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Feb. 12, 2019 - Dr. Oz Podcast
42:46
One-on-One with Sally Field

Iconic actress Sally Field sits down with Dr. Oz to reveal how the roles she has played have influenced how she cares about the state of mental health issues in this country. She also reveals her own health battle with osteoporosis and what she wants people to know who are struggling too. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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What saved my life was the stage in junior high and in high school because when I would go on stage, I could let these colors out, rage and any degree of sexuality, that it was not acceptable for a little 12 and 13 and 14, 15-year-old girl.
At that time when I grew up, it wasn't acceptable for a grown woman, much less a child.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
This woman who's won two Academy Awards and has also been a three-time Emmy Award winner and two-time Golden Globe winner.
Did I get that all right?
I think so.
It's hard to keep track.
But I know her best as Sister Bertrill in The Flying Nun.
And you've made a spectacular career, Sally Field.
Thank you for joining us today.
Thank you.
Very happy to be here.
We've got so many questions for you, but I'm going to start off with the big one.
And we're going to come back to health issues, by the way.
Yeah, good.
Those of you who are out there nervous about how am I possibly going to interview Sally Field, let's talk about how you first got started in the business.
Oh gosh, how did I first get started?
It's actually one of those stories that no mother should listen to, and certainly you shouldn't think this happens to anybody, but every now and again it does happen.
I had just graduated from high school.
I lived in Los Angeles.
I came from a real working class show business family.
Working class means it wasn't...
necessarily very glamorous but I through junior high and high school I was always in the drama department I grew up in this fabulous time in our country when they actually had drama departments and music departments and you know all of these great things in schools that we don't have anymore which is bad and when I graduated I wanted to continue acting I I didn't know I should be going to New York.
I was so naive and unsophisticated.
So I joined this workshop, which was located at Columbia Studios, used the facilities at night, and I literally was standing on a corner waiting for my brother to pick me up.
I was 17. I wasn't allowed to drive at night yet.
My brother had to pick me up, and a casting guy from Screen Gyms, which is the television division of Columbia, came by and asked me if I wanted to come on an interview the next day.
Are you kidding me?
No, and that wasn't a pick-up line.
No.
No, it wasn't a pick-up line, but my stepfather did go with me.
To the interview the next day, just in case, and sort of sat there as I went in and read the sides, and then sides being the scene, which I at the time didn't know that's what you called the scene.
I said, do you want to read the sides?
And I thought, the sides?
The sides of what?
The sides of the building?
But I tested and read and tested and read and tested, and after many months, then I got my first television series, which was Gidget.
And that later moved on to The Flying Nun, and then later on, onward into other...
Well, as a little boy, I didn't watch Gidget.
And I didn't have any older sisters.
But I think everyone watched The Flying Nun.
It was probably across the board.
As you've gone through your career, you've seen many changes in this nation and the expectations we have.
And one of these arenas is in health.
And you've done some things actually theatrically as well in this arena.
I wanted to actually talk a little bit about Sybil, which is based on a best-selling book.
Actually, you tell me about it.
That was the scariest thing I've ever seen in my entire life.
Worse than the exorcist.
Well, it was an interesting time altogether, certainly in television, but even in film to a degree.
It was the 70s.
Miniseries were brand new to television.
This was like the second miniseries I think they'd ever done.
And they had certainly never done anything that really graphically depicted the effects of child abuse.
And certainly it showed...
Really severely mentally ill person.
They have much debate since then of what you actually call this disease, whether you call it multiple personality or many other names they have for it now.
But this was a documented case of multiple personality that really began because of her childhood, which was really graphic and extraordinary child abuse.
So when we did this, and at the time it was, I think, two nights, so it was like four or five hours worth of this.
And it was an enormous reaction in the country.
people would stop you on the streets not because you were a celebrity but because you had affected them so much we get so many letters from psychologists and psychiatrists who had had people coming in that had never come in before sort of breakthroughs for people who couldn't verbalize what had gone on to that in their lives and And if you can't verbalize it somehow, you can't get over it.
You can't move on.
Your psyche can't heal.
And so it was certainly an extraordinary experience to go through it as an actor.
Did they bring the story to you?
Or had you read it yourself?
They did.
They didn't bring it to me.
I mean, I had to test for it.
I was in a transitional part in my life and my career.
I had to struggle really hard to get out of The Flying Nun and all of those things and be considered a serious actor.
And I had studied long and hard to be that.
And when this came to me, I really had to fight to be seen.
And then I had to just convince them and convince them.
I would convince them and convince them, not by saying, please let me do it, but by performing.
I would do scene after scene, test after test after test, until they said, well, we have to hire her because...
the best one.
And they did.
And it was just an incredible experience for me.
It must be challenging just to do the acting for that.
I would think that often when you act, you begin to understand the person you're acting well enough that you sort of feel like them sometimes.
And...
I mean, being an actor, the worth of it for me, and why I've done it for 40-some-odd years, is because you reach down, deeply down inside of yourself, using techniques of self-hypnosis, really, and how far down and into your subconscious can you go, to place yourself as much as you possibly can in somebody else's shoes.
And try to be that person with their history and with their posture and with the melodies that are going on in their head.
And depending upon the quality of the work and the quality of the writing, certainly that matters.
You're in some cases always changed.
You're irrevocably changed because it becomes your experience that you went through.
Right.
So, for example, in a case like this, when you do the role of Sybil, obviously you look pretty mentally intact right now.
He's wondering if you still have multiple personalities.
I'm going to step out of the room right now.
No.
Go there.
Go.
Go there.
It must change your perspective on mental health.
And I'll give you the most concrete example.
I think a lot of folks, this is probably changing a bit, but a lot of folks still think that depression is something you just snap out of.
Just move on, come on.
Because we all feel in the dump sometimes, and most of us do move on because it's situational depression.
But if you truly are profoundly depressed, you don't just step out of it.
People who kill themselves don't just step out of it.
It's like having a broken arm.
You're not going to be able to throw the ball as hard.
And when you play a role of this nature, I would gather because you've actually experienced it in a way, when you reach down, as you beautifully described, it probably gives you insights into what people face who are actually experiencing the problem.
Totally.
Totally.
And there were times when I was doing this that it was profoundly frightening, that I felt...
Frightened that I wouldn't come out, you know, that I wouldn't be all right on the other side.
And there were times when I actually called my mother to come get me and take me home.
Are you kidding me?
No, I couldn't drive home.
I couldn't make it.
And many times when we were filming, and it was a lot of hours, and I was so wrecked and emotional and like...
Where most normal people would go lay down and go, you know, watch TV and get your mind off of it.
The actor's task is to keep putting your mind into it.
And one time they said, you know, shall we quit for the day?
Shall we quit?
I mean, it just was a wreck.
And I knew that no, then was the time to shoot it.
Because I was so raw that...
I was more like Sybil than I could possibly be because of what I'd already asked myself to do.
I, you know, I have learned a great deal about mental and I care deeply about mental health issues and certainly mental health in this country.
And I think most primarily because of some of the roles I've had the opportunity to research and to put myself in.
And I think also because I grew up a very volatile, very emotional world.
I was a little girl in the 50s in a time when little girls weren't supposed to be all those colors.
And I felt very imprisoned and frightened by that imprisonment.
And I think what saved my life was the stage in junior high and in high school, because when I would go on stage, I could let these colors out, rage and any degree of sexuality, that it was not acceptable.
For a little 12 and 13 and 14, 15 year old girl.
At that time, when I grew up, it wasn't acceptable for a grown woman, much less a child.
Why do you think you were so volatile?
Do you think we all are and some of us just hide it more?
I think we have a much larger scope of emotionality than most adults allow themselves to feel.
I think a lot of our emotional colors get shut down and turned off.
Early on in our lives that we shouldn't do that.
My grandmother, who was raised in the South, in really hard circumstances, whenever I would get angry, she'd say to me, don't be ugly.
Don't be ugly.
Oh, that's great.
And that was her term for anyone who was mad.
And anger is such a rich part of being alive.
If you can't be angry at things, you know, instantaneously flare.
Lisa is smiling at me because she's angry at me all the time.
You got all this.
He has to let it out.
A range of color.
A range of angers.
A lot of colors.
Love and happiness.
There's a lot of colors.
A little anger sometimes.
No, I was joking with her mother and she actually showed me a side of her that was just like Lisa.
And so I look up, I said, you're petulant.
And she argued about what petulant meant.
And I mean, you're irrationally angry.
It's just one more color, darling.
See?
There you go.
There you go.
These are all important.
All of these colors are important.
So, it's intriguing that you mentioned your grandmother's responses that she didn't want you to be ugly.
So, emotions are obviously an important part, dealing with emotions are an important part of any child's maturation.
I think so.
You used the stage, early on you talked a little bit about how our schooling has altered quite a bit.
We don't have mentors as much as we used to.
Did you have a mentor growing up?
No.
My mother.
But I think she was a mentor as much as she was a mother.
So I didn't really.
I was kind of an isolated child.
And again, I don't know why.
Except that I was very shy.
And I didn't know how quite to...
To get on the other side of that, it took me a long time to learn how to step over that shy barrier that you feel so sharply.
So how did acting help you cope with these emotions?
Was it just through allowing you to express them?
It was allowing me to have a place to put them out there so that I could look at them, so that Sally could look at them.
And in some ways I would walk back from...
And still do it today and go...
Oh, is that what I feel?
And without editorializing on myself, my instantaneous colors, my emotions, and the stage allowed me to do that and allowed me to feel worth at the same time.
Some of the roles prove more fulfilling than others, in part because they challenge you or because they allow you to go places that you probably should go but don't want to go?
Oh, absolutely.
Oh, absolutely.
I've been so fortunate in my career to have the opportunity to play some of the women that I've had the opportunity to play because they're so rich and they're so different people.
And they've been raised in different places and their life experience is so different than mine and my having to be in their shoes has given me so much that I wouldn't have gotten otherwise.
Talking with Sally Fields today.
Sally Fields is well known to all of you in her many acting roles, but she has one other attribute that some of you may not know about.
And she's kind enough to share it with us today.
When we come back, we're going to talk about a health challenge that she's come in contact with.
It's a problem that many of you face.
I must say, we often have celebrities on the program, but I'm particularly honored to have you because you're able to take a physical challenge.
And it's not just to start with a scar.
It's insight into the holistic elements of the illness.
There's lots more when we come back.
Actually, we're just kidding that The producers were saying that Lisa and Sally sound the same, so we're going to have you change roles.
Someone said, maybe it was me, that Lisa has multiple personalities.
I can never tell who I woke up next to.
And I said, aren't you lucky?
Because it keeps life so interesting.
You know, he's a Gemini, and they don't.
If I were just one person, you'd leave me.
Absolutely.
Well, she actually, I don't know.
Maybe you were speaking before, we did today's show, but this week, she was mad at me about something.
I did something bad.
A lot of times, she gets mad at me because of things I do in her dreams.
That's so not true.
Please, be honest.
That has happened, but not a lot.
Yes, okay.
But sometimes, you know, I'm always the bad guy in the dream.
Yeah, but the dream is probably holding some emotion that she wasn't expressing.
Exactly.
So I just came out in the closet.
Exactly.
The dream happened.
She realized what she really felt.
And so when she finally got her hands off my neck...
And she told me that she finally realized what it was and that she was deep down nervous that if she stopped getting mad at me and challenging me, that I might not find life with her as exciting.
No, no, no.
That wasn't what I said.
That's what I took away from it.
What did you say?
This is about Sally, not about us.
I think that you should always spend this time and you guys should both tell me what you feel and maybe I can help you sort it out.
So what did you say then?
No, I just said that, you know, if I didn't react to what you were doing, you would up the behavior until I did get a response.
But that's very different from how you interpret it.
Well, I think it's interesting that that's how you interpret it.
But you admit that that's what I said, right?
Well, after getting her doctorate degree at Harvard, Sally went into full-time...
All right, so you're healthy and beautiful as always, and what happened?
Just to back up, I have a really great doctor, something that a lot of people in this country don't have, and that's just awful.
He really believes in preventative...
Medicines and behavior, put it that way.
And in my history, I have on both sides of my family a real history of osteoporosis.
And I am a prime candidate because I am Caucasian, I am thin, I'm small, and I was over 50. And the statistics on On women is that one out of two women will experience osteoporosis related fracture sometime in their life.
That's one out of two.
It's so huge.
And he watched me and was giving me regular bone density tests, which too many women are not getting as a regular thing.
But he started on me really in my early 50s.
Once a year?
Once every other year?
Once a year.
Okay.
He was giving it me once a year because he was concerned about my bones.
Because I have such small bones that I don't have a lot...
Very far to go before I'm in danger.
I admit that you're thin, but you look fairly muscular.
Yeah.
Well, I work out a lot.
I take care of myself.
I exercise.
I eat right.
I do all of that.
And in most cases, you can do all of that right stuff.
Exercise.
Take your calcium.
Eat incredibly well.
Lots of green vegetables and exercise and pump iron and And do great cardio.
But he felt eventually I was going to get osteoporosis.
My genetic condition was just going to catch up with me.
And it eventually did.
Right before I turned 60. So I'm almost 61. Almost two years ago or something like that, he said, went from osteopenia to full-fledged osteoporosis in my hip and my spine.
How do you differentiate those two?
Do you know?
It has to do with the degree of bone loss.
Osteopenia is, you know, a borderline between healthy bone state and an unhealthy bone state.
Then when it tips over further into the unhealthy bone state, and they use a terminology of plus and minus difference.
The plus, obviously, and the healthy, and the minus, obviously, unhealthy.
And I went down so that I became what would be called osteoporosis in my hip and my spine.
And he said, this is dangerous now, and we have to decide on a treatment.
The good news about osteoporosis...
Is that it is very treatable.
But it's silent and you don't know it's there unless you really are getting bone density tests.
You have either somebody looking out for you like a really good doctor or you know enough to look out for yourself.
At the same time I was diagnosed, I was approached by...
This really great company that makes Boniva, which is what I take, to represent the drug so that we could help bring about awareness of osteoporosis and the huge numbers And it's like $18 billion a year in this country is spent for osteoporosis
-related fractures.
And this all could be prevented.
We don't need to be spending that amount of money.
Not to mention the impact on these women's lives, or men, because 20% of diagnosed cases are men.
But much fewer men are getting, Lord knows, than the women are getting the bone density tests.
And of all the things that can happen to you as you get older, and we know there's a whole lot of things that you're going to have to transition into and kind of figure out how to...
Embrace in your life.
Having weak bones is not one of them.
You can treat your bones, whether you choose to take Boniva or not.
There are many other treatments that you talk to your doctor about.
There are treatments that are once a day, once a week, minus once a month, but now they've even come out with a shot.
That's once every three months for women who can't tolerate anything digestively.
Right.
Just to give the listeners a little bit of background, we were talking with Sally Field about a very common medical ailment, osteoporosis, one that is actually readily treatable as well.
The two major ways you can treat it, and by the way, all those preventive things that Sally spoke of are critically important, and osteoporosis starts at age 20, 25. That's when the maximum bone density happens, especially if you're a frail woman.
If you have any If you're a member of your family who has osteoporosis, the things that I was talking about with leafy green vegetables, calcium, vitamin D. Of course, you need vitamin D to deposit the calcium.
I've learned so much about vitamin D. Isn't that cool?
I've learned so much.
I take a massive amount of vitamin D because my body still is having a very hard time absorbing vitamin D. How much do you take?
I'm taking 4,000 IU. Right.
I'm going to emphasize that.
4,000 IU is four times what we recommend as baseline.
And some people have to take...
I take it once a week.
I only take it once a week, though I take it on Sundays.
Okay.
And he's going to check me again because he's hoping that he's trying to get it to pick up.
My body is not absorbing vitamin D. Why wouldn't you take it every day?
Not 4,000, but maybe 1,000.
Well, my doctor, what he does is he begins these...
When he has to go to a prescriptive medicine, which is when you're taking vitamin D at this level is a prescriptive medicine, he likes to begin it very slowly and then test me and see how is it working.
Rather than starting at the top and working your way down, he likes to start at the bottom and work his way up, which sounds like a good idea.
He had started me on a dose that I was taking every day, And I don't remember.
That was like 500. 500 right a day.
That was 500 a day.
And then that was still not working.
So then he moved to the 4,000 once a week.
Is it helping now?
We haven't retested that yet.
But I also learned that because it's a mixed thing going on here, to protect ourselves from the sun...
I go hiking all the time, but I'm wearing long sleeves and I'm wearing hats and I don't want wrinkles and all this.
And We need a little sun.
We need a little tiny bit of sun every day.
And I found out that there's like vitamin D doctor specialists that they prescribe a little bit of sun on your legs beginning slowly at 10 minutes every other day.
Right.
At the proper times of the day, like, for instance, in the afternoon when the sun is not so strong or in the morning before it's too strong.
But I didn't know that.
I mean, that might have been the reason, partially the reason that...
Well, vitamin D, besides being essential to absorb calcium and deposit it in your bones, is also the most potent vitamin to prevent cancer.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So there are many reasons to get sun exposure.
And I agree with your physician and others who are advocating for direct sun exposure.
Most of us who live north of Atlanta don't get enough vitamin D in the winter.
It's very difficult to get the vitamin D because you're not going to go out in short sleeves and shorts in Minnesota in January.
It's hard to know how to do it.
You won't be off for very long anyway.
You'll turn red, but it won't be.
It's windburn, not sunburn I'm worried about.
But we have to get sun exposure.
The skin plays a very tenuous job.
It's difficult to do.
Matching up the amount of vitamin D it wants you to get.
So it lets the sun through your border do.
But it also wants to protect your body from depleting antioxidants and folic acid.
So it's a balancing act.
I think taking vitamin D for most of us is probably an easier way to go.
Especially if we're not going to be too attentive to the sun exposure.
But I'm intrigued actually that...
Just overall, that you seem to like to take or avoid taking pills in a daily fashion.
Are you not good at it?
Yeah, I'm really bad at it.
Very bad at it.
I mean...
That's why, obviously, and I recognize that I have to take osteoporosis very seriously.
I've heard these horror stories, you wouldn't believe, I'm sure you've heard them, where, you know, a woman broke her back because she sat down on a hard bench.
Right.
Because without being diagnosed, she didn't know that her bones were that porous.
And I'm very active, and, you know, breaking my back would not be good.
It would, like, really crimp my style.
Right.
So I realize that I have to take my treatment very seriously with osteoporosin.
I have to do it the rest of my life.
So my treatment, since it's once a month, is easier for me.
But there are other treatments that work equally as well.
And I think there are other medical reasons why you might choose one over the other.
That's why you really have to discuss it with your doctor.
Just to help the listeners for a second, so Boniva and similar health care provider, doctor, nurse, someone else is helping you.
Someone other than your mother.
Just call mom.
Hey, mom!
So the two classes of pills, and there are several that we can talk about, but the two major classes are the ones that slow down the breakdown of bone.
Remember, the bone remakes itself every seven years, so it only does that because it knows how to break itself down and knows how to build itself up.
Drugs like Boniva are in the category of preventing breakdown of bone.
Which in theory is great.
If you don't take it at the wrong dose so that it doesn't have an effect or you take too much, which actually causes your bone to get sometimes brittle because it's not quite as solid because it hasn't been remodeled like it used to be.
And those are first-line drugs.
They have the least side effects.
They also are the ones that are best tolerated in terms of intestinal side effects and the like.
The other family of drugs, and there's one big one in this category, are the ones that actually stimulate new bone growth, which you would think, hey, I'll do that too.
The problem is those drugs are a bit more difficult to administer.
They're generally with injections.
They're more prone to side effects, a lot more expensive, and so they're not first-line therapy.
Then, of course, there's estrogen therapy.
Which influences a lot more than just your bones, which is why they're not as popular.
But there are some designer estrogen drugs now.
Because we know that women, while they still have estrogen, seem to maintain bone mass.
So if you're having terrible problems with hot flashes and other problems around the time of menopause, then that's also a solution for some women.
I just wanted to get the drugs out of the box here.
Because there are a lot of options.
And you're absolutely right, Sally.
This is a place you probably shouldn't be self-treating.
You get someone who really is good at this business...
Yeah.
Well, would you know?
If you didn't go to a doctor, would you have any clue that you had this?
No, see, that's the thing.
People say to me, well, gosh, I'm so sorry about your diagnosis and how bad did you feel?
I would not have known.
I would not have known until I broke something I did not want to break.
And it was only because I had such a good physician who really was watching this.
And, I mean, I have other things in my genetic...
Information that I'm going to have to look out for, too.
And he was giving me what is a great thing to have, and that is an early on baseline bone density test.
So he was able to see how fast my bone loss was happening.
And although I never would have known, I never would have known.
When we come back with Sally, we're going to talk a little bit about Rally with Sally for Bone Health.
We've got a lot more questions to get to, but first, a quick break.
Joined by wonderful woman Sally Field who's talking to us about how she overcame a problem that many Americans face, men and women.
You pointed out 20 to 25% of men have osteoporosis as well.
And it's an ailment that we ignore and not realizing that I think falls are the sixth most common cause of death.
We don't think about this much, but people walking along, either they slide on something they shouldn't have stood on or they just break.
Well, it's also...
If you break your hip or your spine or even, Lord knows, your leg, in a lot of cases your health so deteriorates after that because of other things.
Having that condition and having to try to Yeah.
you break something and you're laid up and for every day you lie in bed it takes you 10 days to get your strength back and you're cooked yeah so you created this rally with sally initiative yes Well, you know, I think my real passion to get this information out there, I think, started when they had the whole information snafu about hormones.
And my generation of women who are happily going down the trail of la-di-da, we're taking these hormones and don't we feel good?
And then they went, yikes, you shouldn't be taking these.
All sorts of bad things are going to happen to you.
And...
Then we were totally confused.
And I, because of, again, of the things in my family's history, just said, I'm not going to take them.
I'm not going to take them.
And I quit.
And it was awful.
It was awful to go from happily and comfortably on all these hormones to nothing.
I really felt like the rug had been ripped out from under me.
And people saying, you know, well, you can do a little of this or a little of that.
And I felt like, ah!
I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing.
I saw a little Sybil there.
Yes, exactly.
So I think that I felt I didn't have enough information.
And I didn't know where to go to get all the information.
And so when this happened to me, and I realized then I had osteoporosis...
And I had a good doctor who could tell me this information and I was learning about it.
And then, luckily, the good news for me is that the Boniva people came to me and wanted me to represent them.
So it allowed me to place all of this information from all of these experts and doctors and what is it and how many and what do you do?
And I wanted to be part of a campaign that brought this information out to people.
And they don't have to take Boniva.
Lord knows they can take whatever is right for them.
But to get the information, to know that you could possibly be at risk, to make sure that there's a bone density test in your health.
Red regime.
Whatever your regime may be, and hopefully you have some sort of a health regime, that you get a bone density test and get that information for yourself.
Are you a good patient, you think?
I think I am a good patient.
I don't like being a patient.
That's the whole thing.
That means you're normal.
So I try not to be anybody's patient.
Do you get your mammograms in a timely fashion?
Totally.
Pap smears?
Totally.
I don't want to be sick because of my own laziness.
If I'm going to be sick because God said that's what's going to happen to me, then I'll deal with it.
But I don't want to feel that terrible regret you must feel that you could have prevented it, you could have stopped it, you could have caught it earlier or something.
So how do folks, and this Rally with Sally initiative is, I guess, primarily a public outreach initiative.
It's a way to get the information out there for women so that they can learn what osteoporosis is.
They can go online to www.bonehealth.com and just really learn what is osteoporosis.
Might I be at risk?
How can I, like you say, if there are women who are in their 20s or 30s or...
Or early 40s, which you should already be thinking about, you know, getting a bone density test.
I mean, how should I be eating?
How should I bring health?
And it's what you do, what your life is.
That's why you're so great.
How can I bring this into my consciousness?
And so I own this.
You should always feel that you're owning this part of your life.
But as you get older...
This choice to be healthy, if you can, and then fate, God, whatever you choose to say, will take you down whatever path you're going to go down.
But the mental attitude of being aggressive about being healthy You'll get Delta Health cards, but you've got to pick the cards up to read them.
And a lot of times, folks don't get the simple things.
And I found it interesting, actually, that you're talking about bone density in the same phrases where you're talking about mammograms and pap smears, because I do think it's right.
And I love the mantra, by the way.
You don't want to get sick because you're lazy.
It's so true.
One other thing I want to mention to listeners out there, we've talked about it a bit in the past, but vitamin K2, which is one of the vitamins that we know are important, for example, for clot degeneration in bodies, one of those vitamins is actually important in bone building.
And we find it in things like kefir, some yogurt products have it.
And these are all actually generally well described on the web, but if you don't know you've got the problem, you're not going to pay attention to it.
And these myriad of alternative approaches, many of which are very effective.
Lisa, what's the one your mother takes?
Bone-up?
Is that what it's called?
Yeah, it's a...
It's a multivitamin with K2 and a bunch of other things in there as well.
But there are companies actually now, they're sort of trying to combine these different supplements that we think are effective.
Well, you know, in my understanding, if you're somewhere down the line going, because it's so strongly in your genetic code, going to get osteoporosis, probably eventually you're going to get it.
But what you want to try to do is keep that from happening as long as you possibly can before, quite honestly, you have to go on any No medication or any treatment.
Absolutely, absolutely.
And a lot of women don't realize that cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption in high doses when you're young, these are things that actually waste away the bone mass.
High protein diets probably play a role too.
So the process is...
By the way, these are not bad things to do.
I mean, it's probably good for you.
To smoke?
No, to stop smoking.
But the things you have to do to prevent osteoporosis are good for you anyway.
So it's not like you're stopping smoking in order to avoid osteoporosis.
You're stopping smoking because you shouldn't smoke.
Well, I told you my grandmother said, don't be angry, be ugly.
I say, don't smoke, you'll be ugly.
Be ugly.
That phraseology comes up a lot.
By the way, I love this.
I'm going to remember the ugly phrase because one of our four kids does that sometimes.
She fusses and she gets ugly.
It's not true.
My grandmother was wrong.
She wasn't using that as an example.
So let's talk about mothers and grandmothers for a second.
So there's a quote here I have.
This is from the Emmy you won for Outstanding Lead Actress.
And let's face it, if the mothers ruled the world, there would be no wars in the first place.
Yes.
We've talked a lot about hormones and how women and men think differently.
Talk to me about the role of women in leadership.
Well, actually, when I said that, I believe that that could be male or female.
I do think that you don't have to be only female to have the sensibilities of what I mean about mothering.
I think what I mean by mothers, I mean they are the people whose primary focus is on children, who their priorities in their life are the lives of their children. who their priorities in their life are the lives of It affects how you see the world, how you face conflict.
It is a proven fact that if you go into the villages in Nepal or wherever, when women are given some kind of empowerment, and that doesn't mean that they have to rule the men, It means they come to the table in any way in their community.
In an empowered way, a decision-making way, that the whole village is changed economically, environmentally, educationally, health-wise, that women bring with them,
and mothers bring with them different sensibilities, Whether it is inherent in who they are or is it because when you give birth to something or you hold a little creature that is your responsibility, be you male or female,
and you spend that amount of selflessness and caring for it day and night and worrying about it and wiping its nose and its bottom and feeding it and caring more about it than you care for yourself, that it and you spend that amount of selflessness and caring for it day and night and worrying about it and wiping its nose And I do believe that if mothers ruled the world, there would be no war.
You express it beautifully.
Thank you for doing that.
And I think you speak for many.
I'm sure a lot of the listeners out there just heard you say that and say, darn right.
So why is it we can't do that?
I mean, why don't we have...
In fact, we seem to beat out the maternal instincts out of many female leaders.
And it doesn't certainly get endorsed.
You know, there aren't a lot of male candidates for president who cry a lot.
Yeah.
And feel empathy for the sanctity of life.
Because it's a miracle.
When that child is first in your hands and you see them breathe, you couldn't build that, you couldn't create that.
It confirms your recognition that there's stuff out there besides you and your little myopic perspective on the planet.
I think that there must be a way to elevate how we behave as human beings.
It has been done in other places.
When you look at how Nelson Mandela handled the trials that went on after apartheid, it was astonishing.
And he...
Was behaving like a mother.
And he brought together the victims and the perpetrators in this incredible ceremony of forgiveness.
And it was a way of not punishing, but of healing.
And that is a mother's...
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Too many countries, we're in a childhood schoolyard mentality, like a grammar school mentality of, you know, let's just beat the holy hell out of the next guy because he hurt my feelings.
You know, he took my ball and I want it back.
I mean...
Once you finish Rally with Sally for Bone Health, is there going to be a rally with Sally for being mothers?
And by the way, I love that idea that you don't have to be a female to be a mother.
No.
Lisa and I talk about this all the time, and she's argued, I think, with a lot of merit, that it's probably one of the best things we could do to change the planet for the better is to go into troubled areas and empower women.
One of the things that seems to be uniformly present in areas of the world where there's a continual conflict and no real resolution in sight is that it's overwhelmingly male-dominated and women are subjugated.
Women are completely eliminated.
They don't count as part of the population.
And in many cases, tortured and not allowed to get an education.
It's pretty astonishing.
So what's your epithet going to say?
When you only get five words on your tombstone, what's it going to say?
She made the place better.
She was a good mother.
Oh gosh, what would my tombstone say?
Gee whiz, I guess.
Gee whiz, I guess?
You're not going to say that.
I think it would be just...
Boy, that's hard to figure out what it would say.
That's a mean one.
First of all, I'm trying to answer a question that isn't true.
I don't want a tombstone.
I don't want to take up any space like that.
I want to be scattered someplace wonderful.
I want that too.
Lisa will not let me do that.
I'm going first.
You can do whatever you want.
I want to be scattered in the trees.
I don't want to be in the ground like that.
I want my kids to come and my grandkids to come visit those trees periodically and talk to me.
I want them to come talk to me.
It would just be, come talk to me!
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