Acute and chronic parasites and autoimmunity with Elizabeth Yarnell, Traditional Naturopath, CLT

This week on The Less Stressed Life Podcast, I am joined by the delightful Elizabeth Yarnell. In this episode, we discuss Elizabeth's diagnosis of MS, getting parasites in Asia, and the transition of learning how to cook whole foods after growing up on gummy bears and soda and her departure from journalism into naturopathy. 

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Food sensitivities
• Parasite infections
• Autoimmunity

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ABOUT GUEST:
Elizabeth Yarnell is a traditional naturopath,  patented inventor, and multi-passionate entrepreneur. As a health and wellness speaker, she's focused on the ways chronic inflammation influences our bodies and our lives, and what each of us can do to get  rid of it in order to live happily and comfortably.
She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1999 and has been on a mission to redefine multiple sclerosis and autoimmunity. As a traditional naturopath and certified LEAP therapist, she's worked with hundreds of others suffering with the same thing in her nationwide clinic, using a unique, personalized, non-pharmaceutical approach to empower her clients to reclaim their health.

Check out Elizabeth's cookbook here: Glorious One-Pot Meals 
Inflammation quiz: https://elizabethyarnell.com/inflammationquiz/

WHERE TO FIND:
Website:https://elizabethyarnell.com/
Instagram: @elizabethyarnell_naturopath

WHERE TO FIND CHRISTA:
Website: https://www.christabiegler.com/
Instagram: @anti.inflammatory.nutritionist
Leave a review, submit a questions for the podcast or take one of my quizzes here: https://www.christabiegler.com/links

WORK WITH CHRISTA:
Are you sick more often than you should be, have consistently low Vitamin D, B12 and iron, salt and sugar cravings, puffiness in your face or extremities, need daily antihistamines or are losing your hair but labs are normal? Food sensitivities, low energy, and skin issues can all be caused by inflammation. The ROOT CAUSE of inflammation is immune system imbalance. Bring the immune system into balance to correct inflammatory symptoms like food sensitivities, low energy, skin issues and a cascade of other “no one has the answer to” symptoms. 
The ANWSER is immune resilience! It's the overarching goal I have when working with 1:1 clients.
Packages include:

• Labs
• 1:1 interpretation and personalized protocols 
• Support between appointments with weekly touchpoints
• Messaging and trainings to get the most out of working together

Past clients, if it's been more than a year since I've seen you, you're welcome to book a call! This is the last time until fall that I'm taking clients. If you want to maximize this season and bring your body into balance go to https://www.christabiegler.com/fss to book a call with me.

SPONSORS:
A special thanks to EveryDay Dose for sponsoring this episode. EveryDay Dose combines organic coffee, grass fed collagen, Lion’s mane for focus and has 80% less caffeine than regular coffee. To get 5 extra sample packets with your order click on this link, https://everydaydose.superfiliate.com/LESSSTRESSED. Let me know how you love it by dropping me a note or tagging me @anti.inflammatory.nutritionist on IG. 

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[00:00:00] Elizabeth Yarnell: When there are parasites in the body, the white blood cells say, sound the alarm. There's foreign invaders, there's foreign invaders. It starts off the immune cascade of inflammation, but parasites don't care about that. So you end up in this vicious cycle of chronic inflammation for seemingly no reason, which leads to autoimmunity.

[00:00:20] Christa: Stress is the inflammation that robs us of life, energy, and happiness. Our typical solutions for gut health and hormone balance have let a lot of us down we're overmedicated and underserved at the less stress life. We are a community of health savvy women exploring solutions outside of our traditional Western medicine toolbox and training to raise the bar and change our.

[00:00:45] Christa: Each week, our hope is that you leave our sessions inspired to learn, grow, and share these stories to raise the bar in your life and home.

[00:01:03] Christa: I have a complicated history with coffee. I love it, but sometimes it's made me jittery, anxious, and even worsen my skin because of the mold that can be present in lots of coffee. A couple of months ago I tried everyday dose, which combines organic coffee, grass-fed collagen, lions main for focus, and has 80% less caffeine than regular coffee.

[00:01:23] Christa: The results have been impressive, and that's after trying several other similar different coffee products that just didn't meet my snobby coffee standards. Here's what I noticed. Ever since I started using Everyday Dose as my daily coffee two months ago, my daily focus and concentration are better because Lion's Main is a neutropic that helps with bring clarity and focus, but unlike other products, everyday dose actually tastes like coffee and not like mushrooms, which usually taste like dirt or sit at the bottom of the.

[00:01:51] Christa: I've noticed I'm not jittery, which makes sense because there's less caffeine and our third party testing for mold or mycotoxins, which is a big deal. So I feel good instead of crappy from my coffee. And three, I've had no change in mood or energy right before my period starts. It's pretty common that my mood is apathetic and I'm annoyed by humans a day or two before the start of my menstrual cycle.

[00:02:12] Christa: But oddly, since I've been doing this daily neutropic coffee, I'd had no mental dips like I had. So if you wanna try Everyday Dose, do me a solid and support the podcast by using my special link everyday dose.com/less stressed. And you'll get five extra sample packs in your order. There's no coupon code, so you'll just have to type in everyday dose.com/less stressed or grab the link from the show notes and let me know if you love it or drop me a note or tag me on Anti-Inflammatory Nutritionist on I.

[00:02:41] Christa: All right. Today on the Less Stressed life I have Elizabeth Yanell. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1999 and has been on a mission to redefine multiple sclerosis and autoimmunity. Naturally as a traditional naturopath and certified LEAP therapist. She's worked with. Hundreds of others suffering with the same thing in her nationwide clinic, using a unique, personalized non-pharmaceutical approach to empower her clients to reclaim their health.

[00:03:09] Christa: She's a TEDx speaker. Award-winning author is Cookbook who has sold more than 70,000 copy, uh, patented and mentor, and has been featured on C B S N B, C A B C and P B S as well as in Good Housekeeping Health. Martha Stewart Living Radio, and many other outlets. Welcome, 

[00:03:25] Elizabeth Yarnell: Elizabeth. Well, thank you so much. I'm excited to be here with.

[00:03:28] Elizabeth Yarnell: So 

[00:03:29] Christa: I think the last time I interviewed someone around multiple sclerosis, I think it was Terry Walz, and she told us about her pretty intense story of being in a wheelchair and then riding her bike to school every day. And multiple sclerosis like diet has affected her big time and it's in mitochondria and all of these things are a huge part of it.

[00:03:51] Christa: And so I always love seeing someone who's living so vibrantly with ms. It's wonderful to see. You were diagnosed a long time ago, and I'd love to hear more about that and how that played into kind of your career choice maybe, I don't know when you became a naturopath, if that was after or before, maybe after.

[00:04:09] Christa: I'm not sure. I'd love to hear about that, the diagnosis and how that journey's been a little bit before we get into some other 

[00:04:17] Elizabeth Yarnell: topics. Yes. I love to talk about my Ms. Origin story because back in 1999 when I was diagnosed, I could never have foreseen the way I would be now as a published author and a speaker and a clinician helping others with multiple sclerosis.

[00:04:36] Elizabeth Yarnell: Because back then, wow, that night in 1999, I went to sleep as usual, and when I awoke the next morning, I literally was blind in my right eye. It was. That sudden and I couldn't figure out what was going on because with multiple sclerosis, which is an inflammatory condition, the inflammation is systemic, and when there's inflammation in your brain, everything is very confusing.

[00:05:04] Elizabeth Yarnell: All I knew was that the night before I had been working on. An article that I was writing for the Denver Post on CrossCountry skiing, and I had been working on it for a couple weeks and gotten it to a point where I felt pretty good about it and I thought, I'm gonna just print this out. It's late, and tomorrow morning I will do the final edits.

[00:05:24] Elizabeth Yarnell: And as I was brushing my teeth, I kind of skimmed it through and I thought I saw three places that I definitely wanted to change. But the next morning when I put those pages down next to my cup of coffee, It was almost like a goblin had stolen into my apartment in the middle of the night and taken an eraser to the pages.

[00:05:45] Elizabeth Yarnell: I entire paragraphs were just not there anymore. Just entire sections of texts and what I could make out, I couldn't understand. I couldn't decipher, and needless to say, I could. I couldn't identify those three edits that I knew were there, but I couldn't find them for the life of me. I had to turn into my editor.

[00:06:07] Elizabeth Yarnell: What I knew in my heart was substandard work, and this was my income, my living, what I had been training to do. I really didn't know what I was going to be able to do with my life if I couldn't read or write anymore. I was gonna have to find a whole new career. So in short order, I was in an eye doctor's office who diagnosed me with optic neuritis or inflammation of the optic nerve and shuffled off into an M R I where I received the lovely diagnosis of multiple sclerosis.

[00:06:42] Christa: Did you have symptoms in retrospect, whether symptoms building up around that? You 

[00:06:46] Elizabeth Yarnell: know, it's funny because I did have some symptoms that I didn't know what they were. I had fainted. A couple months before my diagnosis, I had come home from a trip to Asia with a ton of parasites, and I think, I know we're gonna get into that a lot, but I think that was a contributing factor.

[00:07:06] Elizabeth Yarnell: But yeah, I had fainted, which is not something that's a habit of mine. Also, I had had tingling in one of my fingertips, one of my hands, all the fingers on my hand for about six. Kind of pins and needles whenever I would touch it. And I didn't attribute that to anything. I couldn't figure out what it was.

[00:07:28] Elizabeth Yarnell: But looking back in retrospect, that was definitely an early symptom. Mm-hmm. 

[00:07:32] Christa: Okay. So you get diagnosed, I'm under the impression that your career as a writer at the this time, and then how do things change? I mean, what, you were blind in one eye. What happened next? Essent. 

[00:07:45] Elizabeth Yarnell: So yes, I was a writer and an instructional designer specializing in multimedia instructional design.

[00:07:51] Elizabeth Yarnell: I was doing both those and then literally I lost the entire, all the vision in my right eye for a period of time, and I realized that I could no longer really work very well as an instructional designer. Because of the intensity and the hours and the demanding pace it required from me, MS is, uh, hallmarked by fatigue.

[00:08:15] Elizabeth Yarnell: And in the beginning I certainly had a lot of fatigue and felt very fragile in a lot of ways, and, and I didn't know what I was going to do, but I started looking into, well, what could I do for. Health and my future because really after all, it mattered most to me how I was going to end up. Because I had learned that 80% of multiple sclerosis patients experienced significant disability within 10 years of diagnosis.

[00:08:47] Elizabeth Yarnell: So I was. Just two weeks before my 30th birthday, and now I was learning that by my 40th birthday I was probably gonna be in a wheelchair, and the doctors told me, oh, there's really nothing that you can do. You can take these, one of these three injectable disease modifying therapies, pharmaceutical drugs, which all had very low efficacy rates and very toxic side effects, but, Medical community, of which my father is a neurologist.

[00:09:17] Elizabeth Yarnell: So a big part of that felt very strongly that I should try one of these. I should pick one of these. And absolutely. In fact, even to this day, the medical community is very clear that anyone who's diagnosed with multiple sclerosis should start a disease modifying pharmaceutical therapy. So I did. I picked one.

[00:09:36] Elizabeth Yarnell: Not only did it not slow down the progression of my disease, I continued to experience flareups or exacerbations on the same timeline that I had been before. But I had terrible, terrible side effects. For three years, I had hives. All over my body every single day. A good day was 30 hives and a bad day was 300 hives.

[00:10:00] Elizabeth Yarnell: Mm-hmm. There were days I could not leave the house because my face was so distorted from hives. And then on top of that, by the end of that period, every time I would inject, This disease modifying therapy, I would literally have a seizure for 10 to 40 minutes before the needle even came out of my body.

[00:10:19] Elizabeth Yarnell: It was very clear, the correlation. Mm-hmm. I thought, you know, my body is telling me it really doesn't want this drug, and in the meantime it was my then fiance, now my husband of more than 20 years, who suggested that maybe my diet might have something to do with. And I had to admit that for the entire decade of my twenties, I have lived alone and I was a girl on the go.

[00:10:44] Elizabeth Yarnell: I either ate fast food or restaurant food, or I really just skipped the meal. The only staple foods I kept in my apartment really for that whole decade were diet coke, crystal light, and gummy bears. So look up to the nineties maybe. Right? Maybe not such a surprise. Mm-hmm. Exactly. The nineties diet, right?

[00:11:06] Elizabeth Yarnell: Mm-hmm. Yes. Not such a surprise that my body would start to fail me at the end of that. Mm-hmm. So that's when I started taking classes. Uh, first I started. Reading and finding books about, well, what is a healthy diet? And there was so much out there. But I really wanted to find out, not a fad diet, but what was a healthy diet.

[00:11:28] Elizabeth Yarnell: And of course this was before Dr. Wallace's book came out long, long, long time before, but I was studying through the a d and the AMA and the Mayo Clinic. And what I really felt that they were all saying was that Whole Foods were better than processed foods. And I thought, okay, well I can do a Whole Foods diet, but I don't really know how to cook.

[00:11:48] Elizabeth Yarnell: And so I started going to cooking classes and watching the Food Network. And what I quickly learned was that cooking Whole Foods from scratch is time and labor intensive, and you end up with a kitchen full of dirty dishes. That's when I was on the lookout for, well, what could I do to make my life easier while focusing on a whole food space diet?

[00:12:13] Elizabeth Yarnell: And I became what I call an accidental inventor after watching an infomercial one night where the guy says, look, I've got this countertop appliance and I can. Make your whole meal in this one countertop of plants. And he pours in dry rice and a can of tomatoes. And then he puts a metal like barbecue grate grill over it.

[00:12:32] Elizabeth Yarnell: And then he puts chicken breasts on top of that. And then he puts another metal grate, and then he puts brownies on top of that. Covers the whole thing with a dome, plugs it in, turns it on very. I dream of Genie type. Mm-hmm. And I thought, wow, that's really cool. I don't have that countertop of plants. I don't have any of those metal grates and I don't really care about the brownies, but maybe I can kind of like innovate on what he's doing in a similar way.

[00:12:59] Elizabeth Yarnell: So I went over to my oven and I. Cranked it up to four 50 degrees because I figured that countertop of plants probably got pretty hot cuz it was cooking fast and I had just received a Cas iron Dutch oven as a wedding G, and I pulled that out and I kind of layered. Foods into it in a similar way that he did only I had frozen fish filets and fresh vegetables and herbs from my garden, and then I put the lid on it and put it into the four 50 degree oven and lo and beholden about half an hour.

[00:13:32] Elizabeth Yarnell: Dinner was ready. It was amazing. And I discovered after a long period of time, just this became the way that we cooked and we really didn't even think that much of it until my college roommate came to visit for a week, and at the end of the week she asked me to teach her to cook like I did. And I said, well, you've seen me do it.

[00:13:51] Elizabeth Yarnell: I literally just throw things into the cast iron dutch oven and put it inside the oven. And she said, I think there's more to it than that. So I, that's when I sat down and wrote out my cookbook and spent five years trying to find an agent and a publisher with no success, and finally decided to self-publish in 2005, which was the best decision I could have made because I sold out my entire first print run of 2000 books in a, in a month.

[00:14:15] Elizabeth Yarnell: Spent a lot of time on the local bestseller's list and, uh, went on to sell it to Random House where it is still for sale today. So check out glorious one, pop. 

[00:14:26] Christa: So you switched to a whole food diet and made a difference with your ms. 

[00:14:32] Elizabeth Yarnell: Correct. So my MS started getting so much more under control and better, and I stopped having exacerbations.

[00:14:41] Elizabeth Yarnell: So I really, I went along for a long time really feeling like whole foods versus processed foods was the secret to Ms. Mm. Until my son was born and he. Was sick from the get go, even though he, I only gave him organic Whole Foods. Mm. But he was just still really sick and by the time he was six years old, he had fallen off the heightened weight chart and we had taken him into, uh, pediatric GI clinics and had his DNA mapped and abdominal x-rays, all sorts of things that no one could figure out what was wrong with him.

[00:15:17] Elizabeth Yarnell: And finally that's when I found, as you and I both know, the M R T Food sensitivity test, which is really the gold standard of food sensitivity testing. And still to this day, I have to say his is the worst test I've ever seen. In fully one third of the items that were tested, he was reactive to. But as soon as we change this diet, It was a miracle.

[00:15:39] Elizabeth Yarnell: I mean, within two months he grew an inch and a half, he gained 15 pounds, he stopped, uh, having tantrums. He started sleeping through the night, stopped to wedding his bed. Just incredible. And that's when I thought, you know, That's when I decided to go through the training and certification program to learn how to interpret the test results and apply them.

[00:16:02] Elizabeth Yarnell: Oh, you were working with someone? Well, yes. We were working with somebody who was not a CLT, of course, who had never gone through that. She was just new enough to give us the test, which was great. But she didn't know everything. And when I went through the certification program, that's when I made the connection between the hypersensitivity reactions that were happening from food sensitivities and the hypersensitivity reactions that are causing inflammation in autoimmune conditions like multiple sclerosis.

[00:16:31] Elizabeth Yarnell: Mm-hmm. Wow, that was a long way to get around to that, huh? 

[00:16:34] Christa: Well, it's funny. I think food, it's always, or often a starting point for people in health, which has makes so much sense. It's a foundation. It's what you put in your mouth every day. It's, it's either nourishing or depleting your nutrients. But what happens is now we're in a kind of a landscape.

[00:16:49] Christa: Where a lot of people have tried eliminations or done things, and I have, as someone who started my practice with M R T way back when, it was really amazing and then it wasn't enough because there was other things that were going on. I know that was part of your story as well, and you said I had come back from agent.

[00:17:06] Christa: And I had a lot of parasites. So tell us about how, when that starts to creep into the story and starts to come to the surface and when you started being aware of that and started dealing with it. Because usually what would happen is that we would have improvements, but then we would kind of start to backslide cuz the, the symptoms from parasites are other causes of inflammation.

[00:17:26] Christa: There's other ones besides parasites. They start to creep in and all of a sudden what you were doing just doesn't work as well as it used to anymore. So I'd love to hear how that came in for you. It's 

[00:17:36] Elizabeth Yarnell: true. So we had my husband and I, or my, he was at that time just my boyfriend. We had gone on a five week trip to Asia and for two weeks we had spent on a horseback crossing the Eastern Tibetan plateau.

[00:17:52] Elizabeth Yarnell: Everything had been great. Those two weeks camping out next to the horses, nothing had ever happened, but then we came back down out of Tibet in Chendu China, and the last night of our trip we had this celebration feast, and 15 of us met at 6:00 PM in front of this really high end restaurant, and we had this amazing feast.

[00:18:12] Elizabeth Yarnell: It was so delicious. But by midnight, 12 of us were worshiping the porcelain. So sometimes sudden onset can be a really clear indicator of parasitic infection. And then you begin the acute phase of parasitic infection where we had a lot of diarrhea and digestive upset, and my husband was vomiting a lot and.

[00:18:34] Elizabeth Yarnell: That was continuing. By the time we returned Home to America and I submitted my stool sample to the C D C. They actually picked up the phone and called me at my apartment once they saw the stool sample and said, where have you been? We have identified five parasites in your stool even to get an identification.

[00:18:56] Elizabeth Yarnell: That's 

[00:18:56] Christa: pretty remarkable. That's really remarkable on a conventional parasitic stool test that almost never happen. I mean, I don't see it very often. You'd have to be, almost never happens. You'd have to be very acute, like you said, like very flaring at that moment. Like it's kinda like lagers. I came home and I was still flaring.

[00:19:12] Christa: Great time to take that test. It might actually show up, you know, if it's in three years, it probably won't. It'll probably be buried deep inside and we'll be Oh yeah. Won't see it. Totally. But that's kinda 

[00:19:22] Elizabeth Yarnell: wild. Yes, this is. It was wild. And you're right, I don't even usually suggest people get tested because the ways that we test for parasites in this country are notorious for false negatives.

[00:19:33] Elizabeth Yarnell: Mm-hmm. And the last thing I want someone to do is to say, Ugh, I, I took the test. I don't have any parasites. Not gonna do the parasite. Cleanse or protocol, and then they move down the line with other things like dietary change and put a lot of effort into that, and they, there's only so much better you can never get if you've got parasites and you don't address them directly.

[00:19:53] Elizabeth Yarnell: Mm-hmm. 

[00:19:54] Christa: All right. So tell me what you did when the CDC picked up the phone and told you you had five parasites, you dropped it, is that correct? Yes. I thought that was so validating. Cause so often people find they don't find out anything and then they're like, oh, I must just have to feel like crap. But often there is a reason you just, it just isn't always picked up.

[00:20:12] Christa: Yes, 

[00:20:12] Elizabeth Yarnell: we were very sick. We'll just say very sick for a while that unfortunately it was not my first experience with parasites. Maybe just one of my more intense ones like can all be intense to different reasons. I had gotten Giardia several times. Previously from camping in the Rocky Mountains, you don't have to travel anywhere to pick up parasites.

[00:20:33] Elizabeth Yarnell: Mm-hmm. I think that's why I wanted to point that out. But yes, I was pretty freaky and of, this was 1998 and I didn't know anything about natural health. I didn't know anything about natural health. There were just starting even to be some natural health stores around, but, I didn't know what was going on with me, and so my GI doctor put me on Flagel, which if you've ever taken flagel, basically wipes out the entire microbiome as well as some of the adult parasites.

[00:21:05] Elizabeth Yarnell: So afterwards you can get some relief from those symptoms like. Constant explosive diarrhea from that acute phase of parasites, but it doesn't address the eggs and some parasites, like 2000 eggs a day. Mm, thank you. So I did do fragile and, and my husband also, because he also was just suffering terribly.

[00:21:27] Elizabeth Yarnell: In fact, he was on fragile at our wedding. A couple months later and Flagel kind of functions like and abuse, where if you drink alcohol you get very sick. And so he spent a lot of time at our wedding throwing up because he was a little bit in denial about what was 

[00:21:46] Christa: going on. Sure. Just a typical 

[00:21:47] Elizabeth Yarnell: ma. Right, right.

[00:21:49] Elizabeth Yarnell: But over the next six years, he continued to have symptoms crop up on a fairly regular occurrence. And he would go back to the GI doctor and then he would put 'em back on Flagel. And finally, after the third round of fragile, I'm like, you know what? The flagel is not the answer. This is not working. You're still having symptoms.

[00:22:07] Elizabeth Yarnell: Like one of his big symptoms was fainting. And I remember one night we were sitting on the couch watching tv, and he got up to get a drink out of the fridge. And all of a sudden I hear this and I walk over to the fridge. The fridge door's open. He's flat on the ground on his back in front of the fridge.

[00:22:24] Elizabeth Yarnell: He had just fainted. So that was a big thing. And also the vomiting. And there were a lot of symptoms that would start to pop up every so often as the parasites. Repopulated in his system. Mm-hmm. And that was really, I was already taking all sorts of natural health classes, but that was what sent me off searching specifically for a solution for 

parasites.

[00:22:48] Christa: Mm-hmm. Well, tell me more about that, because we're either really, really pro open. I, I kind of tread a line between the middle, like I don't talk about parasites every day. To the public, but I talk about them to my clients quite frequently, um, and make them, make them a little easier to digest. You know, I always say to clients, Google what the CDC says about pinworms.

[00:23:10] Christa: They say 50% of people have them. So if you have children or you work in an institution, it's always like to start there. Like the CDC says, you have a one out of two chance of having pin worms if you have children. So there's a starting point. 

[00:23:23] Elizabeth Yarnell: I've seen a stat that the C D C says seven out of 10.

[00:23:27] Elizabeth Yarnell: Worldwide are carrying 

[00:23:29] Christa: parasites. Hmm. Interesting. Wonderful. It's a challenge though, because like you said, you can feel like you're better and then they can just kinda rehash or re like, just kind of come back with a vengeance, repopulate. Mm-hmm. And that's, you know, parasites are really frustrating like that because they're a little stealth, I feel like, and they're a little more aggressive.

[00:23:48] Christa: Like they come back with a vengeance when they're gonna come, when they're not quite dead. They do. Right. So let's talk about how you learned. Uh, what to do and how that helped your husband and maybe even in yourself because he had pretty significant symptoms. But I would guess even some from some flagel, if you had five parasites and you had history of Giardia showing up before, I would guess you had residual symptoms.

[00:24:08] Christa: For 

[00:24:08] Elizabeth Yarnell: sure. I did. And you know what? I had recognized what had happened when I taken that round of fragile. My last round of fragile ever, but not my first round of fragile, unfortunately, was that I had had parasites for the previous decade. Mm-hmm. I had been living in Italy and my roommates and I took a 48 hour train ride from Budapest to Istanbul, and we ran out of water halfway through, and as the train pulled into Sophia Bulgaria, which was still behind the Iron Curtain at this time in 1991.

[00:24:40] Elizabeth Yarnell: The conductor had said, you have three minutes run out and fill up your water bottles in the public fountain in the middle of the train station. And we were all so sick from that, which I was thrilled about because I had gained a lot of weight over that year in Italy and I blasted all that summer. Ever since then, I had gone into what I call the chronic phase of parasites.

[00:25:07] Elizabeth Yarnell: So the acute phase is when you have a very, a lot of distress and it's kind of constant and you're feeling really crappy. And then you move into the acute phase because the body wants to survive and you cannot survive in that acute phase. So you go into a chronic phase. And for me, what my chronic face looked like was a lot of constipation interspersed with morning.

[00:25:28] Elizabeth Yarnell: And so every morning, pretty much for 10 years, I had explosive diarrhea in the morning, first thing, but it didn't interfere with my day. And so I didn't really, I didn't know who knew? Nobody knew. Nobody talked about like, oh, well this could be parasites or really anything. Nobody knew, and I didn't really even probably talk about it to many people.

[00:25:49] Christa: Mm-hmm. So you knew that you had chronic parasitic infection. How did you figure out what to do? How did you help your husband? Because like we were just talking about you can take things and then it kind of pops back. So tell us a little bit more about that 

[00:26:03] Elizabeth Yarnell: process. So then I was pursuing my natural health education, and the degree I got was kind of like a, like a executive MBA program where you did a lot of distance learning and then you would have onsite.

[00:26:17] Elizabeth Yarnell: Hands on things. And I went to one of these onsite hands-on events and learned a ton. And while I was there, was asking around other students and teachers, what do you do? And that's when I learned about the ingredients in the parasite protocol that I still use today with all of my clients, and how to really saturate the tissues of your body so that you can get all those eggs that are hiding in the nooks and crannies.

[00:26:45] Elizabeth Yarnell: And since then, so I've been using that particular formula and protocol for since 2008 for a long time, and I'm just, it's been updated and expanded. I've included, um, an another ingredient like, um, mean, mean tree leaf, which is more of a North American anti parasitic, in addition to the three herbs that were the core part of the program, which are warm wood cloves and black walnut.

[00:27:13] Elizabeth Yarnell: A key part of my program is the amount that you take of them. If you take two drops of cloves or something like that, it's not going to do anything. You have to address the adult parasites, the larvae, those eggs that they're laying constantly. And then Neme is specifically a herbicide for worms. So I've been using this pretty successfully in having really good results with clients for 10 years.

[00:27:43] Elizabeth Yarnell: But just recently I have decided to expand it. So now it includes some other protocols as well to really help dislodge things like liver flukes and some of the nastier ones that are harder to get 

[00:27:57] Christa: at. Right, for sure. So something that comes up a lot with parasites is. Should I do a prophylactic parasite protocol every year?

[00:28:06] Christa: And this is kind of fresh on my mind as I just finished traveling in Peru last week and I don't eat raw fish anymore cause I look at too many stool tests and my friend brought me some ceviche and I was like, Hmm. I really don't like to eat ru fish, but I decided to try. I'm like, guess I'm going home to do some prophylactic, like short-term para to nail anything I may have just picked up there.

[00:28:31] Christa: So I think that there are times, I think let's talk about a vector points for parasites that say like if you have these vector points, like if you're consuming sushi, if you're consuming this, you're probably gonna need to do a parasite protocol. Let's. 

[00:28:45] Elizabeth Yarnell: Okay, so it's really, really easy to pick up parasites, unfortunately.

[00:28:49] Elizabeth Yarnell: Mm-hmm. You can pick them up through swimming in a river or a lake, or even a public pool or waterpark. Every summer I watch as the news finds reports of Giardia in. Highly chlorinated public water parks. Mm-hmm. So you can pick it up there, you can pick up parasites through, uh, walking barefoot in the grass or swampy areas, or sometimes even on the beach down in South America, they call them.

[00:29:16] Elizabeth Yarnell: They bite through the feet. They come up through your feet. Those are, they've just recently been discovered in southern Texas, so they're definitely coming north, but you can. Parasites from playing with your dog. You can get it from changing your kitty litter. Tea G comes through kitty litter. You can get parasites from eating unwashed produce.

[00:29:37] Elizabeth Yarnell: Remember in 2018 when there were a dozen McDonald's across a bunch of Midwestern states that found cyclospora in their salads? You can get it certainly from uncooked or raw fish. Also undercooked or raw pork, right? Can you carry? That's it. No, no, no. The parasite that comes from pork, certainly we deworm our animals, our dogs and cats and horses, things like that on a fairly regular basis.

[00:30:06] Elizabeth Yarnell: They can carry things. Certainly a lot of these things can be spread and picked up by humans. It depends on your. Some of it depends on your personal hygiene. Like a lot of parasites get spread in daycare centers from people who aren't very good at changing diapers and then being clean about it. Another way that people are picking up parasites is the C D.

[00:30:28] Elizabeth Yarnell: C thinks maybe fresh cilantro. So you can think about how frequently. You might have seen fresh cilantro on a menu sprinkled on top of everything. Well, that can carry Cyclospora, and they don't really know where that's coming from. Back in the nineties, let's not forget, the entire city of Milwaukee was infected with Cryptosporidium through their municipal water supply.

[00:30:50] Christa: Thanks Milwaukee,

[00:30:54] Christa: and we just kind of pretend like it wasn't really there sometimes. So to answer it. So I think there's this answers the questions that there's a lot of vector points. Are we gonna be reinfected all the time? And so then the question is, are we stressed about this or do you just do some, I kind of waffle between is it necessary to do anti, like a prophylactic antipas protocol on an annual basis, or only if you become symptomatic?

[00:31:20] Elizabeth Yarnell: That's such a good question. I tend to lean more towards, if you're symptomatic or if you have a history, like you just came from Peru. Mm-hmm. Last year I went to Ecuador. Yes. I did it. After I came back from Ecuador, I did another parasite protocol. I wasn't having any issues, but. You know, we ate street food.

[00:31:42] Elizabeth Yarnell: We, there were a lot of things that maybe might have been a little foreign to my body to begin with, and I think it's not a bad idea as far as I can tell. There's really no harm done. Most of my clients, I'm gonna say all of my clients have tolerated the herbal ingredients very well, very easily. Some of them have had to go on to.

[00:32:06] Elizabeth Yarnell: More intense parasitic removal they had before they came to me. Nobody had ever talked about parasites. They never thought about it. But then they started doing the protocol, parasites start coming out. They, they realized they definitely have parasites. They maybe repeat the month long protocol. They're still coming out.

[00:32:24] Elizabeth Yarnell: And then we move on to some more other protocols to try to help dislodge the ones that are still stuck in there. I have one client, she lives in The Bahamas. She has multiple sclerosis. Hmm. And when she started working with me, as I said, I put. Every single person who works out with me on a parasite protocol because it is so gentle and it's so foundational, if you have those buggers, they're not that much we can do to help you.

[00:32:49] Elizabeth Yarnell: So she's, she did the parasite protocol, saw lots of parasites coming out, but still continued to see what looked like kind of sesame seeds in her stool. Which of course were the eggs, and she was concerned about that and she improved a lot, but there were still some multiple sclerosis symptoms even after we had done all the other protocols with the dietary changes, was still having some symptoms and still seeing the seeds in her poop and.

[00:33:16] Elizabeth Yarnell: She suspected maybe she still had parasites. She repeated the original protocol, got some more out, but was still seeing seeds in her poop. Went on the next layer of protocol and lo and behold, she texted. She emailed me last week and said that there was a worm hanging out of her butt. Sorry to be so 

[00:33:35] Christa: graphic.

[00:33:36] Christa: No, that happens. You know, and so that actually begs the question, do you have to see parasites? You know, I think that's like, we always like validation. So people, if they know, you've give, given some descriptions of things that people can commonly see, but not everyone sees them and they think the other comment there is it different.

[00:33:51] Christa: Different organisms responded, different treatment. 

[00:33:54] Elizabeth Yarnell: So, yes, and since we really can't figure out which parasites are the problems or which treatments they'll respond to, sometimes it takes a few different treatments. Some parasites are visible to the naked eye and some parasites are visible under microscopes and then other parasites.

[00:34:10] Elizabeth Yarnell: You need incredibly intense, microscopic, and amplification, and the right medium on the. Slide to even be able to see there's parasites. One of those is Chagas. Chagas is a parasite that is a vector born, so it comes in through mosquitoes or flies. Mm-hmm. And we didn't even mention ticks, which are other vectors that can carry parasites and it go lives in your bloodstream.

[00:34:36] Elizabeth Yarnell: Chagas does. So you can do lots of parasite testing for chaga, for parasites. And if you're just looking at stool, you're never gonna find. 

[00:34:46] Christa: Mm-hmm. That's how I feel right now. I'm still itching. Bizarre bug bites from Faru a week later that I only got in one spot and then had a fever when I came home. I'm like, probably picked up something really awful from those bug bites, 

[00:35:00] Elizabeth Yarnell: so.

[00:35:00] Elizabeth Yarnell: Right. So like CT flies, carry parasites, all those things, right? 

[00:35:05] Christa: Yeah. Good. Times. Times. Well, where did parasites fall in? You had this MS. Diagnosis. Let's see. I'm trying to do the math here. You started treating parasites after your MS diagnosis, 

[00:35:16] Elizabeth Yarnell: right? I did. Well, I had done fragile before my MS diagnosis.

[00:35:20] Elizabeth Yarnell: Mm-hmm. But I didn't even know about anything herbal or natural before that. So I didn't treat parasites herbally for seven years after my 

[00:35:30] Christa: diagnosis. So tell me about after you treated parasites, how did that affect or change some of your ms. 

[00:35:37] Elizabeth Yarnell: Yes. Well, it was amazing. I just felt so good after treating for the parasites.

[00:35:44] Elizabeth Yarnell: I. 40 years old. I was doing like amazing things like taking double jazz size classes back to back. I had little kids. I was working around the clock trying to build my businesses. I just had so much energy and my husband, after he did his first parasite cleanse, So he is a competitive runner and he had been really since high school and after he did his parasite cleanse, he started breaking five minute miles again in his late forties.

[00:36:13] Elizabeth Yarnell: I think he might have been 50 at that time, and he just was able for the first time since we had gone to Asia, to regain and hold on to the weight that he had lost from that initial. Infestation of parasites that had gotten us both so sick when we were abroad, so he hadn't been able to put that weight back on literally for 10 years.

[00:36:37] Elizabeth Yarnell: And so he was able to do that and his athletic performance just like skyrocketed, which he was super excited about, and he just felt so much better. Oftentimes what I find when people do a parasite protocol is that they don't really feel anything d. During the protocol, if it is a newer parasitic infection, then there's more of a chance that you're gonna feel like an amazing difference within five days of starting.

[00:37:06] Elizabeth Yarnell: But if it's an older one and you're in that chronic phase, it may take a little while and oftentimes people will report back that they really didn't feel anything while they were going through the protocol. But three months later, It was almost like they woke up and like the world was a brighter place and they just felt so much better.

[00:37:26] Elizabeth Yarnell: They hadn't realized how much fighting off parasites lowers their vitality. Mm-hmm. And their zest for a living. I think of it sometimes as it's like, it's almost like the gauze has come down from in front of your eyes. The colors are brighter, more vivid. Everything just seems more full of possibility.

[00:37:45] Elizabeth Yarnell: One of my clients is a spiritual counselor. And when she went through the parasite protocol, she realized that parasites have a consciousness and she really felt that parasites were at her parasites were actively working against her in many ways to stop her from getting rid of them and killing them off.

[00:38:05] Elizabeth Yarnell: Hmm. So I think that that's possible too. I think that. If you feel like you have some blocks going on in your life, it could be the block, the the consciousness of the parasites or the fact that they're really blocking your life force, your chi, your flow. 

[00:38:21] Christa: Everything's trying to stay alive. Right? So might be stepping on someone else's shoulders to try to do that.

[00:38:26] Christa: It's true. 

[00:38:27] Elizabeth Yarnell: Mm-hmm. It's true. And you know what really kills me is when I read about those trials for multiple sclerosis and other autoimmunity where they intentionally introduce a parasite into someone's body. And they say, oh, well look, her MS symptoms are gone. Well cause body trying to get rid of that parasite.

[00:38:46] Elizabeth Yarnell: But bodies can't get rid of parasites on their own. I think it is just irresponsible. Obviously those trials were designed by people who've never been infected with parasites. Mm-hmm. Before. Cause I would never intentionally wish parasitic infection on. 

[00:39:02] Christa: Yeah, it's such a tricky thing cuz it's, they've been around for a long time and people will often say like, oh, shouldn't you be able to fight that off on your own?

[00:39:08] Christa: I'm like, that doesn't make sense to me cause it's a different living organism. But I do know that the presence really reduces the, the resilience or the constitution is really the concern. And I think, you know, I was recently studying. A saint from like 1100 Whow wrote a book on botanical and herbal medicine.

[00:39:25] Christa: And, and the thing is like people have been using plants and herbs since the beginning of time to treat things right. We just don't always have it all in writing and we probably do, we're just ignoring it cause it's from a couple thousand years ago. 

[00:39:38] Elizabeth Yarnell: Well, a lot of, in our country and in the US a lot of the reasons why we no longer know about these things is because of.

[00:39:46] Elizabeth Yarnell: The Flexner report, which came out in 1910, which demonized the natural health industry and strove to put every natural health practitioner out of business and only allow medical practices that practice pharmaceutical medicine because. It was the Dale Report was paid for by Andrew Carnegie and JD Rockefeller, and they owned most of the oil in the United States, and their chemists discovered that they could make medicines out of petroleum, and they wanted to corner the market.

[00:40:20] Elizabeth Yarnell: I have 

not 

[00:40:20] Christa: heard that in the past. So 

[00:40:21] Elizabeth Yarnell: now I'm piece of little known history that we should all know. Hmm. 

[00:40:25] Christa: Very interesting. Well, we've covered a lot. It's kind of hard to summarize. We went from diet to parasites. We didn't directly mention this, but para, we talked about it offline. The parasites are often a cause of food sensitivities.

[00:40:38] Christa: Right. Which I think that's relevant to say. Yeah. Cause it's like something 

they 

[00:40:42] Elizabeth Yarnell: leave you pockmark and perforated and inflamed. Mm-hmm. As we know whenever there's inflammation, there's inflammation in the digestive tract, and that leads to leaky gut and all sorts of other things. And the one of the things I wanted to add really quickly was that our body's immune system, our white blood cells, works really well to protect the body against invasion from foreign invaders that are virus and bacteria.

[00:41:07] Elizabeth Yarnell: We have heat, we have inflammation, we have antibodies. But not at all against parasites. Parasites don't care about any of those. So when there are parasites in the body, the white B blood cells say sound the alarm. There's foreign invaders, there's foreign invaders. It starts off the immune cascade of inflammation, but parasites don't care about that.

[00:41:26] Elizabeth Yarnell: So you end up in this vicious cycle of chronic inflammation for seemingly no reason, which leads to auto. I. 

[00:41:33] Christa: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Do you ever use white blood cell counts as a potential indicator for parasites or not really? I'm a 

[00:41:41] Elizabeth Yarnell: traditional MathPath, so I don't draw blood like that. I definitely use functional medicine labs, and if somebody has their counts from their doctor, then yes, I'll look at them, but I don't rely on them.

[00:41:54] Elizabeth Yarnell: I, as I said, most people have parasites, and if you have a chronic health problem, there's probably parasites in there, so I just make everybody do. Well, I feel 

[00:42:03] Christa: like getting, uh, we just started to broach the topic about fingers, lights, honestly. I know. Where can, where can people find you online? And I know you're writing a book about multiple sclerosis that's coming out in March, right?

[00:42:17] Elizabeth Yarnell: It is March is MS. Awareness Month, so that's when my book, multiple Sclerosis from Life Sentence to Life Solution will come out. And the best place to go to find me is elizabeth yanell.com. My website, everything is kind of focused and hub there. But I would love to offer listeners a little gift if that's okay with you.

[00:42:40] Elizabeth Yarnell: That's. So we talked about inflammation a lot in this hour, and I have an inflammation quiz that can help you assess the amount of inflammation that's going on in your body. It does take like seven or eight minutes, so give yourself a little bit of time and. And go through the questions and really look at them because there will be questions on there that never occurred to you or might be due to inflammation about symptoms in your body.

[00:43:10] Elizabeth Yarnell: So it can be a really helpful tool and you can get [email protected]. 

[00:43:16] Christa: Thanks so much for coming on today, 

[00:43:17] Elizabeth Yarnell: Elizabeth. Hey, thanks for having. 

[00:43:21] Christa: Sharing and reviewing this podcast is the best way to help us succeed with our mission. To help integrate the best of East and West and empower you to raise the bar on your health story, just go to review this podcast.com/less stressed life.

[00:43:36] Christa: That's review this podcast.com/less stressed life, and you'll be taken directly to a page where you can insert your review and hit post.