Take dirt and call her in the morning

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Riverdale resident and pediatric neurologist Maya Shetreat-Klein became aware of how diets can be the cause and solution of chronic diseases when her 1-year-old son started having severe breathing issues that turned into asthma. He stopped reaching development milestones. 

“He stopped gaining new words even though he’d been speaking really early, at 8 months, and he wouldn’t catch himself if he fell, he would just fall on his face and smack his head on the ground and had bruises and cuts on his face,” Dr. Shetreat-Klein said. “I looked a lot in the scientific literature because that’s what I’d been taught to do as a doctor… Ultimately, we discovered that my son was allergic to soy. When we took soy away, within three days he had no more breathing problems unless he was exposed to soy.”

The experience helped inspire her to write a book touting the benefits of straight-from-soil food in a new book, “The Dirt Cure,” released by Simon & Schuster earlier this year.

The work describes the harm that can come from popular children’s food and relates ways to eat more healthily. She calls on her own practice to provide tips.

Dr. Shetreat-Klein spends an hour and a half with every new patient to retrace his or her health and food history, from birth. 

“Even things like how you are born or what you ate as an infant, whether you were breastfed or bottle fed, does influence your gut microbiome and that impacts your lifelong health in different ways,” Dr. Shetreat-Klein said.

She said realizing the importance of one’s diet has led her to see dramatic improvements in her patients.

Dr. Shetreat-Klein recounted results in children who had what would be considered severe conditions like epilepsy, autism and ADHD that she had been taught to treat with heavy medication. 

“I had a lot of children in my practice who were either able to go way down in their medication or completely stop medication by changing their diet in significant ways,” she said.

Dr. Shetreat-Klein prescribes reading the ingredients as a start.

“You should understand everything and if they wouldn’t be in your own cabinet, then it’s best to avoid that,” she explained.

But she emphasized that one’s reaction to food is individual and she wouldn’t remove dairy, wheat or soy products from anyone’s diets if it wasn’t necessary. 

After detecting what ingredients might have a negative impact on her patients, through food journals and blood tests, she has them do an “elimination and re-introduction” process. That means 30 days off of the specific ingredient. Then they add it back in for a weekend and see if any negative effects occur.

“Ultimately, all of that gave birth to the ‘dirt cure.’ It’s not just about not eating certain foods,” Ms. Shetreat-Klein said.

“We’ve learned that dirt from three different angles is how we can be healthy. One of those ways is being exposed to germs and microbes, another way is eating fresh food from healthy soil and the third way is by being outdoors in nature,” the doctor said. “If we do these three things, we would probably have much less chronic illnesses because what we’re learning is that biodiversity in the world around us holds the answers for health.”

The mother of three applies her own advice to her family and her own health. She takes long walks in the woods every day and enjoys Riverdale because of that. 

“I always say this is the only place in New-York City that I think I can survive in, because it’s so green,” she said.

Dr. Shetreat-Klein also rarely buys any processed foods. She confesses sometimes she will indulge in some potato chips or dark chocolate. But she tries to stick to unprocessed food most of the time. 

In her garden, Dr. Shetreat-Klein grows a variety of fruits and vegetables — kale, cauliflower, broccoli, strawberries and more. A henhouse containing eight chickens abuts the garden. 

“Why I wrote the book was to empower people to take charge of their health and know that it’s possible to heal from a lot of the chronicle illnesses that people are suffering from right now,” she said.

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