My first encounter with depression and anxiety happened at age 12. I didn’t know what it was. It reoccurred sporadically throughout high school and college. It came back with a vengeance in the postpartum period after each child. I knew depression and anxiety were a disease, but unlike allopathic doctors, I also knew instinctively that there had to be a cause. With that thought, my quest was born. In 2002, I started testing for and adding deficient vitamins, minerals, and fatty acids and cleaned up my diet. At that time though, I still had a lot to learn about the quality of food and farming, supplements, and my own genetic makeup. All these things work together to cause chemical imbalances. Deficiencies are also passed down through generations. I was still feeling and getting sick. Even after losing two of my organs, I didn’t have the drive to find all the missing answers until my daughter suffered strange ailments. For her, I looked further and did not stop until I found reasons. I was not interested in covering symptoms in my child, but more after the cause, like a warrior in battle so that I could find cures. Every reason I found came back to what we put in our mouths and what we don’t. Food is not just energy. Vitamins and minerals drive every enzymatic process that makes us human. Eating real food makes us feel like real humans. Eating garbage makes us feel like garbage. The trend today is to work and never rest, which causes stress, and this depletes Magnesium. The trend is to farm with poison to get a higher yield with fewer pests. The result is nutrient deficient food and soil, sick livestock, sick humans, and Glyphosate saturating not just the lawns we walk on but nearly everything we consume. Glyphosate was originally used to clean rust from drum linings. In humans, Glyphosate strips the minerals from our bodies. By accident, it also kills weeds pretty well. On purpose, it is used to quickly harvest and turn over grain crops. Anxiety, depression, allergies, autoimmune disease, cancer, you name it, are all at an all-time high. I wonder why? There seems to be an onslaught of chemicals in the American way of life that we were never designed to handle. It angered me that so many doctors accepted this and just handed over a pill. Any pill I ever took made me feel worse or caused another issue that I needed another pill for. I wasn’t interested at all in giving my children pills. In 2011, we met an alternative physician that pointed out that we have a genetic variant that 40% of the population has and doesn’t know about. It requires avoiding specific synthetic vitamins that the food industry fortifies most foods with on shelves. This made me look further at the quality of our supplements and food. It ultimately led me to find a mineral researcher [Morley Robbins] who explained how all the puzzle pieces fit together (food, body and household products, minerals, vitamins, etc.). We switched to only whole-food versions of supplements. We chose organic and natural foods and products in their whole states or closest to their whole food states when possible. I was irritated that I alone was the only one interested in finding the cause of all these issues we were being diagnosed with, not our doctors. I was not interested in managing illnesses. I wanted to learn how they occurred because if I did, there was hope to reverse them. That’s when I found the folks this mineral researcher was connected with. Through years of research, they created The Root Cause Protocol. It sprung forth from the Magnesium Advocacy group to a total back to basics lifestyle. The result? I haven’t had depression in nearly a decade. I don’t walk around with constant anxiety. Doctors are calling my daughter’s autism diagnosis history. The lipid disease that CHOP said Laurel would suffer with for life is gone, and they are speechless. My kids’ food allergies disappeared, my sister’s infertility was solved, and my kids lost all their motor and verbal tics and sleep peacefully through the night. My kids have only needed an antibiotic maybe 5 times in their lives. My back pain is gone despite my x-rays being a radiographer’s nightmare. Our medical files are now clean that we live cleanly. Notably, my daughter’s anxiety has been reduced by half. Her sensory aversions don’t rule her life, and we’re at the point where we can all indulge in conventional treats now and again without having major setbacks in our health. The days of being in bed all weekend because I ate a bite of cake at a birthday are gone. The days of child rages and rashes, because they ate out of their trick-or-treating bags, are gone. And it’s affordable because we aren’t paying doctors out of pocket now for anything. No one has to be a forever victim of mental illness or many illnesses. The disease cannot exist in a mineral-balanced body. Research has proven it. Minerals are the fundamental building blocks of health. Their balance in us keeps genes from going rogue and organisms from setting up shop where they’re not invited. I’ve witnessed this in my extended family over the past five years; they’re all my guinea pigs. But, again, nutrition is fundamental. The body physiologically can’t be in a place to accept help from outside if it’s not running on the right gasoline. As such, very few diseases are destined to be a forever way of life. Many can be reversed or extremely reduced. As I’ve learned, gene expression can even turn on and off depending on our health state. I have also learned that medical doctors have only about 6 hours of nutrition training, and those textbooks are often funded by pharmaceutical companies. I’ve been on RCP for going on 5 years, my kids for four. It’s crazy because I had a rough year doing the single mom thing, post-divorce, focusing nearly all my energy on my new job, skipping my supplements most days, and not always making the best diet choices at the moment because I’m always running somewhere as a mommy. I used to never get sick. I was sick often this year because I wasn’t maintaining balance in sleep and supplements. But, as usual, as soon as I get back on the plan I feel amazing, and I have the confidence in the fact that it works as a lifestyle. But this makes me think about the people with no plan, and I’m reminded of the days long ago that felt dark and despairing. I remember staring down that rabbit hole, but I also know that no one has to forever. Whether it’s a plan or just a person, no one should suffer from anxiety or depression alone. It needs to lose its stigma. It’s also important to remember to keep yourself on the top of your list. Only when you are your best can you do your best for everyone else. It’s like the plane oxygen mask analogy. We need pure, clean air to breathe. We also need pure, clean food to function long-term. It is not selfish to put your physical and emotional needs first, especially when you are caring for others because they need you, like forever. I know that there were little light bulb moments that got us to the good place where we are today, moments when my eyes and ears were open. It has also been said that only 1 out of 10 people will genuinely consider something outside of their personal experience. But, if our journey can give anyone, even just 1 friend, a light bulb moment that leads them to a better place, then that’s worth sharing something personal on social media to me. It’s even worth inciting a little anger because through the anger we do start to reflect, and reflection breeds change–and change is healing. We have to remember as humans that we are social creatures and part of a community. At my lowest and most frustrated, I reached out to a stranger, a researcher I found online, and he was so compelled by his life’s work that he helped me and my kids and continues to help thousands of families like mine. Always reach out to someone, anyone, if you’re in a dark place, and try to think about how what you put in and on your body or in your home might affect you and your family in ways you’ve never imagined.