Dhru Purohit Show - Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hi everyone, Drew Proit. You've seen the headlines and I've seen them too. They're all over the news. Our toxic burden is getting out of control. Forever Chemicals, PFAs are water supply, microplastics, air pollution. You know just as much as I do. This is a serious issue. And it's a serious issue because these things aren't benign. They actually contribute to chronic disease. And they're also obese agents, which mean that they are pro-obesity. They make us a serious issue. They make gain weight. Environmental toxins are a huge contributor to all sorts of problems that can go on in the body. And the more that we learn about them, the more that we understand that they can contribute to things like Alzheimer's, dementia, mental health disorders, cancer, Parkinson's disease,

Starting point is 00:00:46 even things like heart disease can happen earlier because of these toxins, hidden toxins, especially, that are all around us. And the thing is, I'm not trying to share this with you to scare you. And believe me, sometimes when we see the headlines, it can feel scary. The goal is actually to raise awareness of what the highest priority toxins are for us to avoid. We're not going to tackle it overnight. We're going to tackle it in chunks and we're going to do our best to reduce our exposure. That's the name of the game. Increase awareness, reduce exposure. And there's a third bonus, which I'll get to here in a second. But on today's compilation episode, we're going to start off by sharing some incredible interviews, one with board certified toxicologist, Dr. Yvonne Burkart, and another one with

Starting point is 00:01:30 neurologist, Dr. Ray Dorsey, about the top toxins to avoid to protect your health and some of their tips on the ways to do that. Let's dive right into my first conversation with Dr. Yvonne Burkart about these hidden toxins in the role that they could potentially be playing when it comes to our risk of things like cancer. I learned that there's these hidden toxins in our everyday cosmetics, especially, that women use a lot more of them than men. There's these hidden toxins that are in our everyday cosmetics that can actually turn cancer genes on inside of the body. My mind was blown when I came across this, and this is related to a study that you broke

Starting point is 00:02:16 down on your YouTube channel. Tell us about this study and what some of the findings were. This study is literally groundbreaking in that there's a long-held belief in common culture as well as through the cosmetic industry itself, that beauty and personal care products don't contribute to our toxic load. They don't contribute adversely to our health and they don't increase rates or risk of disease.

Starting point is 00:02:41 This study basically completely shut that down. For the first time, we have been able to see exactly what certain ingredients are doing in the human model because we ethically cannot study chemicals in humans. We can't subject people to talk of chemicals and see what happens. That typically happens in animals. Unfortunately, a lot of these chemicals are being released into our personal care products, into our consumer goods, and it isn't until after decades of use that we start to see correlations and associations with disease.

Starting point is 00:03:16 And this study basically asked 41 women to switch out their beauty and personal care products for a very short time, for 28 days, just 28 days. Switch out your beauty and personal care products, and stick to a list of approved products that does not contain parabins, phthalates, and other phenols, which are endocrine disruptors. Just to give you a background on endocrine disruptors, these are chemicals that are xenoestrogens that interact with estrogen receptors in the body. They can cause a host of health issues ranging from cancer, infertility, miscarriage, cognitive decline, and so much more.

Starting point is 00:03:54 When these women switched out their products, So what they did was they took measurements by injecting the breasts of these really, really brave participants. They took breast cancer cells, measured breast cancer genes before and after the intervention. So the intervention, like I said, was very simple. Only switch out your beauty and personal care products, avoiding certain ingredients, paribins, thalates, and phenols. After 28 days, they saw a significant reduction in breast cancer gene expression, which is huge. This is in humans. So we're not talking about rats that were subjected to extremely high doses, which is what you normally see.

Starting point is 00:04:33 This is doses that you would see in products that are being sold on store shelves that people are using day in and day out as we speak. They have not been banned. They haven't been outlawed. They are still very much prevalent in the marketplace. I mean, mind-blowing. What are the implications? You know, it's 41 participants. But as you mentioned, it's human.

Starting point is 00:04:56 beings, and it's also not just like an observational study. They're actually looking at these cancer expression of cancer genes inside of the body. What are the implications for especially all people, but especially women who are listening to the podcast today? The implications would be that even though there's 41 women, this study showed that the breast cancer genes were activated when they started, meaning that the products that they were using with those ingredients were responsible for activating those genes. Once they took those ingredients away, breast cancer genes turned off. What does this mean? This means that once you stop using products that contain paribins, phallates, and other xenoestrogens, that breast cancer genes turn off, meaning you reduce the risk

Starting point is 00:05:39 of developing breast cancer. One of the risk factors for developing breast cancer is the activation of breast cancer genes. That's the first step in the process of developing cancer is the genes need to be turned on. Something needs to be turned on because estrogen is actually a carcinogen. It's naturally occurring in the body, but what it does is stimulate growth. Stimulate growth in estrogen responsive tissues. The breast, the brain, the uterus, the cervix, the gut even has estrogen receptors in it. So these estrogen receptors are all over our bodies. And when we're putting products on our skin that have estrogenic ingredients, they're getting absorbed through the skin into the bloodstream and traveling to areas of the body that are responsive to estrogen,

Starting point is 00:06:25 clearly the breast. Mind-blowing. You know, you mentioned a few of these ingredients that they had participants removed. Can you reshare what those ingredients are? Absolutely. Parabins being one of them. So there are several different types of parabins. And you can find these on your personal care products just by turning the bottle around

Starting point is 00:06:42 and looking at the ingredients list. And you can see methyl paraben, butyl paraben, propyl paraben, those tend to, to be the most commonly used paraben. There's a long-held belief within the cosmetic industry that these paraben are innocuous, that the amount absorbed is so low that it doesn't matter. But clearly, this study shows otherwise. What are some everyday products that listeners are using?

Starting point is 00:07:07 Literally this morning, when they wash their face, when they are putting makeup on, what are some everyday products that you see people using that are sold on the store shelves today, especially here in the United States, that would be an example of being similar to the types of products that women would be using in this study and would contain these ingredients like paraben. This is an excellent question, and I set out to do research myself. I walked into a store and I picked up several products to see how many out there still have paraben's. What are the major products that I see being promoted online that still contain these ingredients?

Starting point is 00:07:44 one of them being serra v. Sarah V is one of the major brands out there right now. Some of their face washes still have paraben in them. For no good reason, parabens are completely unnecessary. They're basically used to extend the shelf life. They're preservatives. They don't need to be used. There are plenty of other safer alternative preservatives out there.

Starting point is 00:08:05 And it's basically because they're extremely effective and cheap. So they're not being phased out as of yet. Other products that I found were Nibia body lotion. which I personally used for quite a long time. And the issue with body lotion is that you apply it generally over large parts of the body and you don't rinse it off. So the chance for toxic absorption is greater than any other type of product. If there's these studies that are popping up, like the one that you mentioned,

Starting point is 00:08:33 which we've linked to in the show notes, people can take a look at it. We've highlighted on YouTube for those that are watching there, title being the reduction of daily use of parabens and thallates, reverses accumulation of cancer-associated phenotypes within disease, free breast tissue of study subjects. So we have the link to that. So if there's more of this type of research that's popping up, why are companies that are out there, multinational, large conglomerates, why are they still using these ingredients in the products? There could be several reasons for this.

Starting point is 00:09:07 One of them is definitely profit-driven, simply because of the effectiveness. and the low cost, but also the higher cost of having to substitute their ingredients. But it isn't until consumers become aware of these problematic ingredients and demand safer ingredients that some of these companies will actually start taking action. So that's really the purpose of why I felt it to be so important to share this information because most people who are using cosmetics these days are young women. There was a study showing that up to 70% of women. young girls below the age of 12 are actually using cosmetics, being lotions, fragrances, makeup,

Starting point is 00:09:49 any of those type of products that are to enhance physical appearance, those are considered cosmetics. And kids are starting to use them at younger ages these days. And this is something that we really need to pay attention to since disease rates are skyrocketing among younger populations. So they're not disconnected, I think. And not only do we need to pay attention to it, there are actually lifestyle aspects that we can all take on. Sure, choosing better products is an easier one, and you've built out a whole entire platform on Instagram.

Starting point is 00:10:24 Please, everybody follow Dr. Burkhardt on Instagram. But there are also lifestyle tips that we're going to get to, and one supplement in particular, that is incredible at supporting our body's natural ability to detoxify. We're going to get to all that in a minute. So some of this might feel like doom and gloom, but it's for everybody's awareness, including my own awareness as well, that we don't have to live in this toxic soup, which is an experiment. We all don't know. In fact, one of the main messages that you share on social media is that nobody knows for certain

Starting point is 00:10:59 what is happening to the human body when you combine all of these different ingredients together and you course them over a lifetime of exposure. Can you chat a little bit more about that? Absolutely. When it comes to understanding the safety or the toxicity of a chemical, let's say, most studies are done in animal models, so rats and mice, and they're given extremely high doses for short periods of time, maybe longer periods, but when it comes to doing these studies, it could be million dollars. It could take two or three years to study. Most companies are not going to do because it's not mandated anywhere for them to do this, except in Europe. Europe has much stricter regulations when it comes to cosmetic ingredients in particular, and just ingredients in general,

Starting point is 00:11:48 simply because of how their healthcare system is set up. So they're more of a socialistic setting. So it does not benefit the government for people to get sick, right? Whereas in our country, we live in a more capitalistic society. Things are different here. So it's more focused on profits as opposed to people's health, unfortunately. And so when it comes to understanding the complexity of chemicals that we're exposed to, there is no way to apply that into a laboratory setting. There's just no way. Everybody's using different types of products.

Starting point is 00:12:28 People eat different types of food. We have different genetic backgrounds. It's really difficult to make any meaningful conclusions with the complexity. There's hundreds of thousands of chemicals that are being registered and released into the commercial space every single year. There's no way to keep up with that. There's no way to study all that. Nobody knows. So the framework is innocent until proven guilty, which is exactly what we see with this study on parabenza valates.

Starting point is 00:12:59 Fascinating. Let's talk about fragrance. That is part of your background. People think, wow, I love fragrance. I personally don't. It gives me a headache. I don't feel great about it. As you can see in our studio,

Starting point is 00:13:11 I have a high-quality air filter. I have all these components that I had to share with my wife, who was obsessed with candles, who's now on the train with me, and we use beeswax candles, which is one of the things you recommend. But what is it about fragrance?

Starting point is 00:13:26 You know, why is it that fragrance would be including this list of hidden toxic things that are not just found in perfumes, but you see that fragrance is added to everything, dish soap, and then going back to what we previously talked about, even many of the cosmetics, lip bombs, lotions that people put on their face. So how are fragrances made and what are some of the hidden toxic ingredients inside of them that could be and are most likely incredibly problematic to our body? Fragenses are generally not coming from the source that you think. So a lot

Starting point is 00:14:06 people think they see the word natural fragrance on their label, oh, it's natural, it must be fine. Well, that just means that it wasn't synthesized from an unnatural source, but it doesn't come necessarily from a rose. If you have a rose scent, it doesn't have to come from rose. So it can come from any other quote unquote natural source. A certain percentage has to be natural, and a certain percentage can still be unnatural. It's very ambiguous. There's a lot of gray area, and there aren't strict regulations on it because the industry

Starting point is 00:14:35 regulates itself. That's a whole other issue. But some of the hidden toxins and the issues that we have with fragrance are, number one, you mentioned how pervasive they are. They are literally in everything. Lip products don't need fragrance, in my opinion. A face lotion doesn't need fragrance, but people like them, people enjoy them because of the sensory stimulation that we receive. And we are, in my opinion, becoming overloaded with these fragrance chemicals. The amount of fragrances that are being churned out year by year, they're being pumped into public spaces. There are people that constantly send me messages

Starting point is 00:15:14 asking what they can do. How can they get, for example, their apartment building to stop pumping fragrances into their gym? They're trying to exercise and get away from this and be healthier, only to be exposed to something that they're trying to get away from. Some of the hidden toxins are endocrine disrupting phthalates.

Starting point is 00:15:33 So the International Fragrance Association, or IFRA, is the industry self-governing body for the fragrance industry. They have a list of what they call the transparency list. If you go on their website, you can actually search and see all the different types of chemicals that could be in the umbrella term fragrance. There are nearly 4,000 at this point. So the word fragrance can be any combination of nearly 4,000 chemicals, any combination. They include phallates, endocrine, those are endocrine,

Starting point is 00:16:06 There are carcinogens in there. Styrene, for example, that's a known human carcinogen. Nothing is being done to regulate these because the industry regulates itself. When those fragrances come into your body, again you chat, talked a little bit about it in the beginning, but just to connect it back to fragrances. So those thallates are coming into your body. What is the potential consequence, right? We don't fully know, but at least we don't fully know, but at least we can't,

Starting point is 00:16:37 do know that thallates have an impact on the body that are exposure. So again, remind everybody what's actually going on physically in the body that these ingredients would be doing, especially if we're regularly exposed to them? Well, thallates have estrogenic activity. So xenoestrogens meaning foreign estrogens that are coming into the body, they are not naturally occurring and they activate the estrogen receptor. And what that does is endless. You know the human let's say science has not yet fully studied exactly what's happening when the estrogen receptor gets activated.

Starting point is 00:17:15 But for example, one of those components that we know is that when young girls are exposed to higher levels of estrogen, they can get puberty, they can get their period and hit puberty much earlier. Like you're talking about in some communities, often it's the most disenfranchised communities. You have doctors that have been on this podcast that are saying that we're seeing girls at eight years old, right? Getting their period, developing breast, these other things, which is not what the body would normally be doing. So early puberty, there could be all sorts of disruptions for infertility that could be there. Are there any other examples?

Starting point is 00:17:57 Yeah, absolutely. There's actually studies on young boys that are being exposed that develop breast tissue gynecumastia in young boys. There's actually a shortening. of the anogenital distance, which is a measurement of the distance between the anus and the penis, and the shortening is an indication of feminization. Wow. And that has been shown with phthalate exposure.

Starting point is 00:18:20 Also linked with thallate exposure is actually early death. So the higher the amount of thallates that you are being exposed to over your lifetime can correlate with when you die. If that's not shocking enough, I don't know what is. These chemicals are not to be overlooked or to be ignored simply for the fact that it affects your lifespan.

Starting point is 00:18:47 We are going through a time in humanity where, again, we talked a little bit about women. You mentioned about young boys. We're seeing amongst adult males a massive drop in testosterone. Now, we know that one of the major contributors to that is obesity, right? Obesity is one of the things that will drop testosterone. What a lot of people don't talk about is that some of these hidden toxins that you've mentioned also can have an obisogenic effect. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Starting point is 00:19:20 What are obesityens that are often in the environment and kind of part of these hidden toxins that people are going through? They're actually one in the same. So the same chemicals that we've been talking about today, the paraben, thallates, and even ones that you may have heard of called P-FAS chemicals. So anything that's having an effect on the estrogen receptor can also stimulate your fat cells to store fat. And the ironic part is that the more fat you have, these chemicals come in, they get stored in fat. So it's just an endless loop of being exposed, storing more fat, getting exposed, storing more fat.

Starting point is 00:19:56 And then these chemicals are being stored in your fat. So you just can't escape them once they're in your body, except for detoxifying, right? So supporting your natural processes of detoxification combined with practicing avoidance as much as you can. So they're in your body. You want to get rid of them. You also want to avoid bringing more in. Yeah. I've heard a doctor on this podcast previously a physician, a colleague of mine who said that if you have a bathtub and you're filling it with water.

Starting point is 00:20:29 And that water, let's say it's pristine water, is supposed to be clean, right, outside of naturally occurring minerals and things. that are inside of it, it's supposed to be clean. Now all of a sudden, there's another faucet on another side that's putting in polluted water inside of it. No matter how much you try to clean your bathtub, no matter how much you try to shovel that polluted water out, if that polluted water is still coming in, you're never gonna get that bath water clean

Starting point is 00:21:00 because you constantly have exposure coming in. And this goes back to your main point, which is avoidance. If you had to say, based on all of the research that you've done, your background in this space as a toxicologist, what would be a few, let's say three to five, biggest bang for the buck, things that we should be avoiding, like categories, right?

Starting point is 00:21:26 Like are fragrances and candles the most important? Is it cosmetics? Is it, you know, this thing? How do you put together a sort of coherent order of operations that most people, everybody's circumstances are going to be a little bit different. You know, men may not be wearing in general makeup. So that might not be the top of their list. But what is the biggest bang for the buck when it comes to avoidance of toxic exposure?

Starting point is 00:22:01 I'll start with what is. necessary for survival. So number one, we need air. Without air, we'll die in a few minutes. So the quality of our air is massively important for our health. And you've mentioned the candles, the fragrances, the scented products, things of that nature. So being aware that we can easily avoid a lot of these negative exposures in the air, that's huge. So simple things like opening your windows and reducing your exposure to these fragrance chemicals, those are going to go a long way. Second, we all need water to survive. Clean water. Filtered water. Unfortunately, our water supply around the world is polluted. Just plain and simple, it's polluted with all different types of consumer products,

Starting point is 00:22:56 pharmaceuticals, toxic chemicals, pesticides, heavy metals, whatnot. We need to filter it. So the better water filter you can get, the better your health will be because we're mostly made of water, right? Third is we need food to survive. Food, when we eat unprocessed, ideally organic, it doesn't have to be all organic. I know some people may have differences in what they can access, but just eating whole unprocessed foods is already going to be a huge reduction in toxic chemical. through your food. Especially ultra-processed foods. I believe there are some studies that back to sub.

Starting point is 00:23:37 We'll have to look it up afterwards. I didn't prepare it for today's podcast. There tends to be a higher concentration of thallates, you know, chemicals, carcinogens in ultra-processed food, which includes a lot of the fast food that people are eating that's out there. Exactly. Processed meats that come from that sort of category. There's just going to be more exposure, more. processing done at scale. Sure, it's super cheap, but it's in chemical plants with and it's

Starting point is 00:24:07 preservatives and it's this and it's that. So just even stepping away from ultra-processed foods as the foundation of your diet, I'm hearing you say that's a major step in the right direction. Absolutely. Food processing. So any time you process every step that you add to this process of making ultra-processed foods, you're adding some other unknown, undesirable chemical in there, solvents, food packaging, plastic chemicals that are leaching into the food, so on and so forth. So if you can cook your own meals at home, whole unprocessed foods, that's going to be huge. Next, in order of what we actually need, some people need things like oral care products, right? A lot of people use oral care, personal care products.

Starting point is 00:24:54 So the very basic necessities, things like toothpaste, body lotion, things of that nature, deodorant, if you choose, try to make those as low tox as you can. Low tox, meaning not trying to be non-toxic, zero-tox because that doesn't exist. Low-toxic just means choosing the better option as best as you can, as frequently as you can. And I hope that gives hope to the listeners that we don't have to dump everything and run and hide. It's not about living in fear. It's really about making conscious and intentional, informed decisions about what we're buying and applying to our skin. So that would be number four and number five. If someone chooses to have makeup in their lives or cosmetics or some kind of

Starting point is 00:25:48 product to that effect, then again, trying to choose the least toxic option as much as you can, especially for products that go on your lips since there is some ingestion involved. Next up, I interview Dr. Ray Dorsey about the root causes of Parkinson's disease, a disease that's been on the rise over the last 20 years. And it seems to be from his research and many of his peers that environmental toxins like trichloroethylene, a common ingredient in dry cleaning, radically increase our likelihood of developing it. Dr. Dorsey also talks about the practical steps that you and I and anyone we love and know can take to a reason. reduce our exposure of developing Parkinson's disease. Let's listen in. So I think the three environmental toxicans that are principally responsible for the rise in Parkinson's disease are certain pesticides, the poster child for them being a pesticide

Starting point is 00:26:51 called Paraquot, widely used as a weed killer. The second are commonly used dry cleaning chemicals, including this one called tri-chloralethylene. And the third is one familiar to Southern Californians, and that's air pollution. Before we break things down a little further in Parkinson's disease and the different ways that it can develop, let's just give a quick little highlight on each of these three, outdoor air pollution, the pesticides, and the trichloroethylene. What are the main sources and exposure of each of those? And maybe we could work backwards with also some good and recent news that came out recently that the EPA is exploring about tri-es. chloroethylene in particular. So trichlorathleen or TCE is a really, really simple molecule. So your listeners know that all of them know that water is H2O, which means it just has three

Starting point is 00:27:47 atoms, two hydrogens, and one oxygen. Trichloratylene is very simple. It's got six atoms. It's got two carbon atoms in black, one hydrogen atom in white and three chlorine atoms in green, hence it's named trichloralethylene. This chemical is initially developed in 1864, so I think the time of President Abraham Lincoln was the president, and has been used since the 1920s, so shortly after World War II. And it's been used in everything. It's been used to decaffeinate coffee.

Starting point is 00:28:16 It was found in Sanko or other decafinated coffees in the 1970s. It's been used to de-greased metal, and it's been to use the dry, clean clothes. It's found in carpet cleaners. It's found in gun cleaners. It's found in typewriter correction fluid. It's found in a wide variety of consumer goods. And this chemical is known to cause cancer. There's no question about that.

Starting point is 00:28:37 The EPA says it's carcinogenic by all routes of exposure. The World Health Organization says that it causes cancer. And yesterday, the EPA, long last, proposed a ban on nearly all uses of trichloroethylene in the United States, and this ban would go in effect in a year. And I think by taking that action, they are preventing generations of individuals from developing cancer in the future. And I think they're also likely preventing generations of individuals from developing Parkinson disease in the future. However, the problem is not just the use of trichlorothylene, which in the 1970s is estimated that 10 million Americans worked with this

Starting point is 00:29:16 in semiconductor industry, in mechanics, and printers and painters and taxidermists and varnish workers, all worked with it. But there are numerous thousands of contaminated sites, including contaminated sites, in Newport Beach, California, where I went to high school and not too far from where you're sitting right now in Southern California and in sites in Woburn, Massachusetts, north of Boston. There are dozens of dry, at least a dozen dry cleaning sites in Rochester, New York, that are contaminated with this chemical in a closely related chemical. So these sites are all around us, but the good news is EPA has banned future uses of it.

Starting point is 00:29:53 This proposed ban would go in effect in a year, is my understanding. But we still have more work to do to contain. remediate and clean up these contaminated sites throughout the country. You know, how are these toxins actually creating a situation where they're breaking, in particular, it seems, are mitochondria? Yeah, so if you think about the brain, it's basically an energy-guzzling organ. The brain's only about 3% of our body's weight, but it consumes 20% of our blood's glucose or energy supplies.

Starting point is 00:30:25 And within the brain, there are many different kinds of cells, and the cell that consumes the most energy are the nerve cells, also called neurons. And many of these neurons are chock full of mitochondria. And certain cells in the brain that are responsible for Parkinson's disease and produce a chemical called dopamine are basically just big garbage bags that are filled with jelly beans. And those jelly beans are mitochondria. And if you think about it, these pesticides, especially paraquate, trichloroethylene and air pollution are all known to damage mitochondria. And they actually kind of bypass our normal protective mechanisms that we have. We have the gut, we have the blood-brain barrier, but all of these guys are inhaled. And so this could be a way of exploiting the

Starting point is 00:31:09 front door to our brain, that these environmental toxins, all of which we know damage to energy producing parts of cells. And we know that the cells that are lost in Parkinson's disease have huge energy demands and that these things are inhaled. So I think you can weave together a story by which these toxicants are causing many people to have, likely many people to have Parkinson's. We'll come back to pesticides and outdoor air pollution, but just as you were sharing that, what was your awakening moment for yourself? In your medical training, in your training in neurology, when did you first realize that environmental factors were a key part of how certain chronic diseases, like Parkinson's

Starting point is 00:31:51 disease, could end up developing? My guess is that you weren't really taught much about that in medical health. school. You're right. I wasn't for maybe I must have missed it because I don't think I ever learned anything. I don't think I even heard about trichlo-athleen when I was in medical school. The real gift is I had a sabbatical about five or six years ago and I spent a lot of time reading the work of my colleague, a woman, Dr. Caroline Tanner, who's a professor of neurology and an epidemiologist at University of California, San Francisco. And she and her colleagues had done a study looking at TCE 10 years ago and founding that the rates of Parkensies among twins who had either

Starting point is 00:32:29 worked with it or had hobby exposure to TCE were increased rates of Parkinson's by 500%. And then research from other researchers, Don Gash and Kentucky and others have showed that when you feed TCE to laboratory mice or rats, they develop the clinical and pathological features of Parkinson's and they lose those dopamine-producing nerve cells in the brain. And then I read a lot more Dr. Tanner's work showing that in the late 1990s, that twin studies suggested that environmental causes were the predominant explanation for people who develop Parkinson's disease. She showed that exposure to Paraquot, and then 10 years ago was among farmers was associated with 150% increased risk of developing Parkinson's disease.

Starting point is 00:33:17 Dr. Jeff Bronsty and Dr. Bietta Ritz at UCLA, not too far from where you're sitting, did research showing that air pollution and well water drinking were associated with Parkinson's disease. So I had the gift of a sabbatical in which I read a lot of literature, and the more I read, you know, a lot of time you go down rabbit holes, but this time you kept going and he kept going and kept going, and I'm not even, I don't think I'm even close to finding the true extent of the effect of these environmental toxins on Parkinson's disease, other brain diseases, including Alzheimer's disease, ALS, intellectual disabilities, brain cancer, and many others. Let's unpack more of the findings that you've presented inside of the book, ending Parkinson's

Starting point is 00:33:59 disease, a prescription for action. People can find it in the show notes below, and there's a beautiful screen capture right there on your screen. Outdoor air pollution, air pollution in general. Now, the EPA themselves say that indoor air can be up to two. to five times more polluted for most people living in America than even outdoor air. So I'm hearing you both say it's air pollution as a whole. It's outdoor air, but then also people can be mindful of indoor air because it can be so toxic. Is that accurate? Yeah. So let's do indoor air first,

Starting point is 00:34:36 because that's really people are probably less familiar with. And but many people know that radon can evaporate from the soil and enter people's basements, for example, and it increases the risk of lung cancer. It turns out other chemicals, including tri-chlorothylene in a very closely related chemical called perchlorathlane, which just has one more chlorine atom on it and has hence the prefix per, which means four. These chemicals can contaminate groundwater, which is about 15 feet or 15 to 50 feet below our surface, and form underground rivers. And these underground rivers that are contaminate with these chemicals, these chemicals are readily volatile. They evaporate, and they can evaporate into people's homes, schools, and workplaces undetected.

Starting point is 00:35:21 And then people can be breathing in these chemicals and never know about it and be increasing their risk for developing cancer and likely increasing their risk for developing Parkinson's disease. In Newport Beach, California, less than a half mile from where I went to high school in Cronomar High School, there's a former aerospace facility that's been contaminated with trichlorethylene and a closely related chemical called perchlorathylene. has been rezoned and made into residential homes. So there are multi-million dollar homes in Newport Beach, California,

Starting point is 00:35:50 about three miles from the Pacific Ocean or from Pacific Coast Highway that are sitting on top of a plume of trichlorophylline and perchlorithylene. That trichlorothylene and perchlorethylene has been documented, documented, to be evaporating into the homes above this plume. And they have found trichlorethylene or perchlorothylene in people's master bedrooms, in their living rooms and in their pits playrooms. Mind blowing, first of all, right? That it's not just, you know, when we heard about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan,

Starting point is 00:36:24 and we heard about these areas. Often these places feel far away from a lot of the centers of population. And by the way, those are the only ones, those are the ones that we found out about. But as many, like Aaron Brockovich have said, there's probably 50 to 150 plus Flint, Michigan that are out there, we just don't know yet that the water quality is that bad. And I'm hearing you say in the same way that there are many places around the U.S. that could have this exposure to these toxins, which can show up in the groundwater, but also could be off gassing and exposing people through air quality, both indoor and outdoor. There are thousands. They're not 150 of these

Starting point is 00:37:06 contaminated sites. There are thousands. Half of the Superfund sites, the United States are contaminated with this chemical. I told you there are 12, at least 12 dry cleaning sites just in Rochester, New York alone. There are thousands of these sites. I visited them in New York. I visited them in Indiana. I visited them in West Virginia. I visited them in Kentucky. I visited them in Arizona. I visited them in California. I don't think there's a state in the country that doesn't have these contaminated sites. It's estimated that up to 30 percent of groundwater in the United States is contaminated with these chemicals. And there is a reason why people are getting cancer and there's a reason why people are getting Parkinson's disease. And I think one of the major reasons for both of those

Starting point is 00:37:50 is trichloroethylene. There was a study done in Italy. So this is not just the United States that found trichlorethylene in the blood and urine of three quarters of the men in Italy. These chemicals are everywhere. Dry cleaning is still using lots of dry cleaners are still using per chloroethylene that releases gas. When you take your dry cleaning into your car, you are now breathing in per chlorathylene. These chemicals dissolve in your fat. Your brain is a fatty substance. You bring your daughter into a dry cleaner with a chocolate ice cream cone. When you leave that dry cleaner, if they're dry cleaning on site, your daughter's now eating per chloroethylene. Crazy. Absolutely crazy. You know, how we went down this pathway as we were talking about,

Starting point is 00:38:37 you said, let's talk about indoor air pollution first, and then we're going to talk about outdoor air. And it's not just TCE, largely what you're also talking about, even though there may not be as much of a direct link and there's so many different toxins that can be found inside the home, TCE being one of the biggest ones and most pervasive one in its direct link to Parkinson's disease and cancer and other chronic diseases, but general particulate matter inside the home that comes from off-gassing of new furniture, paints that are there, carpets that are largely made out of synthetic fibers increasingly. There's a whole list of things that could add, even though the

Starting point is 00:39:18 air looks clean. We can't see these, you know, part of particulates, but we're breathing them in. And could they also be contributing to our overall exposure? So I don't know. I focus on Parkinson's disease. So I look at the world of menarian. narrow view. And I think there are other indoor air contaminants that could be. Some of those indoor can cams can be coming from outside, you know, just from the ambient air when we're outside. And that has filled with particulate matter. And that particulate matter can be carrying toxic metals with it. We also know that people in agricultural areas or even people who work on sports fields or play on sports fields or golf courses that are sprayed with pesticides, you know,

Starting point is 00:40:03 they're walking in them. When they bring their shoes into the house, they can be bringing these chemicals into their homes and then pollute their indoor air that way. I recommend, increasingly recommend such as people who live in areas of high pollution, such as Southern California, think about air filters or air purifiers so they can decrease their exposure to these chem. Well, one thing that you've been sharing as you've been going on the podcast circuit a little bit, is that even a place like Rochester, you know, now because of wildfires and things like that, you know, the air quality could be significantly impacted, you know, short period of time, but that even places like New York City, I think you were referencing in a friend's podcast

Starting point is 00:40:48 that New York City this past June had the worst air quality in the entire world because of all the wildfire contaminants that were coming down from Canada. So it seems like wherever we are, you know, getting a high quality air, filter and you can go look up online or look at EWG, you can find them, could be an extra way to protect your health. Yeah, if you want to live a short and unhealthy life, breathe polluted air. And so there are lots of ways that people get air pollution. You know, selling California, you know, people remember that 50s and 60s, you, the air pollution

Starting point is 00:41:24 was so bad in Los Angeles. People wore masks, not because of COVID-1950, but because of air pollution. and because of the burning effects of air pollution, the governor of California in the 1960 said we should eliminate all unnecessary driving in Southern California. The governor of California in the 1960 said we should eliminate all unnecessary driving in Southern California because of the toxic effects of air pollution.

Starting point is 00:41:48 That governor was Ronald Reagan. So there are tons of reasons to do so. Air pollution as a whole costs every human being in the world on average three years of life expectancy. If we didn't have air pollution, industrial air pollution in the world, all of us in general would be living three years of life longer. And so this is air pollution is strongly linked to heart disease, strongly linked to stroke, strongly linked to a wide range of lung diseases. And increasingly it's likely has been linked to brain diseases, especially Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. And so what is air pollution?

Starting point is 00:42:24 So when you're looking out in the smog, you can see smog, right? You know, in some California, it's visible. And what you're seeing is particulate matter, which is just little pieces of dirt and soot, many of them about 1 30th the width of your hair. And hitchhiking on these pieces of dirt and soot are toxic metals, lead from leaded gasoline before it was banned, iron from brake pads, platinum from catalytic converters. Most of that particulate matter, we either catch in our hairs in our snows and in our nose and sneeze them out or we cough them out. But some are so small, they're called small particular matter or ultra-fine particular matter, they can actually bypass our normal protective mechanisms enter the nerve responsible for smell,

Starting point is 00:43:09 which is hanging down from the base of our brain, and make its way back to the smell centers of the brain. A really, really, really smart and creative scientist named Dr. Lillian Calderón Garci Duenas, who's now at the University of Montana, was from Mexico. And as you might recall, Mexico City had the worst air quality in the world in the early 1990s. And she wanted to know what the effects of this was on kids. And so she looked at the brains of young children and young adults who died prematurely from car accidents and gun violence in Mexico City. And she looked at 203 brains. In 202 of those 203 brains, she found the evidence of Alzheimer's pathology.

Starting point is 00:43:53 And in over 20% of the brain, she found. evidence of Parkinson's pathology, this pathology was found in children as young as 11 months old. Wow. And obviously 11 month old doesn't have Alzheimer's disease or Parkinson's disease, but it's quite concerning that the seeds of the future cases of Parkinson's disease or Alzheimer's disease might be being placed in our children simply because of where we live and what we're allowing them to breathe. When it comes to some of these exposures that are there, you've already given us a few tips. We're going to get into a bunch more in a minute, but you've told us about the

Starting point is 00:44:26 importance of using a high quality water filter, you know, no shade on companies that are made in these plastic jugs that you get from Walmart or wherever, but that's not a high quality water filter. You know, we're looking for something that's high quality. You know, we talk about a high quality air filter, preferably something that's like HEPA-based. When it comes to testing your home, but then also testing your body, are there consumer level tests that are available for people to see if they're being exposed to some of these toxicants that you mentioned in the book? Yeah, so I'm not a toxicologist. And so I recommend a carbon filter for water.

Starting point is 00:45:01 Like, you know, I'm not here to endorse any brands, but Pure and Britta and things like that can help reduce your exposure to chemicals and to pesticides in your water. And we talked about air filters, which can reduce your exposure to particulate matter and other chemicals in your indoor air. And when you're driving, you can roll up your windows and turn your air on circulation and decrease your exposure to particulate matter, especially when you're driving. you're driving. Testing your home, people have had their homes, basements tested for radon.

Starting point is 00:45:30 The testing for tri-chlorothylene is very similar to that for getting a home tested for radon. I've never had my house tested for trichlor-ethylene. Fortunately, I live in my house was likely on a cornfield before it was a house. So you should only, just to interrupt, just to clarify, so you should only really get tested if you think that you were nearby a site, right, for TCE, right? That's not telling everybody get tested. Yeah, no.

Starting point is 00:45:55 And be clear, but there are lots of, like, if I live near a dry cleaner, I would get my home tested. If I live near a site that was in metal fabrication or anything with decreasing metal, I'd get my home tested. If I live near a landfill where I test my water and I would probably test my indoor air. So there are lots of reasons why I would think about testing indoor air. And then you can get a tested and if it's found to have high levels of training. trichloethylene is addressable. You get, I think the cost is like $1,500 to $2,000. You get a remediation system that basically pumps the air underneath your foundation from where the chemicals coming up from the ground and vents it above your house and it goes in the atmosphere

Starting point is 00:46:36 and dilutes. You know, not perfect solution, but, you know, it's a very practical solution. Last people have radon remediation systems in. I think even one of our homes had a radon remediation system put in. And that's a way to address indoor air pollution. I'm not going to lie. I know it can be scary and overwhelming to think about toxic exposure. Everything you read and I read just makes you feel like, oh, are we just doomed? Which is why it's important to remember that in addition to doing our best to avoid exposure, there's also so much that we can do to support the body's natural ability to detoxify itself. Some of the things that are top of that list are, first of all, of course, reducing our consumption of ultra-processed foods.

Starting point is 00:47:22 You know, when they make ultra-processed foods, a lot of the foods that are out there that are in the box supermarkets or fast food stores, those machinery that these items are made on an industrial scale. The machines are coated with all sorts of junk and the products pick it up. And there's all sorts of steps. Every step you go through, there's more chemicals that are exposed and packaging and plastics. So just not eating or not focusing your diet on ultra-processed foods and minimizing their prevalence in your diet. That's a huge step.

Starting point is 00:47:51 You can also eat a ton of fresh, colorful plant foods and spices. things like sulfurane, which is found in broccoli sprouts, those help us naturally detoxify. And of course, don't forget about anything that makes you sweat. Exercise, first and foremost, has so many benefits, but a little bit of sweat goes a long way and removing toxins. And also, too, whether you're working out or whether you're not working out, sauna. If you're not working out, here's a little hidden secret about soda. It's the closest thing to working out that you can do without working out.

Starting point is 00:48:19 So getting sauna, you know, a few times a week, a hot sauna, sweating, sweating those toxins out, that's a huge part of the process of detoxification. And lastly, a little shout out to a long-time sponsor of ours, Air Doctor and Aquatrue, reducing your exposure by investing in a high-quality water filter, air filter, or both. I have air filters all around my house in my office where I'm recording this audio podcast right now, and I see the quality of my air at all times. And big shout out to Air Doctor, because long before they were a sponsor, I'd been using them in my home to have just incredibly high-quality air. And of course, Aquatru as well, too. Really great. water filter. Those things all add up to minimize our exposure with all those combined. My hope is that

Starting point is 00:49:00 the information in today's episode empowers you to step into your autonomy and take control of supporting your help to the best degree possible. That's all we can do, just the best degree possible, the one step that we can take today to head in the right direction. If you like any of these interviews, you want to listen to the full-length version. You can listen to our interview with Dr. Yvonne Burkart and Dr. Ray Dorsey. You can find them in the show notes below. And if you enjoyed today's episode one favor, one tiny request, share it with a friend. It makes a huge difference when you have a recommendation from a friend or that goes out to a friend and says, hey, I know you've been kind of thinking about these toxins in our environment. This is a great episode that might give

Starting point is 00:49:40 you the information and the courage to take some steps appropriately in the right direction to protect your body. That's it for today. Thanks for listening to today's compilation episode. I'll see you back later this week with the brand new episode of the Drew Perot Show.

Dhru Purohit Show - Hidden Toxins In Everyday Products. Top Toxins You Need to Avoid to Decrease the Risk of Cancer, Parkinson’s, and More

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