enrichment situation, they lose many of their symptoms,
in some case all of their symptoms. So just giving
them a little bit more social stimulation, all kinds of
(09:36):
new things to do, changes their brain sufficiently so that
it compensates for these neural problems that they have. I mean,
that's a big well yeah, yeah, And you can actually
see this in humans as well. If there's a problem
in the brain, it develops a workaround, so it uses
(09:58):
other pathways in the rain to make the outcome, the
behavior and the thinking normal again. And so that's why
it's so powerful. Neural plasticity For me, as a mom
to a child with pretty severe autism, who I continue
to believe in every day is kind of like my
saving grace. Like the idea that the brain can adapt
(10:19):
and learn and grow and never stops is really fascinating
to me, but also really comforting because it does give
you a sense that there's hope and we can actually
retrain a somewhat disordered or disregulated or disorganized brain. That's
what's so wonderful about the concept of environmental enrichment that
it works for so many different kinds of things and
(10:42):
in a sense customizes what needs to be done to
the brain to normalize it. Dr Leon says the idea
of environmental enrichment is becoming more mainstream. For example, some
companies have developed sensory enrichment activities and therapeutic boxes of
tools designed for your child's brain. I've used one program
(11:04):
with my son Zane and have even seen firsthand how
it improved its communication. But I also noticed how interested
my younger daughter Asha was in those same exercises and
how they were helping her flex her muscles ahead of time.
We see this often with parents telling us about their
younger kids who are sort of getting this kind of
(11:26):
environmental enrichment with their older kid getting it for some
very specific reason, and the younger kid really blossomed. And
what this suggests to me is that the human brain
needs a lot more stimulation to be optimal than most
people think, but it takes a lot of effort, and
many parents can't do it for that reason. It takes time.
(11:48):
But unlike many of the therapies you hear about, environmental
enrichment is affordable. A lot of the exercises Dr Leon
uses in his lab involve things you already have in
your kitchen. Dr Goh says, in many cases, all you
need to do is head outside. So one of the
things we know from research to is just how beneficial
(12:10):
it is for our bodies when we're outdoors. So there's
an approach now called ecotherapy, which is just about being
the natural environment. So finding ways to have physical experiences
in those environments is really important. There's this adage you
can't teach a drowning man how to read. When is
a baby's brain or child's brain or any of us.
(12:30):
When are we more primed to truly learn to make
those connections in an enriched environment. Yeah, So there's a
term up that I really like, which is ready to
learn state. Basically describes like what is the state of
being this case, let's think about a child, is one
in which they're not overwhelmed, they're not drowning. It means
(12:52):
it's one in which their basic body mechanisms are secure
and stable and not in a state of just regulation.
Another term use in neurology is a state of arousal.
You know, are they hyper aroused? Are they already on
overdrive and overwhelmed? That is not a good state in
which to benefit from learning environments. And so how do
(13:12):
you get out of that state? Depends on the child,
but often it's about making sure their basic needs are met.
They're not too hot, they're not too cold, they're not hungry, thirsty,
or sleep deprived, so that basic functions are met, and
that their senses are not being overwhelmed by what's coming in,
and they're not in a state of feeling threatened. We
(13:33):
think of that sometimes it's a fight or flight state
where they're fearful and on guard. It's hard for any
of us to learn when we're in that mode. On
this topic, I mean, how can we create a ready
to learn state without being so prescriptive. It's more about
like how do we live in that state? Yes, Well,
routines are really important. When I think about a nice
(13:55):
daily routine, it includes a few key elements movement, things
like nourishing your body, interactions with other people that are enjoyable.
Every day needs to have the sort of flow to it.
I also like to think about sometimes short term stress
is good because it means we're being challenged, maybe we're
(14:16):
learning something new, there's a new demand. But it's really
important that you have the opportunity to recover from that stress.
It's when stress becomes long term, chronic sustained that's really
really damaging. And for children, because they're growing and changing
so much so fast, especially in the early years, there's
a need to find challenges that, yes, may increase stress temporarily,
(14:39):
but are at the right level for that child's next
step in their growth. The term that occupational therapists use
sometimes is the just right challenge. It's what is the
challenge that does not overwhelm a child but scaffolds them
to the next level of development and their skills. Both
Dr Go and Dr really On talked a lot about stress,
(15:02):
how it can affect a baby's development in utero or
a young child's ability to self regulate. So most people
know that in fetal life it's not good to take
any kind of medicines or drugs or alcohol or anything
that will disturb the development of the baby's brain. But
most people don't know about what is called the adverse
(15:23):
childhood experiences, And this came out of a study of
seventeen thousand developing children, and they just counted the bad
things that could happen to a kid, so verbal abuse,
sexual abuse, physical abuse, isolation, parents who are drug addicts
or alcoholism, kids who have lost one of their parents,
(15:44):
any incarceration, poverty itself, food insecurity, or parents having a
mental problem. And they didn't look at the severity of
it or the duration of it, just whether they had
experienced this or not. And then they looked into their
teen years and adult years, and what they found was
just striking. That is, for every one of these bad experiences,
(16:08):
the kids experienced really significant changes in their entire life.
And so at one extreme, if they ticked off six
of these things, it cut twenty years off the lifetime
of the individual. I think with four of these things,
you had a thirty two times more probable to have
(16:28):
problems in school because you couldn't self regulate, you couldn't
stay calmly in your chair. You know, it predicted violence
in their later years, incarceration, dropping out of school, having
problems with relationships, getting into risky sexual situations. Every bad
thing that we see in our culture is probably located
(16:50):
in the bad experiences that these kids had. Early in life.
Doctor Leon did emphasize that there are things we can
do to help kids recover from stressful or even traumatic experiences.
You can have normal, positive experience and that's good, but
you need to do special things to recover from adverse
childhood experiences. And so what you're seeing in many schools
(17:13):
now is that they are using meditation, which can calm
the system and works very well. Yoga is another thing. Again,
they're using that in the schools, and that also calms
the nervous system. And again it's one of these special
things to do, but it's probably a really important thing
to do. And I should point out not only do
(17:33):
you have mental problems when you've experienced these things, you
also have physical problems. So these people are much more
subject to cardiac problems and cancer and just a variety
of medical issues that emerge from their early experiences. And
that's probably due to the fact that all of these
things trigger chronic stress. He says. Sensory enrichment, specifically old
(17:59):
factory enrich men, can help prepare neural pathways that may
have been damaged from chronic stress. Most people think that
the old factory system or the smell system is just
sort of a nice to have system, but in fact
it's probably in many ways the most important sense that
we have, but it's actually critical for the health of
(18:19):
the brain. It turns out that you can replace all
of the environmental enrichment experiences with old factory enrichment, and
what that means is that every day you give people
many odors to smell. Again, novelty is key, and when
you do this, what happens is that in this case,
the mice have just as much improvement as they would
(18:41):
have experienced in the entire environmental enrichment situation. And they
saw what the mechanism was, and that was the production
of new neurons in the cognitive areas of the brain.
So you're saying exposure to a variety of smells actually
improves cognition and creates more neural activity. Yeah. So they
(19:03):
found this in mice, and we took that and did
it with humans, and it turns out that after six
months of olfactory and richmond we found cognitive improvements. And
we also image the brain and found that there was
an improvement in a critical pathway in the brain that
is involved with cognition. And it turns out that the
(19:23):
more olfactory stimulation that you get. That is, the different
kinds of odorance that you experience each day, the better
the outcome for the brain. And there's one spectacular report
out of South Korea that is just amazing, and that
is they gave people with dementia, that is Alzheimer's disease
forty different odorants to smell in the morning and in
(19:47):
the evening, and they were able to reverse the memory
problems that these individuals had, and they also were able
to decrease their depression symptoms. So one of the other
thing about the old factory system is that goes to
the emotional systems of the brain, and so they found
striking improvements in both their cognition and emotions. And just
(20:12):
to make sure everybody understands this, nobody has been able
to treat Alzheimer's disease successfully with anything that has been tried.
There have been hundreds of failed clinical trials using every
drug you can imagine and billions of dollars spent with
very little to show for it. There's no reason to
(20:33):
believe that we can't get the same kind of improvements
in children that we see in older adults. And maybe
that people just need more old factory stimulations throughout their lives.
You know, if you breathe in deep now wherever you are,
the likelihood is is that you will smell nothing. And
people probably didn't evolve to spend their lives in odor
(20:56):
free environments. And you need the kind of novelty and
complexity and different kinds of stimulation every day that you
get from olfactory enrichment. So it's not a romantherapy, which
is just using a single odor that people think have
special characteristics. It is the continual experience of new things
(21:17):
that gets your brain to trigger neuroplasticity or even just
maintain itself. I asked actually on what else he recommends
for parents looking to help their child develop a more
resilient brain. I think my favorite intervention is people having
conversations with their kids. Anything that the kids says cooing
(21:40):
or moaning or bubbling or burbling. Respond to it as
though they were saying something sensible. And you have these
conversations with the kids over time, and that actually turns
out to have really strong impacts on these kids, And
they've been followed up for ten years and these impacts
continue into their teenage years. What this is showing is
(22:02):
that it's not so much the words that they hear.
What I particularly like about it is that you're not
going to have the same conversation with the kid every time.
It's going to be a novel interaction, and so I
think what they're doing is triggering the neuroplasticity that you
get from those kinds of interactions. Here's dr Go again.
(22:23):
You know, research has come such a long way. There
could be a really wonderful kind of comprehensive curriculum for
people who are wanting to become parents, and it would
include education around the different domains of development like find motor,
gross motor, social, emotional, language, cognitive, and just a general
overview of what the developmental milestones are in each of
(22:45):
those areas and the normal range. So, for example, the
age range when children might start to walk can be
anywhere from eight months to eighteen months. That's a huge range,
and so I think even knowing those ranges can be
quite reassuring. But then also for parents to know what
to be looking for and then to know what to
(23:07):
do if they begin to be concerned for their child.
We'll be back after a quick break. Welcome back to
the Healthy Baby show. When Zane was diagnosed with autism
(23:29):
at age two, I had to rethink everything I thought
about brain development and children. That's because the brain of
a child with autism actually develops differently than a neurotypical
child's brain. I asked Dr Goh, what the latest research
tells us about this. So a lot of what we
know about the brain and autism now comes from brain
(23:50):
imaging research that's happened over the past couple of decades.
And there are several different theories, but probably the leading
theory is that the brain and autism is different in
terms of how networks are connected. So our brains have
very highly complex networks, and there are short range networks,
(24:11):
and then there are connections that connect more far ranging
areas of the brain that are called long range connections.
And so the thought and autism is that there may
be fewer of these long range connections and more of
the short range connections. Their variety of other thoughts about
how the brain might be different and autism, including the
brain's metabolism, how our bodies taken nutrients, convert them into
(24:32):
energy and then get rid of waste and toxic and
that's happening for the brain and so that is a
very dynamic state. Understanding autism in this way. I feel
like it's very hopeful because those are things that can
be changed. What is the future of treatment for autism?
Do you think that there will be one day a
way to enhance the metabolism of the organ of the
(24:55):
brain to be able to be more connected. I do.
I don't think it will end up being one treatment.
I think it will end up being a combination of
multiple different approaches, including things like norm modulation, which is
the application of different electrical and magnetic technologies to modify
brain function. It will include things that we currently do,
(25:18):
but we'll find new and better ways to do them
and combine them, like occupational therapy, music therapy, speech language therapy,
physical therapy, behavior therapy. You know, there's a lot of
innovation that is happening, and it needs to happen, you know,
and how those therapies are delivered. I think there's a
role for nutrition, there's a role for medication, and so
I do think the future for autism therapy is finding
(25:39):
out how to use these in combinations. Dr Leon agrees
he added environmental enrichment to that list too, and says
in the future, He hopes we all come to think
of it as an essential part of our daily routines.
Instead of considering environmental enrichment or old factory enrichment as
(26:00):
a medical procedure that is something to do if there's
something wrong with the brain, consider it more as a
public health feature that you do this preventively. That is,
you brush your teeth every day to make sure that
you don't develop the cavities. Just as that is the
case for your teeth, I think it's even more important
that we do this for your brain. We have to
(26:21):
recognize that we're probably being deprived. Our brains are not
getting enough stimulation, and rather than waiting until something goes
wrong or we lose our memory as we age, what
we're probably going to see is that we will have
a preventive public health orientation that allows us to prevent
these things from happening to begin with. As we look
(26:47):
to the future of ensuring healthy brain development for our
kids and Dr Go touched on this a minute ago,
a fascinating and crucial element will be nutrition. You've probably
heard of fatty assets, but did you know scientists have
recently discovered a new one. Stephanie and Eric Van Watson,
founders of Seraphina Therapeutics, are a physician and veterinarian at
(27:10):
the forefront of this discovery. The new fatty acid is
called C fifteen and full disclosure, I'm a proud investor
in their company because I'm always doing research on new
supplements that can impact brain health and a new friend
introduced me to them, and now my son takes fatty fifteen.
(27:30):
I was working for the CDC and World Health Organization
as a veterinary epidemiologist, helping to set up surveillance systems
for infectious diseases all over the world, and then about
twenty years ago, I was asked by the U. S.
Navy to help start and lead a clinical research program
to continually improve the health and welfare of the Navy's dolphins.
(27:53):
And so as we got to see the journey from
neonates all the way to geriatric we're able to to
discover that dolphins, just like people, as large brained, long
lived mammals, were developing similar chronic diseases, including neurologic diseases
such as Alzheimer's disease. We were able to find a
(28:15):
hundred molecules that predicted which dolphins would be healthy ages
and which wouldn't. And from there we then moved into
the lab to start evaluating these molecules that are present
both in dolphins blood in our blood, and that's where
C fifteen was discovered. It was one of the top molecules.
Stephanie's team spent the next three years working with C
(28:38):
fifteen and found that it wasn't just an active fatty acid,
A growing number of scientists have declared it essential. Just
like OMEGA three and OMEGA six, the essential fatty acids
are important in the growth and maintenance of our baby cells,
their neurons, the growth of their white matter, and then
the cell signaling that's required between being all of these cells.
(29:01):
And then for our baby's brains, fatty acids are even
more integral to the growth and connectivity of their brains,
especially when their brains are making over one million or
more neural connections per second and growing quickly, which is
pretty amazing. Studying the dolphins, Stephanie's team was able to
isolate the effects this newly discovered fatty acid was having
(29:24):
on their health. We found that dolphins have had lower
C fifteen in their blood were less healthy When we
put C fifteen back into their diet via high sea
fifteen fish, they got better. Interestingly, in humans, you know,
we've been going through our own forty year experiment with
taking C fifteen out of our diets, and that's because
(29:46):
our main source of C fifteen is whole fat milk
and cow's milk and dairy. So you in Congress took
an unusual step in coming out with recommendations for people
to decrease their intake of all saturated fats. And our
primary source of saturated pats are whole fat milk and butter,
(30:07):
and so the purpose of that at the time was
to help decrease the risk of heart attacks that were
happening among primarily men. Those recommendations were made across the board.
Now what's happened since then is that instead of getting
healthier wor seeing an increase in obesity and heart disease,
liver disease called fatty liver disease type two diabetes importantly
(30:31):
among younger and younger people. And so a lot of
studies have come out since that change that have shown indeed,
even chain saturated fatty acids, the ones that are present
at the highest level in butter and milk like C
sixteen and eighteen do continue to be associated with poor health,
but see fifteen and C seventeen that are these odd
(30:53):
chain saturated fatty acids, and the president at much much
lower levels have been continually associated with decreased risk of diabetes,
these heart disease, to the very diseases we were trying
to prevent. And this impact of odde chain fatty acids,
including C fifteen on development appears to be due to
improvement in the myle in sheaf. And so it's this
(31:13):
insulating wrap right around our nerve cells that allow the
electrical conduction to allow our brain to do what it
does basically. And so the studies to date support that
the higher odd chain fatty acids are helping to improve
the quality of that mylen sheath and that then is
helping to facilitate growth of cognitive development and brain health
(31:37):
for the infants. Do we hope that in our near
future we can see C fifteen as a supplement that's
given to all women who are pregnant, lactating, and then
eventually the babies themselves. We do. We spent a lot
of time trying to figure out what would be the
ultimate source of C fifteen, and so, to make a
(32:01):
long story short, we now have a plant source, a
pure ingredient. Our last batch was pure and it's vegan friendly,
meaning we didn't use animal products. It's non dairy. I'm
so grateful you've identified a third essential fatty acid because
it seems like something that can shift the trajectory of
neurological development, that can improve the way our brains age.
(32:25):
What does the future look like in terms of optimizing
brain health for babies and adults. The vision for this
would be that this pure ingredient is used to fortify
foods the same way that we see fortified foods for
the other vitamins and essential fatty acids. The second part
is taking on the continued recommendation that all saturated fats
(32:51):
are bad. If we look at the most recent national
guidelines in the US for nutrition, there are a hundred
and sixty five pages They mentioned the term saturated fats
is bad a hundred and sixty three times. And so
we've done a disservice to public health, to ourselves, to
(33:15):
our children by not seeing the science that's now in
dozens of studies from reputable groups showing that just like
we first thought all fats were bad. We now know
some fats are good, some fats are bad, and now
it's this new frontier of not all saturated fats are bad.
Some saturated fats are good and those are the eye
(33:36):
chain fatty acids, and how can we bring those back
into the world. Well, that's it for this week's episode.
Next week we're going to talk all about gut health
and the microbiome. Gut health is so important because the
microbes in your body can control the way that you
behave in act and a lot of us don't realize
(33:58):
that our gut is like our second brain and if
we actually approach creating holistic health for our bodies through
our gut, we can improve our brain health and improve
behaviors in our children. And it's something I think it's
really cool to share with new parents so they understand
the importance of the early years of how their baby's
guts are developing and why that's so cool. Join us
(34:21):
next time. The Healthy Baby Show is a production of
iHeart podcast Network and healthy baby dot Com, where you
can find a new line of the safest baby essentials.
The Healthy Baby Show is hosted by me Shazivs from
our lead producers, Jennifer Bassett. Executive producers are Nikki Etre,
Anna Stump, Shahsis Fram and James Violett. Mastering and sound
(34:44):
designed by Carl Katel and Dan Bowsa, additional writing and
research by Julia Weaver. Our theme music is by Anna
Stump and Hamilton's Lighthouser. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions
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