Successful Integration of Nutrition in the Chiropractic Industry

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All right. Welcome to the Align your practice with Dr. Cliff and Dr. Joe and special guests, Shonna, who's going to be talking to us about a Aceva, and this is brought to you by Edline life where we want to give you the tools to find and create your online life. And we feel like a Aceva is one of those critical tools, because we can be talking about adjusting and business and all that. But if we're not nutritionally sound, then we're not gonna be able to take care of ourselves. So Joe, I know, this was another, you know, you founded this company, and you created this product. So I'd love to hear a little bit about that. And then what Sean is role is in this company.

Yeah, as I've said numerous times on these podcasts, like a lot of the things that I do in my career is based on based on basically the frustration I've had in the field of healthcare. So I think my innate genius is the creation of things from, from nothing, and, but I'm not really the expert of developing process. So I've had the great opportunity of having Shana come onto this team, with a very extensive background from being a health coach, PhD, and she can elaborate and author, she can elaborate on the amazing bio, that she, she's just such a well rounded person from, you know, she'll beat you and run around the block, because she's an accomplished athlete. She's an incredible mother. But if you look at her academic or any of the other pathways she's done, I just love having such a well rounded person at the helm of this particular company. I've been honored to create it. But I'm not the one who develops it. Shonna is the brains behind the movement of this company. And what's happened. And just to share my pain is I disliked serving people in a mediocre in a mediocre way, by removing a subluxation and leaving them with inflammation, leaving them with gut dysfunction, leaving them with alterations to body composition, and wishing them the best. I just couldn't do it. So I didn't want to be a nutritionist or naturopath or any of these other accolades, or I did it because I could not let that patient go with suboptimal results. That was just a curse than a blessing, I guess, for my journey. So again, it's a pleasure to have Shonna here. And I think, Shonna, when we have guests, a lot of times, we ask, how did you get into natural health? Why? Why this you? You're brilliant woman, you probably could have been on Wall Street, you probably could have been an engineer, you could have probably could have done a number of things. Why? Why this?

Oh, that's a great question. I mean, I would say that that started at a very, very young age, innately, you know, my family, you know, being in the islands, everything is about nature and natural. And my grandmother was kind of like the, you know, unofficial islands go to person for anything health and medicinal that was natural. So if you needed you went to my grandmother, if you had a cough that you couldn't get rid of you went to my grandmother, so from a very young age, that kind of thinking was instilled in me and it just continued even into adulthood.

You know, it's wild. I know some of your other parts of your story. But I didn't know about you mentioned that the mindset on the island, but I didn't know your grandmother was like the shaman of the I love that.

So I'm sorry, Cliff, are you gonna?

I was just gonna say so it's basically in your DNA. Dr. Shawna is what I'm here.

It's deep in my DNA. DNA and RNA.

For sure. That's, that's awesome. And I think when Joe is speaking, I'm like, I think it'd be easier to go over the list of things you haven't done in your life. Like, I know, we've spent some time together and I really admire, like your competency and so many different things. And it's not like you're like the jack of all trades. You're like a master of many things. And I think you're definitely a master of that nutrition. But like your knowledge base is so foundational and fundamental for me, that I know when I went through the program with you like I learned so much and I knew a lot but I learned so much from you. So yeah, good point.

When you look at someone running a company, it's tough in health care, because you have to know what the practitioners needing, like clinically, but then you also have to run a business like you have to know economics and finance and you have to sell marketing and leadership and people so any leader of any company I like to edify that it's it's a lot on a plate to actually be a developer of a company. So if we dive into it a little bit, from your perspective, Shawna and Cliff, and I can add some juice to the question. Why would someone want to add nutrition to the office? Let's say we've been mostly chiropractors on this podcast, because why would a chiropractor and nutrition? I'm going to state the question in a debate reading the book by Al Ries called Focus, he talks about how Heinz what had ketchup, and they put hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing, mustard, and they failed miserably. It wasn't a lack of money, it was that their name was around ketchup. So in chiropractic, you know why doesn't like chiropractors simply just provide chiropractic. They're not nutritionist, they don't need to bring nutrition, it's another service offering, it can diversify the team, it can make it more complex, it can make it harder, why would a chiropractor want to implement nutrition to their business?

Yeah, and that's a great question, when you think about why a chiropractor decided to become a chiropractor is because they saw the power of the entire human body being able to function as one complete organism, so to speak. And because of that, you know, they know that, you know, adjustments and addressing subluxation, even though that's a very intricate part of it, you know, you need more you need your patients to be able to understand how their food can impact their life. And the fact that the standard American diet is so for knowing that supplementation is needed. So from a chiropractic standpoint, to be able to know the power of what they're doing in their hands and addressing subluxation and to be able to marry that with nutrition. And knowing that if they are able to give the human body a key ingredient that will help it to generate the outcome that they're looking for. So that adjustments lasts longer, the quality of life for their patient is improved, then why not? It's it becomes a no brainer to understand that nutrition is a very important component of chiropractic care.

I love that. And I want to add to that, because the other reason to integrate it is there's nowhere to send them. There's no where to send these people. Where are you going to send them? What group what practitioner nationwide that you can lean on, you're going to send it to Weight Watchers, or you can send to a dietician at a hospital. Where do you find the people that deal with metabolic dysfunction. And what percentage of the countries deal with metabolic dysfunction? It's over 90% of Americans have metabolic dysfunction. 70% of chronic disease is a lifestyle problem that's quantifiable cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, obesity, or lifestyle problems. And as chiropractors, we can no longer ignore the lifestyle problems our patients are dealing with because it affects our ability to sustain neurological integrity. We can't turn our cheek anymore. The game is over at a 68% obese or overweight rates right now, cancer when I was in school was one out of three. Now it's one out of two. That means if you're listening to this podcast, and there's one person sitting next to you, one of the two of you are going to hear the words you have cancer. That's where we're at at this stage of life. We can't ignore it anymore. Medical has not stepped up to the plate to handle metabolic dysfunction yet, to this day and age, and we simply can't wait for the 25 years for medicine to come up to the table and deliver on a natural approach to health care. We look at the history of medicine and conventional medicine. Back to the days of folic acid. It took 25 years from the day the research came out that folic acid deficiency causes neural tube defects to when the AMA stated you need folic acid from the research to implementation was 25 years that's been seen in a medical history over 10 times. Vitamin D, same story. 2025 years for research to become accepted by conventional. We frankly don't have two and a half decades for metabolic dysfunction to be handled by the conventional route. Okay, we pause, breathe. That's all I wanted to say.

Sure, yeah.

So, Shonna, that one of the questions I had is, you know, what are the different ways to integrate nutria Sure,

there's so many different ways to be able to do that I always recommend initially, for someone that's just starting out to always be a product of the product, you definitely, if you're going to advocate something, I just highly suggest that you take the product itself. So in my nutrient cabinet, you know, we have a seven nutrients, we have daily balance, Omega Ultra biotic, like all of those things, absolute greens, all of those things that are what I would call the foundation nutrients that our body needs. So being a product of the product, inside the office setting to extend out of that, you know, your staff, your staff should be a product of the product. And in just that simple way, that's, you know, the basis, and then you have your patients that come into your practice regularly, you know that they're going to need a multivitamin, they're going to need essential fatty acids, they aren't getting enough greens on a regular basis. So why not every patient perhaps get started on just what we would call the foundation of nutrition. So and just those simple three steps, you can easily integrate nutrition into your practice, and then you can take it from there, we have so many innovative ways that we're able to do that at a Aceva from lab testing, to seeing exactly where the, you know, the DIS ease or the dysfunction is within the body from a nutrient standpoint based on labs. So the sky's the limit when it really comes to integrating nutrition, and we're definitely there to support every clinic as possible. Because we have a big goal at a Aceva, you know, it's a big, audacious, hairy goal, to change the world. And we know that in order to do that, it's I say this all the time is one person at a time, one clinic at a time, one community at a time. And just imagine like the ripple effect that that can create, eventually, to be able to spread nutrition, you know, to every household in the world. That's the goal.

I love it. And so it brings me to one of my thought processes of like, you know, nobody wants to buy a drill. So nobody wants to buy nutrition, but everybody wants. If you're buying a drill, you're buying a drill to drill a hole. So, you know, it's not that we want to buy nutrition, why do we need nutrition? Because I think that's the gap for a lot of chiropractors. No, that was for me. And I loved what you said about like being a product of the product. Because I do the same thing. My if you saw my shelf over here, it's like I have my six things I take, we have our fish oil in the fridge. But then we also provide it for our team we take we do the first two, we take care of their first two nutrients if they want to do more than we give them everything at our our cost. But why? Why would a practice need to bring in nutrition?

It's the foundation of it is really simple. There, no one is getting what they need from the foods that they're eating, the soil is depleted. The foods that are available in the grocery store full of additives, preservatives, things that can kill us. It's full of phthalates, endocrine disruption, there's just so many things that you know happen simply because the nutrition in this country is is poor. So you have to supplement there isn't a question of should you, it's the fact that you need to, and there's no way around it. When we think about the human body. And you know what is disease. Disease is two words, it's dis ease, there is no ease in the body. And when that happens and inflammation is there. The body is screaming for help. And one way that we address it is through nutrition. If you don't have enough bees going through your body, so to speak, you need to supplement B vitamin D deficiency is is very high. And we talked a little bit earlier Dr. Joe mentioned Dr. Deficiency rickets was on the rampage at one point, just simple things that address dis ease within the body. So when it comes to chiropractic and patients it's it's needed because the work the food that we're eating the soil, we're not getting good water, all of those things are killing us slowly and it's up to each individual to be very proactive in taking their health into their own hands and really driving that healthy outcome.

I love what you did last chiropractic, don't you? This is no rocking our language here. My love language. Yeah. Oh, yeah, go ahead, Joe. It boils down to deficiencies and toxicities that are in and you could use that in your own life. In your relationships and your business. We have deficiencies and toxicities. My good friend Stephen France and uses that in his language in a lot and as a nutritionist that kind of perked my ears up deficiencies and toxicities where are they and clinically that That's nutrition is where the deficiencies and where the toxicities and little deeper on clinical when you have deficiencies, you absorb more toxicities deficiency drives the absorption of toxins, it's crazy. So I love the way you presented that shot. I also love how simple you put it. Because when I started as a nutritionist, I started doing 3d different tests. And this I made it so complex, you're saying, first step is just add basic nutrients, everyone's missing to a care plan, and enhance their health and just start there. And that's it. You want to do lab testing us our virtual team of many functional medicine doctors to interpret it, you want to there's so much you can do. But to start is get behind your belief, people are missing key nutrients, serve them with the nutrients and make it simple just to open the door.

Absolutely.

And so I think one of the things for me is like, why is this even different than how's it disrupted? The integration of nutrition and chiropractic practices? I think that's probably my like it no one thing? How's it different?

Well, we aren't just a supplement company. We are a service based company. We take pride in the detail when it comes to our formulation. It's easy to go on certain big name brand websites and just buy a supplement that may sound good and may look good. But did they take the extra care to make sure that there isn't oxygen that may contaminate so to speak, or break down the active ingredient inside of the supplement? Did they take the care to make sure that the bottle that the supplement is packed in is it does it filter light so that the active ingredient isn't broken down. So those are just some of the things that we do at Aceva And because we're a service based company, we want to make sure that we're providing the education that you need, you understand, you know why a patient needs to take a certain supplement. And you know, and the reason for it, and just really be able to be your partner when it comes to serving your patients and health care. So that would be I would say one of the fundamental reasons as to why a Aceva and what makes a Aceva so different. Anyone can put out a product, but not everyone can stand behind a product the way that we do, and help it align your life really is what we're wanting to do.

Man sold, Sign me up. Yeah, that was awesome. Shana. I really like I think that's so true. And I think that's the thing I most admire and appreciate about this eve is, you know, all the different places of sourcing, how it's built, and all those things, and just the quality and the bioavailability I think that's the big thing for me, like, I talked to other patients, and they were taking other nutrients, and I'm like, it's just not very bioavailable, it's going to end up in your poop, you know, rather than end up in your body.

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I get like, the warm fuzzies. And the insight when I know how detail, you know, our clinical team is when it comes to formulating, sometimes, you know, there's a lot of Round and round discussions. Because ultimately, when we say, you know, we recommend this product to your patient, that's not said lightly, that comes with a lot of weight, a lot of research a lot of conversations back and forth about you know, how is this going to produce an outcome is it going to actually absorb, are we going to just provide a multivitamin, and you have expensive urine because you just, you know, released it, you know, things so it, it, we don't take it lightly. And we really take a lot of pride in what we do when it comes to formulating.

One of the things I think along those lines, John is being able for a clinician for me, they really want to feel like selling to a patient and to have a guarantee on product that if it doesn't work, they don't like it, they could just bring the bottle back and and you will refund it replace the product for for free any product at any time. So what I would do is I would say to patient, listen, try it doesn't work. We have a guarantee 100% money back guarantee that just creates such comfort. And the other component is knowing that each clinician is at a different stage of academic understanding different culture, that you do that nutrition integration questionnaire to help see where people are at. So you can guide them to the next level of wherever they want to go because we're all at a stage and whether it be our chiropractic practice, the nutrition integration, or any of the other integrations neuropathy is, or decompressions, or whatever it is, you're at a certain knowledge and business level, and you're trying to go from A to B. And the gap is the space between your current reality and where you want to go in the business, right. So what we have to do or what you're doing with Ziva, and what Cliff and I are doing an online life is creating the plan, the training, the resources, the education, the tools, to go from a current reality of be where you want to take your business or your service for your patient. So that's what I really love is being a service based business that you're actually guiding. You're not just pushing products, a service company with great products is better than a great product company. So that little twist is really important for those that realize that it's not just about product, it's about your ability to deliver authentic outcomes for people and express the need and communicate. And that's where the fall down is when people are trying to integrate nutrition. You don't just put vitamins on a shelf and you grow another department. It just, unfortunately, doesn't work that way.

And then, then, oh, sorry, Shawn, and then it's world class when you have a great service and a great product. And that's where you know, and that's really what I see in the sea. But it's like it's the best of both worlds.

So cliff, just a little tangent, because I think this brings the line your life podcast, collectively together. All right, one of the things that you're talk about a lot is leadership. It requires, it requires leadership in order to do these things. And I know in align life, one of your training mantras is we have to build leaders, just two seconds about that, because you can't just throw product on the shelf, I just want them to feel what it takes. And you comment on that for a moment.

Oh my gosh, like 30 seconds on leadership, I think thing I think is when when you talk about leadership, I just looked at Shawn, I think that's the thing that a Siva gives the Align life doctors is a leadership on how to do it and bring it in. And so when you have that leadership, then you're able to deliver a different product and a different service, because you have such great leaders and Shawn has invested, I mean decades of time into being a great leader. And that's why I think as Siva is blowing up, and it's in hospitals, all these offices across the planet, like it's in, I don't even know what countries it's in, honestly. But I know Shonna does, but we're all over the globe, because that product is serving at the highest level.

That's a great point, that's all I wanted to showcase that you're saying is, with China, being a great leader, she's going to help the clinic have the leadership to be able to integrate something, because the point is, we know doctors trying to add new services, and they don't raise their leadership. It's hard to be successful. That's where the service comes in. So thanks for adding that.

All right, Shawn, any last words? Any thoughts? And, you know, like, my one question on that would be who should reach out to you? You know, I think like, I know, for me, nutrition was new when I joined align life, and so I didn't really do that much. And so who should reach out to you? And why should they reach out to you?

Well, I would say, everyone that wants to really impact their community, when it comes to the health of their patients should reach out to me. And, you know, that gamut is is very wide. From the chiropractic standpoint, you know, knowing the passion that, you know, these clinicians have, they should reach out to me at a Siva and, you know, talk to me and talk to, you know, our team as to how do you integrate nutrition? How far do you want to go when it comes to nutrition, you know, at what level? Do you want to impact the health of those that you serve, to reach out to us and you know, let us let us talk with you, let us consult with you, let us find out where you are, from a nutrition standpoint, from the basics to the, you know, the highest level of you know, clinical understanding, and we'll work with you, we'll put a plan together, we'll build a performer, we'll see exactly what you want to do. When it comes to nutrition goals. And let's change the world together. Ultimately, let us be your partner when it comes to integrating nutrition in your practice. And that's what we're here to do. We aren't we don't want to just sell you another supplement. We want to partner with you and create this ripple effect. And I started off earlier talking about this big, audacious goal. And you know, for the years that I've been involved in nutrition and just trying to fill my knowledge base as much as possible. And I got a phone call from one of my colleagues who was the director of the sickle cell foundation and at the time he was working in, you know, one of the alignment clinics and he said, I you know, I have an opportunity that I think that you would you know, really enjoy because I know your passion. And that conversation led to a meeting with Dr. Joe and I. And immediately, I felt a connection with an individual who I knew aligned with my thought process and what I believed in. And he said he wanted to change the world. And I said, Let's do it. It was just that simple. And, you know, I'm almost getting emotional, because it's been such a journey. You know, for us, it's been a great journey. And I hope you can hear the passion in my voice. When I say that this is just the beginning. This is just the beginning of what a Steve is doing. And we're receivers going, and we want to partner with you when it comes to that. Because we know we can do it, we have the tools, we have the resources, we have the knowledge, we just want the passionate chiropractor, or any practitioner in the natural field, to join us become this NSC the provider. And let's let's change this world together.

Awesome. Well said, I love going back to the beginning of the journey. Look at that, because life is the journey. It's not a destination. So I appreciate any entrepreneurial or mission based journey anyone takes I love I love the share of that on this podcast and hear other stories. That's beautiful. So I just want to say thanks for all you've done for practitioners and for the movement in natural health. It's a it's a tough journey with all the adversaries against the truth about going upstream. And really helping people solve core problems that interfere with our expression of life. And I think you've done a great job by helping people go upstream and solve problems, patch them up. So great work over the years of what you've done. I look forward to more people that engage with you and kind of dissect their practice and see how you can and the team can help solve some of the gaps and introduce things that are going to provide better outcomes for people across the nation. So beautiful message today.

Awesome. Thank you.

Thanks, Shonna. I think my biggest takeaway on this is like if you guys want to really bring in the best nutrients and stop having your community, your patients, your friends, your family taking nutrients that are not bioavailable, they're not adding health and vitality to that human being that that's what a CV is committed to. And, you know, Joe, just like you said, bringing in nutrition to your clinic is not hard, but or is not easy. But we will definitely make it way easier because Shauna and that whole ASEA team have so much experience on so many different levels on how to do it. It'll make something that will take years to take months.

Great point. Great and awesome. Shonna,

thank you so much for your time. Joe, thanks you so much. Thank you, and we'll see you on the next one. All right, thanks. Take care.