The Experience Miracles Podcast

Preventing Chronic Illness in Kids is Simpler than you think (w/ Dr. Joel Gator)

Oct 15, 2024

Why 1 in 2 Kids Has a Chronic Disease, and the SEEDS Framework That Can Change It

Episode 43, Experience Miracles Podcast | Host: Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP, Pediatric Chiropractor & Founder of PX Docs | Published: October 15, 2024 | Duration: ~58 min Guest: Dr. Joel Gator, MD, Board-Certified Integrative Pediatrician, Los Angeles, CA | Author, Parenting at Your Child’s Pace: The Integrative Pediatrician’s Guide to the First Three Years

Key Takeaways

  • One in two American children now has a chronic disease, and autism rates have climbed from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 22 in California, trends that integrative pediatrician Dr. Joel Gator says cannot be reversed by conventional medicine, which was built for a different era of illness.
  • The SEEDS framework (Stress, Environment & Toxins, Exercise, Diet, Sleep) is the foundational layer every family must address before turning to supplements or advanced treatments. Lifestyle changes alone can get families 75–90% of the way toward a healing place.
  • Modern medicine excels at acute crisis care but has never structurally shifted to address chronic disease, giving medications for symptoms without addressing the root cause is, as Dr. Gator puts it, “treating the pain without pulling out the tack.”
  • A Harvard study found that switching from canned to homemade soup for just five days produced 1,000% lower BPA levels in participants’ blood, a concrete example of how small, consistent daily decisions compound dramatically over time.
  • Children whose Autonomic Nervous System is locked in Sympathetic Dominance from Birth Trauma or prenatal stress may not respond to dietary and lifestyle interventions until their nervous system baseline is restored, a gap that Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care is specifically designed to address.

Why Are So Many Kids Chronically Sick, and What Can Parents Actually Do?

One in two American children now lives with a chronic disease. Autism rates have surged from 1 in 10,000 a generation ago to 1 in 22 in California today. Ten percent of kids have an anxiety disorder, 20% are obese, and 1 in 3 have diabetes or pre-diabetes. Integrative pediatrician Dr. Joel Gator argues these numbers are the predictable result of a medical system built to fight acute infections that never adapted to the chronic disease era, combined with a steady drift away from the foundational health behaviors that once kept these conditions rare.

The solution Dr. Gator advocates isn’t more advanced treatments, it’s a return to what he calls the SEEDS framework: Stress management, Environment and toxin reduction, Exercise, Diet, and Sleep. These five foundations, addressed consistently over time, account for 75–90% of the healing potential available to any family. Supplements, specialty interventions, and advanced diagnostics have their place, but only after these basics are reliably in place.

For children who have already developed significant chronic conditions, Dr. Tony Ebel adds a critical layer: kids whose Autonomic Nervous System has shifted into Sympathetic Dominance, often rooted in Birth Trauma or prenatal stress, may not respond to even excellent lifestyle changes until their nervous system baseline is restored. In those cases, Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care becomes what Dr. Ebel calls “step zero”, resetting the nervous system so the body can actually receive and respond to the healthy lifestyle being built around it.

Dr. Gator’s Journey into Integrative Medicine [00:00 – 07:30]

Dr. Tony Ebel: Within chiropractic, specializing in pediatrics, we’re a unique bird. Most chiropractors focus on musculoskeletal back and neck pain, which is wonderful. But pediatric-focused, integrative work puts you in a smaller percentage of your profession. And Dr. Gator, as an integrative pediatrician, your slice of the pie within conventional pediatrics is even smaller. So I’ve got to ask, what was the catalyst that pushed you down this path?

Dr. Joel Gator: The conventional story for integrative medicine is usually someone who has a health issue, doesn’t get better in the conventional system, finds an integrative practitioner, and has their mind blown. That’s not really my story.

For me, it was a mixture of things. Going through residency and training as a medical doctor, I got really frustrated with the system, giving medications for everything, all the time. Then I started seeing patients go to chiropractors, naturopaths, and get better after being told they’d never get better. I saw it with patients, with friends and family members. My wife was naturally minded and holistically inclined. All of these things together opened my eyes to a different world.

And once you start looking into it, the most striking thing is how obvious it all seems. There’s nothing controversial about preventive care, wellness, or thinking about your foundations. We just weren’t taught any of it. Medicine is excellent at teaching you to identify what’s severe and treat that severe thing. It’s genuinely not built for preventive care or chronic disease, and that’s not a flaw in the people. It’s a structural reality. The medical model was designed a hundred years ago for the problems of a hundred years ago, and it hasn’t shifted.

Dr. Tony Ebel: That’s exactly it. The most common thing parents say when they first encounter our content or come in for a consultation is: “Why didn’t someone tell me this before?” And we practitioners ask the same question about our own training. The best integrative and functional practitioners have often traveled a very similar road to the families we serve. We all found this path because the conventional one left questions unanswered.

Why Modern Medicine Is Outdated for Chronic Disease [07:30 – 14:00]

Dr. Tony Ebel: One of your Instagram posts that really resonated with me said, “Modern medicine is outdated.” Not conventional medicine as a whole, but specifically for chronic disease. MRI machines and surgical interventions are genuinely remarkable for crisis care. But for health restoration and healing from chronic conditions, they aren’t the tool for the job. Can you go deeper into that?

Dr. Joel Gator: I think about it this way: medicine was taught as “here’s the problem, here’s the solution, here’s the treatment.” Take the tack-on-the-butt analogy. You have pain, you go to a doctor, they give you Tylenol. But if you don’t pull out the tack, the Tylenol isn’t going to help. That’s the way we’re practicing medicine for chronic disease right now.

We have more technology than ever, and we are legitimately better at infectious disease than we’ve ever been. Sanitation, antibiotics, better nutrition access, people don’t die from things that used to kill them routinely. That’s real progress.

But chronic disease rates are climbing for basically every condition. More than 50% of adults are taking five or more medications. Autism went from 1 in 10,000, to 1 in 150, to 1 in 30, to 1 in 22 in California today. ADHD rates are skyrocketing. Ten percent of kids have an anxiety disorder. Four to five percent have depression. Twenty percent of kids are obese. One in three children has diabetes or pre-diabetes.

“The simple thing to think about is: what we’re doing isn’t working. Modern medicine and its advances are not the solution to the chronic disease problem.”, Dr. Joel Gator

You can use modern medicine to make sure you’re not missing cancer, or to help someone through an asthma attack. But the question it doesn’t answer is why, why does that child have asthma? Why is that kid developing autism? Why are children getting diabetes at these rates? What is going on, and what can we actually do about it?

The answers are not medically complicated. They’re societally complicated to shift, yes. But for your family, they’re pretty simple. It’s lifestyle. It’s food. It’s toxins. The vast majority of people who make these changes see a huge difference. Genetics plays a role, absolutely, but it is not the main driver here.

The SEEDS Framework: Foundations Before Fancy Treatments [14:00 – 29:30]

Dr. Tony Ebel: I see this pattern in integrative and functional health too, we’ve gotten so advanced that we’re now starting to repeat the same mistake as conventional medicine. Practitioners trying to heal the brain while the body is still a mess, and the brain works for the body.

If you don’t get sleep handled, if you don’t get gut function handled, if you don’t get a hold of these basic core foundations first, you’re not going to get to the anxiety in the brain. You’re not going to get to the autism in the brain. That’s not how health works. When families come in struggling deeply and the parents look at me a little sideways when I say “let’s start with sleep and digestion and getting outside”, those are the parents who need this message most.

Dr. Joel Gator: Exactly. And I think on the grand scale, especially on social media, it has to be about the basics, because the more complicated the intervention, the more patient-specific it becomes. That’s where a practitioner like Dr. Tony comes in, to dive into the nitty-gritty with someone over time. But the vast majority of healing begins with the things that everybody can actually do.

I try to speak to the things people can actually change. You can talk all day about changing the water supply or air quality regulations, but that’s not going to shift today. The question is: what can you do for your own family right now?

When I wrote Parenting at Your Child’s Pace, one of the big things I wanted to do was give parents a practical framework, not a magic smoothie, but the actual ingredients of health. So the Dr. Gator smoothie, as I call it, is the SEEDS acronym:

S, Stress E, Environment and toxins E, Exercise D, Diet S, Sleep

These are the foundational inputs your child’s body needs to function well. Around those, you can layer in other things that matter, sunlight, time in nature, family and community, access to clean water. But SEEDS is the core, and you start there. If you are mindful of these foundations, you will get 75–90% of the way to a healing place over the next five to ten years.

“None of it matters if you don’t exercise, none of it matters if you don’t eat good food, because we’re literally built of what we eat.”, Dr. Joel Gator

The Role of Stress in Children’s Health [19:00 – 26:15]

Dr. Tony Ebel: The “S” in SEEDS is where our work overlaps most directly. The story of The Perfect Storm, prenatal stress, labor and delivery interventions, early childhood toxin exposure, is fundamentally a stress story. And I love that you open your framework there, because stress isn’t just a thing that happens to adults scrolling their phones at 11 PM. It’s happening to our children’s nervous systems from day one.

Dr. Joel Gator: Stress is one of the most important influences on health, period. In itself, stress is a good thing, it’s a survival mechanism. But our lives now carry a low-level, chronic background stress at all times. Social media, news cycles, the constant information environment. And we forget that we’re a system. Everything’s connected, hormones, immune function, digestion.

When you have low-level chronic stress, your body is releasing cortisol and other hormones at levels they were never designed to sustain. Digestion is impaired. Blood flow is not optimal. Your immune system is running below capacity. Studies have shown that people who report higher stress and poor sleep have two to three times the rate of developing symptoms when exposed to a virus. This isn’t new science. We’ve known it for a long time. We just keep forgetting to apply it.

For kids, this matters even more. Children are going to do what we do, not what we say. If we’re not managing our own stress, we’re modeling a stressed nervous system for them. And they’re entering this toxic soup of chronic stress earlier than any previous generation.

Dr. Tony Ebel: That’s the whole thesis of the Perfect Storm framework, that stress begins before birth. Prenatal stress, the physical stress of labor and delivery interventions (forceps, vacuum, C-section), and early childhood exposures compound on each other. A colicky baby isn’t just uncomfortable, their nervous system is stressed. And if we don’t identify and address that early, it becomes the soil in which all these chronic conditions take root.

Awareness is necessary, but awareness without action doesn’t move the needle. The question for every parent is: what am I going to do differently because I now understand this?

Basics First: Why Healing Has a Specific Sequence [26:15 – 45:30]

Dr. Joel Gator: When I think about how to approach patients, whether in the practice or through the content I create, the foundation always comes first. Not because the fancy stuff isn’t real, but because it literally doesn’t work if the foundation isn’t there.

You can run every advanced test you want, but if a child isn’t sleeping and isn’t eating real food, you can’t interpret the results meaningfully. The foundation has to come first.

Take something simple but striking: there was a Harvard study looking at canned soup versus homemade soup. Participants were assigned to each for five days. The researchers measured BPA levels, BPA being the chemical in the lining of those cans. After just five days, the homemade soup group had BPA levels that were 1,000% lower. One small swap. Five days. That kind of compounding happens across every daily decision your family makes, in every direction.

“If you are mindful, which a lot of people are waking up to, then you give your kids a better chance. Our job as parents is not to look at those extremes. It’s to make them as resilient as possible, to give them the best chance at health, to give their bodies the best chance to fight disease.”, Dr. Joel Gator

Dr. Tony Ebel: This is why I’m so intentional about saying the same core things repeatedly. Not because the audience isn’t smart, but because we all have a retention limit on any given podcast or book. If there’s one thing that sticks, let it be this: the basics work. They work in a specific sequence. You don’t skip steps.

I see it in the clinic every week. A family comes in after doing all the right things, gluten-free, casein-free, no chemicals in the home, OT, PT, ABA, a mountain of supplements. They’ve done the work. And I get so excited to see those kids, because that child who has the clean diet, gets outside, has screens turned off, prioritizes sleep and movement, that kid heals like a boss compared to the child who is still living in a chemically-laced environment and eating processed food all day.

There is a massive dichotomy in healing potential, and parents are the ones who create it. If you’re that family, if you’ve done the work, sit back with this episode and feel good about it. You have already done enormous healing for your child. You have primed the pump. When you find that next key with the next practitioner, it’s going to work infinitely better because of the foundation you’ve built.

When Lifestyle Alone Isn’t Enough: The Nervous System Exception [45:30 – 53:00]

Dr. Tony Ebel: I want to close with something for the families who have done all of this, who have genuinely checked every box, and still don’t have the outcomes they’re looking for.

There is a neurological line in the sand I want parents to know about. If your child’s central and Autonomic Nervous System has shifted entirely into Sympathetic Dominance, the clinical term is Dysautonomia, then they are often so neurophysiologically shut down that they won’t even respond to the basics. They won’t tolerate the protein and the fat. They can only handle carbs and sugar and refined foods. Their gut isn’t processing, their sleep isn’t regulating, and the lifestyle changes feel like they’re bouncing off.

This is the specific case where Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care isn’t step one, it’s step zero. It resets and releases tension from the Sympathetic Nervous System, gets the foundational nervous system function back online, and makes the child more responsive to everything else being built around them.

If that resonates, I’d encourage you to go back and listen to my solo episode on The Perfect Storm, where we cover the real implications of prenatal stress, forceps, vacuum, and C-section on the developing nervous system. That’s where this picture gets fully assembled.

Dr. Joel Gator: I’d add one thing to that. I don’t think of neurologically-focused chiropractic as sub-zero, below the foundation. For a meaningful percentage of families, it is the first step, because the biology dictates it. The progression looks like this: try the lifestyle changes, try the SEEDS foundations. For a lot of families, that alone creates a massive difference.

If it’s not getting you where you want to go, then yes, there’s genetics, there’s nervous system function, there may be environmental exposures you haven’t identified yet. That’s where a specialty practitioner becomes not just helpful but necessary. And the beautiful thing is, you can pursue both simultaneously. Lifestyle foundations and nervous system care aren’t in competition, they’re additive.

Parenting Confidence: The Foundation Under Everything Else [53:00 – 58:00]

Dr. Tony Ebel: The mission behind everything Dr. Gator creates, and what his book is named for, is about pace. Not trying to build Rome in a day. Not overwhelming parents with an impossible standard. About moving forward with intention, one step at a time, at a pace that’s actually sustainable.

His number one stated mission: to inspire parenting confidence.

You are ready. You can do this. Parents who’ve found their confidence, who’ve stopped waiting for a prescription to fix things and started trusting their own ability to build health for their family, those are the parents whose kids heal. That confidence is the spark.

Dr. Joel Gator: Thank you for everything that you do. The mission you’re on, sharing this with families, it matters enormously. For anyone who wants more, you can find me on Instagram at @drjoelgator, and the book is Parenting at Your Child’s Pace, available at parentingatyourchildspace.com or anywhere books are sold.

Dr. Tony Ebel: Keep rocking those whiteboards, buddy. See you next time.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the SEEDS framework for children’s health?

The SEEDS framework, developed by integrative pediatrician Dr. Joel Gator, stands for Stress management, Environment and toxin reduction, Exercise, Diet, and Sleep. These five foundations represent what every family should address before turning to supplements, advanced testing, or specialty interventions. According to Dr. Gator, addressing these lifestyle factors consistently can get families 75–90% of the way toward a healthier baseline for their children.

Why are childhood chronic disease rates rising so fast?

Dr. Joel Gator points to a medical system that was designed around acute infectious disease and has never structurally shifted to address chronic conditions. Meanwhile, children are being raised in environments with more processed food, more chemical exposures, more chronic stress, and less sleep and movement than at any point in history. Currently, 1 in 2 American children has a chronic disease, autism rates in California have reached 1 in 22, and 1 in 3 children has diabetes or pre-diabetes.

Can changing diet and lifestyle really make a difference for my child’s chronic condition?

Yes, and the science is clear on this. A Harvard study found that switching from canned to homemade soup for just five days produced 1,000% lower BPA levels in participants’ blood. Dr. Gator emphasizes that genetics plays a role in chronic disease, but lifestyle is the dominant factor for the vast majority of conditions. The goal isn’t perfection, it’s building resilience through consistent, foundational choices that compound over time.

What should parents focus on FIRST when their child has autism, ADHD, anxiety, or another chronic condition?

Both Dr. Gator and Dr. Tony Ebel agree: foundations first. That means Sleep, real-food Diet, toxin reduction in the home, Stress management, and daily Exercise and movement, before adding supplements, specialty protocols, or advanced interventions. Dr. Ebel notes that children whose basic nervous system functions (sleep, digestion, sensory regulation) are dysregulated won’t respond well to advanced treatments until those foundations are stabilized.

When does my child need a neurologically-focused chiropractor, not just lifestyle changes?

When a child’s Autonomic Nervous System has been shifted into Sympathetic Dominance, often stemming from Birth Trauma, prenatal stress, or a difficult delivery, they may not respond to even the best lifestyle changes. Dr. Tony Ebel calls this situation “step zero”: Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care resets nervous system function so the body can actually receive and respond to the healthy environment being built around it. If your family has done everything right and still isn’t seeing results, the nervous system may be the missing piece.

How do I find a PX Docs practitioner near me?

You can search the PX Docs directory to find a Neurologically-Focused Chiropractor in your area who is trained in the clinical protocols developed by Dr. Tony Ebel.

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