Change Your Brain Every Day - Are You Eating Toxic Food? Here is your solution...

Episode Date: February 27, 2017

Today's episode is first in five parts of our interview with Dr. Joseph Pizzorno. Dr Pizzorno is the founder of Bastyr University and best selling author. He wrote the book , The Toxin Solution, which will be the center of this five part series. 

Hi, I'm Donnie Osmond, and welcome to The Brain Warrior's Way, hosted by my friends Daniel and Tana Amon. Now, in this podcast, you're going to learn that the war for your health is one between your ears. That's right. If you're ready to be sharper and have better memory, mood, energy, and focus, well then stay with us. Here are Daniel and Tana Amon.

Welcome, everybody. This is Dr. Daniel Amen. I am here with Tana. We are so honored and excited to have Dr. Joseph Pizzorno with us. I was blessed to be able to review his book, The Toxin Solution. I'm asked all the time to review books, and I rarely can do it because of my schedule. But I'm working on my new book, Memory Rescue, and toxins are just such an important part of why your brain deteriorates and how to get it back. And so I just loved his book. Virtually every paragraph is a gem to read. Dr. Pizzorno is the founding president of Bastyr University, which is one of the premier naturopathic schools in the country. Actually, one of our own doctors, Kabran Chapik, graduated from there. And he's just a wonderful naturopathic physician. And Joseph, we just feel honored to have you with

us today. Yes, thank you so much. Well, thank you for the very, very kind introduction. What we're going to do, and we're going to do five podcasts. We're going to break it up into toxins in food, toxins in personal products, toxins in the environment, detoxification, and Dr. Pizzorno's greatest hits on what he has learned over his decade-long career. But Joseph, let's start with food. And what are some of the most important things you have learned about toxins in our food supply? Well, thank you for that kind introduction. And I think as you mentioned, and again, thank you so much for reading my book, the health problems people have and have changed pretty dramatically.

I've been involved in medicine now for almost half a century. First as a researcher in conventional medicine, then as a student of naturopathic medicine, then as a clinician, then as founder of Bastion University, and now doing a lot of research and teaching. So it used to be people were having disease primarily because of nutritional deficiencies and excesses. But then it started to change, and I saw this really dramatically starting about 30 years ago when I was starting to see patients come to me because they were toxic. They still have

nutritional deficiencies and still have nutritional excesses, but now they have a lot of toxins. And it turns out, as I dug into the research, the majority of the toxins were coming from the food. So when I say coming from food, I want to say it's from two perspectives. One is how our foods are now being grown. But second, the package of materials in which the fruits are stored. So going back first to how the foods are being grown. When you start looking at the use of these pesticides and the herbicides that are now being so widely used for our foods, initially nobody thought it was much trouble. When they looked at farmers who were around these a lot, they would see more cancer in

farmers and in later years they're starting to see more dementia. But the research is all saying, well, it's just people with high exposure. The average population, it doesn't have much effect on them. But the problem is when you look at the research that was being done on the toxins they were looking at primarily people with high exposure like poisoning or industrial exposure and they were asserting that well everybody else has so much lower exposure it doesn't matter and when you look at one single toxin that might be true the problem is we're exposed every day to hundreds

of toxins, and we're being exposed to these toxins through our whole lives. So then we start looking at it from that perspective, all of a sudden, all this data shows up showing that most chronic disease today is primarily due to toxins. And it starts, and unfortunately, unfortunately starts in utero. There have now been three studies that I've seen looking at children where they assess the toxic load of their mother while they were pregnant. Three studies have now shown if you look at the children born to women in the top 10% of chemical toxin exposure compared to children born to women in the bottom 10% of chemical exposure, and you use statistics to iron out the socioeconomic differences, these kids have a seven-point drop in IQ and a doubling of ADHD. One of the studies looked at these children for

seven years, and seven years later, they still hadn't gotten their IQ back. So that's very disconcerting. So another group of researchers started looking at, well, what is the impact to the general population? And is there any correlation with this increase in dementia in older people? And one study has now asserted that the average person in North America has a 14 point lower IQ than we had 100 years ago. That's pretty disconcerting. And I'm not making this up.

This is what's in the medical research. So you need to start looking at, well, what are these toxins? Why are they causing trouble? Where are they coming from? And now we know that not only does the research show that people with the top toxin exposure have a lot more disease than people with the lower levels of exposure. But the problems are getting worse. Now, the good news is that way back in the 70s, we banned lead and gasoline in paint. And that's good because our lead levels went down.

But remember, all of our people in the baby boom generation who are now hitting the chronic disease problems, when they were growing up, they were making their bone when there was a lot of lead in the environment. So as people lose bone as they get older, they're starting to lose the lead in that bone. I should say the lead's coming out of the bone, going to general circulation, and poisoning their brains. That's not just lead. It turns out that the primary storage place for mercury in the body, which comes primarily from so-called silver fillings, which are actually 55% mercury, and from eating fish that is big, it turns out the mercury

stored in the bone as well. So when people started using bone during the perimetopausal and the, you might say, periandropausal times, so it's both men and women, were poisoned with these metal toxins. But it's not just the metal toxins. So another good thing we did was in the 70s, we banned DDT and we banned PCBs. That's great. The problem is that these chemicals, they're basically what are called organochloric pesticides. These chemicals were designed to be not only pesticides in terms of killing insects, they're also designed to be difficult to break down.

So once they were sprayed on foods, that when the sun came up, it wouldn't automatically wipe them out. So they have very long half-lives, not just the environment, but also when getting into our bodies. So if you look at research, looking at the amount of PCBs, DDT, and the breakdown product of DDT in the body called DDE, which is just about as toxic. If you look at the level of these things, the older the person gets, the more that's in their bodies. And it's not just that they were exposed more as children, but they're being constantly exposed. Then we look at the half-life, that is, how long does it take for the body to get rid of one half of the toxin? There's a pretty standard method by which toxicologists look at how toxic a chemical is. When you look at the half-lives, the half-lives of things like DDT and PCBs, which are very neurotoxic, the half-life is 2 to 25 years. I'm not saying weeks or days or months.

I'm saying years. So what's going on is these things cause all kinds of trouble. So for example, one of the things I've been doing, I got a nice advance from my book, The Toxin Solution. And perhaps foolishly, I spent the whole advance hiring researchers to work with me to dig into the research, to say, what does the research tell us? And so one of the things we're trying to do is to try to figure out what percent of each of these chronic diseases is due to toxins. And what we're finding, we're finding these numbers that are stunning. So for example, looking at children with ADHD, we would assert based on the research that one of every four

kids with ADHD has it because of DDT in their body. You say, wait a minute, it was banned over 40 years ago. Yes, it was banned 40 years ago, but still in the environment, still getting to our bodies. It gets in our bodies through the foods that we eat. It's a significant source because the whole environment is so contaminated. Oh, my gosh. I just talked a lot. No, it's great. My head is like spinning with a ton of questions.

I'm sure a lot of people who are listening, theirs are too, because I get a lot of these questions on our community, which I answer a lot of myself. And so through the rest of these podcasts, I want to make sure that we address some of those things because you just opened up a whole lot of stuff. One of them being the pregnant women who were studied because I know I took a class and they actually tested cord blood on newborns and found that they had a ridiculous number of toxins in their bodies and they just entered the world. And one thing that I learned also was that the best way for a woman to drop her toxic load or reduce it was to breastfeed, which is really scary when you think about that. Now, that doesn't mean people shouldn't be breastfeeding.

They need to be breastfeeding because there's so many benefits to breastfeeding. But it really gets us thinking about this idea of responsibility, of taking responsibility for ourselves and the next generation in setting up the proper environment and knowing it. I mean, the first step is knowing and knowing what to do. Great. I'm glad you said that. I think it's absolutely critical that we help women before they get pregnant to prepare their bodies for babies. Because in our current

toxic environment, these children are experiencing a severe, you might say, disservice from us as a society, as a community. You mentioned, for example, breastfeeding. So we recommend to women that they eat fish, but we recommend they eat low mercury fish. And the reason we recommend they eat fish is because fish is high in omega-3 fatty acids, and the fatty acid levels in the pregnant woman has a big impact on child's IQ. So that's good. The problem is the more fish women eat, even if they're avoiding the high mercury fish, they're getting what are called the persistent organic pollutants, particularly the PCBs, that's the polychlorinated biphenyls, because they're so high in the environment. So these PCBs, they concentrate

in fat tissue and they concentrate in fatty liquids like breast milk. So it turns out PCBs are a very significant cause of breast cancer in women. And it could be one reason why women who breastfeed have less breast cancer is because of getting the PCBs out of the body, which is not being as damaging to the breast. And the PCBs go into the babies and they cause ADHD and decrease their IQ. It's amazing. So we only have a few more minutes. And I know when I read the book, The Toxin Solution, I was horrified. But there is a lot of hope. There's actually a lot of very specific directions, prescriptions that you give people. So in two minutes, what can people do to avoid toxins

in their food? Great. So the best way to get toxins out of your body is to not let them in in the first place. And so that comes down to some fairly straightforward things. Number one is people should only eat organically grown foods. Now, if they can't afford eating only organically grown foods, the Environmental Working Group has put together a nice website, www.owg.org. And they show you which foods called the dirty dozen are the most toxic, which should only be eaten when they're organically grown or not eaten at all. And they have what's called the clean 15, which are the foods with the lowest level of chemical toxins, whereas not as critical that they be organic. So number one is eat organic foods. But number two, almost as important is to not

eat food that's been stored in plastic. Or if you have to eat food that's been stored in plastic, as soon as you get it home, wash it and put it into glass. So there's one study I mentioned in the book where they looked at bisphenol A levels in homemade food versus store-bought food. They look at soup, lentil soup. They found the store-bought food had 12 times as much bisphenol A in it when it was stored in cans like we typically get. We get our soups in cans. And that bisphenol A has all kinds of health problems.

Right. And that lines most cans, unless it says BPA-free, it's actually the lining on a lot of cans. Exactly. And not only that, even if it says bisphenol A-free, now people are using bisphenol S and bisphenol Z. And why would we think they're going to be any safer? These chemicals were designed to be difficult to break down. So they're basically, they're toxic. So it's not only what the food eats that you eat, it's also what the food is stored in that you end up eating. So if you get healthy, uncured ham that's in a plastic container right that that actually would not be healthy and a lot of foods that are hot are served in plastic and that's even worse yes well fast food's almost always in plasticized containers lots of chemicals and fast foods and

then we get home and we prepare it. So if you want to use a nonstick coated pan, that's fine. But be very careful not to let it get very hot because as soon as that Teflon coated pan starts getting very hot, it starts releasing what are called the perfluorinated hydrocarbons. Those things are toxic as well. Right. All right. Stay with us.

Next, I know this has horrified many people, but there's a hopeful message, which means you can take control of your health if you take control of the toxins in the environment. When we say you're in a war for the health of your brain, we're not kidding. And we're going to look at personal products next. We're going to stay with Dr. Joseph Pizzorno on The Brain Warrior's Way. Thanks for listening to today's show, The Brain Warrior's Way. Why don't you head over to brainwarriorswaypodcast.com.

That's brainwarriorswaypodcast.com where Daniel and Tana have a gift for you just for subscribing to the show. And when you post your review on iTunes, you'll be entered into a drawing where you can win a VIP visit to one of the Amen Clinics. I'm Donnie Osmond,

and I invite you to step up your brain game by joining us in the next episode. you