The Ground Our Children Grow In with Dr. Michelle Perro | Ep. 007

Pediatrician Dr. Michelle Perro on industrial food, glyphosate, and what four decades at the bedside taught her about why kids are sick.

For most of a career spanning emergency rooms and children's hospitals, Dr. Michelle Perro watched the patterns in front of her shift—more allergies, more gut trouble, more neurological and chronic conditions in children who, a generation earlier, would have been rare. Rather than treat each symptom as its own broken part, she did what good clinicians do: she stepped back and asked what had changed in the soil these kids were growing in. The answer led her into the tangled relationship between industrial food, glyphosate, the gut, and the developing body.

In this conversation, Nasha and Michelle move past the noise and the absolutes to sit with the harder questions. What does it mean when a child's body is responding intelligently to an environment that no longer supports it? What gets lost when we medicate the response instead of tending the conditions? And what does it take for a physician to let her own observations—not just the literature—reshape how she practices? This is a conversation about children, yes, but also about food as terrain, about the courage to swim against the current, and about what becomes possible when we stop asking what's wrong with the child and start asking what's shaping them.

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