Dhru Purohit Show - How to Minimize Toxic Exposure to Keep Our Children and Ourselves Healthy

Episode Date: March 10, 2025

This episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth, One Skin, and Ollie. Environmental toxins are everywhere in our modern world—yet most remain untested for their long-term health effects or combined impact. With exposure at an all-time high, understanding how to minimize risk is more important than ever.  Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, we’re bringing you a special compilation episode featuring Dhru’s conversations with top experts on the toxins we encounter daily—and how to protect ourselves and our children. In this episode, our guests share practical strategies to reduce exposure and safeguard long-term health. Beth Lambert explores the growing epidemic of childhood disease linked to toxin exposure. She shares her personal journey of healing her children, the insights she uncovered along the way, the key factors affecting gut health, and how small changes can lead to big results. Dr. Joel breaks down the major drivers behind this rise, including ultra-processed foods and environmental toxins. He also introduces his SEEDS protocol—a holistic approach focused on both prevention and treatment. Beth Lambert is an Author, educator, and former healthcare consultant. She is also the Founder and Executive Director of Documenting Hope, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that focuses on root-cause healing solutions for children’s chronic health and developmental issues. She has monitored and documented the escalating rates of childhood chronic conditions for 15 years.  Dr. Joel Warsh is a Board-Certified Pediatrician in Los Angeles, California who specializes in Parenting, Wellness and Integrative Medicine. He completed his Pediatric Medicine training at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles (CHLA) and worked in private practice in Beverly Hills before founding his current practice, Integrative Pediatrics and Medicine Studio City, in 2018. In this episode, Dhru and his guests dive into: The role of the gut microbiome in detoxification (01:40) Multigenerational changes to environmental toxins and changes to our food systems  (11:40) Simple decisions that impact our overall health (22:54) Toxins in our everyday products and how to minimize exposure (25:59) What to prioritize to reduce toxic exposure, filtering water, and organic food (28:34) Toxins and the correlation between heavy metal exposure and Autism (35:44) Avoiding heavy metal exposure, testing, and diversity in food sources (38:19) Dr. Joel’s SEEDS protocol (44:21) Dhru’s Final Thoughts (51:34) Also mentioned: Full episode with Beth Lambert Full episode with Dr. Joel G. Warsh Parenting at Your Child's Pace: The Integrative Pediatrician’s Guide to the First Three Years Dr. Yvonne Burkart Episode: Toxicologist Reveals the Top Sources of Hidden Toxins We’re Being Exposed to Daily This episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth, One Skin, and Ollie.  Right now, get 40% off your Cozy Earth sheets. Just head over to cozyearth.com/dhru and use code DHRUP. Right now, One Skin is offering my community 15% off; just go to oneskin.co and use coupon code DHRU to save 15% and give your skin the scientifically proven, gentle care it deserves. Want to give your dog the best in clean eating? Take the online quiz and introduce Ollie to your pet. Right now, Ollie is offering 60% off your first box of meals when you subscribe today! Just head to Ollie.com, use the code DHRU and you’ll get 60% off your first box of meals in your subscription. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi everyone, Drew Prode here. It's no secret that we're exposed to many toxins in our daily lives that are negatively impacting our health and our children's health in particular in a myriad of ways. In fact, 80,000 toxic chemicals have been released into our environment since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. And only very few of those chemicals have been tested for their long-term impact on human health. And definitely the vast majority have not been tested for their impact together on human health. But we can't freak out about this. There are many steps, simple steps that we can take every single day to minimize the effects of our toxic exposure to protect

and heal the health of our families. So on today's episode, I talk with two experts on how to do exactly that. First up, we have Beth Lambert. She's an author, educator, nonprofit director, and former healthcare consultant. She's also the founder and executive director of documenting hope, a 501C3 nonprofit organization, focusing on root cause healing solutions for children's chronic health and developmental issues.

Also, in addition to Beth, I chat with a friend of mine, Dr. Joel Warsh. He's a board certified pediatrician in Los Angeles, and he specializes in parenting, wellness, and integrative medicine. Let's dive right in, starting with my conversation with Beth Lambert, which I really enjoyed, by the way. And in this snippet, she details the changes that she made in her own household to address her children's health issues. And she also discusses the vital role that our gut microbiome plays when it comes to how our body handles toxic exposure. The gut bacteria are so profoundly important for every

function in our body from making neurotransmitters to regulating the immune system to determining whether we're reactive to our environment or not. And they help us detoxify. So I learned that my kids had imbalances in gut bacteria and I dove right into there, but kind of became a little bit nerdy and obsessed by it because it's so cool what these microorganisms do for our body and how much it's within our control because some, a big part of our microbiome, it can be regulated by the food that goes in every day. And as a parent, even if you're not super resource, you can to some degree control how that microbiome shapes up by food and through food. So I would say our family was eating pretty standard healthy American diet.

So like I thought that was, you know, you ate whole wheat products. And, you know, we ate organic some of our stuff, but not maybe everything. We ate maybe a lot of pasta in our house, which I thought was healthy because that was sort of an idea, a narrative that's out there. And, you know, my kids eat fruits and vegetables. But I found that the standard American diet, there's the ultra-processed version of the standard American diet and even the healthy version of the standard-American diet. diet is not what human beings evolved to eat over millennia. So, you know, the human body has evolved,

if you think about going back to our ancestral roots, eating more hunter-gathered-type foods, right? Like eating things that had been maybe processed in traditional time-honored ways, whether that's soaking or sprouting or things like that. So we in the modern world do not eat the way our ancestors do and our body pays the price. The microbiome has changed as a result of it. So that was my first big, heavy move was like, we're just changing our diet. So I started following a lot of Western Price type T change, which is basically just getting into alignment with the way ancestral habits for preparing food for the types of food you eat. And we stopped eating all things like seed oils and refined sugars and a lot of grains.

We dropped a lot of grains out and we started eating a lot of fermented foods. So that was one really powerful, or I should even say, empowering. experience for me because I could I could control this every single day with breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And I saw results immediately. You know, within a few weeks, I saw behaviors, for instance, tantruming, mood dysregulation, all come back into balance. I saw skin symptoms go away. I saw gastrointestinal symptoms go away. I mean, things like constipation, all of a sudden became normalized because food can have that impact on your body. And I wouldn't say that was the only thing that we did, but that was certainly the cornerstone.

And then the other things we did were just switching all of our products out at our house. Anything that wasn't natural out of the house, laundry detergent, toothpaste, shampoos, like all the products, the stuff and things that we think are normal. Like I remember being a kid in like a teenager and I now see it for what it was. I was like captured by the commercials. I remember going into a CVS and like looking at all the products, like the beauty products and the cosmetics like on the CVS. counters and I was like just oh I want that and I want that and there's almost this like dopamine hit walking in there because that's how you were influenced when we see things on I mean

now it's on TikTok but for me it was on TV and that is our culture right that is so American is that we we want the shiny things the smelly things the things that are pretty and we we fill our environment with these synthetic products but those synthetic products are almost always toxic they almost always have some kind of endocrine disrupting chemicals or maybe even heavy metals that we don't even know about like in our cosmetics and these are things that are very easy to change out. So that's one thing we did with our family. We just detoxified. We detoxified our life. And then the last, I think, major piece about what we did to turn my family's health around was to just start paying attention to nature. Like I grew up in New Hampshire, like a total woods kid. Like I love being outside.

That was sort of my roots. So that's easy for me to always go back to. but I really started paying attention to things like circadian rhythms and going to sleep or, you know, turning the lights down when it gets dark out and getting up with a morning sunlight and really paying attention to the importance of sleep. And those are things that in the modern world we don't really do that often just because, again, it's not culturally normal to do that. It's culturally normal to turn all the lights on it. You know, as soon as the sun goes down and we stay up until midnight and, you know,

we don't pay attention to nature nor do we surround ourselves by it. So I really made an effort to get my kids outside more, barefoot, in the sun with no sunscreen. I actually really feel like those were important parts of their healing journey. And they, you know, it's it's sort of baked into who we are. I think it's such an important fundamental part of healing to just connect to nature, whether that's in your environment, whether that's in your food, whether it's in your rhythms, or just sort of your outlook. Like, we need to be connected to nature to be healthy animals. Every kid in any chronic condition they're dealing with or any symptoms they're dealing with, every kid is a little bit different. But there are themes across the board that are there.

You went through a bunch of different categories of your lives. But for a lot of these documentation of reversal, no evidence of disease, healing that you've seen for the families, if you had a rank in order, what are like number one biggest contributors, number two, number three? And the context for this question is that I was born at 82. And I had a pretty diet growing up, minus dinner. Dinner was always like a home-cooked meal. I was under protein because we grew a vegetarian, but it was always like a good, you know, healthy vegetarian Indian meal at home that was made from scratch. And a lot of my friends, too, like, you know, they all had pretty diets and we're drinking

Coca-Cola a lot and other stuff and things like that. And so we had a lot of processed food. growing up, but it seems something different in this more recent generation of kids that there was like a switch that happened where all of a sudden it's like, yes, I used to get sick a lot as a kid. I would get, I had like strep throat and bronchitis and other stuff every time it was like cold season, flu season. But I wasn't dealing with anything more major than that, maybe upset stomach here and

and there. So something seems like it's kind of gotten more aggressive. Is it environmental toxins? You know, is it what has been that lever and have you heard that from other people? I have a couple of answers to that question. First of all, this epidemic is multi-generational. It's not just like all of a sudden these kids are weaker than we were and we could handle toxins and they can't. The cumulative amount of toxins are exposed to is way more than we were. I mean, just think about something like glyphosate. Lysate wasn't around when we were little. Like it wasn't on every single industrial agricultural crop. Now it's in everything. And I'm sure you've probably followed moms across America and they're doing all this testing or GMO science or testing things like baby formula. And

you know, average things on the shelf like hummus and all these things. Pasta. It's it's in everything. And glyphosate disrupts your gut bacteria in a big way. So that would be one tiny example of what's from like the types of pesticides or the types of chemicals we were exposed to as kids. But I think, and I have a research study called CHRP that backs this up. So one of the studies we've done is called Child Health Inventory for Resilience and Prevention. It's the longest environmental health survey that parents fill out to assess what is in and around their child's environment. What was their family health history? What is their birth history like?

It's basically an inventory of how any particular. child is living in the modern world. So we've been running that study since 2018 and collecting data. And so you asked, what are the things? What's different? And some of the things that come up in that data, you see signal and noise, right? Because this is a massive survey. So we want to know everything. And what comes up with the most signal, the single biggest impactor is antibiotics and the cumulative exposure to antibiotics. So again, going back to multi-generational. Think about your great-grandmother or grandmother who might have been the first generation of humans on the planet to have antibiotics, a sulfa drugs that came out in the 1930s. And those were miracle drugs. People were

like, you had tuberculosis and you were going to die, you had this magic pill. And all of a sudden, you are restored to health and you get to go on and live your life. So that's actually a foundation, I think, of why we have such capture with our mindset about pharmaceuticals, because we had that experience deep in our culture. That first generation of humans in the Western industrial world started taking antibiotics for everything. Shortly following that, you start seeing the rise of food allergies. Food allergies didn't exist before the 19th century. It didn't exist in the 19th century.

It was the 20th century when you first started seeing food allergies, life-threatening food allergies. And then if you think about your grandmother, a great-grandmother who had her antibiotics, then she passed her disrupted microflora from her microbiome was all messed up by those antibiotics. that got passed on to your mother. And your mother, who might have had one, two, three, four, five rounds of antibiotics,

then passes that on to me. And then that passes that passes on from me to my child. So you have multiple generations of humans who are transferring a microbiome that has been irrevocably damaged by antibiotics. So lots of us have that in our experience. I've done talks in a large room and asked everybody in the room who's had an antibiotic to raise their hand. There's nobody in the room that hasn't raised their antibiotic. I mean, raise their antibiotic. There is nobody who hasn't, doesn't raised their hand. Everybody has

had an antibiotic. But it's not just antibiotics that disrupt the microbiome. And again, I think the microbiome disruption is one of the main reasons why I have so many sick kids today because it is the seat of our health. But there are so many other classes of medications that came out in the 60s, 70s, and 80s that also disrupt the microbiome. So that would include birth control pills. 80% of women in the United States have been on birth control pills at one point or another. What did the birth control pills do? There are hormone in steroid medication and there are other classes like asthma medications are steroid and medications that affect your gut bacteria.

It basically causes certain types of microorganisms to thrive. A lot of the like more fungal type overgrowth can happen when you're on birth control pills. And it really suppresses some of the better, more beneficial microorganisms in your gut. So again, that is then passed along generation to generation because when a baby is born, the baby receives the mom's microbiome when it's a vaginal birth. The other class of medications would be reflux medications. And those ones took off in the 90s. Like all of a sudden, boom out of nowhere, like I was saying before, every baby was put on

reflux meds. And I actually was on, I used to work in healthcare consulting. And I worked on a project once where my job was to find. children, families that would be willing to test a reflux medication in their infants, newborns, zero to six months because there wasn't patent protection or approval for that particular reflux medication. So I was literally looking for parents whose kids who didn't have reflux but would be willing to trial, you know, just so they could try it to make sure it was safe.

That was to extend the patent life. That was to give patent protection to the pharmaceutical company. so that they can continue to make the higher prices on their drug. What we did by doing that is we created a whole market, a whole new market of infants who could receive reflux medications. Reflux medications totally disrupt the microbiome. They change the pH of your gastintestinal tract by suppressing the acid that's produced. So think about all those ways I've just mentioned that are talking about just the microbiome.

And again, that's over multiple generations that's happened. Now, layer on top of that, this is where that whole total load concept comes in, layer on top of that. Your number one detox tool besides your skin protecting you from the world is your microbiome. Your microbiome actually helps you demethulate things like mercury. It helps you excrete toxins out of your body. So when you mess with your microbiome and you screw up that balance of what's normally in there, you don't have your normal defenses to get the toxins out of your body. So what happens, those toxins that are going in?

All those pesticides, the glyphosate, the chemicals in our, the BHT and the food colorants that they're trying to get out of fruit loops right now, all of those chemicals that we are exposed to on a daily basis, we're going to retain them in our fatty tissues, in our liver, in our brain. So what are we seeing with our kids? We're seeing this profound epidemic of neurobehavioral and neurodevelopmental conditions. Their brains are being impacted by the toxic load and not having the microbiome. am to protect them and I am to protect them. And it's multifactorial what's causing these conditions

in our kids, but there are big baddies. And also, if you take an antibiotic before you take a vaccine, you're going to have a negative impact from that vaccine because you've just wiped out your immune system. And your immune system cannot mount the response it needs to. So it's the synergy. It's the cumulative. It is these things working in concert together. And these kids just don't have the resilience to be able to tolerate that total load of stressors and they just end up with you know, myriad symptoms and ultimately diagnoses as a result. The idea of toxic load is so important when it comes to how we think about how to protect our health and the health of our children. This is because it's the cumulative effect of

toxic exposure that leads to so many conditions and diseases that we're seeing today. And in my conversation with Dr. Warsh, he shares how a powerful, seemingly small, day-to-day decision can be when it comes to protecting our children's health. Let's listen. Ideally, I want to set the stage or help people set the stage for health and wellness by focusing on those foundations like diet, like exercise, sleep, minimizing toxins. And yeah, I think it is very important that we focus back on some of these simple things. is not rocket science, but we oftentimes either are too busy or we just kind of set it aside

until, like you said, something happens. And that is often times when people find natural medicine or integrated medicine because there aren't any great solutions in modern medicine or at that time where you're going to need to take a lot of pills and people don't want to. So yeah, I don't want that for people. I want to get ahead of it. And I want people to think about these simple things because it adds up. It adds up over time, the simple decisions that we make, really add up and it matters. There was a great study out of Harvard. I don't know if you know the soup study.

Only because I heard you talking about it a couple of times. Okay, yeah. I know. I love this study. So that's why I mentioned it because I think it really goes well. And I mean that in a complimentary way. Yeah.

It's a study that everybody should know about. Yeah. And that's why I love to chat about it because there were five days of soup, right? These patients, they took them in, they gave them five days of soup, five days of canned soup, and then five days of homemade soup.

And they were looking at the BPA levels in urine. The canned soup has BPA lining, so they're looking at the difference. A thousand percent difference in five days. It is a magical study. It's super simple. It illustrates the point beautifully that little changes matter. And that's why I love to talk about it because a thousand percent difference in five days from one chemical. Yes, your body can probably handle those five days of BPA.

But if you're eating that soup every other day for five years, plus every other chemical that we're being supposed to, it adds up as opposed to the kid that eats the homemade. soup, they don't have that BPA in their body. And yes, your body can handle it to a degree, but at what point is it too much? I think we're getting to the point where it's too much for too many people, and that's why we're seeing all this chronic disease. You know, we have a toxicologist on this podcast. Really love her work. We'll link to her in the show notes, along with your book and your social media, her name is Dr. Yvonne Burkhar. And one of the things she was saying is that as somebody who worked in the industry coming up with flavoring and different chemicals and additives that get placed into food and fragrances, is that,

even when in the rare instance you get some safety studies on exposure to a certain toxin, it says, okay, this level of BPA is toxic, but at this level, it's okay, right? And so, I don't know if Can Soup, if they're testing the levels, if they're not, let's give the benefit of the doubt and say they are. And that they looked at the BPA level from soup exposure and they said, look, it doesn't seem to be causing anything. Okay, let's give the benefit of doubt. But the study that nobody's doing is looking at an average household and looking at all the exposure from all the products that they're happening over, you know, years and decades, a lifetime. And then on top of that, looking at the crossing of those different chemicals and how they might

be interacting with each other. Now, we're most likely not going to be able to do that study. That'd be a very difficult thing to do. But part of what you've been advocating in the book and what you teach your patients is that if you don't want to end up getting sick or if you want to reduce your chances as a family of developing neurological issues, diabetes, all sorts of chronic issues that are out there, you have to take a precautionary approach and assume that a lot of this stuff is most likely not good for you. And how do we know? Well, we're looking at society where a lot of people are ending up with a lot of chronic disease and they're living a normal life. So in a way, we got to be a little bit weird with ourselves and with our family if we don't

want to end up being normal. Right. Well, I mean, you're talking about reality. I think that science doesn't want to talk about, right? Like, this is the real world. And first of all, why in the world do we trust a company to tell us that something is safe versus not safe? Of course, they're going to paint their chemical, their product in the best light. They're going to say it's supremely effective and there are minimal risks and they're going to do whatever they can to finagle the research to show that. It's up to us to kind of push back. But it is really hard to do that when you talk about reality, when you talk about mixing all these chemicals together and how they affect us, that's a very difficult thing to do because if you consume a pill today and you get cancer

30 years from out, it's not so easy to kind of pinpoint those two things together. If you take a pill today and you have a heart attack tomorrow, then sometimes people can figure that out. But what we're seeing more and more of these chronic diseases, these things that are building up over time. And I think you have to step back and you almost have to take a common sense approach to it by looking at what's going on, looking at the statistics, looking at history of these chemicals where we say it's safe, we say it's safe until it's not safe until the company gets sued for 20 years and we finally figure out, oh, they actually knew a lot about the lack of safety on you know, glyphosate or whatever, whatever chemical it is that year or that time. And then we go back

and go, oh, this is really unsafe. It's causing cancer. That's probably true of a lot of these chemicals if you get enough of them. And it's not to fearmonger. It's not to scare people. It's just the reality of the world. And so the best practice in my mind is to assume that most of these chemicals and toxins are not good for you. In 20, 30, 50 years, we're going to figure out that we shouldn't have them around. And so just try to minimize them as much as we can. It doesn't mean that you can never be exposed to some BPA, you're going to be. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't breathe the air, like there's going to be stuff in the air. There's going to be stuff in your water. But you can take some proactive steps to minimize your exposure to toxins wherever you can, especially in

your home where you spend so much of your time. And I think that for most people, that's enough. That's going to keep kids healthy. And I think that we're so far out of balance that at this point, too many kids are getting sick because they're exposed to too many chemicals and toxins. And we just keep saying, oh, it's safe. The company said it was safe. Oh, under this level, it's safe. What about lead? Look back in history at lead and this level was safe. And then this level is safe. Oh, yeah, actually, no, no level of lead is safe.

And I think that's going to be true of most chemicals over time. Not to say that if you ever touch something with BPA, you should be terrified. But it's probably not good for you. What's an example in terms of priority? Because the one thing that you don't want to do and that you make a good attempt on and the thing that we try to do on this podcast is the longer the list of things we tell people not to do, the more likely that people are going to throw their hands up in there and say, okay, I get it. Everything's going to be told me. So I just got to live my life, right? So if you had to

have prioritization, we talked about food a little bit, getting away from ultra-processed food, minimizing that, you know, focusing on fresh foods, you know, minimizing sugar. It doesn't mean you shouldn't be eating, you know, sugar, healthy treats at home, things that you can be making, even stuff that you buy, but limiting that exposure. I asked Dr. Robert Lustig, who's one expert in this space, And I think that he said, you know, there's no upper limit in terms of nutritional facts and nutritional labels in terms of sugar. But I thought he said that adults shouldn't be having more than 20 grams of added sugar in their diet. And I think for kids, it's like 10 to 15, which if you look at most things that kids are

eating, in one to two servings, they're above that limit of added sugar. We're not talking about fruit. We're not talking about things that have healthy levels of fiber inside of it. there's sugar in everything. There's the sugar in sugar as carbohydrates. There's carbohydrates and vegetables, et cetera, sweet potatoes, anything that you're going to eat is going to have it. We're talking about added sugar. I'll look that up and I'll fact check and I'll put inside of the show notes if that's accurate. So we don't want to tell people that they have to be perfect, but we want to give limits, recommendations, and boundaries of things that people should be paying attention to.

So when it comes to chemicals, is there a top one, two, three, four things that you feel from your clinical experience or reading the research, that these seem to be big drivers of chronic exposure to chemicals. And if I can get a family to prioritize these one, two, three, four, five things, at least I know I'm taking care of the big culprits. Is there anything like that in the category of chemicals? Yeah. The thing that I always say to prioritize is just starting to read labels. If you haven't even done that, that's where I start. And then sugar is probably one of the first ones. Certainly added sugar is one of the things that I would look at first. and chemicals in children's food. We have a ton of research at this point on the harmful effects.

So there's no real reason that should even be in kids foods anymore. It's not in some countries. And I think that we should also prioritize organic wherever we can. There's so much glyphosate everywhere, so many pesticides. And I think that we have, again, great evidence that that can cause cancer and all sorts of gut issues. So you're going to pick two or three. I think those are a reasonable place to start. But there are just so many. And then plastic. I think not cooking in plastic. not using plastic as much as you can. We get so much exposure to BPA and thallates. I think we know that those are quite bad for us at this point too.

So wherever you can minimize using that, I would put that on the top couple as well. Would you add people getting a good quality water filter to their home? Good quality water filter. Would that make your top five? Probably. I mean, I think that's up there. I mean, it depends where you live, I guess, right?

There's someplace that have better water than others. So I think it depends where you live. But if you're going to be drinking a lot of water, especially we're going to drink a lot of tap water in a location like Los Angeles where the water is not great, then I would say having a good water filter would be a really good place to start. Because you also, I think sometimes, well, what do we do the most, right? What do we do the most? And if you can kind of cut down on some of those things, and that's helpful. So we breathe and we drink water a lot, right? So I think that if you can improve the air in your home a little bit by getting an air filter or putting some plants, that's going to get a lot of bang for your buck because we're breathing, you know, 20, 30 times.

minute, right, with the air. So we're breathing a lot. And if we're drinking tap water every single day in your home, then that's a very reasonable thing to be filtering out some of those chemicals so that you're minimizing that constant exposure to something. Is there anything that you guys do in your home? Something maybe more recently that you kind of really go out of your way as a family to avoid or minimize. And maybe the research is not settled on this, but you anecdotally, or not even anecdotally from your clinical experience or your gut intuition, you kind of feel like this is going to be a big deal. So you as your family, again, you're not recommending it to everybody.

You're not telling your patients to do it. But you guys as a family go out of your way to really avoid this particular thing. Is there anything like that? Well, tap water. I think that we order mountain spring water in glass and that's one of the things that we do. And also trying to get fresh produce, we try to go to the farmer's market at least once or twice a week or the stores they get fresh produce. And we try to prioritize that.

That's where I feel like our money is best spent. And so we try to prioritize fresh fruit and water because we're eating that every day and we're drinking that every day. So I think that is where we might do something that's a little bit different. Some people say, well, you know, we can't afford it. I get that. But that's what we do. And that's where we prioritize our money.

This is something super controversial that shouldn't be at least we can have the debate. At least we can have the conversation. I appreciate you having the conversation today. So just a little recap, we're living in this incredibly toxic soup that's contributing disease. And yet we're all acting like everything that's out there has been studied long term and been approved by all the agencies that have oversight instead of the fact that a lot of stuff, a lot of chemicals were actually grandfathered in based on these rules that were

passed in sort of Congress. And even though it would take a magnificent effort for the government to solve the problem, the takeaway is that families have to have a precautionary approach, at least with the main contributors to these toxins that are there. You mentioned a few, you know, minimizing our total level of added sugar inside of the body, how that can be a toxin to the body, especially for our mitochondria. And a lot of kids, especially on the autism spectrum, I think it was Suzanne Goh, who has been on the podcast. She was, and her lab was the original work that found that 80% of kids that are even on on the spectrum, 80% of them have mitochondrial dysfunction.

It was a theory, but then it was proven by her work and her team that that was part of the original lab that she was at, which I believe it was at Harvard that was doing the work. So sugars, food additives, dyes, things that are often banned in other countries because there's some emerging research or there's a lot of questions. You know, takes a little bit of extra effort and energy, but it's worth it. to protect your family, get clean water, you know, clean air if you can get a chance to do that. And number four, anything actually you want to say about that other, that topic of toxic soup that's contributing disease before we go into number four?

Yeah, I would just say this, that as a practitioner, as a pediatrician, as a doctor, it's really frustrating that we're not talking more about prevention when it comes to these topics. We're not thinking about toxins. it's here's your, here's your pill or your disease, that's it. And that is leading to this epidemic of chronic disease. It absolutely is. We have to shift our focus back.

We have to talk about these things like toxins. You don't look at a fish who's sick and you don't look at the water that's filled with a bunch of chemicals in there, right? I mean, we know that that's the reason why that fish is dying. You don't give them a pill. You have to clean up the water. And I think that we forget about that for ourselves. We forget that we need sunlight.

We need clean water. We need nutrients. We need food. We need to minimize the chemicals and toxins that we're exposed to. And we just don't think about it in that light. And it's hard sometimes to prove these things. Just like you said, a lot of these chemicals are not researched. Some of them were grandfathered in.

The company puts out whatever research they do. And then it takes us 20 years to give them lawsuits to fight it back. It's really not an easy thing. Well, that's one big topic. And we didn't really talk about metals. That's a big concern for, I think, a lot of parents and families. these days metals in food being supposed to lead arsenic cadmium aluminum i think that's another i think that's another it's in soil so it's not that we're going to have zero amount of that in the

food there's going to be some but we're probably getting too much it's very common in a lot of the foods that we're eating and a lot of children with chronic diseases they you test their blood if you test their urine if you test their hair these metals come up in high in high amounts same with adults and so i think it is again it's just another important thing that we we should think about it's it's it's complicated to be a parent it's complicated to live right now to think like that we everything can be toxic i don't think that's the way to go about it but i do think that we need to be mindful that these these things can contribute and so we need to to keep looking into it because i've been looking into autism a lot lately because i've been talking about it a lot and there actually is a lot of research on a variety of

chemicals and toxins that are contributors to autism nothing's definitive but they're there's There has been some good meta-analyses that really dive into what some of the triggers are for autism. And I think that's a very good way to kind of look back at chronic disease in general. And we know that pollution increases your risk. So the kids that are close to highways, they have a significant increase risk. We know that aluminum, cadmium, arsenic, all of these things can be related, especially exposure for moms in uteril.

These things are related. Can I ask a quick question on that topic? Anything that people can do, pregnant women. or if you have young kids and you've mentioned that some of the kids that come in and you test them, they have high levels of metals. You know, some of this is in the soil. But is there anything that you recommend to people that are the big contributors to having high levels of heavy metals inside the body? It's hard.

I mean, each one has different contributors. One of the big ones recently that's been found rice. You know, Irishnik was found in a lot of rice products. So I think that this is one of those topics that's more of a community issue. I mean, we need to push for better testing, more independent testing, making sure that companies are doing that and then advertising it, at least as a consumer, if anything, you can try to look for products that publicize it. They publicize they did third party testing. They publicize that they are looking for some of these things as much as you can. I mean, it's hard for every piece of food. You're not going to do an internet deep dive dive as a parent or as a practitioner. But at least the more that you can do the better and the more that you're a savvy consumer you buy it when it's on the packaging. I think that that's going to push companies to do. do this because we're working with our dollars. So the best that we can, but yeah, it's, it's hard. I mean, it's, you're not going to look at best. Just want to toss it on the rice thing, because I've been tracking that for a little while. It seems to be that there are higher levels of arsenic in

rice, but the big concern is, and I still have, you know, white rice here and there, the big concern really was any kind of product that is using rice as a protein, like you have concentrated rice. You have concentrated, like, granulized rice that's being used as a carbohydrate source for snack foods, et cetera. And, you know, you could probably ask if there's a, you know, kids eat the same stuff. They eat the same snack. They like this one snack. They're going to eat this thing all the time. You can reach out to the company and ask them, do they have any heavy metal testing if it is rice that's out there? I don't want people to freak out about, you know, whole grain, sorry, not whole grain rice, but like typical white rice that's there.

which does have elevated levels compared to years in the past. But it seemed to me the biggest concern was like there was this big trend of people using rice as protein powder. Right? So they were using brown rice powder as the protein powder. And that concentration, that seemed to be a problematic thing

of the level of arsenic that was there. I'm by no means an expert on it, but I was tracking that. And it seemed to be the concentrated source. But again, you can ask the companies if there's certain products that your kids like to use on a regular basis because their bodies don't,

they're not as big as ours. So if they have half the concentration as you, but their body is a third smaller or a fourth smaller or a fifth smaller, it's going to be having a bigger toll on them. Right. And I want to say to that because there is a really good tip that I talk to parents about

when it comes to this topic is if you're talking about a specific chemical from a specific product, a lot of times the discussion will be around oh, it's just fear mongering, and, oh, it's well below the levels and it's in the soil, so why are we talking about it? But when you have a child, especially a child, but anybody who's eating a product consistently, like you said, like there's one snack that they love and they're getting it every day,

that to me is where the biggest concern is that whatever problematic chemicals are in there, whether it's a metal or anything else, those can build up in the body over time because you're eating it so frequently. So the easiest tip there is just to mix up what you're giving them. Try not to eat anything from the same company over and over and over again every day for weeks and years. Try to vary it up if you're going to do chips. Do it from different companies. Try different kinds of chips if you're going to do whatever product you're going to do,

even if you're buying fruit or vegetables. Try to buy it from different places, from different farms, from different stores, different varieties. That way, at least you're getting different things. And hopefully that same chemicals are going to build up in your body to the point where it's going to cause an issue. So I think that's a good way to minimize your risk by just very. up what you're eating as opposed to eating one thing because you just never know. And we've seen it. We saw it with formula.

We saw it with lots of things. You just never know when we're going to do some research on a product that seems like it's super healthy. And then you're like, whoa, there's a ton of lead in there. Who knew? Right? And your kid's been eating that cereal for five years and they've been eating it every day for breakfast and you find out now that that cereal has lead in it, then that's where

you can run into a problem where there's a lead build up in your body and you have no idea why. As opposed to switching up with different cereals, it's much lower. likelihood that all of those zeros are going to have a little bit of lead not to the point where or arsenic or whatever it is is not to the point where it might cause an issue but it could if it builds up and that's what happens with lead I mean that's to me the the easiest example that we are aware of in pediatricists because we test for lead in kids because it can build up I mean it can be in your home it can be in the paint it could be in

china like old old pots and pans or old toys and it's oftentimes not because you touch it once it's because it's there and you're exposed to it over a long time that it builds up in your body and it gets to a point where it's problematic. And if it gets really high, then it becomes very problematic. So I think that's probably true of all of the rest of them and we don't necessarily need to fear cereal. But I think if we balance what we're eating and vary up our food, then we're going to minimize our risk of getting the same chemical over and over again.

This is a good opportunity to talk about something that you chat about the book and it's an acronym. It's called seats. And I want to go through it because, yes, we do have. a toxic environment that's out there and how we live our life makes us so much more resilient. You and I both were exposed to hundreds of toxins starting our day off today. We're doing okay. We're going to continue and we're doing our best.

So for families, remind them, walk them through seeds and just how important it is to just dial in a couple of areas. And this is where we're really having families, you know, in your message in your book. Again, the book is out, is going to be out on August, August 6th, parenting at your child's pace, an integrative pediatrician's guide to the first three years. But it's really about just more than that. It's about sort of how to really create this as a lifestyle for you and your family. Or maybe you want to have a family one day like I do, my wife and I.

There's a lot of things that are out there that we can worry about. And some of those things, we have to decide what are going to be majors and what are going to be minors. and then there are the majors, the things that deserve the most amount of attention. And you put them together in this acronym called Seeds. So walk us through that. The first S in Seed stands for. Stress. What do you want to say about stress?

Well, I think that we live in a world where stress is more prevalent than ever. I mean, people seem to be more anxious. We have more anxiety disorder, more depression, more stress than ever before. I think because of social media, because of the news, because of the fear. and whether it's for ourselves or parenting or for our families, we know that chronic stress is not good for us, and yet most people are living in this state of chronic stress. And I feel like we have to take a step back,

especially when it comes to parenting. We have to take care of ourselves first, and a lot of times we forget about ourselves. And so I really do think that when we're talking about the foundations of health for our kids, it starts with our stress because otherwise that's imparted to our kids. And I think that shows up, later in life for them we're overly stressed about everything or overly stressed what's going on

the world. So creating an environment at home where it's not, you're going to always have little acute stresses. Being a kid is stressful. Being a parent is stressful. But you're talking about doing your best to eliminate the chronic stress, especially that your kids can feel. And that's probably a whole topic for like parenting books, the generational approaches to parenting, not over-scheduling kids, not being helicopter parents. You know, that's beyond the scope of this conversation here. But there is a lot of utility to creating an environment that allows kids to be kids and not have to deal with the chronic stresses of life, stresses of life.

Really important that we take care of some of our stress for ourselves. I think that's really important. Again, we don't think about ourselves. We don't put ourselves in that equation. but parenting, you know, if you're wanting to become a parent, if you are a new parent, it's stressful enough. You're already not sleeping that much. There's enough stress there that if we don't manage some of our own anxieties and worries

before we get into it, then these things spill over. Again, it's tough enough. So the more that we can work on ourselves, especially if you have the time right now before you become a parent, then I think that's a great, great motivator to do the work and, you know, either go to a therapist or work with a great practitioner to kind of go through some of of these stresses in our life and try to see if we can find some ways to minimize that stress. Okay. So the other E that we didn't talk about, which is huge because kids today are living an extremely sedentary lifestyle. And the lower you go on the economic totem pole,

unfortunately, you have a massive overconsumption of calories. So you have a sedentary lifestyle and you have a ton of extra calories that kids are eating as well too, which are contributing to the chronic rates of obesity that we're seeing in even kids. What do you want to say about exercise and how important it is? Yeah, I mean, you said it very well. Exercise, of course, is one of the most important topics. We didn't really talk about it so much today, but it's a whole other topic and a whole other world of discussion.

But, yeah, kids are sitting in front of the screens. We have a very sedentary lifestyle, and we need to move. We're talking about toxins. How do we get the toxins out? One of the main ways is by sweating, and yet we're not outside. We're not moving. We're not sweating.

and that is a big issue of obesity, diabetes. These are major issues, some of the biggest issues in America and around the Western world, and really the whole world almost at this point. And a big part of that equation is moving. And we're doing everything, especially from the time of the pandemic. I mean, we're moving further and further away from moving. What do we do during the pandemic? We stayed inside.

We stopped all the activities. I mean, you know, for better or worse, whatever you believe in, but that's what happened. For worse, definitely. Yes, I would say for worse too. But yeah, for the people out there, you know, everyone's got different opinions. But I know my opinion, but we're so diplomatic. But we did all the opposite things to what we know is important for health. And exercise stopped.

And we got in this pattern where it was already a problem. And then we got in this pattern where we're on screens more. And we're sitting more at home and we're getting more isolated. And we know that we need to move. I mean, look at the blue zones all over the world. They're not going to the gym. Not so much. They're just moving.

Their lifestyle involves walking or cooking or farming. And that's what we need to get back to. We have built a life that doesn't involve moving. And while I think it is useful as a first step to get kids into activities and sports and movement in general, we have to build a lifestyle where we're just constantly moving every day. I think that it can't be something where we just go to the gym and that's actually, I mean, if you want to go to the gym, that's great. But really where you get the most bang for buck is walk. just moving all day, whatever it is. The people that live the longest, that's their life.

They're just the grandmas who are 95 that look like they're 60 because they're in the kitchen, just rolling and cooking and working hard. And you see them on any of the videos you ever watch on the blue zones. It's like they're stronger than me. Why? Because they're working all day. They're not going in the gym. They're not exercising.

They're just moving. And we have to get back to that. And so for a parent, we have to think, how do we build it into their lives? How can we build some movement in? But it doesn't feel like it's forced. It doesn't feel like we're making them go to the gym. We're not shaming them for not moving. We're just walking more.

Like, let's park the car a little bit away from school and walk to school. Let's find ways we can walk more. Let's take the stairs into the elevator. Whatever it is that you can do into your day, build it in because those little bits add up. I love it. We talked a lot about diet. That's the D in seeds, seeds plural. Let's talk about sleep.

What do you want to say about sleep? And again, these are the majors. There could be so many things that parents and individuals. individuals can do, but these are the things you get these things right, you're doing better than 95, 99% of the population who's struggling with even just the basics. So let's talk about sleep. Right. We also know that sleep has been getting worse and worse in terms of the amount of time that kids are sleeping, the quality of the sleep that we're getting with all the screens and the distractions. It's become a problem, a big problem. And not rocket science. We need our sleep.

That's where we rest. That's where we digest. That's where we, detoxify and if we're sleeping three hours, four hours in the night, then how are we going to be focused at school? How are we going to be focused during the day? How are we going to let our body do what it needs to do? So just a simple focus back to reminding kids, just how important it is, making sure we're getting optimal sleep for our age, for our kids and for ourselves. It is a vital part of the day we need it. If you don't sleep for just a couple of days, you start having a lot of issues. So we know that it's extremely important for us. Trust me, as a resident, the doctor in training, You learn very quickly how crazy you go when you don't sleep for even one night, right?

I think it is really important that we get our sleep in. So just gentle nudging back to our kids, make sure they're sleeping, make sure they're getting off their screens, no screens in the bedroom, no screens after bedtime. These are simple things that we can all do that can make a huge difference for their mental health and for their general health. That's great. Personally, I'm very passionate about doing everything I can to minimize my own talk. But I hope that you're walking away from today's episode, feeling like the goal here is not to be perfect and not to live in a toxic-free bubble. That's just not going to happen.

Rather, the goal is to reduce our toxic exposure as much as possible by focusing on the things that have the biggest bang for their buck and time invested. And the simple things that we can do for ourselves and our children can go a long way. We can do that by supporting our gut microbiome, being mindful of the products that we choose, and what we use in our household, paying attention to what's in our food and eating a diverse diet, prioritizing our connection to nature, moving our bodies, getting quality sleep, and most importantly, having a positive mindset. As a society, it's not hyperbole to say that our children's health is in danger. And issues such as allergies, ADHD, autism, autoimmune diseases,

type 2 diabetes, and so on, are becoming more and more normal. But we have the power to make change and protect not only ourselves, not only our families, but our communities to all the small decisions we make every day. If you found this episode helpful, do me a favor. Share this episode with a friend. And if you want to hear my full-length interviews with Beth and also Dr. Warsh, you can find those links in the episode show notes. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.