Joanne Kennedy

100 – Joanne Kennedy

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Habits and health episode 100.

Welcome to the last edition of habits and health and my guest today, joanne Kennedy, who is a naturopath and specialist in M T H F R. Histamine intolerance, gut health, SIBO, and women’s hormones. She runs a clinical practice in Sydney, Australia, and sees patients online worldwide. And so we talk a lot about what is M T H F R and histamine intolerance and identifying root causes of illness. So all of that and a lot more to come in today’s last edition of habits and health. Hope you enjoy this week’s show

[00:00:58] Tony Winyard: Habits and health. My guest today is Joanne Kennedy. How are you Joanne?

[00:01:03] Joanne Kennedy: I’m Tony. Thanks so much for having me on your show.

[00:01:05] Tony Winyard: It’s amazing how considering the time differences between England and Australia that we are able to do this. It’s, I just can’t imagine this happening even just as recent as 10 years ago.

[00:01:16] Joanne Kennedy: Yeah, no, it’s great. Like the world is really opening up. It’s, it’s what 9:00 AM for you and 8:00 PM for me, so it’s very easily done.

[00:01:23] Tony Winyard: Yeah. Cool. So Joanne, tell us who are you as a person?

[00:01:28] Joanne Kennedy: Who am I as a person? Funnily enough to myself, I am actually a, I am an entrepreneur, and this is something that’s quite extraordinary to me to think about because I never envisaged myself as being an entrepreneur visionary, when I started on my naturopathic journey about 15 years ago. So yeah I’m a, an extroverted introvert and a visionary entrepreneur, so that’s how I’d summed myself up these days.

But if you’d asked me five years ago, I would’ve said I was a healer. But things have changed. And I think the industry that I work in and what I have seen my patients struggle with and the ill health in our chronic ill health in our modern world and how people are let down and are frustrated and at their wit’s ends has moved me to figure out solutions that I can get onto a more of a global scale than just seeing one-on-one patients in Sydney. So I’m starting to see patients globally and I’m branching into the US very soon. I haven’t been able to see patients in the US due to professional indemnity insurance restrictions, but I’ve trained a US-based practitioner to start working with me. Because the US is a market that is desperate. I honestly get emails from them every day asking me to see them as patients cuz they are very unwell and lost. So this has led me to become more of a visionary in my industry and more of an entrepreneur working out how I can get my knowledge to more people to help more.

[00:03:21] Tony Winyard: Okay. There’s a few things to explore there. How did you first, you know, so you mentioned about your naturopath, so how did that come about in the first

[00:03:29] Joanne Kennedy: place?.

[00:03:29] How Jo became a naturopath

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[00:03:29] Joanne Kennedy: What’s funny I was many years ago, I when I was about 28, I used to always say to myself, Joe, you need to start doing yoga before you turn 30 because you need to start doing yoga all the time so that you’re flexible when you’re old. I don’t know why I used to think that, but. Anyway, I joined this yoga class with this Indian teacher.

She was from Mumbai P, that was her name. She’s a really authentic Indian yoga teacher, and she was practicing out of her little studio in Sydney, and I went and met her and she’d said to me, Jo, like, you’re just, you’re holding onto the mat, like you’re gonna fall off the earth. You’re just like really highly strung.

And she said, you need to ground, down and you need. Start eating warm hot foods. I’m like, what do you mean? He goes, you need to eat warm foods. This is Ayurvedic medicine. This is Indian natural medicine. I’m like, oh, that’s fascinating. So I started googling that and I’m like, oh, you do a course in Ayurvedic medicine at the naturopathic college in Sydney.

And I went and spoke to them and I was so fortunate to get a career advisor there who was really switched on, and she said to me, Jo, you know, Ayurvedic medicine. It’s a philosophy. It’s a lifestyle of philosophy. You probably do need to go to India to take it the whole way you study for eight years in India.

She goes why don’t you just start with a western nutrition degree that you can use, you know, and start practicing. And I thought, you know, she’s. and I started studying nutrition and I had to go to the student clinic to help them get patients. They just needed more patients. So I went and they gave me some herbal medicine and they gave me a herd called Ashwaganda, or with Thania, which is really calming, and it was really calming.

I’m like this works this medicine works. So I was hooked. And then I started studying herbal medicine and moved from the nutrition degree into the naturopathy.

[00:05:23] Tony Winyard: And when you say it really worked, were you having some health issues at the time?.

[00:05:28] Joanne Kennedy: No I wasn’t, I was fortunate. I, fortunately, I haven’t had any health issues, tony, a lot of naturopaths have, I just find the history of it. The biochemistry, the history of natural medicine fascinating. But it was just it was calming. It was really calming. It just put me in a really chilled out place.

I’m like, this, it’s meant to be, it’s a calming. . I’m like, this this is really working. I can see that this works. And I became quite fascinated with that. And then I yeah, I just threw myself into my studies for five years and after that I was fortunate enough to work in a clinic that specializes in a gene mutation called the MThFR gene, which is a very common gene mutation. A lot of people are very aware of this mutation, and I was fortunate enough to work in a clinic that specialized in that it’s more functional medicine that I started to become educated in when once I left college, traditional naturopathic medicine, I moved more into functional.

Um, Which is what I do now. So I use it, I do a mix of like functional medicine where we use tests, functional medicine tests, very scientific based tests, and we draw on our evidence-based natural medicines and traditional naturopathic medicine, which sometimes doesn’t have the evidence, but it has it, it has, it’s tried and tested over years of practice.

So we tie that all together. So it’s a mix of traditional and functional medicine. That’s how I’m here today.

[00:06:54] Tony Winyard: So you started training in you know, in the Ayurveda and so on, and. I’m just wondering, so when did you start, you started working with clients, what, on a one-to-one basis initially, or working for some sort of clinic or how what

[00:07:08] How Jo began working with clients

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[00:07:08] Joanne Kennedy: Yeah. So after I graduated from college, I went and worked at a clinic called M Te f r, support Australia, that specializes in. the Mt. FFR G mutation, and this is where and issues pertaining to functional medicine. So I think what we, I need to explain is that functional medicine is getting to the root cause of illness.

And unfortunately, and I do need to say this a lot of the time in the education even in naturopathic college, And not getting to the root cause of ill health. You’re taught that but that’s not really the case. So it’s not un it’s not until you go out in your own practice and you get mentored from someone, or you do further education in functional medicine.

You are really getting to the root cause of illness, and so natural medicine lends itself beautifully to be able to healing the body when we get the results from functional medicine testing. So for instance, you can do. See, like, gut microbiome testing, right? SIBO testing, stool testing. You can do organic acids testing.

You can do dutch hormones testing. These are looking at how the body is responding, how the body is in, in real time. What is going on with your biochemistry and your microbiomes and your. And looking at very causative issues in the body.

[00:08:43] Tony Winyard: Okay, so we’ve got much better understanding of where you’ve come from and what is what it is you do. So do you specialize in any area now? Do you specialize with a certain type of demographic or.

[00:08:52] Histamine intolerance

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[00:08:52] Joanne Kennedy: Yeah. It’s really interesting. I do specialize in something Tony. It’s called histamine intolerance. and I specialize in histamine intolerance because it is extraordinarily common. So when we understand that chronic illness it’s inflammation in the body, and when there’s inflammation in the body creates. Always, and we have histamine receptors in our respiratory tract. It can cause shortness of breath, it can cause sneezing, rhinitis, sinusitis. In our cardiovascular system, it causes heart palpitations, histamine receptors in our gut. It causes chronic reflux and heartburn. It causes abdominal pain, bloating, diarrhea.

We have histamine receptors in our skin. It causes hives, eczema, it also causes acne and we also have histamine in the brain, and that will cause when it’s too high vertigo headaches, migraines, anxiety, insomnia, problems regulating your body temperature. So you can see how wide these symptoms are. It’s, and it’s coming from the inflammation that people are suffering from when they have chronic illness.

So whether that’s gut microbiome issues, food intolerances, mold, illness will do it. Lyme disease will do. Estrogen dominance, perimenopause, these conditions will drive up histamine in the body, and it’s so extraordinarily common. And it blows my mind that that more people weren’t doing it.

This is why I I I started to learn about this in my first job, and people would present with hives, which is a classic histamine symptom we know. , but then we’d be looking at treating them for that and they’d come back and their headaches had gone, their skin’s better, their sleep is better, their anxiety is better.

And it’s just like, this is histamine. So I did a deep dive into all the research on histamine, and it’s one of the most research molecules in medical science, but they’re trying to find the drugs to hit the receptors. But I’m like, how can we look at this naturally? So I just did a deep dive into all the different causes. Deep dive into histamine, the biochemistry, how it’s made in the body, how it’s broken down in the body. And then I’ve looked at all the different conditions that can cause. high histamine. And so I wrote a ebook and I’ve done a like a video masterclass on, on histamine intolerance.

It’s extraordinarily common. A lot of people don’t even know that they have a histamine intolerance though and Tony, like so many people will be Googling their symptoms. They’re seemingly unrelated symptoms, anxiety, insomnia, migraines, reflux, and they finally figure out its histamine. which is a shame because you should be able to go to your GP and then recognize it that they don’t.

So this is how I’ve been able to develop a business around this because it’s extraordinarily common and people are suffering from it in a really big way.

[00:12:00] Tony Winyard: And so how easy or difficult is that to treat? So you have someone with one of those many conditions you just mentioned. How easy is it to.

[00:12:08] Treatment for histamine related conditions

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[00:12:08] Joanne Kennedy: Yeah. Well, It depends on what condition. You know, it’s funny, one of a really common cause of high histamine in the body is actually gluten intolerance, cuz gluten is highly inflammatory to the human gut and it depends on your tolerance level. So some people, it’s just simply gluten.

Other people can get a condition called small intestinal bacterial overgrowth or sibo. It’s becoming very commonly known and tested these days. It’s a major cause of irritable bowel syndrome globally. And SIBO will cause significant inflammation in the small bowel and significant release of histamine that, that is not too hard to treat.

You know, as long as the patient’s compliant and we, that’s not too bad. Estrogen, this is really interesting. estrogen in women. Women are estrogen dominant or perimenopausal, are very likely to suffer from high histamine because estrogen increases histamine. So that, that clinically for me is not too hard to treat, cuz I’ve worked that out but when women are getting perimenopausal and they’re not ovulating and not making progesterone, they have unopposed estrogen, and that causes a lot of problems with histamine.

So a lot of women in that perimenopause stage will start getting migraines for the first time and that. due to the histamine recently. But then there is a whole lot of people Tony that are suffering from a severe form of histamine intolerance. It’s called mask cell activation syndrome, where the immune system is out of control.

[00:13:39] How mould affects this

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[00:13:39] Joanne Kennedy: It really is the mask cells are dysregulated. These are the cells that release histamine, and one of the major causes of that is mold illness. Now this is really a difficult thing to treat often because. people. It will, we will go undetected for years. The person doesn’t know they’ve got mold in their house.

We had this Scottish guy who was so sick and he got the builders in and they pulled down some of the the wallpaper and it was just covered with mold and he didn’t know. Right? And you get these mold creates microtoxins and they get into your body and. Create havoc. They really dysregulate your immune system, your nervous system.

It’s, that can be extremely hard to treat, especially if the person has been exposed for a long period of time. You can also have a genetic susceptibility to being, to fearing worse from mold than other people. And then the whole situation, like some people are right, right. I’m gonna pack my bags and I’m leaving the house.

Other people have five children and a mortgage. and it’s difficult. So it depends on the, it depends on the cause and then it depends on how long the person’s had the condition to how long it’s gonna take them to get out of it. Histamines a symptom. Yeah. It’s a symptom of underlying health conditions.

Yeah.

[00:15:00] Tony Winyard: Okay. Commonly most people think of histamine, you know, like hay fever and stuff like that. And you say you take an antihistamine pill or something along those

[00:15:08] Joanne Kennedy: Yeah. That’s only one of the symptoms.

[00:15:11] Asthma

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[00:15:11] Tony Winyard: So from what you’re saying, you talked about respiratory as well, so I’m presuming it’s got something to do with asthma as.

[00:15:16] Joanne Kennedy: Yeah, definitely. So histamine will exacerbate histamine’s part of the pathophysiology of asthma and eczema. Def. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:15:24] Tony Winyard: So if someone’s been suffering, there’s many conditions you mentioned and they’ve been going to see the doctor and their, the conditions aren’t, the symptoms are being treated, but nothing’s changing. They’ve still got their eczema, their asthma, whatever it may be.

[00:15:37] Reasons to seek out a naturopathic or integrative medicine doctor

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[00:15:37] Tony Winyard: What would you say? Maybe a next port of call may, may be for them if they’re just not getting satisfaction from seeing their GP or whoever.

[00:15:45] Joanne Kennedy: It’s really important to get to find a naturopath or an integrative doctor that looks at the functional medicine test that I was talking to you about.

So Tony, if someone is suffering from, any of those histamine symptoms I was telling you about, and they’re being just prescribed antihistamines or sleeping tablets. If you actually look at a lot of sleeping tablets in antihistamines or steroid drugs, obviously this is not treating the cause.

[00:16:15] Joanne’s e-book on histamine

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[00:16:15] Joanne Kennedy: Okay. You know, if people are really interested, they can look at my ebook, which lists all the cause of histamine. and they can take it to their naturopath or nutritionist or gp even, integrative doctor, and ask to get the tests run that I talk about in my ebook. Okay. So it’s stool testing, it’s SIBO testing, organic acid testing.

There’s a lot of tests that you can do to get to the root cause of why you are having problems with histamine. Because it’s not recognized. It’s not a condition, it’s a symptom. Okay. But because we have these histamine receptors all over the body, it causes a lot of different symptoms where people get quite confused.

They see a neurologist, they see a gastroenterologist, they see a psychiatrist, they see an endocrinologist, they’re seeing all these specialists, and it basically, it comes down to there’s something driving up the histamine in the body to a point where it can’t break it down effectively. But if people are really interested in my ebook, I list all the different causes of histamine and I have had people, patients that I haven’t been able to see, tell me that they’ve taken it to their doctor, and their doctor has been helpful in getting the testing done for them. Yeah. But, it’s not a new condition, but how we are testing for the causes and treating it is actually quite.

[00:17:46] Patients suffering from histamine related conditions

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[00:17:46] Tony Winyard: And you know, some of the conditions you mentioned now, I imagine there’s gonna be people listening who’ll be gonna be quite a surprise that maybe the root of the problem is something as like that histamine, because they’ve probably been told something completely different.

[00:17:59] Joanne Kennedy: Yep. Yeah it’s really true. Tony like, like it’s extraordinary. My girls, my naturopaths and nutritionist that train with me after they’ve been through uni they cannot believe when they sit with me that the patient after patient will come in and their symptoms are histamine symptom driven from chronic inflammation.

It’s just, it’s really quite extraordinary, especially this chronic reflux. We have histamine receptors that stimulates hydrochloric acid. Chronic reflux and heartburn. It really is profound and extremely common. I’ve had really, I don’t think I’ve had one case where it hasn’t actually been histamine, and these people are told they need to have gut surgery, but they don’t, they need to get the bacteria down.

That’s creating all the histamine migraines absolutely driven in the majority of cases driven. histamine and anxiety. Histamine stimulates adrenaline, so people have a lot of anxiety. Insomnia is is often histamine and you know, obviously these, you know, anxiety, insomnia can be from other things, but when people are presenting with all the signs and symptoms of SIBO or all the signs and symptoms of mold illness and they have all these histamine symptoms. You know, this is very likely a histamine problem, like their anxiety is histamine and once, once you calm it all down the body, the adrenaline will stop pumping up and it will relax.

Motion sickness and nausea is also a really common histamine.

[00:19:37] Tony Winyard: So once you’ve identified what the issue is, and yeah, I appreciate you said, depending on there’s so many different conditions. There’s therefore many different ways to go about treating it. But is this something that can be completely eradicated or is it something that’s gonna have to be watched out for the rest of their life?

[00:19:58] Joanne Kennedy: yeah. Case by case spaces. So if someone has sibo as I said, major cause of irritable bowel syndrome, this is something that we’re, you know, myself, my colleagues, a lot of practitioners. You know, in the UK and US are getting very good at treating, we are getting very good at. This is not a, it’s not a disease, it’s an overgrowth of your own.

Bacteria in your small bowel is overgrown, causing problems. This is a very treatable condition. If you’ve got histamine producing bacteria in the large bowel or candida, that can also cause histamine. That’s very treatable. Getting your hormones in balance as a woman is very important and very fixable in a majority of cases.

You know, it’s not a, it’s not a condition, it’s just a natural part of the progression into menopause. But there’s a lot that can be done to support that balancing hormones. It’s just mold illness is the tricky one. Because the way that mold disrupts the mass cells to a point where they.

They’re triggered constantly. They’re it’s quite different, just a histamine intolerance. The mass cells are de granulating and releasing histamine in a very out of control way. These people are quite severely unwell. And mold illness is just, my colleague specializes in it.

I don’t treat mold. She had mold illness herself. But that is yeah it’s all about how bad the exposure is and how quickly you can remove yourself from that environment. And it’s every, it’s, you know, England, I’ve got England, Scotland Island, Denmark, like the cold places.

Sydney’s rife with mold and we’ve got patients in Indonesia, Asia, damp mold. It’s common. It’s really. So if you yeah, so it’s people. The mold patients come to me and they’ve done everything. They’ve seen so many practitioners. They’ve done all the gut stuff, they’ve done all the candida protocols, they’ve done everything, and they never get better.

That’s a classic red flag. And they also have multiple chemical sensitivity. Like they can’t walk down the aisle of the supermarket past the cleaning products. They can’t go into. Selfridges and go past the perfumes. They have massive issues with multiple chemical sensitivity, and they also have major food intolerances.

These are the people that are living on two or three different types of foods, so that’s like a classic red flag to me that they’re, it’s not just a simple gut problem, it’s a lot more insidious than that.

[00:22:22] Tony Winyard: Again, the conditions you’ve described affecting everyone, I all sorts of ages and cultures and nationalities and whatever, but are you, do you specialize in any particular demographic? You’ve talked about menopause and perimenopause, for example. So are you dealing

[00:22:35] Menopause and perimenopause

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[00:22:35] Joanne Kennedy: yeah. Ideal. Look, you know, just the way I. Look it all I’m surprised by this, like when I’m looking at my demographic, you know, even looking at my Instagram following it’s majority women between the age of 35 and 55. But we, you know, we see a lot of men in our clinic with a lot of different health issues.

But yeah, for absolutely there is when women’s hormones start to change. in the perimenopause phase, which really does start at 40, for most women. It’s like a 10 year rollercoaster nightmare, right? When? When women don’t produce as much progesterone as they used to, which is what happens in that transition, your estrogen is higher than your progesterone and that can stimulate histamine and it causes a lot of histamine symptoms in a lot of women. So they don’t even know, A lot of women don’t even know that their heightened premenstrual anxiety in insomnia is driven from estrogen and histamine imbalance. Like it’s really extraordinarily.

So I have a, yeah, my demographic. You know, definitely a lot of women between the age are like 35 and 55. Definitely.

[00:23:58] Tony Winyard: So what you just described, if that’s caught early in the whole process, is it then quite easy to treat?

[00:24:04] The role womens genetic makeup plays

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[00:24:04] Joanne Kennedy: Oh it just, we, every women are so different in their genetic makeup. They’re in their their stress level. Stress plays a massive part in hormones. You know, you might have thyroid issues that contributes to menstrual cycle, irregular. You might have you might have stress. Stress has a massive role in women’s hormones, gut issues, et cetera, et cetera.

There’s just a lot going on with women in their hormones. And it’s just, but it is a transition and natural medicine lends itself beautifully. Herbal medicine and stuff is extremely efficacious for balancing women’s hormones. So much can be done. A lot can be done.

[00:24:43] Tony Winyard: Early in the episode, beginning of the recording, you talked about how you’re getting so many clients from America,

[00:24:50] Joanne Kennedy: Yeah.

[00:24:50] Why does Jo have so many clients in the USA?

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[00:24:50] Tony Winyard: I’m intrigued as to, do you have any thoughts as to why there are so many people in America reaching out to you?

[00:24:56] Joanne Kennedy: A few things that I think they. They are huge. They are consumers of things. The Americans, this is just very true. They are very aware of functional medicine and natural medicine. Integrative medicine. There are a lot of very good naturopaths and integrative doctors and pathology laboratories in the United States.

Right. There is a lot of that. So they’re exposed to. but I have a niche area and, I can talk about it in layman’s terms, so they find me on Instagram and YouTube and because I can talk about the gut microbiome and hormones and histamines and some kind of tricky genetic stuff. All in one thing.

I can pull it all together and they’re like, oh my. You are talking about all my different things. I went to this practitioner for my sibo. I went to that practitioner for my mold. I went to that practitioner for my hormones. I went to that practitioner from my M t h FFR G mutation. And I I’ve, I’ve can pull it all together.

So that’s why. I do get patients from Britain and stuff, but the US is, it’s also Chinese. It’s a massive market. There’s so many of them. Also, . They do, it is true. Like the food chain in the US is not good. The stress in the US is not good. Right? The over-prescribing of medications, it happens here.

It happens in Britain too. It’s not, we’re not really that different. But I think the us, they do, a lot of them have, are exposed to a. Great practitioners for specific things, but I can pull it all together. And I think that’s what they’re looking for. And the histamine thing’s such a big deal because a lot of the practitioners just actually aren’t aware that these signs and symptoms that they’re presenting with are an actual histamine symptom and how to actually deal with it.

And it, it’s extraordinary to me. I, I. Do not understand why it’s not more commonly known and treated. It. It’s starting to be, but it’s always been there. It’s always been there, right? We’ve always had histamine in our body and we’ve always had not forever, but Mo in modern living has driven these problems.

And people have been sick with it for a long time, but a lot of practitioners, even these amazing naturopaths, old school naturopaths that I’ve trained with, that I learned from incredible practitioners, they didn’t know about histamine until recently either. Like people just didn’t know about it and it’s like the lights being switched on.

It’s like we, I can’t believe we didn’t see this before.

Yeah.

[00:27:35] What stage is science at with research into histamine?

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[00:27:35] Tony Winyard: Is it possibly, at a moment we are in the, there’s so much that we don’t know, and when I say we like science doesn’t know about the gut and the microbiome and we’ve just, we know a tiny bit. And is it something similar with this? It’s just many people are only kind of discovering this now and there’s still much to be learned or what would you say?

What’d you.

[00:27:52] Joanne Kennedy: Yes. I think no I think. , a lot of research has been done around how histamine is made in the body, how we break it down, et cetera. Right? This is why we have a lot of medications that are targeting all these histamine. Re I think there’s five, four or five histamine receptors. We’ve got drugs for all these receptors just to block them, right?

But. what is now becoming more and more known and the research is getting better. It’s actually, I’m gonna say it like this, the research around the micro, the microbiome disruption is a massive cause of histamine intolerance. There is so much research done on the microbiome, it’s fascinating. It, we are their human.

There are trillions of bacteria in our gut way more than cells in our body. they, they communicate with our dna, they regulate our immune system. They they support detoxification processes. They’re just, they, creates seratonin. They’re extremely important. A lot of the researchers there, but this is the catch, right?

[00:28:59] Why entrepreneurs are needed for this area

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[00:28:59] Joanne Kennedy: The commercial testing, right? And. And then the businesses the practitioners who have a business brain and the money to create a business so that they can create a clinic for patients to be treated, is the problem. Does that make sense? So for instance, we didn’t learn about SIBO at uni.

There was an amazing, she’s actually an American woman Neur Jacobi. She’s been in Australia for years and she specializes in gut, and then she started to really realize that SIBO was a big problem. So she created commercial testing that you combine due from your own home that’s very efficacious, safe and accurate.

Then she developed all these treatment protocols around what to do. Then she created a business where she would sell. Webinars to practitioners, so practitioners could treat patients. And it takes a brain and a lot of energy and a lot of money. And there’s another pla there’s one in, it’s called SOS SIBO in the us.

Very similar. Does that make sense? It’s just because the businesses need to be there for clinics, for patients to go and be treated. It’s just, it’s how it is. Does that make sense? So it’s getting the research and creating a way that patients can get the testing done and get treated for it.

And this is what is not happening in allopathic medicine. So it needs to be done.

[00:30:39] Tony Winyard: So it’s making more sense now. When you, at the start of the recording, when you said that you are now an entrepreneur as opposed to a healer.

[00:30:48] Joanne Kennedy: Yeah.

[00:30:48] Tony Winyard: Following on from what you just said about those couple of examples.

[00:30:51] Joanne Kennedy: Yeah. It’s that. So I, due to this the US market, and I’ve got a girl who I’ve trained in America, she’s gonna start with for me next month. She’ll be inundated with patients. I, I already got a whole list. Then I’m gonna have to train another one, but, so I’m like, okay, Joe, you’re gonna have to create online course.

You’re gonna have to create courses for these practitioners to do, and then you’ll have to accredit them and they’ll have to retrain every six months, et cetera, et cetera. I need to create things. So it’s, I’ve become more entrepreneurial because the need is there. Yes, still a healer, but it’s just, I’ve market’s just there.

I can’t not see it. Like I c it’s there. Which is, you know, it’s extraordinary to me that this has happened with. Career in natural medicine. But it’s exciting and it’s interesting and you know, if we can help a lot of people, it’s really rewarding.

[00:31:46] Treating the body as a whole

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[00:31:46] Tony Winyard: And so I’m wondering if in this expansion you’re talking about where these new people you’re taking on. Would it, would you like it to be the situation where maybe you’ve got one person who specialize in perimenopause and another person in sibo and another per, you know, for example, would that.

[00:31:59] Joanne Kennedy: Ki but you need to be able. To treat the body as a whole. Because if you have a, we do. If so it because our patients are majority are women. You need to be able to treat hormones as a practitioner. So yes, so we are going to we do someone that can do gut issues and hormones.

Definitely. Then there’s the whole mold illness side, which is really complex and I do have a practitioner that works for. Just doing mold illness. So I do gut and hormones. That’s really my forte. And my colleague Nicole, who trained with me closely she does a lot of gut stuff. I’m more of a hormone guru than her, but then Melanie is the mold specialist.

So yeah. But it’s just that the premise of natural medicine is trying to treat the whole body as a. So I, it’s just that. But then there are certain conditions that really need a specialized kind of like Nicole, my colleague is brilliant at sibo. She’s very good at that. If I have a tricky case, I’ll send them to her just to have a, another look.

If she gets a hard hormone case, she’ll send it to me. So we do share patients to get the best results. Cuz there’s just so much to know. Like there’s a lot to know with natural. Yeah.

[00:33:22] Jo’s fave book

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[00:33:22] Tony Winyard: One question I ask all all of my guests, is there a book that’s moved you in for any reason?

[00:33:26] Joanne Kennedy: Yeah, it’s called The Snow Leopard by Peter Matherson. and I’m not sure if you’ve read it. Dunno. No. Peter Matheson is a, he’s a environmentalist, a Buddhist and a writer. And he went to the Himalayas on like a science expedition looking for snow leopards, the elusive snow leopards. He does eventually see them, but the whole book is about him meeting his Sherpa in Nepal and.

the Sherpa taking him just protecting him and him going through the mountains and going deep into his meditation practice. And he would always be in a rush to get to the next, like base camp for the next day. And he’d get there hot and flustered, and he’d sit there and he’d, oh, I’ve done this in five hours.

And then his Sherpa would just walk up calmly, casually. Mindfully present, and it was that he’s learning about how to be mindful, calm, present, and to meditate is what led me into doing meditation and yoga, which led me into natural medicine. So I’ll always, I’ve got it here, I’ll always remember this book.

It it changed, it did change the trajectory of my life cuz I was just in my corporate head party girl lived in London and then it just shifted my perception on mindfulness and calming and being present. Look, you know, I try and practice meditation most days. I don’t always get there, but it, I don’t think I could have done my degree without my mindfulness meditation practice.

And that book led me into that world.

[00:35:16] Contact details

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[00:35:16] Tony Winyard: So if people want to get your, the e-book that you’ve mentioned and find out more about you and your social media website and so on where should they go?

[00:35:25] Joanne Kennedy: So my website is simply joanne kennedy.com.au. And so my website that’s where you can book appointments to see me and my colleagues. And I have an e bundle, which you can get from my website, and that is all about histamine intolerance. So there’s an ebook. Video masterclass is also some recipes and some other handouts.

So that’s on my website. I have a YouTube channel called Joanne Kennedy Naturopath, and I’m on Instagram at Joanne Kennedy naturopath.

[00:35:57] Tony Winyard: And finally, Jo, is there a quote that really resonates with you for any.

[00:36:01] Favourite quote

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[00:36:01] Joanne Kennedy: I do love this quote, and I dunno who I don’t know. I see it on Instagram a lot, and I dunno who it’s by, but I’m gonna tell you what it is. If you cannot digest it, let it go. No matter how shiny and gorgeous, how lusciously tempting it might be, if you cannot digest it, it will poison you.

[00:36:21] Tony Winyard: And when did you first come across that?

[00:36:22] Joanne Kennedy: A few years ago, but I pop, it was weird. It came up today and I thought, I really love that. It’s just, you know, so often in life we’re tempted by things that are so shiny and look amazing, and then we try and people if you know, if how they behave towards you, their attitude towards your energy is something that just.

Sits in your gut, it doesn’t move through. The energy gets stuck in you. You, You can’t digest it. You gotta let it go. You know, and I often talk to my friends about this. It’s just when not everything is for everybody. And not everybody is for everybody. And I think that’s one thing that I’ve learned is just to let go of things in business as well.

In business I’ve just learned to. . If things don’t sit well in my body, if they cause an anxiety disease, they’re probably not right for me and I’ve gotta let ’em go.

[00:37:26] Tony Winyard: That’s some very wise words, I think.

[00:37:28] Joanne Kennedy: Thanks, Tony.

[00:37:29] Tony Winyard: Take to heed that advice

[00:37:31] Joanne Kennedy: yeah. No, I love it. It’s good. I’m telling, I tell my friends all the time. That’s always my advice to them. Yeah.

[00:37:38] Tony Winyard: well Joe, thank you for your time and for sharing your wisdom with us. And I think a lot of people are gonna be quite surprised with what you’ve told us about histamine.

[00:37:45] Joanne Kennedy: will be.

Spread the word people do need to know. Yeah.

[00:37:49] Tony Winyard: This episode’s gonna be coming out at the beginning of January, so have a fantastic 2023 and yeah, thank you for sharing your knowledge with us.

[00:37:58] Joanne Kennedy: You’re welcome Tony. Thanks for having.

[00:37:59] The end of Habits & Health, but the beginning of the new show!

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That was the last edition or the last episode of the habits and health podcast. From next week, there will be series four of the podcast, which is called Escape from the vicious circle (which you didn’t know you were in). It’s going to be a lot of similarities with the habits and health podcast.

The main focus will still be around health. And very much into behavior and habits and so on. But we’ll be looking at the vicious circles that many people are in. Most of them are going to be looking at health, but it will allow me to widen the scope slightly and look at some other problems that people face in their lives. Sometimes they’re not aware they’re in, and in health there’s so many of these vicious circles. That people are struggling in. And so each week I’m going to be continuing to interview people. And looking at how can we help people escape some of these vicious circles?

So the first episode. We’ll be with Simon Blake. He is the chief executive of MHFA England, which is mental health first aid, England. Simon Blake has an OBE. He joined MHFA in October, 2018. And leading a social enterprise to achieve its vision of normalizing societies attitudes, and behaviors towards mental health.

Through training one in 10 of the population. That’s there aim. He also chairs, the Dying Matters campaign and the support after suicide partnership. So we’re going to explore a lot of that. That will be episode one of the escape from the vicious circle podcast. Next Tuesday, same time as usual. Hope you have a great week.