Transcription of Heartfelt, #74
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Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you’re listening to the Dr. Lisa radio hour and podcast show number 74, “Heartfelt”, airing for the first time on February 10th, 2013. This week is a very important week in my life. This is the week that my daughter turns 12. It’s interesting my Sophie calls Valentine’s Day, Sophie’s birthday because that’s exactly what it is in her mind and it’s appropriate. She’s my third child. She is a child of my heart. She was the unexpected blessing behind her other brother and her sister and she served to remind me that you can be a doctor and live in your head, you can spend as much time as you want focusing on the thoughts and the ideas but there’s always going to be a part of you that’s connected back to this very loving energy that’s around us in the world.
So happy birthday to my daughter, Sophie and I’m very privileged to have on the show with us today other people who have heartfelt ways of living in the world and bringing their message to people just as I am. Our guests today include cardiologist, Dr. Lowell Gerber, Steve and Kate Shaffer of Black Dinah Chocolatiers on Isle au Haut and Francis Howell of Hiking to Build Hope. Dr. Lowell Gerber is a cardiologist that spent many years rooting around in the arteries of people’s hearts trying to fix problems that had started years before. Over time he came to understand the type of medicine he was practicing was too far downstream. He wanted to go upstream and help people’s hearts to be healthy from early on.
Steve and Kate Shaffer of Black Dinah Chocolatiers are offering their own version of living in a heartfelt manner in their chocolatier studio at Isle au Haut. As we have come to understand recently from the medical research, dark chocolate is actually good for us as is the love that’s put into creating a product that people enjoy. We know that you’ll enjoy their interview.
Francis Howell of Hiking to Build Hope is one of the most enthusiastic proponents of hiking we have ever run across. He reminds us that it’s important to live our lives with passion. Get out there, connect with nature, and really do what brings your heart joy. So from my heart to yours, happy Valentine’s Day. I’m sending lots of love in your direction and I hope that you are able to bring love into your own life and send it back out again. Thank you for joining us today and here are my interviews with Dr. Lowell Gerber, Steve and Kate Shaffer, and Francis Howell.
As you might imagine, given that I am radio show host, I really enjoy spending time talking to people about their health. Many of the things that I speak with patients about or talk about on the air are I think that I’ve learned in my own life and not necessarily through my training as a doctor. Recently we started a series at The Body Architect of information that combines the best of all worlds and our next topic is on February 27th and it will be about revving up your metabolism. More information on the talks that were given on February 27th at The Body Architect in Portland or to sign up please call 207-774-2196. We look forward to seeing you there.
Dr. Lisa When you think of Valentine’s Day, obviously we think of hearts and we’re thinking more about hearts as they relate to love but we also think about hearts as they relate to blood and physiology and of course I think about it this way because I’m a doctor so I’ve invited one of my fellow doctors, Dr. Lowell Gerber, a cardiologist who practices in Freeport to come in and talk to us about this wonderful organ that helps us pump blood throughout our body and really keeps us alive. Thanks for coming in.
Dr. Gerber: Well thank you for such a nice introduction because I too feel that the heart is the source of love and relationships in life. However what you described earlier, in medical school, the medical profession, I sometimes have arguments with my colleagues who say that the heart only exists to hold the two lungs together or the heart only exists to provide a source of blood supply to the brain or the heart only exists to circulate blood to the gastrointestinal tract, to the ovaries, or uterus or whatever their organ of interest is and I’m very pleased to be part of a discussion where we can talk more about the holistic effects of the heart and what it represents.
Lisa: You and I spoke on the phone yesterday and it was interesting to me because you were an interventional cardiologist for …
Dr. Gerber: 30 years.
Lisa: 30 years and I think you described an early sense that really the body was just a box around the heart. When you were … this is the heart, this is your focus, you got to go in there, you’re going to do what you need to, to the heart and the body just becomes a box.
Dr. Gerber: Well and actually it’s … when I step back and have this out of body experience and look back and what I was doing so after the body was lying medicated and I had my means and mechanisms for getting into the body but the heart actually was located in a box suspended over the body when you catheterize it. For many of the newer physicians I think it’s unfortunate that they take this as a video game. Truly for 30 years I was focused on a very small portion in fact when I was putting in a stent in a coronary artery. I was interested in a segment of the artery that was may be 1 to 2 cm long and may be 3 mm in diameter and beyond that it was somebody else’s territory.
I had an interest in cardiac rehabilitation and got my masters degree in exercise physiology and I never gave that up but as I went into medical school I became like all the other doctors and basically put aside everything that I had learnt in the science of anatomy, physiology, pathology, biochemistry and began to follow the guideline-based medicine that we’re all now accustomed to.
Lisa: I want to step back and explain to people who have never been in a cardiac cath lab and may be people who have been but don’t really realize what you’re saying that … and I was part of this when I was a medical resident, a medical student. You go in there, the person is on the table. Stuff is happening to the person. What you’re looking up at is basically a screen, a television screen. So it really does feel like you’re kind of monkeying your fingers around in a very highly skilled way to get the achieved result up on a screen. That must have been a very kind of … let’s just say, disembodied experience.
Dr. Gerber: That’s why I can’t … reflecting back, I’m like 30 years in the cath lab as an out of body experience because we got very accustomed to knowing a patient by the disease that they had and our exposure to the patient very often, mainly physicians I know really didn’t examine the patient very much, interventionalists when they met the patient, there was a small opening over the groin area, now over the wrist and for me that was really the introduction. We try to avoid that now and get to know our patient’s better but still it is a very impersonal way of taking care of patients. This is the surgical approach. There are many people who have bonded with their surgeons or with their obstetricians.
I don’t know as many that bonded with their interventional cardiologist because typically the relationship is quite short what used to be an experience where somebody would have a heart attack. They come in. They’ll be in the hospital for two weeks. Now they come into the emergency room. They’re met with a very skilled team who makes their assessments very quickly. There’s a stopwatch that starts ticking. There’s a time frame to get them into the cardiac catheterization laboratory to get the procedure completed, and it used to be called the door-to-balloon time and now it’s the call-to-balloon time. From the time the patient calls for help, the stopwatch starts.
Lisa: And the balloon is …
Dr. Gerber: The balloon is the device that’s put into the artery to deploy, use it to deploy a little piece of metal that’s called a stent. When the artery is blocked, we open it with a balloon and then put a stent in there to keep it open. It’s all on the clock right now. Now there are case managers who are meeting with the family when the patients come into the emergency room with a heart attack to begin the discharge planning. A patient may come in with a heart attack and be out of the hospital within 24 hours. The whole time that we had to bond with the patient, develop a physician-patient relationship, to take advantage of that teachable moment when the patient and the family are suffering a medical crisis and they’re more open to listen to things, that’s really been diminished.
For many patients, they’re in and out so quickly, for many of them, quite literally it’s difficult for them to believe that anything bad really happened because it goes so quick, they’re sedated, they’re treated very humanely but the teachable moment is gone and so one of my interests is to make lifestyle changes for people. Usually that teachable moment is when the patient and the family are very much open to a lifestyle change but that’s gone for many.
Lisa: Well after 30 years being an interventional cardiologist, for people who are listening in an interventional cardiologist, just to find out a little bit.
Dr. Gerber: There are different types of cardiologists. Back when I started training, there was no such thing as an interventional cardiologist. There were clinical cardiologists who were physicians that often worked in their office and there were invasive cardiologists who often did most of their work or some of their work in the hospital doing these procedures where you actually do something to the patient to make a diagnosis. That something was usually putting a small tube into an artery or peripheral artery usually in the groin and then advancing the tube up into the arteries of the heart and taking a picture of the heart, and often putting a tube into the chambers of the heart to measure the pressures and that was called catheterization.
The invasive cardiologist did cardiac catheterization measuring the pressures of the structure and function of the heart in coronary angiography. It was cardiac catheterization and coronary angiography. Then in the late 70s and early 80s for the first time, we were able to actually do something to the artery besides take a picture of it or measure its function. The first things that were done were using a balloon to stretch the artery open and at the same time we learnt how to stretch the arteries in the legs open, the arteries in the kidneys. The arteries actually into the brain were done very early but the problem was they kept coming back.
Then in the mid 80s and early 90s, we introduced putting little pieces of metal around that balloon called the stent, and that’s probably one of the most frequent procedures done in the United States today is opening an artery through the cardiac catheterization, measuring the pressures and function and the coronary angiography taking the pictures are a preliminary step. Then the next step is actually to do something to the patient to change them. That’s putting the balloon and the stent in.
That has gone well beyond that now because now we put artificial valves in without surgery. We put stents in the carotid arteries to hopefully prevent stroke, into the renal arteries to prevent kidney failure, and the arteries of the legs to relieve symptoms. It has really expanded and now we do this in not only in neonates to avoid recurrent congenital heart surgeries, but there are procedures in utero when the fetus takes …
Lisa: You’re talking about neonates …
Dr. Gerber: We’re talking about babies before they’re born.
Lisa: Babies before they’re born.
Dr. Gerber: This whole idea of interventions in cardiology and radiology, I’ve got to give a lot of recognition and respect to the interventional radiologist who helped this field develop. It’s not just cardiology, it’s not just radiology, it’s been neurologists, it’s been nephrologists. It’s really been blossoming physicians who want to do something for their patients, more proactive than surgery.
Lisa: Well this is a good place from me to jump in because what you just said this time describing, I think it’s really helpful because we hear these terms and people who’re listening, they hear these terms but we don’t always get them defined as clearly as that. The term’s very technical. I mean, you, you, it sounds like a very technical field where you have to be very skilled with your, like you’ve to be intelligent, you’ve to be able to use your fingers in a way to manipulate the things that need to go into very small spaces and it’s … what we’ve been able to offer patients is truly amazing and you’ve been able to prolong lives, you’ve been able to do really wonderful things with the technology. After 30 years of doing this technical stuff, you’ve really shifted the way that you now practice not as, and you’re in the process of shifting … so …
Dr: Gerber: Well, one of my interests became what’s called now multivascular disease and that’s why I try to bring in all those other disciplines because this thing, disease process not only affects the coronary arteries but it affects arteries throughout the body. You reach a point as people age and develop other medical problems that promote this atherosclerosis, do we get to a point where we’re going to put stents in two carotid arteries, two renal arteries, three coronary arteries, and arteries in legs. Where does it end? Maybe we’re approaching this a little too late.
Now my father was a dentist and he got interested in dental prevention very early and was at odds with the Chicago Dental Society because prevention really wasn’t something people were really interested in then. Maybe some of that rubbed off on me as I’ve maintained my interests in interventions but also in cardiac rehab and prevention. A lot of what we’ve heard about prevention has been pretty much held as blasphemy that it doesn’t work, it can’t work, and that anybody who tries to reverse these things is a quack. I believe that.
I had a fair number of patients who were getting chelation therapy in Florida where I practiced for a long time that have failed chelation therapy. The disease progressed despite it and through a course we just had this as this more proved that you can’t change it and what we do as interventional cardiologists putting in a balloon and stent is the answer. Then as we got better at putting balloons and stents, the technology got better, the devices got safer.
We, I’m speaking generically amongst interventional cardiologists and radiologists, started to feel well if most heart attacks occur with a plaque that’s less than 50% blockage, I don’t think most people know that. Most people think that if you’ve severe blockage that’s when you have a heart attack. Well if it happens acutely or if a plaque ruptures and it blocks an artery then people have a heart attack but most of those heart attacks occur from plaques that are less than 50% obstruction of the lumen. In fact, most of them are 30% and we call this now a vulnerable plaque because we know more about the pathophysiology.
Still many of my colleagues felt that well if stenting a 70% to 90% stenosis is a good thing then maybe we should be stenting the 30% to 50% stenoses to prevent them from ever having a heart attack and that was called plaque sealing, s-e-a-l-i-n-g. We hear a lot now about ceilings, fiscal capital debt ceilings but we’re talking about a different type of sealing. Physicians thinking that they were doing a good thing for their patients by sealing these vulnerable plaques in vulnerable patients, we began to create a new disease category of stent thrombosis and stent dissections. We always have to keep in mind that we want to do something for a patient and that to our patients. There is a lot of drive to do things to people for lot of different reasons.
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Lisa: You’re right that again, it’s very important. If you’ve a patient who comes in with a lesion you certainly don’t want him to have a heart attack or a stroke so it’s not that this doesn’t have its place but you’ve been working more upstream than that literally and figuratively, I think. You’ve been working more with metabolic disease, with obesity, with dietary changes, and you’ve been trying to get people to a place where you’re trying to impact things before they get to the place where they need to have a stent. Talk to me about that.
Dr. Gerber: This is where I start the conversation with my patients, and I started out my life doing exercise physiology with a master’s degree, was working at a Ph.D. in that. In medical school, I was doing research in endothelium, injecting very minute amounts of what’s called endotoxin and it’s an inflammatory component of bacterial cell walls and studying the interaction between the blood and the vessel wall. I had been looking at that for 30 years.
As I got into interventional cardiology, my life was taken care of the other end of that experimental model that is the effects with chronic disease on the endothelium of plaque buildup. I’ve been trying to put that together, but it’s always been at a distance. It’s been a research interest. It’s been a clinical interest. Then what happens that at age 50, I think I mentioned this at age 50, I realized that I had been doing triathlons, I had been in cross-country team, then an athlete all my life, I was doing triathlons and then at age 50, I started to slow down. I started to gain weight.
I had done nothing different about my exercise regimen or my diet but I was slowing down and gaining weight and my running partner who was 73 years old was starting to pull ahead of me. We would run one day, swim one day, cycle one day, do resistance training one day. Then often we would go and look at the course and do the course because to be competitive, you really had to know the course. You had to know where to leave your bike, where to leave your shoes, where to leave or pickup your goggles. We would do that one day and just do a light workout and then we’ll compete and take a day off. We did that almost every employee could do the triathlon more than once a week if he really wanted to.
My own doctor told me that I should give up the Mediterranean diet that I was on because there was too much fat in it and I should go on a very low-fat diet, get the fat out of my diet, and I should start doing what I told my patients. They should workout 3 to 5 days a week at 30 to 45 minutes of moderate intensity because I was eating too much fat and I was overtraining. I did that and I gained more weight. My cholesterol wasn’t bad, but it never got where we wanted and he wanted to start me on statins. My blood pressure was never really high at rest, but on the treadmill test, it went up a little bit too much and so he wanted me to take an ACE inhibitor. Both my mom and dad had coronary artery disease but both at very late age, but he wanted to be preventive and started me on aspirin.
Now I am on aspirin, beta-blocker, statin, and ACE inhibitor and I’m following the advice I give my patients and I’m gaining weight, my cholesterol is not getting to target, my blood sugar, my fasting blood sugar, it was normal but it was in the upper range, the 90s, and he is telling me that I realize, Dr. Gerber, that you’re very, very busy. You make round to do all these procedures but you need to start taking care of yourself. You need to follow this diet and do this exercise. Then I just kind of got very flushed and had this I call it the aha moment, where I said to myself, oh my God! He is accusing me of not … I’m doing exactly what I should be doing, in fact I’m doing less than what I used to be doing and I’m gaining weight, my blood pressure is going up, my blood sugar and my cholesterol is not at target.
I said, oh my God, my patients weren’t lying to me. I was so arrogant that I would get up 3 o’clock in the morning with a patient having a heart attack, put a balloon in a stent, in the Widowmaker, it’s the proximal part of the artery. If that closes off completely they die. We get them into lab, open a valve by patting on the back, saved your life, pat myself on the back, I saved his life and I’d give him this regimen to follow and ask him to see me back in six weeks to three months and if they weren’t at target that they hadn’t made the goals I set for them, I would have them see my dietitian about a very low-fat diet. I’d have them go to the gym that I selected because they were very medically oriented type of gym and have them follow American College Sports Nursing Guidelines that were recommended, and I’d have them come back and they still hadn’t made their progress.
Again I was so arrogant, I would see you better really get with the guidelines here because you’re going to have another heart attack and nobody maybe able to get to you quick enough to save your life, and they’d say doc, look at me. Here’s my journal. I go to your dietitian, here’s my exercise log, I go to your gym, I breathe air, I drink water, I eat quinoa and look at me. Then when I did it to myself, when I gained 50 pounds, had metabolic syndrome with pre-diabetes, pre-hypertension. My cholesterol was a little bit too high, and then found I had a plaque in my carotid. I said, “Oh my God, I am doing it to myself following the guidelines.” That’s where my life shifted 180 degrees. I said, “You know what? Something’s wrong here.” I had to find out what was wrong.
Lisa: What are you doing differently now? What do you now offer your patients and now practice yourself?
Dr. Gerber: What I had to do for myself was find out why wasn’t I following those guidelines that are supposed to work for everybody? What I did is just had to go back in my memory to where was I when I was working on my Ph.D. in exercise physiology when I was studying body composition and nutrition. I went back and looked at what we knew 40 to 50 years ago and looked at where we are now, and then looked for a type of physician that had a more of a holistic approach to treating the human body than the guidelines. In other ways, what it is about Lowell Gerber that his diet isn’t the same for him as other people that exercise or what are the metabolic hormonal factors are there?
I found a physician that would do that that would have a very personalized approach to find out from detailed history, physical, family history, biochemistry, hormonal patterns where am I today and as most of us in medicine have had to learn, some of us the hard way is that patients have wants and needs and I knew where I wanted to go, but he knew where I needed to go and they weren’t the same because he was thinking about individualized personalized care and I want to follow the guidelines because that’s what I had been taught. It took me a little bit while to wipe my slate clean and follow what they had told me to do that as a former researcher, physician, Ph.D. candidate to go back and look at it for myself and make up my own mind.
Lisa: I could spend hours and hours on so many different aspects of this because I know this is something you’ve dedicated your entire life so it’s too hard to encapsulate this down into an hour long show. How can people find out more about the work that you’re doing in the community and where can they hear you speak and connect with you personally? What’s the best way to reach you?
Dr. Gerber: Well at this moment, I’m actually in a metamorphosis professionally. I’ve done cardiology now for 30 years. Finished my cardiology training, I hate to say this in 1980, and transitioning work to the fulltime practice of a combination of preventive aging, preventive cardiology, and weight management. I’ve been actually questioned by some of my patients about why would a physician who’s interested in preventive aging include children and families by developing a medical retreat for my fantasy would be to have baby boomers with their parents and their kids because when I see a middle-aged woman who comes in who wants to lose weight and she’s got kids at home and her own parents to care for, and she is working because of the economy, she didn’t have time to fix different meals. So part of the challenge is to figure out the dynamics of the family as well as the dynamics. It has to be a lifestyle to stick with. It may not be perfect but it’s better than what they’re doing.
I see children who are and you probably see them as well, there are infants. Most recent I took care of a 9-year-old who had obesity, hypertension, pre‑diabetes, and hyperlipidemia and the answer by his pediatrician was to make him work out more and put him on antihypertensives, glucose lowering, and statin drugs.
Lisa: When people come to see you, you don’t do that for them, and I know your practice is in transition but how do people contact you?
Dr. Gerber: I have a webpage and you can go to www.leanerme.com or the new complete packs of Leaner Me as the weight management aspect. I have an age management practice which was live younger, love longer, and be strong and those two are being combined into a single program called Younger Leaner Me. All those will lead to me. I didn’t bring a business card today because those are being, I’ve got consultants, my goodness, telling me how to design the card, how many letters to have in it, and that’s the part of this I don’t like, but in order to get the word out as we’re doing for me now, people need to know how to get a hold of me so www.leanerme.com is probably the easiest. I hope to have the new practice up and running full probably by Valentine’s Day. That’s kind of my target right now.
Lisa: Perfect. As I said you just are a wealth of information and I know that there are many, many more shows that we could do on various aspects of what you’re doing, and I congratulate you for spending all of this time and really trying to understand things that you’ve gotten great personalized plans for people, preventive cardiology plans, and other weight loss plans. I appreciate your coming in and speaking with us today. We’ve been talking with, Dr. Lowell Gerber, whose cardiology practice is in Freeport.
Dr. Gerber: Thank you so much for helping me get the message out for particularly putting it on Valentine’s Day, and I will be giving this talk on Preventive Cardiology in Freeport in Portland, and it will be in the newspaper and on my website.
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Lisa: One of our good friends Beth Shissler, the cofounder of Sea Bags, and she heard that we were putting together a Valentines Day show, said you know I’ve this group of couple people that you definitely need to meet. They were these two individuals you definitely need to meet and this would be Steve and Kate Shaffer who are the cofounders of Black Dinah Chocolatiers all the way up the coast or off the coast at the Isle au Haut which is always kind of exciting and the fact that you agreed to come down off the island and talk to us about what you’re doing at Black Dinah Chocolatiers makes me really happy. It’s a good way to start my day. Thanks for coming in.
Steve: Yeah, Glad to be here.
Kate: Thanks for having us.
Lisa: I know that actually you came up from New York City so or New York.
Steve: Yes.
Lisa: You’re not having to come down off the island today but what’s that like to live on an island?
Kate: Well, it’s a lot of scheduling. This time of year there’s only two boats a day which is pretty good for a remote Maine Island, but it’s still, you really have to plan your life around the boat schedule.
Steve: Yeah, the nickname of it is luggerhelp because you’re always lugging something on or something off.
Lisa: How long is the ferry ride out there?
Steve: About 40 minutes.
Lisa: How does that feel? Does that give you kind of then time frame in which to just hang out or you’re doing business stuff. What’s that like? I’ve always wondered, to live on an island and not just visit.
Steve: It’s … I’d say it’s to hurry up and rush. You get used to, rush to get ready. You have been like before, preparing everything so when you get up in the morning, you’re ready to go that morning to catch the boat and once you’re on the boat that’s that moment where there’s nothing else you can do but sit.
Lisa: Do you bring this sort of sense of, it sounds like just mindfulness and rolling with it and being kind of peaceful in the way that you approach your lives? Do you bring this into the work that you do with creating chocolate?
Kate: I came down to the island as acook for the inn out there with the keeper’s house. Actually it’s going to be open again this summer, but it is definitely, I won’t say fly by the seat of your pants, but it is definitely work with what you have and resources that you have and that was a huge factor in creating our business model. We wanted to make fine chocolate but we really wanted to use our local resources. Since chocolate is so not local, everything else we use really with all had to be. We took a look. We started right there in our front yard and started looking around at what we could use from the island, from Maine to create a really high quality confection that would resonate not only with gourmet chocolate lovers but with Maine as well. Yeah, definitely.
Lisa: What did you find when you were taking a look and I’m fascinated by the fact that you looked in your front yard and find something that might go into a chocolate?
Kate: Sure.
Lisa: Just tell me about that.
Kate: Well, Maine is very known for, for instance Kate’s Butter.We use butter in our truffles and local cream and milk. We use local herbs, fruits, and flowers so apple is right from the island, pumpkin is from neighbors across the water, blueberries of course, raspberries, strawberries.
Steve: We first moved out here Kate grew up in California and when she first moved out here her thought waswhat about the food because California has such great food and it’s abundant. Within I think the first couple of years when she was working at the having to source food, she found out that the food here was much better, than what she was able to find in California and she’s was very surprised.
Kate: Well, it was more accessible and I really developed a lot of personal relationships with the farmers here. For instance I was living on the island, when I was a cook at the Lighthouse I was living on the island five days a week. I would do all my farm runs on my way to the boat before my week hour. I developed a lot of personal relationships with this very dynamic network of farmers and home gardeners. When we decided to start our own business, it was a natural sort of organic movement to use the resources that we had already developed with them. It was fun, it was really fun.
Steve: Like I feel it is a organic process. We haven’t, we didn’t build the business with an idea in mind and then just let it develop with the reflection of that from the community and so this has been a very interesting process.
Lisa: That is very interesting because not everybody lives in a place that they will consider a community. You can call something a community because you live there and there’s other houses around you, but there isn’t necessarily always the back and forth. On an island, you kind of have the people who are on the island with you.
Kate: Okay.
Lisa: Even the people who are on the mainland, I mean, if it’s a small town in Maine, there’s only so many of them. You kind of have to learn to get along and to rely on one another.
Kate: Right.
Lisa: What’s that been like?
Steve: Well I think, one of the things that has been really interesting for us is as we’ve hired people from the community is targeting people as we go. Okay, who has the skills that they think will fit in here and then offer them the opportunity that they wouldn’t have had so that they may be doing something that they think is what they can do, but it may not be tapping into a skill or something of an interest that they have. I think that we’ve been able to offer up a different way of being out there and they’ve been able to actually propel us toward our goal. I am good at this, I can do this. So it’s been really fun to see that kind of interaction happening.
Kate: Right. One of the questions that lot of people ask us that there’s 40 people that live on Isle au Haut and when you start a business, especially a growing business out of there, people say well, what about the work force? Where do you hire from? Do you hire from off island and we have not because it’s sort of amazing we’ve found our perfect coworkers right there on the Isle au Haut. I mean, we couldn’t have asked for better people to work with, with more perfect skill sets.
Steve: I guess for me that … what was the crux was at the beginning was we sat there and said we want to be here, so what we’re going to do to be here and we just sat there and coming with an idea well, we’re going to move here and do this. We sat down and said okay what can we do here that is feasible given the community and the materials that we have at hand. That’s the thing about like it was very organic, that whole process on both ends with the design of the business and also in the production of the chocolate and how, creating things.
Kate: Yeah. It is definitely a different way to create something as being in a place that you want to be and taking different pieces from that and creating a model from your surroundings.
Steve: Often it’s like, look at how businesses are created and people say I want to move up to Maine and do this, and we came to Maine because we wanted to be at Maine and then we said what is it we’re going to do here in order to survive because we are on a remote island and so you kind of have to sit down. We spent a full winter working out the details about what we can do and what is possible there. We really thought about it.
Lisa: It makes perfect sense … it is a very different way of approaching things because I think people do often come in with sort of top down, “I am this that I’m going to sort of put myself in this place and expect things to kind of morph around me” and what you’re doing is saying you want to be in this place and let’s see what is already in existence and how can we create this collaborative group …
Steve: Right.
Lisa: To actually create a product. That is … and that’s something that I find really very touching because in Chinese medicine, they talk about food having an essence. They talk about specifically life. They talk about different plants and growing different fruits and vegetables and they have different essences. Like you’re creating something from food sources that are already, I mean, may be those foods don’t have the essences but you’re still contributing personal essences and the essence of the community into the chocolate that you’re making which is a very loving process.
Steve: Yeah. Right.
Kate: I think so and also chocolate itself is an extremely magical substance. I mean was never creative about chocolate before we started it and I wasn’t gaga about it but as an ingredient I was always fascinated by it and how it behaves and it is especially combining it with other things including energy and all that stuff. It’s magical.
Steve: That’s one thing too is when Kate was working for Lighthouse and she was having shoulder issues, I think it was and she went to see somebody who did some body work and said you need to stop putting stress into what you’re doing and so she really took it to heart and started coming in and say okay I’m go to put my love into this.
This is what I love and at the same time she started working with chocolate which was very frustrating because it doesn’t behave like any other products but she had to change her attitude towards it and I think it was an interaction. Chocolate has, you can make it beautiful. It’s also chemistry and it’s food and so combined a number of things that touched on what Kate liked to do and she said, I don’t want to put the stress because I’m frustrated with this product. I am going to learn to love it and work with it.
Kate: Yeah.
Steve: It totally changed how she did what she did.
Kate: Chocolate is definitely one of those ingredients that you have to learn from rather than learn to master and at least that’s the way I approach it at. May be other chocolatiers do it differently but I have learned a lot from working with it about pretty much everything that I think it is definitely related to our life and how we live our life from that also.
Steve: Kate has been able to laugh at a lot of the mistakes she has made. She has on her homepage I think it is first Facebook. A photo of the chocolate that she spilled onto the floor and it was really beautiful. It was the first kind of orange and pink any business chocolate Jackson Pollack type design, and it looks, it’s great. It’s sort of seeing the mess and being like well, that is still kind of beautiful, it’s not I wanted but …
Kate: Right. If we want every project that …. We got a really good photograph …
Lisa: Steve, are you from Maine?
Steve: I’m not. I grew up in Pennsylvania. I moved to Maine, graduated from UMO and then moved to California and then realized I really liked Maine. The community, how small it is and so forth, so I wanted to introduce Kate to it and when she decided, “Yeah, I’ll move back here. I’ll try it living here.”
Lisa: What is it about Maine that attracted the two of you? Why Maine? Why the Isle au Haut?
Steve: When I lived in Maine previously, I really liked the island, so I was always attracted to the smallness of the community and when I moved to California, I was kind of intimidated by California because it’s always just been a magical and big place, and stuff like that and I felt like I was living in Maine because I was kind of avoiding people.
I moved to California. I was like okay I was living in different places and so forth and I realized that I really wasn’t there because I liked Maine because of the values that people have, and one of things that I think about is how people came to America initially to design, to set up communities. On the East Coast, especially in Maine, the weather determines your values because especially when we know if you’re in trouble it doesn’t make any difference if you like somebody or not, you go and help him. The rules are based upon nature.
On the West Coast, it feels to me like people made a gold rush. They went over there for wealth and the whole system was set up on society. The rules when you base them on society are changeable. One minute it can be this rule and the next minute, it can be this. It wasn’t stable. People weren’t as community oriented even though living was easier, and I realized that I really liked this about Maine. I really liked the community and one of the things I really appreciated on the island is I developed friendships with people that I would never have developed. The opportunity has been that we live so close to the people that I feel so enriched by that where normally you can surround yourself with yourself and not have to challenge yourself in this way. So …
Kate: Can you tell he studied philosophy?
Lisa: Yeah … You’re very well rounded in …
Steve: I don’t know about that but …
Lisa: Why is it called Black Dinah?
Kate: Black Dinah is the name of the mountain which is actually really just a rock right outside our backdoor and on the old maps of Isle au Haut, they have it on the old maps but not on the new maps. It’s a rock. It takes about 10 minutes to hike up to the top of it and you get a great view of Penobscot Bay and Camden Hills and …
Male: This segment of the Dr. Lisa radio hour and podcast is brought to you by the following generous sponsors. Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of RE/MAX Heritage in Yarmouth, Maine. Honesty and integrity can take you home. With RE/MAX Heritage, it’s your move. Learn more at rheritage.com and by Booth, accounting and business management services, payroll, and bookkeeping. Business is done better with Booth. Go to boothmaine.com for more information.
Lisa: What are your favorite products that you, we talk a lot about life and …
Kate: Living and …
Lisa: Coming back to the chocolate idea what are some of the favorite, your favorite creations?
Kate: That we make? Well, I love our chocolates and that’s our biggest product and I mostly love them because of the process of making them. They are fabulous to eat and all that but it’s just so, it is so rewarding to start from scratch. You’re creating your chocolate, your butter and make the best ganache you could make and then coat it in the best chocolate you can find and make it look beautiful. Still I love that process, but as far as products go, I think my favorite ones are the ones that have sort of sprung up from … by accident or just by innovation because we’re trying to figure how to use that that’s paramount that we cut off that would normally be composted.
It’s a great thing. We would hate to get rid of it, so Steve and I will sit there, we’ll be in the kitchen looking at it. Steve will stick a chocolate frog on a piece of caramel and be like hey, we could do this. This could be our frog on log. This was definitely one of our best selling products now so …
Steve: We do it like. There was one thing too is having to bring it because with our chocolates we would always take back what has them still because they’re fresh in their mold and so forth, so we didn’t want them in the stores beyond the certain dates, we bring them back and so then we were like what we’re going to do with these because it really it was heartbreaking to have to compost them so we started making ice cream. It’s always this thing of what do we do to reduce ourwastestrength. I have to say one of my favorite, not only for the taste which is the Varietal I like it because what it is, is a in South America this is a Peruvian chocolate.
What happened was they were down there they were growing cocaine because that was the only source of income that these communities had and they were on drugs, the government would come down and designate the communities. They started having to go into the rain forest, creating new fields destroying the rain forest, setting up again and the government would find them and make them move. You’re ruining the community, you’re ruining the rain forest. This organization came in and said okay we are going to offer them chocolate. We are going to teach them how to grow chocolate. We are going to buy it from them. We are going to make this high quality chocolate and we’re going to sell it. The Varietal is actually …
Kate: It’s a truffle.
Steve: It’s a truffle and it comes from its one source, so you really get the flavor of the chocolate. It’s our most requested truffle and it’s also supporting another community that is trying to make themselves viable. I feel like that is because I learnt philosophy. I don’t have a great power like Kate does so I think about the whole process is how we’re setting up things and how … what is the stream from beginning to end and so that’s one of my favorite products.
Lisa: How do people find out about Black Dinah Chocolatiers, the chocolates which you’re making?
Kate: Well, we have been very lucky to have had a lot of media coverage since 2007 when we started. Regionally we’ve been covering a lot of magazines around here. We don’t really do any paid up advertising. Nationally, we’ve been in Martha Stewart, Gourmet, and Austin Globe but also we do wholesale to certain outlets along the coast of Maine. Our biggest part of our business is our website where we do 75% of our business online so we ship all over the world. However, we really wanted to make our products affordable and accessible to people in Maine, so we are pretty well covered from North to South along the coast of Maine where people can find our chocolates in stores in their local communities and take them home and hopefully order them online.
Steve: So www.blackdinahchocolatiers.com or you can Google Black Dinah Chocolatiers or Black Dinah, you may get some odd things, when you do to just Black Dinah but we’ll be pretty much near the top.
Lisa: It has been a great pleasure and a very sweet pleasure to spend time with you both. We have been talking with Steve and Kate Shaffer who are founders of Black Dinah Chocolatiers up on Isle au Haut. Thank you for again bringing sweetness into the world and for bringing sweetness into my morning.
Steve: Thank you.
Kate: Thank you.
Steve: This has been great.
Lisa: Not too long ago, the Dr. Lisa radio hour was contacted by an individual whose Facebook page was called Hiking to Build Hope. We were fascinated and we wanted this individual to come on our show and talk about hiking, but he happened be out on the Appalachian Trail of course hiking, so when he contacted us again recently and said “I’m back in town and I would like to talk about hiking and hope.” We said “Great, come on in,” and we’re so thrilled to have this time to talk with Francis Howell of Hiking to Build Hope at long last. Thanks for coming in Francis.
Francis: Thank you for bringing me in. Hiking to Build Hope is really excited that you brought us in. The last time we were trying to reach out to you when you answered our call through E-mail, I was on the Appalachian Trail at that point, and I just really I want to start just with a positive impact on the people this is what it’s about, it’s about healing.
Lisa: Well tell me about that. Why did you start hiking and how does it bring healing into people’s lives?
Francis: It started as a dream, just came to me. Our trust was doing a campaign to raise 5 million dollars, pretty big church and this just came to me. I wanted to walk through New Hampshire to try to raise funds but our Church takes care of itself and pay for it so, but it became Hiking to Build Hope and is going there. May be some day we can do something, I don’t know. Hiking to Build Hope started out as a dream. I don’t know what hope looks like. I’m trying to find out.
Lisa: You’re going to share your message by using the technology and communicating with people all over the world.
Francis: Right. I am not bringing technology on trail. I kind of want to speak to this for an outdoor magazine. I wrote up an article that three days in the outback can increase your brain power by 25%, that’s real. I’m going to try not to bring technology on the trail. I got a good team behind me, they’re supportive and that’s what I need because you can’t make it alone.
Lisa: People get in touch with you through Facebook?
Francis: That’s where. Yeah. You can message me.
Lisa: Okay.
Francis: Put a post on the site or if you want to keep your identity safe you can email, call, those are two good ways.
Lisa: Okay. I know that you’re very good at getting back to people because you and I have been communicating back and forth so people who are interested in hearing more about Hiking to Build Hope, they can be in touch with you.
Francis: Right. I built a Paypal come or you can try to push that forward.
Lisa: Okay.
Francis: That was recommended for again a person who’s very, very connected to the Appalachian Trail Community.
Lisa: Very good. Well we’ve been speaking with Francis Howell of Hiking to Build Hope, and we so appreciate your being persistent and coming on the show and sharing your message which is a very important one that people should get out and connect with the environment, increase their brain power, connect with their communities and really wherever they’re coming from, they should do what they can to make other people’s lives better and I think that you’re one of those people Francis, and we are very pleased that you came in to speak with us today.
Francis: Thank you.
Lisa: You’ve been listening to the Dr. Lisa radio hour and podcast, show #74 Heartfelt. Our guests have included cardiologist, Dr. Lowell Gerber, Steve and Kate Shaffer of Black Dinah Chocolatiers on Isle au Haut, and Francis Howell of Hiking to Build Hope. For more information on our guests, visit doctorlisa.org, that’s d-o-c-t-o-r-lisa.org. The Dr. Lisa radio hour and podcast is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s shows sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Dr. Lisa Facebook page. You can also follow me on Twitter and Pinterest doctorlisa and read my take on wellness on the bountiful blog, bountiful-blog.org.
For more information on my medical practice at The Body Architect, call 207‑774-2196, and they can also give you information there on our February 27th rev up your metabolism talk. We love to hear from you. So please let us know what you think of the Dr. Lisa radio hour. One of our sponsors Apothecary by Design, has let us know that there’s an upcoming event that they’re encouraging you to go to. Sounds pretty great. It’s called woman’s vitality, looking and feeling your best with Dr. Masina Wright and Katie Donohue of Rx Skin Therapy. This will be taking place on February 26th 2013 at 6:30 p.m.
For more information on this event, visit the Apothecary By Design website or their Facebook page. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. Hoping you’ve enjoyed our Heartfelt show. Thank you for allowing me to be part of your day. May you have a bountiful life and happy Valentine’s Day.
Male: Dr. Lisa radio hour and podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors: Maine Magazine, Mike LePage, and Beth Franklin at ReMax Heritage, Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists in Falmouth, Maine, Booth Maine, Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial, Apothecary By Design, and the Body Architect. The Dr. Lisa radio hour and podcast is recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street in Portland, Maine.
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