Hey Shayla - Judgement Free Motherhood 😅😭😍
Hey Shayla - Judgement Free Motherhood 😅😭😍
064 - CBD DURING PREGNANCY: SAFE? Or AVOID it? With scientist Karli Swenson
The best natural remedy for morning sickness? Or something to avoid?
064 - Is CBD SAFE for the fetus during pregnancy? With scientist Karli Swenson PhD
Hey Shayla Podcast | Ep: 064
Guest: Karli Swensen @karliswenson www.instagram.com/karliswenson a PhD in physiology and Masters in maternal and child public health.
Dr Swensen studies how different substances affect fetal development. In her work, she wanted to understand if CBD was safe to consume during pregnancy, as many pregnant women use it to decrease the nausea and vomiting of morning sickness.
Since CBD has only been legal since 2018, the research has been very sparse. Over the last few years, they have learned an incredible amount about the potential risks, and potential benefits, of using CBD to decrease morning sickness.
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We're also seeing all of these metabolic effects. The cannabis full cannabis, thc and CBD exposed kids had higher adiposity and higher BMI and higher fasting blood glucose than the non-exposed kids. I had this moment where I realized during fetal development, when you're being exposed to CBD and your brain's like soaking it all in development, when you're being exposed to CBD and your brain's like soaking it all in. I kind of forgot that like so is the liver and so is the pancreas and so is everything else in the body, and I was like, oh yeah, those organs could also be affected.
Speaker 2:Hey guys, my name is Shayla. Welcome to the hey Shayla podcast. I went from full-time travel to full-time new COVID mom and now I'm a mom of two, and holy wow is motherhood and adulting a learning curve. There are so many decisions we need to make and a million ways to do it right. I created this podcast to interview some of my gurus, to share their knowledge and empower you on your journey. Let me be your guinea pig and ask the questions you think everyone else knows. Here. We're a little hippie. We try to do things as naturally as possible, we're open-minded and we don't take ourselves too seriously, but above all, we support one another and work to find what works. If you're into it, you're our people. Let's get started. Hey guys, welcome back to the hey Shayla podcast.
Speaker 2:Today I've got an interesting one. Today I'm interviewing Carly Swenson. She has her PhD in physiology and her master's in maternal and child public health. She studies how different substances affect fetal development. In her work, she wanted to understand if CBD was safe to consume during pregnancy, because many pregnant people take it to decrease nausea and vomiting and morning sickness. Since CBD was only legalized in 2018, the research was super sparse at the time. Over the last four years, they've learned an incredible amount about the potential risks, potential benefits of using CBD to decrease morning sickness. Today, carly's going to tell us about what she's learned. We'll learn about what CBD is, how it affects fetal development, any risks and benefits, and I'm really interested to talk to her and learn more about this. Okay, I have so many questions before we even get into the mean potatoes of what you found. So, okay, welcome. Thank you so much for coming on and chatting with me about this. First, just tell me about you and how you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, your PhD in physiology, your master's in maternal and public health, like, yeah, let's hear it. Okay. So I, um, when I went into college, I knew I liked science. It was kind of unspecified. I was like, you know, I'll, I'll dilly dally, I'll figure it out.
Speaker 1:And I fell in love with this embryology class, which is kind of the study of how fetuses and embryos form and develop. And I took it as an elective and I was like, wait a minute, this is the coolest thing I've ever learned. And I know, like all of the the I don't have kids of my own, but like I know all the moms who are listening have that same moment of like I just went from two cells to a whole human in a relatively really short period of time, like really quickly, and I just think that that is the coolest thing that any body can do and it makes no sense to me. And so I just I don't know. I really was fascinated by it. And so when I got close to graduation and I was having that, you know, what career do I want? What are you going to do after college? Yeah, the most stressful question to get when you're like 21.
Speaker 1:I was like I don't know I think pregnancy is cool, and everyone was like, okay, that's good. And so I ended up deciding to go to grad school. So I went to college in Wyoming and then moved down to Denver. I went to the University of Colorado at the Anschutz Medical Campus, which is an awesome academic medical center. You really have access to anything that you need in the science world.
Speaker 1:And so I got into a PhD program in physiology and most people have no clue what PhDs are. I learned partway through that because I also didn't totally understand it until I was in it. So a PhD is a research doctoral degree. So we have our doctorates but we're not medical providers. And so we do all sorts of research, all the way on the super, super preclinical level, working with cells and animals, to clinical research, working with patients, like clinical trials, and then all the way up to like population based studies where you have thousands and thousands of people that are totally de-identified and you're just working with numbers, basically Interesting. And so I was in the physiology program and I knew I wanted to study something fetal development and fetal development in itself is so cool, but also studying what can go wrong in fetal development I thought was really interesting because things do go wrong and you want to be able to have the literature on how they go wrong, how you could potentially intervene when they go wrong, like how we can help patients when things do go wrong. And so I ended up finding kind of my home in the lab that I was in and my boss at the time was pretty flexible and she was kind of like you know, if you find something you really want to study and we can get it funded, let's tackle it. And I was like, okay, cool, and that was in 2019.
Speaker 1:So it was right after CBD was federally legalized and was officially made available at, like, gas stations, grocery stores, whole Foods, pet stores is a big one and because it was then so widely available, it was like essentially kind of started gaining traction as this wonder drug where it was gaining research expertise. So CBD at that time was starting to get traction in like pediatric seizures. So Epidiolex is FDA approved for kids with very severe pediatric seizures. It's the first CBD product to be FDA approved for medication. That's wild, yeah, and it's incredibly useful.
Speaker 1:And so then it started gaining traction in chemotherapy. So there's been a ton of work in how CBD and THC, which is the other component of cannabis, that kind of gives you the high that's associated with cannabis or marijuana or whatever we want to call it. And so people were studying it for people who have cancer and were in chemotherapy how it decreases their pain and decreases the nausea and vomiting from their chemotherapy drugs and how it can really improve quality of life, which is awesome and it's so, so important for those patients, like it was. It's such a breakthrough in that scenario and in many other scenarios. But there was kind of this idea that now that it was becoming a medicine and you could buy it at Whole Foods, everyone was like this is the wonder drug.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this can. This poses no risk, this is totally safe. And we were kind of like whoa, we don't know that, like we, we don't't have any data. There's no data to show safety or harm like. It's not that it's not safe or not harmful, we just don't know right. It's such a weird spot totally when you're trying to talk like actively pregnant patients. At the time my boss was pregnant and she had really severe um morning sickness. She had something called hyperemesis, which is when you have morning sickness like always horrible.
Speaker 1:And she had people. Literally she would get sick at the grocery store.
Speaker 2:Oh man.
Speaker 1:People would be literally handing her CBD products. I mean, like you should do that, like this will help, this will help, this will help and, of course, like any rational human being, in that moment you're like, will this help me?
Speaker 2:Like I feel 100%, yeah, okay, wait, before we go further, will you discuss, cause I feel like it's two sided. So first, I think when it, when it was legalized, yes, wonder drug, but also like it was a whole food. So you're like oh, this is like a vitamin. It's super chill Like no big deal.
Speaker 2:Literally deal, literally in the supplement aisle yes, but on the other hand, I remember my dad because I think he had like back pain or something and that was me. I was like, dad, you should try cbd. See what happened. Or people were recommending it and he was like hila, where can I get some cbd? He was like I don't know yeah, literally you could order it on Amazon. And he's like well, you do know anyone that like give me some CBD.
Speaker 2:I'm like it's not it's not a drug dad. It's not like marijuana, like he was trying to get me to be his dealer or something.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that was such a pervasive belief for a while there because also, like all of the cannabinoids have really similar names and so a lot of people so there's. So to give a little like yeah, give us the very layman term or layman understanding of yes, so cannabis, which is the plant also called marijuana, okay has many, many compounds in it and they're all called cannabinoids.
Speaker 1:It's just a compound that's in the cannabis plant, basically something like that name, um, and they have a whole bunch of different acronyms, and the ones that most people are familiar with are thc, which, when you ingest it, however you ingest it, it crosses this thing called the blood-brain barrier and it can get into your brain and that's how it causes the high that's associated with getting high from marijuana or cannabis. And then there's other compounds like CBD. You might have heard of CBG or CBN. Some of those are like starting to gain traction right now, but there are all these other minor cannabinoids. They've been in the plant for many, many years.
Speaker 1:It's part of the plant, um, and a lot of people who are familiar with cannabis have been told about, like, the different strains of cannabis and how some get you really high and some give you a body high and some are brain high and all of that. Yeah, um, there's that science is a little iffy because the plant has been inbred for like thousands of years. So there's, the strains are debated, but basically it's the different levels of like, how much thc to how much cbd. Oh, interesting, okay, and so thc like the actual compound of thc is the one that's federally illegal but legal legalized in many states. And then CBD in 2018, I still have some beef with this and it's because so the federal government in 2018, released something called the Farm Bill and that basically regulates, like, production and sales of all of these different plants, essentially um, and so they de-scheduled cbd.
Speaker 1:It used to be schedule one, the highest tier, just like thc is, along with, like, I believe, methamphetamine is like it's up there, yeah, right, literally as high up the list as you can get, um, and so they de-scheduled it, but there was a a hook on it where they said they won't. They specifically their verbiage was that they descheduled hemp derived cbd, which does not include synthetic cbd, which is what a lot of companies sell and also what you can get from the government. So that was very frustrating. There were some legal loopholes we ended up having to jump through, but I don't even understand what that means you can synthetically make yeah, okay, so you can synthetically make cbd.
Speaker 2:Is that? Are there cbd plants that are without thc, or do you need to do some sort of?
Speaker 1:so you can extract it from plants that have other compounds in it. It's very like a very pharmaceutical approach so you can extract it and purify CBD from plants that have all sorts of other things, but you can also make the compound of CBD just like how you would make the compound of Adderall or whatever pharmaceutical you're taking in a bottle.
Speaker 2:And you can also just have a CBD plant. I, I think so. Okay, we don't know for sure. Okay, but typically it's synthetic or it's extracted, derived, yeah, from the plant. It's hemp. Derived is hemp. The same thing is hemp's. The plant.
Speaker 1:So if you hear like cannabis, marijuana all the same, okay, yeah, like you can buy hemp bags a lot of people are really into the hemp lotion, hemp balm, that kind of stuff, yeah, but you can extract CBD from all those things. Okay, which was annoying when we were trying to source CBD for our research, when it was like you can legally have hemp derived but we couldn't source hemp derived. So we actually spent 16 months getting a schedule, one drug license from the federal government to study cbd and I was like I can go to 7-eleven on campus, I can go to 7-eleven, buy it and take it, but I cannot study it because it's illegal federally oh yeah, that was the most annoying 16 months ever.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you can't get funded until you like have the license to have the drug. So we were basically sitting there like twiddling our thumbs, just waiting, just waiting. Okay, and it was covid, so like it took forever.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh yeah, but so so what made you say I want to see if cb, what? Just the timing of like CBD coming up and you looking at fetal development?
Speaker 1:It was mostly because so I wanted to study something related to pregnancy, and one of the most common debilitating symptoms is morning sickness and people. I haven't had them myself, but I do have so much empathy for people. I like that they call it morning sickness, even though it's like such a misnomer, like that is an all day yeah thing, and I just have so much sympathy for the person who's like laying on their bathroom floor at two in the morning, hugging a toilet for like the fourth week in a row, yeah, yeah, just miserable. And at that point, like I feel like there's a point of desperation that you hit where you're just like googling, like can I do this, can I do this? Will this help me? Will that help me? Yeah.
Speaker 1:And at the time there was this big influx, partially on social media, partially on like the rest of the internet, like on Facebook and TikTok and all that stuff, but also on like google. Um, that was saying, like nope, cannabis is totally safe, 100 safe. Um, like I'm these are all anonymous accounts, obviously, but it'd be like I'm a nurse, you're totally fine, there's no legal repercussions like yeah, my doctor told me to do this. This is how you can avoid like prosecution Because it's a federal one. Cannabis as a whole is still a federal one, federal schedule one drug. If you test positive at labor and delivery units, depending on your state, that's an automatic CPS referral for cannabis or for CBD.
Speaker 1:No for cannabis, oh, got it. So at the time I was wanting to study cannabis yeah, and in Colorado I was like it's legal, yeah, I should be able, like this should be easy. And then it turned out it wasn't easy, so I was like I'll do CBD Like CBD is new, got it. It's hip, it's like less stigmatized. Yeah stigmatized. Yeah, and it's now at whole foods, so like this is gonna be so easy and then, and then it took the 16 months right and I was like it's not easy.
Speaker 2:So then, once you decided that you were gonna do it, then how did you do it?
Speaker 1:yeah, um, I work in pre-clinical research, which means I work with cells and animals instead of people, so with people in general and especially with a pregnant population. There's so many ethical considerations like it's totally unethical to have this drug and, no, there could potentially be risk, I'm going to randomize pregnant patients to take it, like no board is going to approve that without the possibility of extreme benefit like right that's not gonna happen.
Speaker 1:So, um, all of my work was pre-clinical, which means basically, we had all of these colonies of mice and we would set them up with males and they would get pregnant and we would it's called plug checking. You have to, like, set the mouse up with a male mouse and then leave them overnight and then go look in their hoo-ha in the morning and see if there's sperm in it. Oh my gosh, yeah, it was. That was. That was fun, love it like hundreds of mice. Yeah, oh.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, that's amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then you take the male out. So now you have this little female pregnant early, early, early pregnancy. Mouse and mouse pregnancies are pretty similar to humans translationally, but they're really quick. So mice are only pregnant for three weeks. Oh, wow. And then they pop out their pups, and they usually have about eight pups. Oh, wow. I know Yikes, and what we would do is so CBD. There's a lot of a lot of the prior literature was doing like injections and things like that and we're like well, no human is out here injecting CBD injecting CBD.
Speaker 1:That's not something that's going to happen, right, and so we wanted to. And the way that the drug is metabolized is super different, so similar to like other drugs. You're gonna feel very different if you orally ingest it, if you snort it, if you inject it like it can be the same thing, but it's gonna make you feel really differently. And with cannabis, a lot of people are familiar with the difference between like smoking cannabis and taking an edible. Like smoking will get you high really quickly and then it peters off very quickly, but edibles take a lot longer to set up and then they come down. Very similar with cbd just the way it's metabolized in the body right, but you're not feeling like yeah, and so I was like injections aren't the way.
Speaker 1:Also, I like don't feel like injecting mice every day. Yeah, we decided to do something called an oral gavage, which is like a little kind of like a little feeding tube that you give the mouse, and so we took the CBD. It finally came from the federal government, in all of its lockboxes.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1:It's really fun, and we dissolved it in sunflower oil. We just Googled, like CBD products and found that a lot of the oral solutions were in sunflower oil and we're like, okay, we'll do that one. And so we dissolved it. And then every day I would go down and I would weigh the mouse because she gains weight during pregnancy and I would give her this one standard dose of CBD with the little feeding tube. So it's kind of like if she had had an edible.
Speaker 2:Comparatively, Right Metabolizing.
Speaker 1:And then you do that all the way through their pregnancy and then they give birth and you let the pups you know they they breastfeed for normal, and then we separate them from their moms once they're like weaning age. But you didn't do.
Speaker 2:CBD during breastfeeding.
Speaker 1:They do not do CBD during breastfeeding. However, a very interesting little caveat that not a lot of people know is so CBD and all the other cannabinoids those molecules are all, based on their structure, really fat soluble. They're not water soluble. So when you think about like alcohol, you pee out alcohol because it's water soluble. But cannabinoids are fat soluble, which means when you consume them they store in fatty tissues and breast milk happens to be like the best fatty tissue that's ever existed.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:So all we the only studies I've seen have looked at THC and CBD, but both of them have shown that actually, when you're consuming THC or CBD while either breastfeeding or right before delivery, when you're starting to build those breast milk stores, it actually it not only goes into your breast milk, but it actually accumulates in breast milk because it's like this is the best fatty storage place, like we're all gonna go yeah, and there was some weird issues.
Speaker 1:This is like such a caveat, but I find it really interesting. There was a lot of issues where, at some of the breast milk banks, you know how people who have like overspent donate.
Speaker 1:They test all the breast milk for for everything right yeah it's clean and they were getting almost no cannabis positive breast milk and they're like cannabis consumption rates are very high. Yeah, this doesn't make any sense. And it turned out that they were using the same test you would use on a urine drug screen on the milk, but urine gets the water soluble metabolites and not the milk soluble metabolites. So then they went back and started retesting the milk and like a ton of it yeah with cannabis positive, and they're like, oh god, we need, oh my gosh, they just changed, like all their protocols yeah, I'm glad they figured it out.
Speaker 1:Yeah right, no kidding, but it was kind of a funny moment where we were like we need to keep in mind how this drug works.
Speaker 1:But interesting, there's a concern like if you're consuming all the way during your pregnancy, when you're putting on all that fat as you have to carry a pregnancy, totally you're storing cannabinoids in that fat buildup and then you have the baby and you're breastfeeding and you're burning all of that fat. There's this hypothesis that you're actually liberating a lot of those cannabinoids back into your bloodstream as you're burning that fat and then it goes through the breast milk and can be detected in baby's bloodstream.
Speaker 2:Which who? But that's what your research is Like. Is that a bad thing, Like I guess, like, oh my gosh, that's exactly. Is it better, Right? Okay, so let's keep going. So you do it to them all through their pregnancy, but not during breastfeeding, not not during breastfeeding and not before pregnancy.
Speaker 1:Um, and so then the pups are born and you let them grow up a little bit and then we run them through, like you know the stereotypical science thing where it's like a mouse in a maze. That's the cheese part cheese is fake, there's no cheese involved but there are mazes, lots and lots of mazes that lots and lots of researchers have figured out, like this maze specifically tests cognition, and this maze specifically tests anxiety and this memory. Yeah, there's like a bajillion mazes. That's bizarre kind of that. You run the mice through and so what? I went into this. So what the literature showed before I started was that the effect of cannabis like full cannabis, thc all of it from clinical studies, retrospective clinical studies, which means people consumed cannabis during their pregnancies as much as they wanted, whenever they wanted, like there was no standardization, but they just reported that they were taking it.
Speaker 2:Which gets rid of the ethical problem right, which gets rid of the ethical?
Speaker 1:problem right, which gets rid of the ethical problem, but there's no controls, right, so you're like so they might be taking it once a week, one time during their pregnancy, every day exactly, and you only, so you have to go on what they say.
Speaker 1:But there's even though, even if you're a researcher and you're like I am not a doctor, I cannot report you to anybody like I am simply a doctor, I cannot report you to anybody like I am simply a researcher there's still that bias of like. But what if you do sort of thing? So even then it was underreported compared to when we took blood and urine, and people who said that they weren't clearly were so, but those studies they kids for. For I think those kids are like eight or nine now, but the most recent published data was from when they were five, okay, and that was showing that in utero, cannabis exposure was causing anxiety in these kids and ADHD can even sometimes compared to their non-exposed siblings.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, but the mechanism wasn't figured out yet. We were just seeing all these correlations between the kids that were exposed compared. Oh, wow, yeah, but the mechanism wasn't figured out yet. We were just seeing all these correlations between the kids that were exposed compared to kids that weren't. But we didn't know. Is that THC? Is that CBD, like? Is it the dose? Is it the timing? Was there a critical window during pregnancy?
Speaker 2:Oh, my gosh.
Speaker 1:We're not sure, yeah, and so that's also so hard when these patients are pregnant and they're coming in saying like is this okay? And the doctors are like yeah no, no yeah I don't think so, like this is all the data we have, so like tbd, and so what we wanted to see was if cbd was causing a lot of those behavioral effects. So we were doing the tests for anxiety and memory and cognition and all sorts of other stuff Right, so the sorry real quick just to summarize what you've just said.
Speaker 2:So the studies were for full cannabis, like somebody just smoking weed somebody smoking weed and and yeah, and just reporting that they're doing it, but it's very uncontrolled, which then led to anxiety, add, but you're like but what was that exactly? So you pulled the one compound of CBD to be like, maybe it's this let's check this out, see if this has anything to do with it when you could have pulled THC. Or you could have started doing the dosage or checking, like you said, the critical periods. The first trimester is the second. Okay, all right, we're going to take a brief break to talk about the viral frownies that you see all over Instagram.
Speaker 2:It's supposed to be the non-toxic version of Botox and essentially what it is is it is a cast that you put on. I put it on my forehead and so it just like makes your muscles not move, and it's supposed to train your muscles not to move. I wear it at night. Sometimes I wear it when I'm working. Anytime I'm in a scowl. I don't really care too much about like the crow's feet or the lines across my forehead.
Speaker 2:I have this butt crack right in between my. Some people call it the 11s. It's probably more appropriate. Mine's just one, though, so I just don't want to call it the one, so I call it the butt crack. I would recommend. I say it's like working out. So if you're consistent with it, it will work. If you're not consistent with it, it won't work. And I know that because I've been not consistent with it and I noticed that my butt crack comes back full fledged. So I'm back on the train of being consistent with it. So if you've seen these and you wondered if they work, I would say yes, if you are consistent and if you want to try them, you can go to HeyShaylacom slash brownies POD and you can use HeyShayla as a discount code. Let's get back to the show.
Speaker 1:So the first study we did was high dose. It's 50 mg per kg, which is just like way higher than a normal human would take. But we wanted to go high and see what we find, Because if you go too low and then you don't find anything're like I don't know if there actually was there.
Speaker 1:So we started with a high dose just to see um and we ran them through these tests and I was really excited that there wasn't any changes in anxiety or adhd. We didn't specifically look at adhd but, um, there was no changes in anxiety compulsivity, which is like one of the factors of like OCD. Okay. Help compulsive my SAR and we didn't see any changes in memory and I was like, oh my God, is this a wonder drug?
Speaker 1:This is the miracle drug. Is this going to be perfect, like I was. I was, so it was kind of hard because it was negative data which is really hard to publish. But I was like this is awesome, oh my God, we're doing so well. And then we ran this test of cognition and unfortunately, weirdly, there was a big sex difference. So the males were totally fine. We were like, okay, that's fine.
Speaker 1:But the females had really difficult times completing this cognitive challenge repeatedly, like different mice, multiple times the females were not meeting these cognitive markers compared to the mice, and we I forgot to mention we had this whole doubled group of control mice where they had the same handling every day by the research team. We were totally blinded to which group was which. So they were getting just sunflower oil as I can during this time. We had no, like me as a researcher, I had no idea which group was which to decrease bias. Right, the females that were cbd exposed were having all of these problems and we're like's really interesting. We hadn't looked at cognition in the clinical population. So I was kind of like maybe it's a fluke, like maybe we'll see where it goes. And so we partnered with this other lab on campus that's a neurodevelopment lab and what they wanted to do was look at a part of the brain it's called the prefrontal cortex. It's like right here behind your forehead and that's where personality and thinking, like that's really what makes you you kind of, is the prefrontal cortex and that's also where cognition kind of lays.
Speaker 1:And so they wanted to look at the brains of these mice and see what was going on in the prefrontal cortex. And they looked at the males and the females that were CBD exposed and vehicle exposed Vehicle is just the sunflower oil and they were also blinded. They didn't know which group was which. And the males, just like in the cognitive studies, had no differences. The males were chilling Like they were totally fine, but the females they saw that the neurons in the prefrontal cortex from the CBD exposed mice had much more difficulty communicating with each other.
Speaker 1:So in your brain when you have one neuron it has to talk to another neuron by sending this thing called an action potential and then that kind of trickles down to get to where you need to go. Basically, and these mice it took a lot more to get them to elicit an action potential, like to get one started or to respond to an action potential. They had a really difficult time doing that and the it was funny because my friends who were running those experiments were like I'm blinded, but I have a theory as to which one's which, and I was like, yeah, do they know your outcome, did they?
Speaker 2:know when they started studying? Did they know that you found that the female cbd?
Speaker 1:they did okay, so they were kind of why we started partnering with them and then, when one group was lower, they were like and they finished their data collection. They're like so is this one the cbd group?
Speaker 2:and I was like yeah, yeah, cbd group okay, so what does that look like like slow cognitive function? I understand like my elective class in college was neuroscience and I was just like like I loved it. I didn't do well. I think I got a c in the class but I could give I care less about the c, I was so fascinated. But okay, so you're saying the neurons and the extra potential, but what does that look like in a human to have low cognitive function?
Speaker 1:So it's hard because we can't do a direct comparison with humans, because we can't like slice a human's brain and then watch it, if that makes sense. But when your neurons are communicating less to each other you have less overall action, potential activity. So there's this thing called an MRI or an fMRI. It's a functional MRI that you can go in and it can look at the activity of a human brain. Like have you ever seen those pictures where it's like, when you see this image, this area of your brain lights up that kind of stuff? That's kind of as close to we can get as humans, that like what we're doing in these mice. And it would basically say that when, in a normal situation when you'd have this much activity going on in the prefrontal cortex, if you were cbd exposed, you have dampened that activity, you don't have as much. But I mean, does that?
Speaker 2:look like you are tripping more.
Speaker 1:You can't think of words fast enough, like, like kind of yeah, so most of the cognitive, and so in mice we have the brain stuff. The cognitive skill is like a challenge. So you repeatedly show these mice to a challenge and once they've seen it once and then they see it again, they should know how to okay. This is what I'm asking yeah their and they don't. Their time stays the same to complete the task.
Speaker 2:Got it that they've already seen, so they have a harder time like learning.
Speaker 1:They have a harder time learning. And so there's a bunch of different ways you can look at that. In humans, a lot of them are surveys, a lot of them in kids, it's like braid the rope, can you braid the rope? You've braided the rope, can you braid it again? Okay, like that kind of is the most translationally relevant.
Speaker 2:Okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so that was kind of one of the biggest findings that we had was this change in cognition in the females that were exposed, and that it wasn't kind of a fluke and that actually their, their brain is signaling differently, and so what we did um after that, what we were looking at, so that was a high dose cbd every day during pregnancy, right then we did something called a dose response.
Speaker 1:so instead of giving 50 mgs per kick per day in this next big cohort we did three different doses. We did 50 mgs per kg per day, just like we had 25 mgs per kg per day, and then 5 mgs per kg per day, and 5 is like a very translationally relevant dose, like something you could easily consume if you were buying CBD at Whole Foods.
Speaker 1:Oh, 5 would be what, like a typical person would 5 is much more relevant to what a human would consume and the data is not published yet, but we saw essentially the same thing in those mice.
Speaker 2:So then, what would be the next step?
Speaker 1:Then what we did. So those mice are all growing up and I defended in September so I haven't been back in the lab but the people are. The rest of the people in the lab are like still actively doing these studies as the mice get older. So we did the dose response and we really liked that five meg per keg dose because we're like we're still seeing effects.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and is it still just with the females?
Speaker 1:That one was. And then I have this whole. I'll tell you about like kind of the whole other side of the story, which is hard because it's not published yet, so it's like it hasn't gone through peer review. We're still collecting some of the data, but we're also seeing all of these metabolic effects, which is basically like the mice that came out at this high dose, the 50 makes per kick. We to give you like the brief story of how we even started looking at that we had looked at this part of the brain and we thought we were going to see a lot of changes in the genes, so like the things that code for everything that goes on in all of your cells. We were looking at all these pathways of all of these genes and we thought we were going to see all of these neurodevelopmental genes come up and the most changed. And we didn't. We actually saw a lot of changes in metabolic pathways, which is like how you use glucose, how you respond to insulin, like everything you think of when you think of like diabetes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, those genes were super different and we were like, okay, that's weird unexpected idea why, why, and we went back to the literature and, right as we were doing that a new study had been published from that clinical group of those kids that were growing up, that were five years old, and it showed that the cannabis full cannabis, thc and cbd exposed kids had higher adiposity and higher BMI and higher fasting blood glucose than the non-exposed kids.
Speaker 1:And we're like, huh, is there a metabolic effect here? Like what, what's going on? And we're like, well, we have the mice, let's test it, like, let's rule this out, and so you know when you have to do your glucola drink, like the that we did that on the mice.
Speaker 1:Okay, okay, you give them glucose and you see how well they respond. Yeah, and they failed it. They all failed it. The CBD mice were super glucose resistant and were like glucose intolerant and we're like that's weird, glucose intolerant and we're like that's weird and we're like maybe, maybe, what if? What if we give them insulin and see if they respond to that? Are they? Are they resistant to insulin? So we gave them insulin and they were resistant to insulin and we were like what in the world is going on here? But they had the same body composition, so they weighed the same and they had the same body composition.
Speaker 1:So they weighed the same and they had the same amount of fat and the same amount of muscle and no difference in gender no difference in gender, just um.
Speaker 1:all all of the cbd mice were showing this stuff and we put them in this thing called a calorimeter which measures, like how much they breathe and how many calories they're burning. It's like this weird little enclosed box, wow. And it showed that the mice were acting totally the same. And I'm a I'm a brain behavior person. So I was like, if these mice are glucose intolerant, insulin resistant, like they're probably eating more and moving less, like that would make sense. But we measured it and they weren't, and we're like okay, so they're not acting any differently, like they're acting the same. Why, what's going on? And then I had this moment where I realized that I'm such a brain person but during fetal development, when you're being exposed to CBD and your brain's like soaking it all in, I kind of forgot that, like so is the liver, and so is the pancreas, and so is everything else in the body. That's also a fatty tissue that he loves to go into. And I was like, oh yeah, those organs could also be affected. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right, Just looking at the brain here but yeah, and so we ended up.
Speaker 1:We, those studies, are like finally wrapping up. We're trying to get it published, hopefully here shortly, but classifying the glucose intolerance and insulin resistance that follow the high dose.
Speaker 2:So then does that mean diabetes?
Speaker 1:Kind of it's like diabetes is hard to measure in a mouse. Okay, because it's kind of like a clinical phenotype. Diabetes is hard to measure in a mouse because it's kind of like a clinical phenotype, but it's. It's kind of like as close as you can get to this mouse being like a diabetic mouse. Okay, yeah, but the same like high blood sugar, like all of that is the same in the mice as it is in like a diabetic human.
Speaker 1:And so when we did that dose response so that was at the 50 megs per gig and then we did the 25 and the five, and the five actually showed worse effect on the metabolic outcomes. Right, yeah, that's the face I made, where I was like what, what is going on? And when you think about exposures you're like more is worse, obviously, like that's how, how drugs work. And then I, as I was going back into the literature, I actually think it's more of kind of like a Goldilocks situation where if you give too much of the drug, maybe you're shutting down a whole pathway, maybe you're like telling these receptors that there's way too much going on. They're downregulating themselves, who knows. But maybe at this low dose you're at that perfect window of like activating the receptors enough to cause a change without shutting them down.
Speaker 2:Right Interesting.
Speaker 1:So we were like that's bizarre.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay. So we kept going with this five mg per kg dose. So we went from high dose all the way through pregnancy. We repeated it with the low dose and we're like, okay, this low dose is where we want to stick. And then the most recent studies that these mice are like they're young now they're probably only a couple of months old at this point. But then we wanted to do a windows of exposure.
Speaker 1:So we were looking at that low dose of five mg per kg of early pregnancy or of late pregnancy and then run the same tests and see if there's any changes. And unfortunately I don't have that data because we're still collecting it. So, interesting To see if it's like what if you do low dose during late pregnancy? What if we don't see it there? We're not sure because we're still collecting it Right, but I'm still approaching it with this like I want to. I want to be able to rule out something to be like maybe it's safe during this. I would love to be able to say that because it's totally accessible. And like, the hardest thing with CBD is that it works really well.
Speaker 1:It's a very effective anti-emetic which sucks, yeah, right right like it's hard because it's like that cost benefit analysis, if it's something that's not helping you, that poses risk. It's really easy to stop, but when you have a really severe morning sickness and this works it's the the barrier is much higher.
Speaker 1:Totally potential risk only in mice, but also we can't test it in humans so we have to go with the mice, so it's very much so like a person-to-person decision and and one of the reasons I actually so, I was in the phd program, um, and I was really enjoying it. That was all the mouse stuff, um. But during that time, a lot of my colleagues that I would interact with, who are very basic science people, I would be presenting this data and they would ask me a question at the end and they'd be like so you showed that this drug, at this dose, causes harm. Ergo, anyone who's using this is like clearly a bad person. And I had some people who were like this is why this should be illegal again, and I was like whoa, whoa, yeah, so not what I said.
Speaker 2:Yeah right.
Speaker 1:Well, I go back through my slides like I never once yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, that's like, what, is that Ibuprofen? I'm not allowed to take ibuprofen, but like that doesn't mean that we should make it illegal for the general population to not be able to take ibuprofen.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and it was like this moral assignment that they were giving and I was like, hang on, this is new research that at that time wasn't published yet. So how would they know? Yeah right, there's probably five other labs that I could name that are also studying.
Speaker 2:I was going to ask you that it's? A small world, and are they finding similar things?
Speaker 1:They are finding really similar things, which is nice, but it's like repetitive Consistent yeah, but there was in Europe.
Speaker 2:I remember learning this in college. There was like an anti-na learning this in college. There was like a anti-nausea drug that was causing yeah, like babies do not have limbs.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right, thalidomide was a tragedy, right, but it's, there was people. I actually did have people compare it to thalidomide and I was like, okay, well, but I feel like it's the unknown of exactly what you're saying.
Speaker 2:This is helping me so much and the cost benefit, and you just don't know yet, right, until you know. And then, clearly, once you know, you're not going to do that and so your whole thing is let's figure that out. All right, we are going to take a brief break to talk about expecting and empowered. If you follow me at all, you're like Shayla, stop talking about them. I can't, I won't, I will never.
Speaker 2:If you are pregnant or you're a postpartum and you want to work out and you need a guide, this is your guide. These women are women's health physical therapists, a nurse. They give you a step-by-step guide through your entire pregnancy for what is safe to do. So you don't have to wonder, you don't have to worry about you're doing the wrong thing. There's an app. It does pelvic floor work, which I had no idea that that was even important. It's crucial for preparing for labor and repairing from labor. And then your workout, and then core work. And core work when you're're pregnant is not crunches, so it just teaches you the way to do things. They have a running program, they have yoga, they have all sorts of stuff on their app and they have postpartum, so I've been using this since I was pregnant with my first in 2019. I am just a huge advocate of them, highly recommend. Hey Sheila will give you a discount on their, on their app. Uh, and you can go to HeyShaylacom slash expecting an empowered pod. You're welcome.
Speaker 1:Like we have to. For people to make an informed decision with their pregnancy, they have to know the risks and the benefits, and to do that, not only do we have to study it to know the risks and the benefits but also in science we suck. We suck at talking to other people like academics are really good at writing up all their data in a very academic manner and then publishing it in a journal.
Speaker 1:That's a very academic that is behind a paywall, so normal people right, can't access it, yeah, and then talking to all of their colleagues in a really academic manner and being like we did it right me crazy. I was like who, frankly, who? Cares if we, if this mouse did this one thing, if we never talk to our ob-gyn colleagues, like if we never talk to the public, if we never talk to public health people, if we never talk to clinicians who cares, like?
Speaker 2:I love that.
Speaker 1:It drove me crazy and so that's when I started picking up the um maternal, child, public health stuff and all of my work in that was was less so cannabis focused and more so like perinatal substance use in general. Um, but it was so refreshing when I was like we are talking to actual people who are making actual decisions with the information.
Speaker 2:And recommendations.
Speaker 1:One of the things that it's also not published, but it's just kind of like a side project that I'm working on. I'm looking at how perinatal cannabis use, or cannabis use during pregnancy, is portrayed online like trying to quantify it. So if you were say well, I guess you're what 18 weeks now.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Congratulations. Hopefully the morning sickness has faded.
Speaker 2:I didn't really get that much this time, but I'll tell you a story later.
Speaker 1:Say you're like 10 weeks pregnant and just having an awful, awful time Like the laying on the bathroom floor situation and you go online. I was like I want to know what I would find if I was that person and so I went through.
Speaker 2:Girl, you are good.
Speaker 1:It's fun. There's this whole thing called Canamami TikTok, canamami Reddit, canamami Instagram. There's Facebook, there's a whole app for like Canamami tiktok, canamami reddit, canamami instagram. There's facebook. There's a whole app for like canamami stuff and everyone unanimously was saying this is totally safe, there's no effects, you are totally fine. Here's how you avoid a drug test, like don't worry about it. But then these patients are like okay, the it's a, it's a. You know, when you're miserable and you want to find something validation with what you want.
Speaker 1:Yeah, a hundred percent validation there's the like the entire internet is your validation, but the thing that will not blow up on tiktok is the cdc being like hey, there are potential risks. Weigh the risks and benefits with your provider. Like that's not gonna be any action no and so they like that. Information is just not findable and all of the published literature is behind these paywalls, so they can't access it.
Speaker 2:That's what I was gonna ask you.
Speaker 1:If somebody wants to do learn more about this yeah, thankfully, a lot of the journals are moving towards something called open access, which means basically the researchers. This is such a messed up system. You think when you do research and you submit a paper that you like, get paid for the work that you did? Researchers pay journals to publish their research. Yeah, it's really well.
Speaker 1:It has to go through peer review and get accepted yeah to pay fees like upwards in the thousands of dollars, depending on the journal, and to publish open access, like one of the the recent papers we published. That was on the cognition stuff. I think it costs like over five grand to make it open access so people who google it can read it. Yeah, isn't that fun. Isn't that just like so fun?
Speaker 2:my brain is melting yeah, it hurts.
Speaker 1:Um, I don't want to like reference myself, but I did write a good um. It's a review paper that is open access. It's online. It's through the, the um journal of cannabis research that I can send you a link to too, okay. But it basically compiles all the literature and it's written in a pretty understandable way and then has the links to all of the papers. So, instead of when people are like I do my own research and researchers are kind of like you know, like we do that, um, but for people who are doing their own research, I think it's so valuable to be like here's the act, like here's the literature. Right, if you want to peruse it? Like right, here it is. It's. Some of them are written in a level that not a lot of people are going to understand. People with language barriers, like that's a whole other right loophole that things are not translated into other languages.
Speaker 1:But I do have a paper that kind of goes through the like why people are consuming, why obgyns are kind of scared to talk about it, because they're not.
Speaker 1:They're not trained yeah right, they don't know, really they don't know, unless they're spending all their time like like searching all of these potential articles. It's not like they're notified that a new yeah right Put out and it kind of goes through like what the clinical data shows, what the preclinical data shows, and it's very much so written in a way that's like here's your information, this is your pregnancy.
Speaker 1:Yeah is your information. This is your pregnancy. Yeah, if you read these risks and the zofran isn't working and the unisom isn't working and all the stuff isn't working and you want to use cbd, go for it like that's your decision, right? Be careful with cannabis, because if you test positive, cps can be called and it's like a whole thing. I'm less supportive of cannabis use as a whole.
Speaker 2:Just the risk of CPS.
Speaker 1:Well, the cannabis use seems to have a lot more effects than the.
Speaker 1:CPS stuff, like the studies of THC alone, are kind of more same effects but more severe. Okay, so it's not not something I wouldn't like recommend cannabis use during pregnancy, but you know, some people it's the same thing where, like, people are desperate to do what they need to do. So if it's like a recreational use, I'd I'd highly recommend trying to cut it, just like drinking. If just like drinking, and there's people, a lot of people, argue like, well, cannabis isn't addictive, you can't be addicted to cannabis, it just like drinking, it's just like drinking. And there's people, a lot of people, argue like, well, cannabis isn't addictive, you can't be addicted to cannabis.
Speaker 2:It's like you can be addicted to anything sugar like well, I think even, not necessarily even like the drug of cannabis, but the act of smoking and like the habits of waking up and doing it and like the spots in the day and whatever, and the people you're with. Yeah right, there's.
Speaker 1:a huge amount of people who are not in the safest of relationships and their partner is very pressuring. Or even if they're not explicitly pressuring, they're kind of implicitly pressuring.
Speaker 2:What about? Is there such thing as secondhand? Absolutely Okay.
Speaker 1:It's just like secondhand nicotine exposure, wild Secondhand cannabis exposure, yeah, which is also for people. So some of the public health work I do is in harm reduction for people who are using substances who are not at a point where they can stop. So there's people with substance use disorders, including cannabis use disorder, where it's like an actual dependency on cannabis use, just like how an alcoholic would go into withdraw from alcohol.
Speaker 2:Wow. Really I didn't know that that could happen with cannabis.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it can happen with anything. So many things Caffeine.
Speaker 2:Do you know anything about caffeine during pregnancy? Because this wasn't full, this full mason jar.
Speaker 1:Hey, the research has shown that the limit is actually pretty high to consume coffee. So see, that's why we need to do the study, but a lot of the work we're doing right now. So, for the people who can cut use, highly recommend cutting it. People who can cut use, highly recommend cutting it. Like, providing the alternatives for nausea that have been rigorously studied to not have negative effects the, the zofran, the, the unison, the vitamin b6, like all of that stuff, has been very rigorously studied, whereas the cannabis stuff is so new and it's popping up with these risks that we're like, please go to the ones.
Speaker 1:But for people who can't stop or choose not to stop, or whatever it may be trying to educate them on harm reduction. So not smoking with the baby in the room. Not smoking or doing edibles right before breastfeeding, right before it goes into your milk supply, to um like consuming it after breastfeeding if you're breastfeeding.
Speaker 2:Okay, so that's interesting, because with alcohol they and by no, they and I don't even know that I say they and I don't think I mean scientists they, as in the internet, probably recommend drinking like as you're doing it.
Speaker 1:Yes, I've heard that.
Speaker 2:because, because it doesn't go it's like your blood doing it. Yes, I've heard that, because, because it doesn't go, it's like your blood, like it takes a little while for it to get in the water soluble. Okay, there you go. Okay, so that's what I was gonna ask you. This is me thinking that I'm a scientist. Are you ready?
Speaker 1:you are.
Speaker 2:You're everyone's a scientist in whatever do female mice have more fat than male mice?
Speaker 1:while pregnant and while breastfeeding. No babies, they put on fat, they build fat while pregnant.
Speaker 2:Okay, no, no, I'd have to check like baseline to baseline, because I wouldn't be surprised well, I feel like that would be the fat storing in the females versus the fat storing in the males, because adult, like humans, we are supposed to have like a higher fat percentage right right, but I'm what I'm just thinking as your research companion here. I'm like, maybe because these baby females, maybe females have more fat, right, I don't know. Maybe Bring it to your team and credit me, I will. I will Put me in your research.
Speaker 1:No, it's really interesting Because the weird thing with research is that you kind of just like pick rabbit holes to go down and you're like this is my rabbit hole. So, like, my rabbit hole is CBD in pregnancy. And then there's other people whose rabbit holes are like the caffeine, like we have people whose entire careers are dedicated to understanding caffeine in pregnancy. Wild, which is crazy, but so important, so annoyed when you go on the internet and there's people who are like no, no, no, it's fine. And you're like yeah, yeah no, but yeah.
Speaker 1:So like some of the major harm reduction stuff for cannabis use, at least it's like washing your hands after using, so you're it's not on your hand, your little baby interesting yeah, we're reducing as much as we can like, even people who want to continue consuming during their pregnancies.
Speaker 1:Trying to decrease the potency of the cannabis, like if they can switch from a really high thc strain to a low thc strain, like they're still consuming, but it's less THC at least, so that's a win. Trying to consume a little less often. You can still consume, but reduce if possible. And then for those that are kind of postnatally, it's a lot of the please wash your hands, please be aware of secondhand smoke exposure, please be cognizant of breastfeeding, please be cognizant of having a sober caregiver and a lot of right.
Speaker 1:Explain to. That is like a lot of people that I've worked with in the substance use world are like well, it doesn't matter if I'm high while I'm at home. And I'm like would you, would you be okay if you hired a babysitter? And they were high while taking care of your kid? And they're usually like no, and I'm like I love your like realistic approach.
Speaker 2:You're like, I've done the research. There's negative effects, right, there's risks, but also I'm not blind to the fact that people are addicted, that people are in relationships with people that are doing that, that people are just going to choose to continue to do this, and so if that's your, if that's your choice, here are other options, like, like what you're saying wash your hands, go in a different room, make sure that you're, you have a sober caregiver, like. I appreciate that so much of just not being like. You need to stop, and if you don't, you're a terrible person.
Speaker 1:Right. Have you ever told someone with a substance use disorder to just like can you just like, quit? You should stop that. No, and also like with and like even compared to kind of a lot of people when they view substance use, Even compared to kind of a lot of people. When they view substance use, they view this like 25 to 45 year old male is like everyone's idea of like who has substance use disorders, but everyone completely neglects the history of moms having hidden substance use disorders whether it's when we're prescribed benzos for like multiple decades.
Speaker 1:To like get through being a stay-at-home mom, basically, or the the wine moms right arguably, probably, are verging on the the boundary of alcoholism totally, but it's like normalized, normal.
Speaker 2:Yes, totally normalized.
Speaker 1:And then there's also the whole physiologic component of like. There is morning sickness, your hormones are changing, your moods are changing. A lot of people are using um can't. In the surveys that are asking, like pregnant people, why they're using cannabis in general, yeah, vast majority up in like the 70 to 80 percent are saying nausea and vomiting makes sense, but also anxiety it does. It can in some people. Some people it increases anxiety, but a lot.
Speaker 1:Some people it increases anxiety, but a lot of people use it to decrease anxiety, are using it as an anti-anxiety med and they get so much flack for that and I'm like they're about to have a baby. Yeah, you'll be anxious. Normal response right, growing and developing an entire human and then just having another human in your life you have to be responsible for and like pay for right. That makes sense to me. That people are anxious, yes, and there's a lot of people, some that are very rightfully so and some that are a little more like propaganda-y, but that are fearful of the pharmaceutical system and they don't like pharmaceuticals and they want something that's natural and they do, even though it's probably produced in like the same factories but it's bottled with like the green, the cute little like green logo and like healthy yeah and you buy it at whole foods and they're like this is safe and natural because it's a plant.
Speaker 1:And you're like it comes from a plant. Opioids come from a plant. Like lots of stuff comes from plants hmm, totally doesn't guarantee safety. But, right, I understand that people are like I don't want to take zofran. It's made in a pharmacy like this is a plant and I want the plant. And I'm like, okay, that's your choice, right, do what you need to do. Like I don't recommend it, but I'm not going to be like you're a, you're an unfit.
Speaker 2:I'm not going to judge you. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:You're doing what you need to do with the information that you have available, which is usually not very much, to try to not throw up all day.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and like I, I get it totally so, in the most concise, what would you the use of from what you found in your research the use of cbd can cause? What are the? What are the negative? I mean I know we've talked about this this whole time, but I want like a brief summary.
Speaker 1:From the research that we have done, consumption of CBD during pregnancy can affect the cognition of offspring, the neurodevelopment of offspring and also the metabolism in offspring. Metabolism in offspring so that glucose and insulin regulation, which can have lasting effects on how these offspring that are mice take that with a grain of salt perform cognitively, how they respond to food and their activity later in life.
Speaker 2:And would you blanket that for male and female, are you saying?
Speaker 1:the metabolism stuff. Yes, the cognitive stuff is. We only saw it in females, and then other researchers have seen other things.
Speaker 2:Oh, really Okay, and males. And then what would you say? I guess could you say could you do a summary on I feel like it's kind of loaded, but either cannabis or THC, like can you do a similar thing from what you've seen from other people's research on?
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely so. From the cannabis research, which is a little more robust because it is both preclinical and clinical retrospective human studies, we see changes in anxiety of offspring, both males and females, in higher ADHD rates, and we're seeing changes also in metabolism, when it comes to how much fat they put on their bodies, what their blood sugar is and also their activity levels when they're exposed to cannabis.
Speaker 2:They have more, higher or lower activities levels when they're exposed to cannabis, they have more, higher, lower activities, lower activities. Okay, and then is it the sorry. What'd you say?
Speaker 1:that's in that metabolic world, when they have higher body fat, the resting blood, glucose, all of that and then is that the same answer for thc specific? That the clinical data is full cannabis product.
Speaker 2:The thc specific literature is very similar okay so your scientific recommendation was to try to cut cannabis and and cbd, but cbd you feel a little more comfortable with.
Speaker 1:I think I would try to cut all of it if possible, but the risks of THC appear to be worse than the risks of CBD. It's the same thing but just to a bit of a higher scale. So if people are really adamant about not stopping use or transitioning to one of the other alternatives for their nausea, vomiting or anxiety, getting off of that high potency THC is a big one. Decreasing the amount of consumption, like the volume of consumption or the timing of consumption, if they can cut it from twice a day to once a day, if you can cut it from every day to every other day, like that's big Um. And if you can cut, like, from THC to CBD, that's harm reduction. If you can cut from CBD to the Unisom and B6, like that's harm reduction, um. And also just really ensuring that harm, that harm reduction of trying to expose the baby as little as possible. So, like the baby's already here for people who have already delivered, let's avoid second hits. Let's avoid smoking in the same room. Let's make sure we wash our hands after consuming. Let's make sure we have a sober caregiver and getting help when you need help.
Speaker 1:There are huge support networks for people who have cannabis use disorders or for people who want to stop or who want to be in an environment that supports them when they're conflicted and they're like I don't know how I feel, like I'd love to stop, but I feel very dependent on this. It makes me feel comfortable. So being able to talk to somebody in that situation without fear is a really big one, and there's large networks, like what. So in Colorado I work with this one organization called Hard Beauty. It's a group of people I think other states have this as well but they are women who had substance use disorders in their own prior pregnancies who are now in recovery and not using, and they work as peer support. So when pregnant patients come in and they report substance use in a hospital, we can refer, refer, refer them out to hard beauty and they can talk and they do like support groups and yoga classes and all of that. That just gives these new moms some social support that can actually help them.
Speaker 2:Because if you, you know, have your baby and then are left with no social supports, that's not gonna deter you from using totally and I feel like, instead of people who are like, well, I've never used, but I know that it is bad for you, versus somebody who's like, yeah, I get it, I was there, yeah, yeah, okay, so that's great, but other do you would like. What would you even google if you were in this, if you were in Minnesota and you didn't know about hard beauty Colorado probably hmm, there's probably a few different ones.
Speaker 1:It could be like cannabis use support groups. It could be like peer. Peer support recovery is a big one. That's what they kind of advertise themselves under. Peer support is kind of like the general term for um. It's almost like comparative to doulas. I know that's a weird comparator to make, but it's like you just bring someone in who's been in the same situation at one point or another and they're not a medical professional. They're not there to medically guide you, but they're there to just be like. I've been here, yeah, really hard. This is what I did call me when you're struggling and I'll be there.
Speaker 2:Sweet, yeah, awesome support recovery services, which is so I would never google peer support yeah, well, like to your point of like what's on the internet? If I was struggling and I think I would yeah, I don't even know support group for cannabis moms or something you know, I don't know yeah.
Speaker 1:And then you'll get the ones that are like, yes, this is the healthiest thing we've ever done.
Speaker 1:Come to our group and you're like but also like in the grand scheme of things, also like giving the kids who might be at risk for these cognitive delays, like early intervention that's a big one. Like getting them the support they need as they go into school, making sure if maybe they're at risk maybe you're finding this out and you're three kids down the line and you've been actively consuming cannabis this entire time and you're like, oh dear God, I didn't know any of this. Like, none of this is meant to shame those moms. It's more so. Just like your kids are at a higher risk for this, this and this, let's make sure they've got really healthy diets on board to see if we can decrease some of those metabolic effects. Let's make sure that they're getting the early support intervention so that they can exceed in school.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of things that we can do to mitigate prenatal exposures. The best, obviously, is avoiding the prenatal exposures, but it's not to say that you know, someone hears this and I, like the intention is never to make them feel like guilty or remorseful or anything. It's like okay, we're now empowered with the information that my kid might be at a higher risk for this, this and this. Let's try to mitigate that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right as much as we can.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, you don't know what you don't know Until you know it, until you know. Okay, fascinating. I'm so, so grateful that you took the time to chat with me. I love your approach to everything, I love the presentation and I just yes, thank you so much for coming on and chatting with me about this.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:All right, I will talk to you soon, all right, thank you guys so much for listening. If you enjoyed it, please share with somebody you think would love, and I would be so honored if you would subscribe to the podcast and leave a comment and rating below so I can know what you guys are digging, what you want more of, just connect with you a little better. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you next time.