How Diet Impacts Sensory Processing Issues in Children

Episode Transcript

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Hi everyone, welcome to the show. I am Dr. Nicole and today, we’re going to talk about how nutrition and diet impact sensory processing issues in kids. Many children, whether they’re diagnosed with conditions or not, struggle with sensory issues. Maybe it’s being bothered by things like touch or textures, being over-responsive to sounds, under-responsive to pain — there’s a whole range of symptoms that fall in that realm of sensory processing and they can be mild to severe. Most people that I come in contact with in my professional work and at the clinic are familiar with interventions like occupational therapy and specific sensory-focused therapy tools for addressing these issues, but really, nutrition and diet are overlooked, I think, when it comes to treating and addressing these things. Just like anything else, what we eat makes a big difference in how our brain functions, how our body functions, and this is absolutely true for sensory processing issues as well. So to help us understand the connection between diet and sensory systems, it is my pleasure to have Dr. Kendra Becker on the show today. 

Let me tell you a little bit about her. She’s an integrated physician who has been in practice for over 10 years, she is Connecticut’s “4A Specialist” (asthma, autism, allergies, atopy/eczema). She holds an ND degree and an MS APRN, she is board-certified in both of those areas and her specialties include MTHFR, fertility, and treatment of “the 4As”. Dr. Becker focuses on primarily treating the pediatric population and their parents. She’s an adjunct faculty at two prominent universities where she teaches physicians and medical students and precept student doctors and nurse practitioners. Dr. Becker lectures all over the country on topics such as autism, the immune system, MTHFR and genetic mutations that have health implications. She’s the author of ‘A Delicious Way to Heal the Gut’, and ‘All you Can Eat’ and was chosen as one of Connecticut’s top naturopathic doctors and 10 best APRNs, Dr. Becker it is a pleasure to have you on the show today, welcome!

Dr. Kendra Becker:

Well, thank you so much. I’m so honored to be here. I feel like it’s been such a long time in coming, too!

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Yes! Absolutely! And I am just super excited to cover this topic because I think this is going to be eye-opening for so many of the parents who listen to the show, so let’s dive in. I want to start by asking you, how did you get involved with this kind of work? You’ve got a really interesting background professionally. What led you to do the kind of work that you’re doing today?

Dr. Kendra Becker:

So I always wanted to help people, and I went to college originally for pre-med and got through my first year and kind of looked at the timeline and realized, it’s so funny — when I tell the story, I laugh at myself, because of course, it ended up taking me longer doing what I do! I looked at the timeline and I was like, “I want to be married and I want to have kids, and that’s too many years for me to do what I want to do with my career and still be a mommy.” So I quickly did an about-face and decided I was going to go to nursing school. I literally went to nursing school thinking I was going to be the next Florence Nightingale. As a nurse, I loved it. I was in the cardiac ICU, I was in the trauma ICU, I was in the pediatric ICU, but I worked in southern California in the late 90s. At that point, that’s where HMOs were starting to roll out.

So my aha moment was — well, first of all, I was in San Diego, so at that point, San Diego was still really like the wild west. We didn’t have scales to hold people that were over 300 pounds. We didn’t have the ability to even hold patients on cardiac cath tables that were over 300 or 350 pounds. They were so bad at healthcare, it was really interesting. The other thing about San Diego was that there was so much focused on health. There was so much focus on being a human and interacting naturally with nature, so all the fun things that you could do as a human were free. The parks, the beach, riding your bike — all these things were so readily available, so it was really easy to focus on health and healing.

So the aha moment came one day when I was in the ICU and this is in the day of fax machines. So I admit my patient, I have no information on him, so I go over to the fax machine and I get the admission paperwork, which is generally all the orders that the doctors write. So as I’m standing there, reading and signing off on the orders for my new patient, the paper that comes over the fax next was his discharge paperwork. Nobody had seen the patient. He was admitted and discharged basically with the same swipe of the pen, and that was that moment where I was like, “We owe patients better care than this.”

So it was literally from that moment, I quit my job and I applied to naturopathic school, relocated back to the East Coast and started my kind of journey with naturopathic medicine. It was just really interesting that that’s how it happened. But what was happening in naturopathic school at the time was that there were people who were doing a lot of second career stuff like I was, but they weren’t medical professionals. So I went into school being able to talk to patients and handle patients and use medical terminology and I was familiar with pharmaceuticals and a lot of my contemporaries weren’t at the time. So I really felt like I kind of had a leg up, but I was in Connecticut and Connecticut didn’t allow for the pharmaceutical perspective that the APRN practice did, which is a conversation for another day that a practitioner like an APRN can prescribe pharmaceutical but a medical physician can’t. 

Because of what I wanted to do with practice — I treat Lyme disease and there are some opportunities where pharmaceutical medications are very, very swift and effective, I wanted to be able to offer that to my patients. So concomitantly, while in Naturopathic school, I actually started my APRN program. They saw me coming like I was a unicorn, right? Nobody had seen a naturopath path who had wanted to go back to APRN school. I had to transfer in a ton of my medical school credits in very little time that I really had to put in for my APRN, now I had a baby!

So I came out in 2007 with a baby, an ND degree in 2005 and then my APRN in 2007. I was like, well, there you go. Now it is what it is. So I started my practice and nobody really knew what a naturopath was and the truth is that I did practice like a naturopath but just had this extra credential. After being a nurse, and especially being in San Diego, where the number one career for females in San Diego was nursing, like everyone, I was a nurse going into what a naturopath is — it took me almost 10 years to come up with my elevator speech as to what is a naturopath. So, kind of being really frustrated and trying to qualify the type of medicine that I practiced, I was like maybe this just isn’t for me. I kept saying to my husband — “Do I just need to go and work in a minute clinic and do like throat cultures?” He said, “Well what do you want to do? And I said, “I want to treat kids. And I want our kids to have a better chance based in the environment that they currently live in.” My husband said to me, “Well, then do that.”

So from that point forward, I really started a pretty narrow and deep pediatric practice, but about 10 years ago, I brought in the genetic component. And so with genetics, because genetics are of course familial, is the children generally start first in my practice, then I see the parents and then on many occasions, I also see the grandparents. So I feel very fortunate with having the ability to really help an entire family unit of 3, sometimes 4 generations, really facilitate healing for them based on their genetic aptitudes and abilities. So it’s kind of a really nice practice that I have now, so I’m not changing anything! 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

I love it. I love the story — we all have such interesting stories and paths that we’ve taken to get to do this kind of work. Most of us who are sort of unicorns in our fields, our stories are just interesting, and so I love hearing that progression for you. And I also really love the focus on this sort of multi-generational family care, and I think we see that a lot too. That the initial patient that’s brought in is the child, and then as we start working with that, it’s like we start working with the parents or the siblings or other family members, and it’s really fun that way. I’m curious, we’re going to focus in on sensory issues, what are some of the common types of sensory processing or sensory integration issues that you see just across the board because you do see a lot of children. What are some of the common ones that you see?

Dr. Kendra Becker:

The clothing stuff, right? The seams on the socks, the seams on the jeans, the zippers, the buttons are a big part of it — some of my happiest emails and text messages are from my patients that text me pictures of their 4 and 5 years olds wearing a pair of Levi’s jeans. Clothing is huge, although, I will say — I was having this conversation with my son, and I was like — I think I was this way. My mother made fun of me and she said, “Listen, we cut out all the tags from your clothes because you couldn’t handle any of them.” She said I never could pass the clothes down and I always gave them away because they never had sizes in them, so I think these were all things that we’ve all seen throughout our society that nobody really connected or diagnosed.

The other thing that I see a lot is the sound sensitivity, the kids that are fearful of the school alarms, the school alarms, that anticipation for kids that are in school is paralyzing. That anxiety is paralyzing. Sometimes the motion stuff, like the kids that struggle with the car rides or the amusement park rides or even going up and down in an elevator or an escalator. So those are the common ones, but there’s all of them. There’s people that have very weird sensations on their skin or have to sleep in a certain position where one ear has tinnitus and the other one doesn’t — You see all kinds of crazy stuff over time but those could be the largest. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Yeah, and I think those can range from mild to severe, as you have mentioned. Some of them really can severely impact — even regardless of what other diagnoses a child may have, some of the sensory processing stuff is really from a functional standpoint, some of the stuff that impacts their quality of life the most — so I’m excited, you talk a lot about food and diet and how that’s such a big component of really functioning well and healing from anything. Let’s start talking about food as it relates to sensory issues, particularly something that I think many people aren’t aware of — what kinds of foods can actually cause or worsen sensory issues? Because I think most people don’t really think about that, but that’s a big deal. 

Dr. Kendra Becker:

Oh, it’s a huge deal! So the number one, I would say on my list, is probably gluten. The number two on my list is sugar, number three is probably the dyes and the preservative, and then kind of like a general tie around four and five which is dairy, corn, soy, some of the other preservatives that are natural in nature but can still affect kids, phenols are on that list as well. Gluten, in my opinion, is the biggest perpetrator and there’s just too much about gluten that is challenging. I mean, it is not the wheat that our grandparents ate, certainly not the wheat that the pioneers in America ate 200 years ago, but what we have done to it by hybridization and just all the chemicals and pesticides and then the processing has turned it into something that is completely unrecognizable to the body. But the only thing that is recognizable is that protein, which is called gluten and it has the word ‘glue’ in it because it actually works like glue in the body. 

So the way that I explain it to the kids in my practice because when you hear these poor patients, they wait like 4 months to get into my office, they’ve heard from everybody how there have been dramatic reversals in their friends and family’s lives, then they come to my office, they get a probiotic and a healing diet and I don’t see them again for four months.

So I explain to the kids why we’re doing the diet, and so with the gluten, I always explain too that it is sticky like glue. It sticks in different areas of the brain and then it literally becomes an itch you can’t scratch, like a mosquito bite, which is very easy for young children to understand, like how distracting is a mosquito bite that you can itch and scratch and then it gets red and irritated. Well, that same process actually goes on in our brain, especially if we have sensory challenges or genetics that don’t tolerate gluten anyway, that that becomes this area of the brain that becomes hyper, swollen and sensitive. And then those feelings or behaviors or whatever become enhanced.

It is really important to note, which is why there are known conditions like gluten ataxia, right? Where part of the motion system in the brain is affected by the amount of gluten that is stuck there. Certainly, anxiety, depression, anger, impulsivity, all of those things are certainly well-known areas of the brain but absolutely affected by gluten and gluten sensitivity. So that would be number one, and of course, you know — even if your gut is perfect and your blood-brain barrier is perfect and everything is happy and your microbiome is perfectly balanced — if you eat gluten, because it is so inflammatory, a leaky gut for up to three hours after that ingestion.

So even in the most perfect circumstances, if it is perfect, then three hours of a leaky gut is probably not a big deal for that perfect specimen, but if you have a child that has a leaky gut and has a leaky blood-brain barrier and has allergies and things that I see on a regular basis, that has an exposure to gluten and we all know our kids eat way more than every 3 hours. It can certainly wreak havoc and enhance the amount of sensory symptoms we’re seeing in those little bodies.  

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

I totally agree and I love that description of how you talk with kids about that. I think that’s such a helpful, tangible way for them to think about gluten and what’s happening in the brain. So you said gluten is the big one, the top one that you see as causing or impacting the sensory systems, and then the second one that you said was the sugar. Talk a little bit about that.

Dr. Kendra Becker:

So sugar — you have to think about what sugar does. So I just said the other day, I had seen the statistic. I have a nine-year-old son. The current statistic is that eight-year-old children in this country have consumed more sugar in their eight years on this planet that their grandfathers did in their lifetimes. Let’s think about that, you know what I mean? The problem with sugar is that sugar is supposed to be used as a very, very quick energy source. So if you’re a caveman running from a dinosaur, put a few sugar cubes in your mouth and go and run 30 miles at 30 miles an hour and that’s what we use the sugar for.

The problem is in little kids, what happens is they consume so much sugar that it starts to wreak havoc with their blood sugar. So their blood sugar goes up, then their blood sugar goes down, their blood sugar goes up, the blood sugar goes down — sugar is abundantly wonderful at really hitting the pleasure centers of the brain. Humans are always inclined towards pleasure and will run screaming from pain. Did you like that? Pun intended. So what happens is that when you kind of tick that pleasure center, the body always desires what’s going to give them pleasure. We know that sugar is 10 times or 100 times more addictive than the illegal drug, cocaine. So we know that this is the physiological addiction that these kids have. When you have that, first of all, pleasure-seeking behavior, then you get kind of a return on your investment, you’re kind of like a superman, that’s what you hear from parents all the time, “Oh my gosh, my kid gets so hyper, oh my gosh, my kid is so impulsive.” 

The other thing that happens, particularly in little boys, and I’m going to do a study.  hen little boys eat a lot of sugar, sometimes — and little girls too, but it’s more common in little boys — they have a little bit like a diabetes insipidus kind of reaction. Their body says, “Oh my gosh, there’s too much sugar in my system, I have to pee it off.” So these little kids eat a bunch of kids and then they’re in the bathroom, peeing, peeing, peeing, peeing. Something that I noticed in my own kid — my kids were potty trained really early. So we spent a lot of time in public potties. When you have a two-year old that’s potty-trained, they’re still two, their bladders are tiny. So you know where every bathroom is within 100 feet of your body. So I noticed we were out somewhere and my son was like, “I’ve got to pee, I’ve got to pee”, I’m like, “You’re two! What is the possible problem?” And so on that particular day, when I first kind of noticed it and put the connection together, he was eating — carrying around all this ready-packed up food and it was granola bars. So all of that was just too much sugar for his little body, that I noticed that his little body was just trying to get rid of it all. It tends to be a really common process, so as far as sensory issues go, there are certainly tons of them because it does affect behavior. So anything that is already a challenge with behavior can get way, way worse if you include a lot of sugar. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Yeah, and I see that too where sugar is just a significant component of those kinds of behavioral issues and sensory issues in kids that that’s a really — it shouldn’t be surprising to me seeing kids all day long and what they’re eating, but that statistic about the average eight-year-old has already eaten more sugar than their grandfather had in a lifetime. That’s food for thought right there for sure. And then you mentioned also the chemicals and some of the dyes and things like that. I do notice for some kids, especially with sensory things that that can be an issue. What do you see with that?

Dr. Kendra Becker:

So it depends on the chemicals and the dyes. The colors, in particular, the colors and preservatives are kind of in their own group. And with those kids, what I see a lot and the way the parents describe it is my favorite. They’re like, “He’s mean,” They don’t say, “He went outside and chopped up a frog.” They don’t say, “He ran out into traffic.”, although that does happen too. They just go, “He’s mean.” You know because you treat kids all the time, you never, ever discount the account of a parent who knows that kid inside and out. I love when they come in and they’re like, “He’s mean.” And I’m like, “That’s dyes.” So we have that conversation, and I don’t know what it is about the dyes that actually creates that kind of aggressive, angry, unsettled kind of behaviors in little kids, but I’ve seen it time and time again.

And then things like MSG and other glutamates, that’s a little different. Sometimes kids can even get physically muscle-twitchy from those sorts of things, but what you see there, if you’re getting a physical muscle twitch, you have to remember that same acetylcholine reaction is going on in the brain. So whatever it is that’s twitching externally, as it is twitching internally. So that can be any number of things. That can certainly be anxiety reactions, it could be headache reactions, it could be sweating reactions, it can be emotional lability, it can be impulsivity. And so that’s a little bit different, it can be a little harder to tease out definitely. And the things with the chemicals and the dyes, that in a lot of cases is super, super-easy for people to just remove from their diet. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Yeah, absolutely and I want to get into some of the strategies for that in a minute. I’m curious, as you’re talking about — there certainly is overlap for so many kids symptom-wise, right? I can’t even think of a child I have ever seen who had significant sensory issues who didn’t also have several other either physical issues or brain-based issues going on. I’m curious, what are some of the physical symptoms that you see? You mentioned things like allergies, some gut issues, because I think a lot of times because in the field of medicine or healthcare, we separate things out — well this is this and that’s that. You and I look at things in a very integrative way, but I think a lot of parents don’t know to connect the dots, so they may not realize it, like, “Oh, my child is having these sensory issues, but it also chronically constipated.” All of these things are connected, so I’d like for you to just take a minute to talk about some of the overlap of that and some of the physical symptoms you see in these kids. 

Dr. Kendra Becker:

Right, so there is a lot of overlap with my 4 A’s — the asthma, the allergy, the eczema, and the autism, number one. And one thing I see a lot almost overwhelmingly is low tone. So the low tone affects — again, it’s multi-systemic, so you certainly have problems with gait and balance, you certainly have problems with constipation and pooping and all of the gut-mediated stuff. Sometimes there are problems with respiratory, if there are substantial lower doses in the back and we’re really concerned about diaphragmatic breathing. Sometimes there is even an endocrine component. So there is absolutely positively a lot of overlap — but conversely, healing and sealing the gut and fixing the diet, a lot of time is literally the only remedy you need, and that, to me, is the amazing part. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Well that’s the thing, is people will come in and say, “My child has all of these different problems.”, and I’m like, “Well the good news is that there are a few foundational things that we can do that when you get those in place will resolve all of these — what seem to be very different issues. So let’s dive into that, because I know that listeners are now thinking, “Okay, I get the connections here. What can I do?” So what are some simple steps that parents and people who are listening today can use to support their child’s healing when they’ve got these sensory kinds of things going on?

Dr. Kendra Becker:

So the first thing is the diet, right? Period. End of story. The diet, the diet, the diet, the diet. Depending on how you need to structure that or how you need to go through the elimination is really very unique and personalized. But removing any one of those things on the list that we had talked about, gives you ammunition as to whether or not it’s a cause or effect. The only caveat to that is, removing something like dairy or corn from the diet, you can probably see results in a week or two. To eliminate one food at a time or one food group like all of the chemicals or all of the food dyes or whatever, and then you kind of have your answer. With those sorts of things, the MSG and the preservatives and the food dyes, you kind of know in a couple of days. Dairy, soy, corn also clear from the body in very short order, in a week or two. Gluten takes much longer.

So what I do recommend in many cases is I say, just go to gluten-free food and just make sure it’s organic, make sure it’s relatively low in sugar count because we all know what happened with that gluten-free revolution. Some of us who jumped on the train early, we all ended up sensitive to corn, because we swapped everything else for corn, and then those of us that kind of jumped on the train a little later ended up with all these high-sugar, high-calorie, nutrient-poor foods. So certainly going from gluten-free or from gluten to gluten-free, you have to be mindful about it, for you to go from gluten processed food to gluten-free processed food — but certainly going to a more whole foods diet can make a huge difference. Now I have one story in my office. I had a little boy who had a very early diagnosis of autism, and the mother was a healthcare provider and I was kind of shocked that she had come into my office. You forget sometimes what people know and what they don’t know. I said, “Is he on a gluten-free diet?” “No, should he be?”, and I said, “Yeah!”. I mean the poor woman was supposed to be in there an hour with a 5-minute visit. I saw her 6 weeks later and she said, “You would not believe the amount of language reversal that I saw in 4 days, taking him off gluten”. So the stories are absolutely remarkable. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

It’s interesting. People often minimize the role of diet, like oh — it doesn’t make a difference, and sadly, a lot of the medical profession writes that off too, and yet, you and I see daily the profound effects that something like a simple food change or diet change can have, and it’s just unfortunate, number one, that more providers aren’t aware of that and aren’t promoting that with parents. Which is the big part why I enjoy doing this podcast, to spread this message to people that a lot of times these things don’t have to be real complicated. As you said, you remove something, and you observe the difference and sometimes you see really profound things, really quickly. 

Dr. Kendra Becker:

Absolutely. And that’s the other thing too, is I think there is so much propaganda out there in conventional medicine where everything is — even with people with IBS and Colitis, it always makes me laugh when my patients tell me time and time again that their doctors say diet has nothing to do with the fact that they’re having raging pain and symptoms in their digestive system. So I mean I think that a lot of times, it’s more reinforcement. I really feel like most of these parents know this and just want the encouragement that they’re actually going to see a positive change. But it is remarkable, absolutely remarkable what you can see and what you can do with diet alone. I fully agree with that. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

So one step that parents can take is starting to look at each of these types of foods or groups of foods that you’ve mentioned and eliminating them for a period of time to see what the response is. You also mentioned that it’s important to look at more of a whole foods — reducing the processed foods, reducing the processed sugars, those kinds of things. Are there other things that you would recommend, either a starting point or just simple things that parents can do nutrition-wise or food-wise to support the sensory processing — 

Dr. Kendra Becker:

I’m a big advocate of turning off your WiFi. So what I say to begin with, because that’s another thing that gives people the sweats is — turn your WiFi off at night, while you’re sleeping. Then when they come back, I say turn your WiFi off except for the two hours a day that you’re in the house, using the WiFi, because there are the exceptions of people who work from home and things like that always, but for the most part, if we’re using our WiFi, it’s literally for two hours when we get home, after when the kids are home from school. It’s a very, very short period of time. WiFi, when you think really about what WiFi is, it’s waves that constantly are pinging at any solid source. So your furniture, your body, all of those things. So to kind of remove that pinging, that constant — against your own cells, can make a huge difference and in accounts of kids who have kind of hyper-stimulating behavior, they’ll be like standing in front of the dishwasher, because there’s a lot of electricity there. Or standing in front of the washing machine. Same thing if they get closer to their WiFi router. If you can eliminate those things, then that’s a really easy fix that we all should be doing to really help our sleep and our own mental health. So, absolutely. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Yeah, agreed and I did a really interesting interview with Peter Sullivan recently about all of those issues, I mean it really is profound, the impact that just having all of that in the environment — we tend not to think about it, right? It’s like we can’t see it, so we don’t think about it — but I too, have seen kids where that makes a tremendous impact. I’m curious, from a nutrient standpoint, do you find in your practice that there are any types of nutrients or supplements that you feel are particularly helpful for kids with a lot of these more significant sensory issues?

Dr. Kendra Becker:

I wish, I’d a very rich woman. The problem is that especially in my practice, most of my patients are such complex methylators that there is absolutely no one-size-fits-all, which includes probiotics. We know that there are certain strains that can enhance histamine, that can cause anxiety, so there’s no one-size-fits-all supplement protocol across the border, unfortunately. And quite honestly, I would much rather have children, in particular, get their lion’s share of nutrients through their food. In many cases, I have used probiotics. I used fish oils, vitamin D can be very helpful, certainly, any combination of B vitamins, depending on what you’re seeing in that patient can be really helpful. You can use histamine mediators or modulators in a lot of cases, but the treatment itself is very, very individualized based on what you’re seeing and what the needs of that child and that family are. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Yeah. I think it’s helpful for parents to know that there can be specific targeted nutrients depending on your child’s specific issues that may be helpful, and to your point that it is valuable to seek out a practitioner who understands those individualities and those issues to look at what targeted things might be helpful there. 

Dr. Kendra Becker:

For sure, absolutely. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Yeah, but I think the food piece is so critical and you really honed in on that, and I think that gives a lot of hope to families, to parents who are dealing with these kinds of things that — wow, we can start even just making some simple shifts in diet and observing what happens with this and really, parents can be their own detective in that way and you gave some clear groups of foods and things to try, so I think that’s really helpful. I want to make sure, before we wrap up here, that people know where they can access your books, because you’ve got some fabulous books and resources online — where is the best place for people to go online to find you?

Dr. Kendra Becker:

So my website is probably the best place, drkendrabecker.com, my books are available on Amazon and all the major online and brick and mortar booksellers, and for those of you — brand new information, I’m sharing it with your audience first, Dr. Nicole, is I have a course that I’m launching for the middle of this month that is called ‘Keeping Healing in the Home’. What it is is it’s eight modules of all kinds of information that you can keep at home, so instead of showing up at the urgent care or scheduling a doctor’s visit that’s going to end up being useless to you, use tools at your home, at your fingertips and at your disposal to be able to kind of keep your healing in the home. So that’s also coming up, and if you guys are interested, certainly sign up on my mailing list on my website and that information will get out to you guys first. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Love it, that is fantastic, thank you for making that available and for telling our listeners about that, and we will have as always all the links that Dr. Becker is mentioning on the podcast page along with the episodes, so you’ll be able to easily just click to things from there. I definitely recommend you check out her books, her program, her other resources, great blog posts, things like that. Thank you so much for being with us today. This was a great conversation, really enjoyed sharing this time with you, thank you for being here.

Dr. Kendra Becker:

Oh, thanks for having me, I’m honored. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Alright, everybody, that does it for this episode of The Better Behavior Show! We will see you back here next time.