Episode 26: Girls on the Brink
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Kara: Sick of the fatigue and fog? Fed up with the unpredictable flares? Hangry from the super restrictive diets?
Hello, and welcome to the Crunchy Allergist Podcast,
A podcast empowering those who like me, appreciate both a naturally minded and scientifically grounded approach to health and healing.
Hi, I'm your host, Dr. Kara Wada, quadruple board certified pediatric and adult allergy immunology and lifestyle medicine, physician Sjogren's patient and life coach.
My recipe for success combines, the anti-inflammatory lifestyle, trusting therapeutic relationships, modern medicine, and mindset to harness our body's ability to heal.
Now although I might be a physician, I'm not your physician and this podcast is for educational purposes only.
Thank you so much to everyone for returning this week for the Crunchy Allergist podcast, if you're new, Welcome!
This is where we talk about all things, allergies, autoimmunity, and anti-inflammatory living.
Today I am so honored and excited to welcome a really special guest. It is author Donna Jackson-nakazawa.
She's an award-winning science journalist.
She's the author of seven books and an internationally recognized speaker whose work explores this really cool intersection of neuroscience, immunology, and human emotion.
Things that I get super excited and I say nerd out about.
She has an upcoming book called Girls On The Brink: helping our daughters thrive in an era of increased anxiety, depression, and social media.
Which is available for pre-order now, wherever books are sold, but is coming out on September 13th.
If you followed me for a while, I'm a huge fan of, especially her book, The Angel and The Assassin: The Tiny Brain Cell That Changed The Course of Medicine, which was named one of the best books in 2020 by Wired Magazine.
This is also the book that taught me about the microglial cells, which I've talked about, I think on the podcast or on social media, that these are cells that were only mentioned a couple times in my immunology textbook.
I just finished training in 2016 so I haven't been out in practice that long, but this is really cutting edge, amazing information.
Her writing's been featured in all of the big places, Wire, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post.
She has appeared on the today show NPR and is a regular speaker at top universities like Harvard, Rockhurst, and John Hopkins, and also has spoken at the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine and their conferences.
I'm so excited to have you join us, Donna, to chat, and to connect.
Donna: I'm really delighted to be here, Kara, and meet you at last.
We've known about each other for a little while, so it's delightful to be I guess we could call this face to face.
Kara: I know to meet as close as possible to real life. In the virtual space.
Donna: That's exactly right. So thank you for having me.
Kara: Thank you.
I was thinking about that a lot. I feel super honored.
I was able to get a sneak peek at your book, Girls on the Brink.
I've been really thinking a lot about where to find the balance in this digital age, and especially as a mom to two girls andin Oliver, too.
Maybe you could start by sharing a little bit about your story before we dig into to the real meat of everything.
Donna: Sure. I think most people know me first and foremost as a science journalist, like you, I love to nerd out if you read my books, you do too.
Sitting on the bench in labs and following people, both neuroscientists, clinicians, and individuals suffering with different struggles of body and mind for years.
Then doing what we're trained to do as science journalist and putting it through that discernment to see how A plus B equals C.
Because all of these things happen in silos that different areas of medicine, neuro and immunology and real patient life and clinical practice.
To take all of that and braid it together so that we break down the silos and we create a narrative that hopefully can articulate things, translate things, present things in a way that we erase the mystique.
We find our common ground and we can begin to affect real change.
We close up that 20 year gap from lab bench to clinician's office
Kara: I love how you explain that with weaving together and braiding things together.
It really is so challenging when you are in the clinical space, in the zone of seeing patients, and answering messages.
Trying to stay afloat, stay up on what's going on in your area, but then also reconcile that with everything else that's going on beyond.
Donna: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Kara: It's something, I guess I had not really considered but really maybe needs to be considered as a vital part of the healthcare team as well.
We think about dieticians and nurses and everything, but I would hazard to say that perhaps we really do need that other outside voice to help bring those voices.
To bring it all together.
Donna: Yeah, because I think that the goal of science journalism is to braid in the lived experience while closing that gap between the science and the patient but also immerse in meaning and narrative.
Of course, every book I write is informed by the personal too, because I am a long time autoimmune patient.
I have had neurological autoimmune disease fail me multiple times.
I did raise young children from a wheelchair several times.
I know what it's like to be the patient, but the professional at the same time.
I don't know what it's like to be a doctor, although there are a lot of doctors in the family and scientists.
But I do know what it's like to have a career that you've created and also be battling severe flares or periods of autoimmunity, and also be raising children and also wanna articulate a truth that will help others, even as you're helping yourself and doctors or caregivers.
They're as the French say the church in the village, and I think that we share a lot of common purposes.
I often find that at medical conferences that we all get ignited by that same desire to maybe make meaning out of our own stories, by helping other people make meaning out of theirs.
Kara: Yeah. It's in that added layer with it.
Having that personal connection, too, of trying to make lemonade out of some pretty sour lemons when it comes to our immune systems.
Donna: Yes. Yes.
You will see the immune systems show up in all my books, as including this one.
Kara: I think, leaning into this new book, really bringing up some information that was really surprising for me to hear, which is the skyrocketing rates of anxiety and depression in our young girls in teens.
Donna: That's right. In the book, because I try to, even though, as, kara, I'm a very complex writer, like we're not talking simple concepts, but I do break things down through metaphor and narrative in a way that I think lands or I hope it does.
I included in the book a couple of pages of statistics, data mind, and through many of the top research institutes that look at these very discreet numbers, which compare male and female thriving across the lifespan.
Some of the stats are really pretty shocking, including a third of 17 year old girls report prior to the pandemic, a period of true depression.
We're not talking, just sad over breakup or school wasn't going well.
We're talking like loss of interest in activities, not wanting to go to school, severe fatigue, or change of appetite.
We know that girls now have twice the anxiety rate of boys at the same ages.
We also know that the suicide rate, which is high for both sexes, because I do wanna get in later how much I care about boys.
I'm the mother of a daughter and the mother of a son.
The suicide rate over a very recent year went up 51% among girls and 4% of boys.
I've had physicians tell me that their psych ward are 90% girls.
I've had nurses at schools tell me that their infirmaries are wall to wall girls.
There's so many other stats I could throw in here that would show not only the gap between how our girls are doing and our boys are doing, but that the gap keeps widening and widening.
We're looking at double and triple the rates of depression and anxiety for girls, depending which study.
We're also looking at that gap, getting bigger and bigger over time.
I think it's a disservice to all of our children, of any gender of wherever they are on the gender. Because we exclude no one.
But I think it's a disservice to not look at this science and also begin to put it together with the fact that it was only in 2016, that the NIH kindly requested that preclinical research and translational research include female models of how stress intersects with the brain in the immune system.
Prior to that, researchers wanted to keep those pesky female hormones out of it.
It's taken those six years since 2016.
Again, this isn't a demand. It's an ask, it's a request.
But as that request has been answered primarily by female researchers who like, yeah.
They begun to get the answers in animal models and begin to look at it more closely in clinical, in real life lived experience.
The staggering differences between how stress affects the immune system and the brain across development in females.
Compared to what happens in the face of testosterone.
We never looked at it before.
You see these skyrocketing numbers.
You see the world our kids are growing up in, which is not the world we grew up in on a dozen levels.
You look at the fact that we're just beginning to see that chronic toxic stress creates global changes in the developing female brain as estrogen comes on board.
That we don't see in the same way in the male brain.
It doesn't mean boys aren't suffering. They are.
But it's a different process.
We've looked at the process of what happens in the male brain, in the face of stress, we know a lot about that.
This is new.
Kara: It's, I think, important enough to restate that it's only been since 2016, that there's even been this ask, like you said, and not a mandate to look at this in women.
I find, it's very saddening of course, but it's also, obviously hindsight's always 2020, but we've known about the increased predominance for instance of depression in the postpartum period.
The influence of those hormonal shifts and things going on in the woman's body, increasing our risk for certainly anxiety, depression, but also postpartum autoimmunity flaring up.
Especially currently, still not too far out from that window with an almost eight month old, that's pretty fresh in my mind.
Donna: Yeah.
Kara: Also thinking, clinically how I will many times see female patients who will say, "yeah, my symptoms started during around that puberty time," whether it is allergy or autoimmunity things where the immune system is going off kilter a little bit.
It's not surprising, but yet here we are just on, to use your word, thebrinkbrain of kind of seeing even just a little bit of, I think we're just hitting the tip of the iceberg is where I'm going with my mixed metaphors.
Donna: No. I believe me, ask my editor, I mix metaphors all the time.
It just it's a sign, usually, that we're excited about something and we're excited even though it's dreadful what's happening, but we're excited.
Because I think information is the only way to change.
Now, I wanna also counter that by saying, I really wish we didn't need to know this in order to wanna help girls.
That it would be enough to say girls are really struggling.
Their rates of depression and anxiety have doubled and tripled over the past several decades.
That's enough to know that they're suffering to just break out every possible new strategy antidote.
In the book, I have 15 antidotes and each of those has breakdown antidotes based on really amazing public health research and science.
But unfortunately, for us as a society, it isn't enough to know that people are suffering.
It just isn't enough.
So I come in with the facts and I hope that the facts, coupled with the narratives and the stories and the metaphor and the belief and the faith of the magic of words, I hope that it's enough.
That it makes us go, "I'm gonna get on what I can do about this."
Now, I am not waiting because these changes are happening in real time in girls right now.
And I'm sorry that we have to know this in order to want to double down on the fixes, but that seems to be how we're made as humans.
Kara: It's also so hard living within this context of time when like soundbites and the sexy headlines are what grab attention and our attention span is so short.
It really does, these topics that really require a lot of nuance and discussion, and really waiting into that murky, great area of the uncertainties in evolving science. But I hold out hope too, we will we'll move the dial.
Donna: I do as well.
As my agent often says to me," Oh, it sounds like you have another idea that's so gnarly, no one else will touch it."
And I go, "Yeah, because if we don't, if we don't put these pieces together and I will say that all of this is done.
What I do, you asked me a little bit about what do I do, what I do is doesn't exist without the incredible researchers who I spend time with and drive insane but end up being friends with over time.
When we talk about all of this, it's also very much to the credit of people like Tracy Bale at university of Maryland, who's director of the program in epigenetics and development and she's just actually moved to Colorado this week to take on an entirely new, very cool thing there.
She did the research to show how when estrogen comes in, it ramps up this immune response in a way that is critical in the developing female brain.
Because the one thing, so this is gonna be like a circular answer so hold on people, I promise I'll close the loop.
So the one thing the brain is asking from the time it's born and it's chatting with the immune system 24 hours a day about its answers.
Am I safe or not safe?
All of that is stored in the brain experiences with caregivers, experiences with the world around us, the environment, the neighborhood, the daycare center, the school, where am I safe or not safe.
As a child's brain answers that question, if the answer is I'm not safe, whether it's because, a parent blows up or has a substance use problem, or untreated depression, or hasn't addressed their own trauma so they're not regulated.
That answer becomes repetitively, not all the time, but repeatedly, I'm not safe.
Then what begins to happen over time is the brain works a chess game on the computer.
It's storing all the past moves so that it can figure out what moves it needs to make in the future.
If the answer is, I don't know when I'm safe and not safe around here, or in my neighborhood, or when shots are fired, then the brain begins to take all that into account as it enters puberty.
The brain becomes, through that puberty remodeling that all of you as doctors know about, there in which the brain is pretty much remodeled based on all the Intel from those past 9, 10, 11, 12 years.
When the brain has to remodel based on the idea of not being safe, that switches neural structure, and neural connectivity in ways that we don't wanna see.
We just don't wanna see that.
Estrogen is rushing in, which is what sets the signals for this remodel.
We all know that estrogen is really groovy.
It's that thing that allows us as women to have smaller organs, but also carry a baby, but also run a marathon, just like a guy, whatever it's got like this immune boosting power.
It has that, so that we have a little more protection for carrying a baby in the womb, but it also means we have a warmed up response to stressors, toxins, lots of different things.
You know that as a doctor, because it's why women suffer from autoimmunity at so many times the rate of men.
Virtually across almost all autoimmune diseases, except myocarditis being a different story.
Estrogens coming in, there's a sense of unsafety, which has increased in kids' lives in today's world, especially with everything heating up socially, politically, environmentally, and online, and on social media, and all that intel is being taken into account.
As estrogen comes in, the brain is remodeled and estrogen is whomping up that immune stress response.
We only started to get it very recently.
Kara: An important thing to mention is that, even these instances of perceived stress, perceived slight, or, I was very, very well acquainted with the mean girls phenomenon, growing up.
But that's all, first of all, magnified on social media with all the likes or comments or, what have you. Shares all of those things.
But that is seen by our brains and by our immune system as if we are being chased by a tiger or a lion.
Donna: That's right. That's right.
To break that down, we can thank the amazing George, head of behavioral sciences, I apologized to all of my researchers, I didn't put their IDs in front of me, at UCLA and he's head of the UCLA stress lab.
He's a real game changer. He's really changing the way we see stress and development with the state of California.
But anyway, George is the scientific father of what we call social safety theory.
There are other researchers who agree wholeheartedly with this, he is not alone in this.
He's just the first person to really name it.
That across evolutionary time, we had very good reason to feel that social threats or social stress were physically dangerous.
Why is that?
Let's go way back in time, discovery channel way back to hunters and gatherers.
During that time close cooperation with the tribe was essential.
You were in a small tribe, a small band living with whatever food you could get.
Keeping out predators.
Keeping out marauding tribes.
Worrying about the weather and the most dangerous thing that could happen to you.
Wasn't going hungry. It was being socially slighted. Or socially dissed or talked about behind your back.
Because those were signals that you and your gene pool, your children would be moved closer to the edge of the tribe.
The closer you get to the edge or the outskirts, or completely being ostracized, the more likely you are to be physically wounded or to be attacked by a marauding tribe.
Attacked by a predator.
Be left to the elements where you over time without any defenses, without any foods, shelter, were very unlikely to survive.
The immune system is super smart.
From reading my book, The Angel and The Assassin, we only learned 10 years ago, thanks to best Stevens at Harvard, that immune cells in the brain would gobble up synapses under a lot of social stress.
We didn't even think there was a functioning immune system in the brain.
The brain was immune privilege.
The immune system has been like the smart, sneaky thing all this time throughout the history of medicine.
We've just been giving it a really good look for about 25 years.
Take this to the way the immune system evolved with our brain over time to Pre-detect social threat, ramp up a huge immune response to protect against future physical danger.
Add in the world that our kids are living in today.
The lack of community. Add in estrogen coming in to remodel the brain.
Now add in the fact that puberty is happening earlier and earlier before girls have the coping skills that come through adolescence, right?
Like puberty and remodeling of the brain shouldn't happen. before you learn the coping skills that should come during development for the world around us.
All those things are happening and then you're online getting likes, dislikes, girls are shamed more on social media.
They have to present more of their physical body and face and posture and show more skin to even be liked on TikTok, to even be liked on Instagram.
They get more criticism from girls and they get shaming and critiquing about their body and faces from boys.
It's really not so surprising that we're seeing what we're seeing.
I think after researching and writing the book, there's no surprise here.
Kara: I wonder what we're gonna see in 20 years in this same corrugation.
Donna: My heartfelt reason for writing this book is to prevent that scenario.
Kara: I have a niece who is 12, going on 13, and sister-in-law who I very much look up to and has done a fantastic job of raising her and my nephew.
But this book will be on its way to just continue to encourage that too.
I think just that reassurance, that yes, I think, the decisions that they have already had to make, being six years ahead of where we are with our family.
It's keep up the hard work, and the good work and the hard work, because a lot of these conversations that you do.
An awesome job of giving us even scripts as parents like to walk through.
Donna: They're so important to me. So important to me.
The last half of the book is 15 antidotes that are neuroprotective.
Each of them, I break down into subcategories, but in each incident I am giving you scripts because here's what happens.
A lot of us come to parenting with our own adversity or history of adversity or trauma caregivers.
I teach at a lot of medical schools doctors have higher rates of childhood trauma than other groups.
So do therapists, counselors, teachers.
It is a thing where you try to make meaning out of healing others, when maybe you didn't have all the resources or support that you needed.
It's not true in every case, but it is more true than it is for some other professions.
That said most of us, no matter what we do, have some degree of adversity that from our childhood, that plays out in our parenting and it's our job to do the work with that.
But while we're doing the work, we are imperfect. I know I am. I know I was. I have two kids.
They could tell you themselves, my imperfections.
I cop up to all of them, every single one, especially after writing this book and see. Oh, that's fight to it, right?
Oh, okay. Let me just spend two days following this incredible person who's working on this at this place.
That's how you do it.
Putting together those scripts, because when the following things intersect, you are super stressed, I haven't met a parent who isn't super stressed before the pandemic, and now it's just whole other level.
You're super stressed.
You have something that happens.
That's hard in family life.
Your child is in some kind of way in an issue, that's already an issue for you.
You react. Your brain goes completely offline so that you don't even really see or hear how you're responding.
Go back to what I said earlier, that this container of safety, am I safe or not safe?
How often am I safe?
Or am I chronically safe, but unsafe?
Am I safe some days, but unsafe others.
So the brain is gonna spit some of the worst things.
It's ever learned in those moments because the brain is offline.
What scripts do and why I love them, when they're well researched and all the most brilliant minds in the country sign off on them.
They align with what I also have learned to be true, you can practice that.
I'm going to tell you that when you begin to learn those scripts, they're just a jumping off point to your own scripts.
But they are so important in that phase of turning it around so that the emotional climate in the home.
The antidotes that you're bringing in ways to shore up support for your daughter, not just at home, but out in the broader community, to make sure she's ready to stand up and go out in this crazy world by herself one day to do all those things, is it's a lot.
But it can be very simple to begin with go-to scripts for given situations and to have it broken down for you so that you can cherry pick. I think this will really work.
I think this sounds like me. I think that this is the thing I was looking for and that's how I tried to write the second half of the book as a mother.
This was what I was looking for. Nobody gave it to me. I wanted it. I had to make it.
Kara: Thank you.
I bookmarked pretty much each one of those scripts.
We may just have copies around the house, especially fast forward, we start first grade in a week, so we'll see how that goes.
Donna: So exciting.
Hey, I have one early reader told me that she had gotten a poster board and colored Sharpies and made these big blow up poster boards handwritten some of the scripts on them and put them on the inside of her cabinets.
Oh, has a lot of this stuff happens, the kitchen. Yes.
We're in the kitchen so much with our kids. So anyway, I thought that was clever.
Kara: Random house made me need to add that too.
Donna: Oh yeah. Here are your kitchen counter in, inside your kitchen cabinet door, blow up script. I kinda like that.
Kara: Like a principle.
Donna: We do have, by the way, I will throw this out, an online healing narrative course or healing narrative, which is a writing, I say writing, it's a write to heal program.
It's got a lot of drawing and audio and video and also writing that I also do with physicians.
We do have that online to help people work through some of their own stuff.
Kara: Yeah.
Donna: To help them be the parent they wanna be.
In the spring we'll have an online version for parenting girls specifically.
Kara: Oh, exciting.
Donna: Yeah, it is exciting. But for right now, the program online is.
If you feel like your stuff is getting in the way, your stress is getting in the way, of being who you wanna be when you're communicating with your child or playing into your reactions in hard moments or making it hard for you to be that person, your child turns to during very hard stuff.
This course is definitely for you. It just flips a lot of those inner narratives that are contributing to that kind of parenting moment.
Kara: Where could people find that information?
Donna: On my website, it's under courses.
Courses I've taught at medical schools and I will say physicians are very good candidates for it.
It also allows for some of the tools to be used in narrative medicine, which I think is pretty cool.
It just opens a door.
It's opening a door to a different way of thinking about who you are and your own story.
By the end of the course, you're flipping it in a way that really is working for you.
You've left some of the worst of how you came to believe. You are in the world behind and opened up to some other really embodied possibilities for how you wanna be and who, and how you are.
I think it matters in patient interactions. It matters in parenting interactions. So I'm really proud of that.
And I think yes, it's just one more resource out.
Kara: That's fantastic. From what I, what you're saying it sounds like a way to really practice and bring into practice a lot of that self-compassion and awareness.
That
Donna: Absolutely
Kara: It's critical.
Donna: It's a process I developed called neural renarrating where we're really breaking down some of the stories and thoughts through different exercises.
Of course, writing, drawing mindfulness, embodiment meditation, but breaking it down in small steps, going slower and slowly down into the core of it safely.
Then coming back up with a different set of revelations awarenesses and tools to ground ourselves.
So that the old stories, coupled with the stuff coming at us in the moment, don't knock us over quite so much.
Kara: Build that resiliency. Yeah. Awesome. I would love, do you have any parting words of advice or things you'd like?
Donna: Yes. I would say that I guess two things:
One, the reasons why girls are faring as they are, is not one thing, it's multifactorial.
There's so many accelerants on this fire.
It's not about what's happening.
It's about all that is happening at the same time and how it intersects with this very new science on development through puberty for girls.
That means that when we think about the reason so much of the book is devoted, my books, I usually don't devote half the book to what do you do?
Because I get so caught up in the science but to me, because the "whys" are so complicated and multifactorial, I wanted half of this book to just be about, "look, you're a parent, I'm a parent, you're an educator, you're a clinician, you are a therapist, whoever you are, you can do it now."
This is gonna be broken down for you. You can pick three things, you can start three things today, tonight.
That takes me to my second thing.
It's never too late to bundle together practices that you feel resonate for you.
No one can pick them for you.
That's why I've given you so many and bundle them together in a way that fits into your family life, your parenting style, your community, your daughter's unique and beautiful personality.
Build these out.
They're very buildable and build them out so that you have lots of different neuroprotective strategies going at the same time.
Maybe not all 15. Maybe five are like the bomb for you.
That takes me to the next thing.
It is never too late. It's never too late.
I started writing this book and my daughter was still an adolescent and I began shifting certain things and it makes a difference.
Our connection is different.
Our trust is different.
Her ability to come to me with hard things is different.
I'm different.
I'm not saying that, I live a perfect, there's no, I'm not saying that at all.
My daughter has mental health struggles and I'm not here to tell her story only.
She can tell her story, but I've been there.
I am there. I know.
We're not trying to make something completely fixed and better because we make that mistake as parents all the time.
We're either the detective.
What happened? Who sent you that text? How do you feel? Well, do you feel better ?
Or were the fixer, like I called this person, I talked to your teacher, whatever.
Just to not be that person and see what's working for them by shifting things on all these 15 levels.
It doesn't matter where you are in the process.
What I don't want is for parenting to be listening to this and say it's too late.
I already messed it up.
That is absolutely never true. Never true.
Kara: I think reading it too, gave me and I've seen this evolution with with personal professional development and then my growth as a mom, too.
But seeing my parents parenting through a different lens and really having that realization, they did the best they could with what they had.
Then trying to take that next step of realizing. That's the same for you.
That we're doing the best we can with what we have at the moment.
Coming back to that, we're perfectly imperfect.
Donna: Yes. Moms, particularly mothers, particularly the female brain, more than the male brain, for reasons having to do with the left amygdala perfusion, for the nerds in the room, tends to ruminate more.
Moms tend to ruminate more.
Mothers, especially over their children.
Rumination is a trauma head space.
Getting caught up in a lot of, I could have, I should have, if I had and it always comes with self blame and self-recrimination and judgment.
We know we're ruminating when we're getting judgey, right?
Like judgey about other people's behavior.
Judgey about the teacher at school.
Our husband this morning. Our child.
Yet the judgey always switches into judgment of self and a lack of self-compassion, and then with rumination, you get caught in that.
The brain just keeps doing it in the hippocampus over and over.
The default mode network is completely offline.
The amygdala is going boom.
It's hard to break the action of rumination with another action.
This is why i implore moms not to be hard on themselves.
Implore them not to get into rumination about what they've done or could have done better.
Remember in every moment, I'm learning as I go.
You may still have the reactions today that you had a year ago.
You're aware. You saw it.
That puts you already in a completely different place to just go, "oh, this is happening. I can make a repair."
And I walk you through how to do that in the book.
Now I can ground myself and my body so that I can ground my child.
I walk you through how to do that.
Now I can begin to bring in these scripts.
It's catching it. It's also going into that moment of awareness without rumination.
Also grounding yourself in that moment and becoming that safe person for your child.
Then it's bringing in some of these scripts and strategies and over time it changes our neural structure to do that.
If we can begin to do it more naturally, which I promise you will you do, you went to med school guys, you can do this.
Then your child's energy begins to shift as well.
We begin to create that beautiful synchrony, where our state is regulated, and healing. And they are regulated and able to heal.
That's really what it's all about.
Kara: I can't say anything. Hard to say anything after that.
Thank you so much, Donna.
I really appreciate your time and the efforts that you, everything you're bringing to the world with.
Bringing science out of the labs, bringing a light, and an awareness to these areas that need so much more attention and more funding.
I just, I really appreciate you.
Donna: Great. Back at you.
Thank you for having me. It's been really delightful.
Kara: Thank you so much for tuning into today's episode with best selling author, Donna Jackson. Nakazawa we hope you enjoyed it.
If you did, please consider leaving a review on Apple podcasts and share this episode with a friend.
Also Donna and I would love to invite you to the very First Crunchy Allergist Book Club Event.
On October 6th, Donna and I will talk all about the research behind her new book, Girls on the Brink.
We'll discuss the new findings that reveal that the crisis facing today's adolescent girls is both a psychosocial and biologically rooted phenomenon.
During our conversation, Donna will reveal some effective strategies for raising emotionally healthy girls.
After our conversation, we will have a question and answer session with the author herself, Donna Jackson. Nakazawa.
For more details and to register, visit www.crunchyallergist.com.
Make sure to do it soon so that you get your book in time for our event on October 6th.
We look forward to seeing you and make sure to tune in again next week, as we talk all about advocacy and living into our values. In the meantime take care and be well.
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