Dhru Purohit Show - Neurologist Reveals The 3 Shocking Reasons Why Parkinson's Disease & Other Brain Disorders Are On The Rise (Rebroadcast)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Did you know that there are three toxicants that are super common out there that are direct contributors to your likelihood of getting Parkinson's disease and possibly even other brain disorders? If you're curious about what these three toxicants are and you're curious about simple lifestyle things that you can do to reduce your exposure to them, like not getting traditional dry cleaning, today's episode is for you. Hi everyone, Drew Brod here. Today we are rebroadcasting, one of our top episodes, but I'm still surprised after talking to so many friends, how many of them missed it? It's with Dr. Ray Dorsey. It came out about 10 months ago, so if you missed it, definitely tune in. And if you listen to it, you still may want to tune in,

Starting point is 00:00:41 because it's a fascinating conversation about the root causes of Parkinson's disease and other neurological conditions and how environmental toxins are radically increasing our likelihood of developing it specifically. Now, a little bit more about Dr. Ray Dorsey. He's a neurologist and a researcher, and he's known for his groundbreaking work in the field of Parkinson's disease. And after completing his undergraduate and studies at Stanford University, he earned his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and he pursued further training in neurology completing his residency at the University of Pennsylvania, followed by a fellowship of movement disorders at Columbia University. Basically, this guy knows what he's talking about. In addition to his clinical work,

Starting point is 00:01:21 he made significant contributions to Parkinson's disease research. His work on the Parkinson's progression Markers Initiative and other research projects have advanced the field's knowledge and treatment options. Ray wrote an incredible book recently that came out. It's called Ending Parkinson's Disease, a prescription for action. And even if you don't have Parkinson's disease, which I hope you don't, and even if there's not somebody in your family that has this terrible condition, I want you to be aware of some of these environmental factors that have caused this disease to skyrocket. Because, as Ray talks about on today's interview, some of the same things that are contributing to Parkinson's disease could be contributing to other neurological and autoimmune conditions.

Starting point is 00:02:04 So, the best approach in life is a precautionary approach. And the best way to do that is to minimize our exposure to toxicants. There's all sorts of great nuggets and gems in this interview. And one of the things that I like the most, Dr. Ray Dorsey, even though he's a clinician and a researcher, He speaks with authority on this subject and he speaks with passion because there are countless people that are out there today suffering because of our lack of follow-up and regulation and other things that allow these toxins to float in the environment and affect us all. And it's a really shitty situation.

Starting point is 00:02:39 You can hear in his voice he's passionate about this and he's trying to get us all excited about this topic so we can help spread the work. By the way, if you love this podcast, you can always support this podcast. How? send this interview to someone who would enjoy it. With that being said, let's jump into this fantastic rebroadcast of my interview with Dr. Ray Dorsey, one of the world's top experts in Parkinson's disease, neurological conditions, and how toxicants contribute to their likelihood.

Starting point is 00:03:05 Dr. Ray Dorsey, welcome. What are these three toxin categories that are breaking our brains and how are they doing it? First of all, Drew, I'd be with you. And thanks for working on helping out fix our brain. 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 called Paraquot, widely used as a weed killer. The second are commonly used dry cleaning chemicals, including this one called trichloralethylene. 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,

Starting point is 00:03:49 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 trichloroethylene in particular. So trichlorathleen, or TCE, is a very good. 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 atoms, two hydrogens and one oxygen. Trichlorothylene is very simple.

Starting point is 00:04:29 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 its name, 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 1920, so since shortly after World War II. And it's been used in everything.

Starting point is 00:04:53 It's been used to decaffeinate coffee. 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.

Starting point is 00:05:15 There's no question about that. 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 in

Starting point is 00:05:54 semiconductor industry, in mechanics, and printers and painters and taxidermists and varnish workers, all work 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 Uber, Massachusetts, north of 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. This proposed ban would go in effect in a year, is my understanding, but we still have

Starting point is 00:06:35 more work to do to contain, remediate, and clean up these contaminated sites throughout the country. 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. And within the brain, there are many different kinds of cells, and the cell that consumes

Starting point is 00:07:07 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.

Starting point is 00:07:43 But all of these guys are inhaled. And so this could be a way of exploiting the 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 things. toxicans are causing many people to have likely many people to have carcences. Before we go to pesticides and outdoor air pollution and talk about some of the top ways that

Starting point is 00:08:14 people are getting this exposure that could be linked strongly with Parkinson's disease, at least that's where you're coming from with the research. How did you feel when you saw that proposed ban? You know, today is October 21st that we're recording this interview, 23. And you more than anybody and your team that you work with that you've also co-authored the book with have been sounding the alarm about why it's so important to ban this chemical. How did you feel when you saw the news? Well, it felt great, but the people who deserve credit for it are people like in Uber,

Starting point is 00:08:48 Massachusetts. I know if you've ever read the book of Civil Action or watched the movie of Civil Action starring John Travolta, their children in a town north of Boston had TCE and their drinking water and those children developed and ultimately died from leukemia. And it was women, I think, by her name is Ms. Anderson, who, you know, when she went to Boston Children's Hospital with her, with her, I think her son, I think it was her son with leukemia. You know, she told the doctor, you know, it's not just my son who's got leukemia. You know, it's two or three kids up the street or developing it and it could be in the water. The doctor thought, no, of course the mom was right.

Starting point is 00:09:30 And so the book, Civil Action, you know, really put this on the map. Another great author, Dan Fagan, wrote a book called Tom's River, New Jersey, talking about TCE, contaminating the water in Tom's River, New Jersey, leading to cancer. Carrie Reinhardt, her daughter died of a rare brain tumor that's typically only found in an adult, but affected her daughter in Franklin, Indiana, which was contaminated with TCE, and at least 82. children in that small town had developed a cancer and she started a nonprofit called if it was your child, you know, highlighting, you know, these chemicals are everywhere and what would you do if it's affecting your child? And then there are researchers from around

Starting point is 00:10:15 the country and around the world who have been working on this. And then there's a story of Camp Lejeune. So this many of your listeners have heard about Camp Lejeune, this marine base in North Carolina that was contaminated with this chemical trichlorathlon and closely related chemicals and cause children there to develop cancer. So, you know, children of Marines developing cancer. And then a recent study showed that Marines who served there, when they were healthy, when they were 20 years old, 30 years later have a 70% increased risk of developing Parkinson disease compared to Marines who served at Camp Pendleton in California. So there's lots of credit to be had for this, including the EPA. Dr. Friedhof and her team have been a fantastic job.

Starting point is 00:10:57 But this is, I like to say, I heard future generations cheering when the EPA banned trichloropylene yesterday, proposed the ban because I think future generations are much less likely to develop cancer, including leukemia, including prostate cancer, including multimiloma, non-hotschukloma, liver cancer and kidney cancer. And I think future generations are less likely to develop Parkinson disease because of this action if implemented. You know, in your advocacy in your book, you're very clear that the people who have developed Parkinson's disease and potentially these other brain disorders that many people are suffering from,

Starting point is 00:11:32 they're victims. And for a long time, the industry knew that these chemicals, like trichloriaethylene, were linked to Parkinson's. Is there any chance in this proposed ban by the EPA that just was announced? Is there any chance of it not going through because of industry capture? I hope not, but, you know, it's kind of hard. to imagine in my mind that a century of causing cancer is not enough to get a chemical ban. Well, that's the hope. And so, but we need to be really vigilant. We need to hold our elected officials responsible for responding to the needs of people. You know, there's a reason that one and eight women

Starting point is 00:12:14 have breast cancer. There's a reason that one and eight men get prostate cancer. There is a reason why rates of cancer are increasing among Americans under the age of 50. There's a reason that rates of cancer are increasing worldwide among people under the age of 50. We need to stop, think about what the underlying causes are that are driving the rates, the increases in the rates of cancer, that are driving the increases in the rates of Parkinson's disease, and think about what in our environment, what can we control to prevent people from ever developing these debilitating and deadly diseases? 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

Starting point is 00:12:54 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 disease, could end up developing. My guess is that you weren't really taught much about that in medical 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 trichlorathleen 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 Parkinson's among twins who had either 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.

Starting point is 00:14:09 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 in, among farmers, was associated the 150% increased risk of developing Parkinson's disease. Dr. Jeff Bronstein and Dr. Biazza Ritz at UCLA, not too far from where you're sitting, did research showing that air pollution and well water drinking

Starting point is 00:14:42 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 and 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 00:15:15 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. 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, because that's really people are probably less familiar with.

Starting point is 00:15:53 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 trichloethylene and 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,

Starting point is 00:16:17 which is about 15 feet or 15 to 50 feet below our, surface and form underground rivers. And these underground rivers that are contaminant with these chemicals, these chemicals are readily volatile. They evaporate and they can evaporate into people's homes, schools, and workplaces undetected. 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, at 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 trichlorophylline

Starting point is 00:16:56 and a closely related chemical called perchlorathylene. It's been rezoned and made into residential homes. So there are multi-million dollar homes in Newport Beach, California, about three miles from the Pacific Ocean or from Pacific Coast Highway that are sitting on top of a plume of trichlorifylene and perchlorifylene. That trichlorifylene and perchlorifylene has been documented. documented, documented to be evaporating into the homes above this plume. And they have found trichlorithene or perchlorothylene in people's master bedrooms in their living rooms and in their pits playrooms.

Starting point is 00:17:32 Mind blowing, first of all, right? That it's not just, you know, when we heard about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, 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, Michigans 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-gazer.

Starting point is 00:18:15 and exposing people through air quality, both indoor and outdoor? There are thousands. They're not 150 of these 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.

Starting point is 00:18:38 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 visited them in North Carolina. 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% of groundwater in the United States is contaminated with these chemicals.

Starting point is 00:18:57 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 is trichloroethylene. There was a study done in Italy. So this is not just the United States that found trichloroethylene in the blood and urine of three-quarters of the men in Italy. These chemicals are everywhere. Dry cleaning is still using.

Starting point is 00:19:22 Lots of dry cleaners are still using perchlorathylene. That releases gas. When you take your dry cleaning into your car, you are now breathing in perchlorathleen. 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.

Starting point is 00:19:40 When you leave that dry cleaner, if they're dry cleaning on site, your daughter's now eating per chloroply crazy. Crazy. Absolutely crazy. You know, how we went down this pathway is we were talking about, 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

Starting point is 00:20:00 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 disease. is, 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 air looks clean. We can't see these, you know, particulates, but we're breathing them in. And could they also be contributing to our overall exposure?

Starting point is 00:20:44 So I don't know. I focus on Parkinson's disease. So I look at the world of a narrow view. And I think there are other indoor air contaminants that could be. Some of those indoor 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. sports fields or golf courses that are sprayed with pesticides, you know, 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. You know, 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 chemists. 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

Starting point is 00:21:53 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 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, Southern California, you know, people remember that 50s and 60s, you, the air pollution was so bad in Los Angeles. people wore masks not because of COVID-1950, but because of air pollution and because of the burning

Starting point is 00:22:47 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. That governor was Ronald Reagan. So there are tons of reasons to do so. Air pollution as a whole, cost 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 will 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

Starting point is 00:23:32 it's likely has been linked to brain diseases, especially Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. And so what is air pollution? So when you're looking out in the small, you can see smog, right? You know, in Southern 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

Starting point is 00:24:16 ultra-fine particular matter, they can actually bypass our normal protective mechanisms into the nerve responsible for smell, 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 Calderon 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. And 202 of those 203 brains, she found the evidence of

Starting point is 00:25:07 Alzheimer's pathology. And in over 20 percent of the brain, 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. I heard you mentioned that even during the original London fog episode, you saw some of the earliest documented cases of Parkinson's disease. Is that true? Well, so Dr. Parkinson's describes Parkinson's in 1817. And he says when he's describing Parkinson's disease, he says,

Starting point is 00:25:52 this has not been classified in the medical literature. He's 61 years old. He's been around the block a few times. He's a well-read man. And you think about it, he's writing a case series of six individuals with a likely a new disease, a disease that hadn't been classified in the medical literature. And there weren't synthetic pesticides back then. Those were largely producing World War II. And there weren't, trichlorethylene wasn't developed. We told you until 1864 and not widely used to 1920. So what was causing Parkinson's disease that Dr. Parkinson's described in 1817. He didn't call it Parkinson disease. He called him shaking palsy. And I think it's air pollution. And air quality in London in 1800 was 20 times worse than it is today. For those of you watch the TV series,

Starting point is 00:26:39 The Crown, you can see the London fog in 1952 when Winston Churchill was Prime Minister. It killed an estimated 12,000 people and led to mass hospitalizations in the first Clean Air Act in the modern world about three years later. The air quality that Dr. Parkinson was experiencing was twice as bad as it was in 1950s London. And so I think he was describing what's like. the result of chronic exposure to air pollution in London. And it turns out that the areas of the world that are most industrialized, like the U.S. and Canada, have the highest rates of disease, and areas that are undergoing the most rapid industrialization and have the fastest, and have among the worst air clawing in the world, like India

Starting point is 00:27:22 and China, have the fastest increasing rates about Parkinson's disease. And so I think Dr. Parkinson may have been describing a disease tied to high levels of industrial air pollution in London, which is the capital of the Industrial Revolution in 1800s about the peak of the Industrial Revolution. Your world is Parkinson's disease and then looking at these environmental factors. What do we know about pesticides in particular and the link that's there? So pesticides have the most evidence for all these environmental toxins. The amount of evidence is most robust for pesticides.

Starting point is 00:28:02 I mentioned to you that farmers who work with certain pesticides, including pesticides called Paraquot, widely used on corn, cotton, and vineyards widely used in Central California, which has among the highest rates of Parkinson's disease, is associated with a 150% increased risk in developing Parkinson's disease. We know when we feed Paraquot to laboratory animals that they produce the clinical and pathological features of Parkinson's disease. Indeed, according to reporting from the British investigative journal, the guardian, the manufacturer of Paraquot knew about its toxic effects since at least in 1960s.

Starting point is 00:28:42 They fed Paraquot not to one, not to two, but to three different species of animals, and they all developed clinical features that would be consistent with Parkinson's disease in the 1960s. And didn't seek to withdraw the chemical, didn't seek to introduce a safer alternative to my knowledge. instead they doubled down on their quote blockbuster product engaged in a freedom to sell and use of paraplot in the United States, including in Central California, has more than doubled over the last five years, which data are available. Over 30 countries, including China, have banned paraquot, but the United States has not. You know, all this and your sabbatical and your reading and the extra research that's come out of that

Starting point is 00:29:27 has led you to believe that Parkinson's is a largely preventable disease if we can get, of course, it's more complicated than just these three, but these three, again, outdoor air pollution, indoor air pollution, pesticides, and TCE, and its derivatives that you mentioned, if we can get those under control, then Parkinson's disease is a largely preventable disease. And when in, oh, sorry, go ahead, please. I even say sometimes it's largely a man-made disease. And the good news is that this is likely preventable. I think it's very likely preventable. There's one high-quality study that shows the incidence, the number of new cases of Parkinson's disease is decreasing, and that's in the Netherlands in a study called the Rotterdam study. And there they show between 1990 and approximately

Starting point is 00:30:18 2,000 rates of Parkinson's disease, new cases, decreased, adjusted for age by about 60%. Crazy amount, crazy amount decreased in a short period of time. I then went back and looked at these three major environmental toxicants, not the only ones, but three major ones, and found that levels of pesticides, especially fat-soluble pesticides in the fatty tissue of humans in the Netherlands, decreased between 75 and 90% in the decades leading up to that decrease in the incidence. I looked at levels of air pollution,

Starting point is 00:30:51 which decreased between 50 and 90% in the, the Netherlands in the decades before the decrease in the incidence of Parkinson's. And in 1981, decades before the decrease, Netherlands had about the lowest level of tri-chlorathlene in the outdoor air of any play in all of Europe. And so, Link, this is an association, this is going back in time, this is not ideally how you would do a research study, but there's clearly an association with a decrease in the decrease in these environmental toxicants and a tie to decreases in the rates of Parkinson's. That suggests for all of us, for United States, for Southern California, for California,

Starting point is 00:31:34 for the country and the world, that if we control our environment, that we can decrease likely the rates of Parkinson's disease. And I don't think it's just Parkinson's disease. I told you about TCs known to cause cancer. We can decrease cancer. We can cause air pollution's linked to Alzheimer's disease. We can decrease the number of people likely affected with Alzheimer's disease. by cleaning up our air. And we've done that. We've already done that in Southern California. The air quality in Southern California is 50 to 90 percent better today than it was in the 1970s. You know, and at the same time, there are more people in Southern California. There are more cars on the road, and the economy is growing more. So you can have a better economy. You can have more people.

Starting point is 00:32:11 You can have more cars and less air pollution. This is all possible. In fact, they might all be synergistic. So we can accomplish all this. And if we do that, we'll all live long. and healthier lives. I can't think of better things that physicians and doctors should be doing than trying to get us to live longer and healthier lives free of medications. It's an important reminder. And really, it's the larger reminder that today's conversation is not just about Parkinson's disease, even though that's your area of expertise and focus, is that many of the things that would help us prevent that would have other, most likely, implications as well. So do you ever get frustrated when, or how do you feel when people go to Google

Starting point is 00:32:51 And they type in, you know, is Parkinson's disease preventable? And, you know, the first link that shows up is the Mayo Clinic. And it says, because the causes of Parkinson's is unknown, there are no proven ways to prevent the disease. You know, is that frustrating? How do you see that? You know, do you understand that largely your work is also, even though you're borrowing and collecting from decades of data that existed, larger your work is about raising awareness that people have not connected the dots? So one of the shortcomings of American medicine, which I'm part of, I was trained at the oldest medical school in the country, is that American medicine goes from disease to treatment, often with not asking how you go from disease to cause.

Starting point is 00:33:37 And the first question you should ask a doctor when you're diagnosed with conditions, why I got this condition. And I'll give you a few reasons why that is. One, if you don't know why you cause the disease, it's really hard to cure it. In fact, I can't think of very many. diseases at all, we can cure medically where we don't know its cause. And anyone with Alzheimer's disease, with ALS, with autism, with Parkinson's, most people want to be cured of those diseases. But if we don't know what it's causes, it's really difficult to cure it. Like contrast, some people remember stomach ulcers, bleeding ulcers. Do you remember what people used to think bleeding ulcers were due to? Yeah, was they, I heard you and Dr. David Perlmutter, a colleague of mine,

Starting point is 00:34:17 talk about this, but they used to treat it by like, you know, doing something with the vagus nerve, an overactive vagus nerve? They're an overactive, vagus nerve, but really people thought it was stress. Stress. But it turns out stomach ulcers aren't due to stress. You know, you can stop your work. And you can, you also get saying, but it's H. Pylori's bacteria. And once we found out what the cause is, you just give people antibiotics and that was the end of stomach ulcers. Almost no one, very few people die of bleeding stomach ulcers. Second reason is if you're diagnosed with the condition, you should stop getting exposed to the causes of the disease. If you're diagnosed with lung cancer, what's the first thing the doctor's going to tell you to do?

Starting point is 00:34:54 Stop smoking. But no one tells someone with Parkinson's disease or Alzheimer's disease to minimize your risk of air pollution or to minimize your risk of pesticides. A few people do I do, but most people don't. And then third, what greater gift to future generations? Sometimes, you know, diseases stink and sometimes we've got the short end of the stick. but it's incumbent upon us to ensure that future generations don't suffer from the same ailments that we do. We live largely in a world free of polio. We live in a world where drinking and driving is socially unacceptable.

Starting point is 00:35:26 We live in a world where HIV is preventable and treatable. These are all gifts that we inherited from previous generations. Few of us had any active role in that. Those are gifts we receive. And just like you have an obligation to receive, you have an obligation to reciprocate. And I can't think of a better gift than we can do to future generations is to give a world where Parkinson's is increasingly less common, where many of these cancers simply never affect children where parents and families never have to bury their children because of a preventable cancer.

Starting point is 00:35:55 I can't think of a much better gift than those. There's been awareness for a long time of, okay, there's diabetes, but there's also pre-diabetes, and a lot more people in America are suffering from pre-diabetes. There are experts in autoimmune conditions that have come on this podcast that are starting to raise the awareness about pre-automune, things that we can be looking at ahead of time before we're on our way to an official diagnosis. Researchers in Alzheimer's are thinking about early cognitive decline, and are you on the track that's there? Is there something that exists in that same category with Parkinson's disease? Is there a pre- Parkinson's disease that people should

Starting point is 00:36:34 be thinking about? Yes, but that they should be first thinking about is not even getting to pre-parkinson's I don't want them to get to pre-park disease. I don't want them to get to pre-alzheimer disease. I don't want to get to pre-diabetes. Listen, in 1990, only one in 10 Americans was obese. Today, over 30% of Americans are obese. Why is that? I think it's because it changes in our diet, right? It can't be changes in our genetics.

Starting point is 00:36:56 And our willpower hasn't changed in 30 years, right? You know, we didn't put soda machines in kids' schools in the 1930s and 40s and 50s, right? That would be unconscionable to do that. We do that every day in the United States, in Southern California, all the time. We give soda to children in school. I mean, what are we thinking about? And then we're wondering why everyone's getting diabetes. And then we're going to pay for expensive medications to reverse that diabetes.

Starting point is 00:37:26 I mean, there is a much easier way and much saner way, a much more favorable way, a much more equitable way, a much more fair way to do this and just prevent people from getting exposure to things that are harmful to their health. And we don't need to be putting it in front of kids, just like we don't put guns and other, we don't put pornography, ideally. We're not putting these things in front of kids because we know there are bad consequences to doing that. If we get rid of pesticides, if certain pesticides, if we get rid of air pollution, if we get rid of chemicals that have been known to cause cancer that have been around for 100 years, we're going to have just a fewer of these diseases. And we're going to have live longer, healthier lives. Today, life expectancy in the United States is less than when I was in medical school. Unfathomable that life expectancy today, 25 years after I was in medical school, is lower. The greatest accomplishment in the 20th century was a 35-year increase in life expectancy

Starting point is 00:38:22 in virtually every part of the world. The greatest accomplishment, perhaps in human history, a 35-year gain in life expectancy for every person on average, 35 years of life expectancy, gained in the 20th century, and we're giving it back. We're giving it back the greatest gift, greatest accomplishment, perhaps in human history, because we're not making rational decisions about our environment. If we make rational decisions about our environment, about what we eat, what we breathe, and what we drink, we'll all live longer, healthier, and likely happier lives. I think there's a lot of people that are listening today, which is like, how do I find a doctor

Starting point is 00:38:59 like you, the amount of passion, the level of awareness? Because many people go, whether it's their primary care doctor or those individuals that are listening today that might be sitting here with a diagnosis of Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or something else. And they've gone to their doctor and they've said, you know, is there anything that I could have done to have either prevented this or are there major things outside of prescription drugs, which great, there's a lot of prescription drugs that are available in treating a lot of these things that I could do. And largely a lot of people here that things like, you know, and I know this firsthand from my mom having been diagnosed with breast cancer and individuals been diagnosed with all sorts of diseases, they'll hear things like,

Starting point is 00:39:41 there's no evidence that such and such has any link to diet. There's no evidence that such and such has any link to this. So I want to come back to your story a little bit. Before you had your awakening during your sabbatical, your sort of red pill moment where you could no longer look at the world the same way. How did you think about Parkinson's disease and what was your hope about what would help us get to the root cause of it? Again, before this sabbatical and your unearthing of these three toxicant categories and their contribution to Parkinson's. I didn't think much about the root causes of Parkinson's disease. I was like most physicians and not thinking about it.

Starting point is 00:40:25 We had identified some genetic causes and about 15% of people can carry genetic risk back from that. disease, but that's saying 85% don't that we know of. And about only 15% of people have a family history of the disease. So we knew that there were environmental factors, but I had not spent much time. You know, I was trained at the oldest medical school in the country, trained at some of the top hospitals and institutions in the United States and have had a very privileged education with some outstanding teachers, and I didn't think about it. And now I do, and I can't stop thinking about it, because I think it's incumbent upon us to create a world where people don't have these diseases. And so I just can't think of a better gift.

Starting point is 00:41:04 There's a book, my son's a philosophy student, and he introduced me to the book called What We O the Future, and it really looks at things like climate change. And, you know, climate change is going to have some short-term ramifications for us, but it's going to have a lot of big ramifications for future generations. And I think what we owe the future is a world where Parkinson's disease is increasingly rare. We owe a future where kids don't die of cancer. we owe a world where Alzheimer's disease isn't affecting six million Americans. We owe a future where people are living longer and healthier lives.

Starting point is 00:41:33 And I think these things are all achievable. We're Americans, we're ambitious, you know, we're entrepreneurial. We can apply all of our skills and things to some of the great health challenges of our time and dramatically transform life for all of us. Can we take a moment here to break down Parkinson's disease a little bit more? Help us understand this idea of misfolded proteins and its role that it plays in the development of Parkinson's. Yeah, so this is hard.

Starting point is 00:41:59 So Stanley Prusner, probably the most famous neurologist, no one knows who a neurologist are, but Stanley Prusner is a neurologist at University of California, San Francisco, and he introduced the idea that misfolded proteins can cause disease,

Starting point is 00:42:13 like preon diseases. And so people know DNA is the genetic material that's found in all of our cells. Chromosomes are just long strands of DNA and genes are little pieces. of DNA. And what is DNA do? DNA is basically a roadmap, a construction manual for the production of proteins. All of our functions in our cells are largely carried out by proteins. They're all

Starting point is 00:42:36 the little workers inside of ourselves are proteins. And these proteins have a structure. And part of that structure is that they make folds, just like a blanket has a fold in it. Some proteins fold in a certain way. Some diseases lead to a misfolding. And you can imagine if you're piling a thing of clothes, and if the second shirt in your pile of 10 shirts is misfolded, all the other shirts are not quite as nice and neat that are above it. And some of this misfolding of a protein can spread, and it can spread from nerve cell to nerve cell to nerve cell. And I told you, when you get diagnosed with the condition, you should say, ask the doctor, well, what caused the disease, or what causes misfolding? And it looks like certain pesticides and some of these,

Starting point is 00:43:22 other toxins can cause misfolding of a protein. The protein's name in Parkinson's is called alpha synuclein. There are other diseases associated with different misfolding of proteins like amyloid and Alzheimer's disease. But Parkinson's appears that these toxicans can cause misfolding of alpha synuclein. This really, really smart pathologist Hico Brock in 2003 postulated that Parkinson's disease does not

Starting point is 00:43:48 begin in the brain. He said that Parkinson's, here to foreconcees, a brain disease and neural disease does not begin in the brain. He said he thought it would begin in the gut because he thought that the part of the biggest nerve which connects our brain stem, the base of our brain to our gut, could lead be a highway, a connection by which misfolding of a protein in your gut, for example, due to an ingested pesticide, whether ingesting that in well water or on food, for example, could lead to misfolding of a protein in your gut. And that misfolding of a protein in your gut could spread via the biggest nerve to other nerve cells in your brain stem,

Starting point is 00:44:27 and then from your brain stem up to higher parts of your brain, that including the area of the brain that's affected in Parkinson's disease, that controls movement, and then later to parts of your brain that are responsible for thinking. In addition to that model of spread, another really smart nuclear medicine position named Per Borcomer, and Denmark has introduced a brain-first model disease in addition to a gut. first model, body first, that Parkinson's begins in the nose and that you inhale these toxicants. These toxins lead to misfolding of alpha-sinuclein in your smell centers, and for there, lead to misfolding different parts of the brain. So it may be that Parkinson's disease doesn't actually

Starting point is 00:45:09 begin the brain, but it might begin in the nose or in the gut, and that these are two of the major ports of entry for air pollution, these certain pesticides and chemicals like tricloric. And is it fair to say for an individual who eventually develops Parkinson's disease is that it could be a combination of those things. It could be the nose exposure, it could be the gut exposure of pesticides through food. So you're getting attacked on all fronts when it comes to these misvaled proteins. It could be. Dr. Borcomer thinks that just like smokers, when they develop cancer, they usually only develop one cancer. Like when you're diagnosed with lung cancer, you have lung cancer in one part of your lung. You don't have 50 cancers throughout

Starting point is 00:45:50 your lung when you're diagnosed. So he actually thinks it's most likely one focus that it could be. Now, you're getting exposed to your nose and your gut, you might be increasing your chances of occurring in different locations. And certainly the dose and duration are likely part of it. But it's likely, as far as we know in 2023, that it begins in a single focus. Now, that focus could be the gut, especially if you're ingesting toxicants, or it could be in your nose, especially if you're inhaling toxicants and what the factors are that determine where it begins are still made to be worked out. But that's our current thing.

Starting point is 00:46:26 This might be a basic question. It might be a dumb question, but you'll tell me because you're the expert. When these toxins get inside of our body and they interact with these proteins, what is mechanically happening that they are doing that is causing this sort of wrecking ball type damage to our body. Like if we could see through an electron microscope or something like, what are they doing? We know, we have heard of viruses, hijacking cells and replicating and other things, but what are these toxins actually doing on a mechanical level to these proteins in our body? So I spend my time in front of a computer screen and not in the laboratory.

Starting point is 00:47:06 So I'm going to have to tell you to invite Dr. Brianna D. Miranda, an outstanding neurotoxicologist at the University of Alabama, Burringham, invite her on to your Drew, and she'll tell you how these toxicans lead to misfolding of the protein, because that's the kind of stuff that she does. Okay. Do you know anything big picture in terms of what makes these toxicants unique? Is it that they are, you know, free radicals? And so they're highly volatile inside of the body. And so they are literally causing wrecking ball-like carnage. Any thoughts about that? Yeah. So I think all of the ones I've described largely damaged energy producing parts of cells. And it turns out the nerve cells that produce dopamine in the brain, I told you, are chock full of mitochondria, which might explain why they are selectively vulnerable to these mitochondrial toxicants.

Starting point is 00:47:59 It turns out there are other nerve cells in our body that are also chock full of mitochondria. So if you think about the nerves that are responsible for controlling movement, you have literally a nerve cell that goes from your brain down to your spinal core, which might be a meter, three feet. length, another one that goes from your spinal cord down to your foot. That's another three feet in length. I'm six with five, so I'm a tall guy. So, and these things are also potentially damaged by these mitochondrial toxins, and diseases like ALS, Lugaric disease are also linked to pesticides. So I think what's the cells that are most vulnerable to these mitochondrial toxin are nerve cells. These nerve cells have huge amounts of mitochondria in it. And these nerve cells, especially in the area, of the brain that produces dopamine and are chock full, even more full of mitochondria,

Starting point is 00:48:52 which might explain why they are more vulnerable to these toxicants than other nerve cells, for example. A lot of people listening here today are pretty familiar with the idea of choosing a better dry cleaning option. And a lot of people listening today are probably shopping, organic, or at least avoiding the dirty dozen that are out there. But part of your advocacy and work is, is that... we are also trying to make the world a better place because some of this exposure that people

Starting point is 00:49:22 have had that could express itself as Parkinson's disease diagnosis later on in life could been from exposure many, many years ago. Can you chat about that? Yeah. So it turns out that we mentioned who among the exposed gets Parkinson's disease. So only 10% of smokers develop lung cancer. The vast majority smokers don't get lung cancer. Some get emphysema, some get heart disease, some get stroke. What are the factors by which we determine who among farmers working with paraquot, for example, are most likely to develop Parkinson's disease? Some of it might be due to genetics.

Starting point is 00:50:00 And so certain people have variations in the way they metabolize these pesticides. Some of them might be explained by when people are exposed. And so I think, I think, I don't know, I think, that children and even infant, and even babies and perhaps even in utero are at greater risk for the effects of these toxicants. You can imagine that the same amount of pesticide is going to have a much bigger effect on a one-year-old than on a full-grown adult. It also turns out that the blood-brain barrier is less developed and that the brain is more developing in young children and therefore may be more susceptible to its effects. We also know that it takes years and likely decades and likely multiple decades for these diseases to become manifest.

Starting point is 00:50:49 You don't smoke a cigarette and get lung cancer the next day. You have to smoke cigarettes usually for some period of time. And it's usually some period of time later when you develop lung cancer. And I think the same may be true for Parkinson's disease. And so I think it's really incumbent not to worry, not only to be not only focused on adults or even older adults and the health effects of these toxicans, but to really be thinking about them for kids. There is, from Camp Lejeune, many of you know the former basketball player, former Laker for Lakers, Brian Grant, developed Parkinson's disease, likely perhaps while playing for the Los Angeles

Starting point is 00:51:28 Lakers, didn't have a very good season that year, but was diagnosed with Parkinson's at age 36. It turns out when he was three years old, a three-year-old boy, he was living at the Marines. base Camp Lejeune that was contaminated with trichloroethylene. His father was a marine station there and he was likely drinking in level water that was containing with this at levels anywhere between 70 to 3,000 times the safe levels. He was there during the peak contamination. Chemicals readily volatile and so not only was he drinking likely drinking this water, but when he was bathing, taking a bath and the water is warm, this is being evaporated. He's likely breathing it in. And so I think we need to think about what's happening to children when

Starting point is 00:52:16 they're getting exposed to these toxicans because I think that could be planning the seed for future cases of Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease. And we talked to you about the Mexico City study where we saw Alzheimer's pathology and children as young as 11 months old. So I think these toxicans, early childhood exposure could be a critical issue. We also know for pesticides, for example, that early childhood exposure is really detrimental in terms of causing intellectual disabilities. One of the resources in your book is basically a map of all of these sort of sites that are around the country that people can look at and sort of double check and make sure that they're not living next to. You've mentioned a few of them, that they're not living next to one of these areas,

Starting point is 00:53:00 at least with the TCE, that have this deep potential exposure. You mentioned Newport Beach. there's another one that's just north of me. I believe that's in Ventura in that area, Ventura County, which is a site that has been shut down for many years that has massive level of exposure and contamination of TCE. Yeah, so this is one of the maps. So this is just Silicon Valley. So I don't know how far you are from the 101 freeway,

Starting point is 00:53:29 but there are 15 superfund sites contaminate with TCE along a seven-mile stretch of the 101. freeway in Sunnyvale, California. 15 superfund sites, most toxic sites in the country, contaminant with tri-flow ephalina long and seven-mile stretch in Sunnyvale, California, some of the most expensive real estate in the country. And that's because TCE was widely used in semiconductor industry to clean off electronics. And so one of the headquarters of Google is situated on a former Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel site

Starting point is 00:54:04 that was contaminated with TCE. So we highlight in the book, Ms. Jane Horton, who lives near that site and was found to have TCE in her indoor air. And the good news is that this is readily remediable. All you need to do is get an equivalent of a radar remediation system put in. It sucks the air underneath your foundation, vents it above your house, and you can breathe free and fresh, clean air in your house, free of TCE, free of radon, and free of increasing your risk of cancer and likely Parkinson's. 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 importance of using a high-quality water filter.

Starting point is 00:54:44 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. 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 the pesticides in your water. And we talked about air filters which can reduce your exposure to particular. matter and other chemicals in your indoor air.

Starting point is 00:55:32 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. Testing your home, people have had their homes, basements tested for radon. The testing for trichlorophthalene is very similar to that for getting a home tested for radon. I've never had my house tested for trichlorophthalm. Fortunately, I live in my house was likely on a cornfield before it was a house. So you should only, so 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?

Starting point is 00:56:08 That's the, you're not telling everybody to get tested. Yeah, no. 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 degreasing metal, I'd get my home tested. If I live near a landfill, or 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 test, and if it's found to have high levels of trichlo-ethylene is addressable. You get, I think the cost is like $1,500 to $2,000. You get a remediation system

Starting point is 00:56:45 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 in dilutes. You know, not perfect solution, but, you know, it's a very practical solution. Lots of 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. Are there any consumer level tests for the body to look at either urine or blood? So I love it. I love there to be. I don't know. The challenges, as we alluded to, is that if you're getting current exposure to TCE, for example, or per Chloricline, if likely, if you are working in dry cleaner, I think there are tests in your blood and urine that could be

Starting point is 00:57:28 done to see if you're getting ongoing exposure to it. Now, as we mentioned, most people were exposed to it at some point in the past. And to my knowledge, there aren't readily available tests for testing it. I alluded to the fact that some pesticides dissolve in fat. And so there have been research studies that have looked at people's fatty tissue, their adipose tissue, and found, like, high levels of DDT or the metabolites of DDT in their fat. And that's one way to do it. You're probably Ness going to ask me. He's their way to get these toxicans out of your body. And so there was one study that looked at trying to get high levels, and maybe back up,

Starting point is 00:58:10 and people with Parkinson's, they have high levels of iron in their brain, perhaps from air pollution, perhaps from other causes. And there was a study looking at a chelation therapy to take the iron out. The chelation therapy and oral pill worked. It took the iron out, but it actually made their Parkinson's disease worse and caused lots of other adverse. effects. The study was published in New England Journal of Medicine and really unfortunately demonstrated the safety risks with curation therapy. So there aren't good ways of getting these

Starting point is 00:58:40 toxicans out that we know of. There are lots of things that people can do to modify the course of the disease, including changes in their diet, changes in exercise, limiting ongoing exposure to these toxicans. But there aren't great ways right now that we know we can take a medicine to take the intoxication out. Yeah, medical detoxification is a whole, you know, expertise, and there's not a lot of people that specialize in it. There have been some functional medicine, integrative doctors that have been on this podcast

Starting point is 00:59:13 that have a deep experience from working with a lot of different patients that are out there, but, you know, people really have to dig deep and try to find individuals that are there. Once somebody has a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease, Again, your core reminder is that still, just like if you got lung cancer, you would tell the patient stop smoking, if that's something that they're doing, which is by and large what a lot of people are doing who have lung cancer. But outside of avoiding the toxicants in the first place, is there any other things that could be supportive to that individual? Yeah, there are hundreds of things that people can be doing. So there's evidence that people with Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease who are exposed to high levels of air pollution after they've been diagnosed have an increased risk of getting hospitalized.

Starting point is 01:00:06 So if you have Parkinson's disease and you can choose to live in an area with low levels of air pollution. If you can't choose to live in areas of low levels of air pollution, I would get an air filter. This is what we, my kids got, their grandparents, they who live in Southern California, air filters for their bedroom and their kitchen, you know where we spend most a lot of time. I put a carbon filter on my water. We didn't talk about people and a lot of Californians get their water from a well. These tend to be rural residents. If you get your water from a well, those wells are not regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act. And so they're infrequently tested.

Starting point is 01:00:46 They're prone to be contaminated with pesticides because they're, There's wash off from nearby farms. The wells tend to be shallow. And some of them can be contaminated with industrial chemicals like trichlorethylene. So if you get your water from a well, you should have your well tested specifically for pesticides and specifically for trichlorethylene and perchloratylene because many of the testing is mainly aimed at testing for bacteria, which you don't want in your water, but misses these other chemicals. And then putting a carbon filter on it.

Starting point is 01:01:16 On terms of your diet, there's increasing evidence that people who eat a Mediterranean diet not only are a lower risk for developing Parkinson's disease, but may be beneficial for it. At a minimum, a Mediterranean diet, which is low on animal products, is likely to expose you to less concentrated levels of pesticides as they make their way up the food chain. So I recommend for people with Parkinson's yeast to eat a Mediterranean diet, low in animal products, high in fruits and vegetables. If you can, I buy organic. I wash all my fruits and vegetables, even the organic ones with water and a pesticide wash. Pesticide wash is just basically soap for your vegetables, and it removes the fat soluble pesticides that aren't readily washed off with just water.

Starting point is 01:02:02 So there are ways to improve your air quality. There's ways to improve your water quality, and there's ways to improve your food quality, all of which I think are instrumental for addressing that carpenter disease. even after you've had the disease, and we haven't even gotten to exercise and other things like that. I've heard you mentioned before on other podcasts, you know, the Mediterranean diet approach and how you yourself have chosen to go, you know, in this direction, and you have also lowered the amount of animal products that you've consumed. Are you at all familiar with the work of

Starting point is 01:02:33 a researcher in the multiple sclerosis space? Dr. Terry Walsh, are you familiar at all with her Walsh protocol? No. So Dr. Terry Wals was diagnosed with progressive. MS. She's been on this podcast before. At one point in time, she was banned by the multiple Scrosis Foundation for giving any lectures where she would talk about, you know, talking at the different various chapters of the MS Foundation. And then fast forward a few years later, after she had essentially, you know, largely driven her progressive MS, which left her wheelchair bound, driven it into, you know, not remission, but basically not having those same.

Starting point is 01:03:13 symptoms and being wheelchair bound to now walking, she developed this whole process called the Walls Protocol and then was given a million dollar grant by the Multiple Scrosis Foundation. So she went from being banned to being given a million dollar grant to further her research. And she's done a lot of really interesting research in the space. I'm bringing her up because even though her work is in MS, a lot of the people that she's trained in the Walls Protocol and a lot of the research that she's put together, many people anecdotally online have also reported that following her Walls Protocol, they've seen

Starting point is 01:03:43 improvements in Parkinson's disease, which largely are very similar to a lot of things that you talk about. Reducing exposure. She herself was grown, she was raised on a farm in Iowa and was exposed to all sorts of pesticides, you know, growing up. Of course, getting out of ultra-processed foods. Ultra-processed foods themselves have, seem to have higher sources and concentration of pesticides just through their nature of how they're being, you know,

Starting point is 01:04:12 manufactured and put together. The one thing she says about animal protein that I just wanted to get your sort of thoughts on is that in particular, a lot of these patients seem to have, whether it's their toxic burden or other factors, they seem to have deep nutritional deficiencies. So certain things like targeted amounts of organ meats are recommended for them to be brought in to help them replenish. Now, you're not familiar with their work, and I'm not asking you directly comment on that. Is it that, what is it in particular about the low animal protein? Is it your concern around that animal foods could have exposure to higher toxins? And are you okay with individuals who still might be able to consume some animal products, but that they would be from very clean sources,

Starting point is 01:05:01 the same way that somebody might get organic food, they might go out there and get, you know, grass fed or pasture raised, you know, chicken? Yeah, I think it, I think it's sometimes what we don't So I'll give you an example. So there was a pesticide called heptoclore that was banned the United States. But in Hawaii, the Pineapple Growers Association wanted an exemption to use heptoclore on their cash crop pineapples. And so that was granted. And they sprayed heptochlor on the pineapples. And then they fed the chop of the pineapple, like the green, leaky part on top of the pineapple.

Starting point is 01:05:38 They fed that to cows. and the cows ate the hephylore lace chop, chop, and then they concentrated that fat soluble pesticide in their milk. And then that milk made its way onto the shelves in Hawaii, leading to a recall of milk in Hawaii, I think in the 1970s. Researchers happened to be doing a different study looking at heart disease and aging, and they did a study, and they found that high, consumers of milk in Hawaii had a higher rate of Parkinson's disease. Then they followed these

Starting point is 01:06:18 individuals to their death and then looked at their brains and lo and behold, they had fewer of those dopamine-producing nerve cells in the area of parts of the brain that are known to be affected by Parkinson's. Those who drank high levels of milk had fewer dopamine-producing nerve cells in the parts of the brain affected by Parkinson's, and they found the metabolite of Hephtaclore in the person's brain. They found the smoking gun, all because likely, possibly, because heptoclore was being sprayed on the feed that was being consumed by the cows. And so you think about the same thing has been happened in Japan. I think it was whale blubber. I can't remember which fish it was. Certain pesticides like heptoclore were sprayed on rice patties coming out of World War II.

Starting point is 01:07:07 They made their way into the fat of fish in Japan, aquatic animals in Japan, and they made their way into the fatty tissues of humans. In Japan, where rates of these pesticides and people's fat increased from the 1940s all the way until about the 1980s, surely after these pesticides were banned. So for me, for Parkinson's disease, I'm most concerned about getting exposed to toxicans in the food that we eat, and therefore, you know, the less fish and animals you eat, the less these things make their way up into food chain. If you eat, you know, organically grown animals that are less exposed to these things, I think your risks and my concerns would be less from a Parkinson's standard. In your research at all, and a lot of people talk about this, it's probably one of the more well-known pesticides, have you seen any link to glyphosate and Parkinson's disease? So glyphosate is this weed killer.

Starting point is 01:08:08 Paracquot is such a toxic weed killer that it kills the weeds that glyphosate or roundup doesn't kill. Wow. So the evidence on glyphosate in Parkinson's disease is much more limited. I personally don't think it's a major contributor to Parkinson's disease. But it turns out, as you might know, that especially farmers aren't just exposed to one pesticide. They're often, it's my colleague, Dr. Boss Bloom, let's point out, a cocktail of pesticides. And it could turn out that these combinations of pesticides might have synergistic effects that amplify the risks of Parkinson's disease. But I think we know a bunch of pesticides that we know damage the energy producing parts of cells.

Starting point is 01:08:51 We know that when they're fed to animals, they reproduce the features of disease. In fact, some of our animal models of Parkinson's disease are based on pesticide exposures to these animals. And there's a lot of epidemiological data for them, parapod and not. other ones like heptochloricorpoporopause or others, roetone are, I think are all much more strongly linked to Parkinson's disease than glyphus. My glyphosate has also been linked to cancer, and that's a whole other talk. And lots of people far better versed than I am to talk about that.

Starting point is 01:09:22 Are green dry cleaners? Are they actually green? Are they any better? Is there any way to navigate this space? Sometimes, you know, I'm very fortunate. I largely get to work from home. I only typically use a dry cleaner when I get ready for a wedding or have to wear a suit for a special occasion. But I know a lot of people have to regularly use dry cleaners.

Starting point is 01:09:47 What is your, you know, research and travels shown you? Is that are they better for you or do we need a little bit more transparency in that industry? Well, I'll say this, per chlorophylline, this trichloratylene with one more chlorine at them is not. good for you. And so I'll just read you a little bit. I, you know, I'm kind of weird. And it's like that's weird. Let's get weird. Thing on that tetrachloroethylene or perchloroethylene right next to me. And this is from the National Library of Medicine report that I got and I think it's produced by the federal government. And this is on tetrachloroethylene or perchlorathylene. And I'll just read a little

Starting point is 01:10:30 bit of it for you. perchlorothylene has been frequently found in higher levels in fatty foods in residence and markets near dry cleaning establishments. So if you live, if you're in New York City, you live in an apartment building, oftentimes the ground floor is a dry cleaner, right? So you come out, you drop off your dry cleaning, you go to work, you come back, you're dry cleaning up. If you live in an apartment building above that dry cleaner, because this chemical is volatile, you will have, you can have perchlorathleen in your. your indoor air at levels that are unsafe. And because perchlorothylene dissolves in fat, when you open your refrigerator door, you can find perchlorothylene in the butter and the margarine in the refrigerator.

Starting point is 01:11:15 Wow. This is from the study. Perchlorithing, they call tetrchlorothylene, same thing, has been frequently found in higher levels in fatty foods in residence and markets near dry cleaning establishments. In Germany, the concentrations of perchloritheline in foods in a supermarket near a dry cleaning shop were 110 parts per billion in margarine. You know, usually wanted this to be less than five. Seven in her butter, 36 in cheese spread, 21 in butter, 25 in flour, 36 in cornstarch. The concentration found in foods taken into a dry cleaning shop were two parts per billion in fruit sherber,

Starting point is 01:11:52 1,330 in chocolate-coated ice cream when I mentioned your daughter, 4,450 in chocolate and nut-coated ice cream, and 18,750 in an ice cream confection. Butter obtained from a supermarket located near a dry cleaning establishment contained concentrations between 100 and 1,000 parts per billion, whereas other shops not near dry cleaning have less than 50. Concentrations in butter in apartments above a coin-operated dry cleaners in Hamburg, Germany were as high as 58,000 parts per billion. Concentrations of 500 to 5,000 parts per billion were found in 4.

Starting point is 01:12:29 of six four or fifty six margin samples from a supermarket in dc the concentration's remaining samples were 100 to 500 in some samples so yeah i get really really really concerned about dry cleaning i don't use a dry cleaner that uses per chlorathleen i think they use a silicon base um solvent i don't know what the safety risk of it are but i got to be less than per chloroethylene all this to dry clean clothes and then, you know, men, when they get their shirts, they're often laundered, so they're not dry clean. So, but if I were getting dry clean clothes, I would not be using perchlorethylene at all. The EPA has determined that perchlorothylene poses an unreasonable risk to human health. And earlier this year proposed a ban on all consumer applications of perchlorathlain,

Starting point is 01:13:20 including a phase out of its use in dry clean over the next 10 years. I think California is working on a bill that would ban the use of perchloroquine and dry cleaning, hopefully, before that time. Is TCE and PCE, is it similar to lead in the sense that there's no safe level of exposure? Some of my colleagues would, I've seen some of my colleagues think that that might be the case. I just don't know. I go by what are the published standards. States vary. Some states have stricter limits than other states.

Starting point is 01:13:55 And in general, the levels that have been deemed to be safe have only been decreasing over time. And, you know, I'm so concerned about it that, you know, I put a carbon filter, even though presumably the water coming into my house has been tested and found to have at least subthreshold levels of these chemicals in it. But I want even lower than that. Yeah. I was at a friend's house earlier this year and I drank their water and I was like, oh, man, I, you know, you know, you guys just moved in this house. I got to get you a water filter, right? This just tastes like normal tap water.

Starting point is 01:14:26 He's like, come on, man. Like, we didn't grow up drinking, you know, filtered water. I was like, yeah, I know. But like there's all these chemicals that we didn't grow up getting exposed to or maybe not in these highest concentrations. And so environmental working group, which is a nonprofit, eWG.org, they have a water database. And I typed it in for my area here in Los Angeles, my zip code.

Starting point is 01:14:47 And I was surprised to see that even though the, The TCE and the PCE was lower than what the legal limit is, and I think the legal limit is five parts per billion, there was still elevated levels of TCE found in the water supply at 0.602 parts per billion. So it's just another reminder that, and then adding on top of it, the last mile, which would have all sorts of additional exposure, you know, they're testing this water right out of the water facility. location, but then it has to go through a whole bunch of pipes. There could be cracks. There could be exposure. There could be, you know, waste sites that this has to go through. So who knows how much worse off it is. So just another reminder, get a high quality water filter. I personally prefer reverse osmosis. You know, I think that's one of the best ones that you can get and it's going to be cheaper for you and you're not going to have, and you're going to have more of the other toxins

Starting point is 01:15:45 removed from there as well, too. It's just going to be one of those things that's going to be beneficial for your health across the board. Yeah. And by the way, I used to think, like your friend, I used to think the water we drink was safe. I used to think the food we eat was safe and the air we breathe was safe. I no longer think of it. So is your family now like, Dad, you should have never taken that sabbatical. Like, what the heck? You know, we're working on our sons. You know, they still eat like the same food that, you know, other American teenagers and young adults eat. I think we're all getting increasingly aware of this. And I think it's really hopeful. I mean, think about it. If these toxicans are contributing to these disease and we reduce our exposure to these toxicans,

Starting point is 01:16:29 then our risk of getting cancer, our risk of getting breast cancer, our risk of getting Parkinson's disease, of Alzheimer's disease, all these things we can reduce. Now, many of these things are determined by our societal, our societal environment. And those of us who are physicians and have higher incomes, you know, are much better position to address this and have the privilege of being able to, you know, afford organic produce and the like. But if we minimize our exposure to these toxicans, we can all live longer, healthier lives and spending a lot less time with doctors and a lot less time taking medications and a lot less money spending on medication. Great reminder. So step one, you know, avoid these toxicants in the first place, right? We talked

Starting point is 01:17:09 about those three categories extensively in the main ways that people would get exposed to them. Number two, which is a no-brainer. It's going to improve your waistline as well, is reduce your consumption of calories from ultra-processed foods, right? Highly minimize those. We are in America amongst the young population, I believe it's 70% before the pandemic. So it's probably gone up since the pandemic because we know everybody's drinking crap and eating crap way more than they were even before the pandemic. Number three here, we've talked about air quality. and getting an good quality filter if you can afford it. And if you can't, often just opening the windows in your car, in your home,

Starting point is 01:17:47 especially if the outdoor air is going to be in a better position. If the outdoor air is not in a good position, then you obviously have to be mindful of that, especially if you live close to one of these sort of, you know, areas that might be off-gassing, like you're living close to a dry cleaner, right? Or you live near a highway. Or you live near a highway. I mean, LA Times has done some outstanding reporting on this.

Starting point is 01:18:08 I think the general guidelines is that people should not be living within 500 meters of a highway, yet we're building schools, I think, that sometimes are closer than that. You know, anyone jogging in Southern California sees the film that's on your car when you drive. You know, if that film is going on your car, what are you inhaling when you're driving through traffic? Were you inhaling when, if you live near the 405 freeway or multiple freeways, I think these are all major considerations that were overlooked. Yeah, and sometimes we can't, you know, we are where we are and we have to make do the best. I live in a very nice area of Los Angeles.

Starting point is 01:18:48 And I would say that I am not 500 meters from the 405, but I'm probably not that much off. And it's still a nice area. And regularly on my balcony, I will see this layer of soot that's there, tire dust, you know, the particulates that have gathered in the air, lead from, you know, this, that, whatever it might be. I can't control that. That's where I live right now at the moment. We're not planning on moving anytime soon. But what I can do is that I, because I really care about indoor air quality, I'd rather

Starting point is 01:19:21 splurge on a filter, a high-quality air filter than I would on some vacation to Cancun or something. Not that they'd cost anywhere near the same, but I'm just saying for me, that health is a priority because it's not just that I'm trying to avoid Parkinson's disease. air quality, especially indoor air quality, has a deep link with cardiovascular disease. We've had many cardiologists on this podcast talking about the importance of protecting the endothelial lining inside of the body and how things like air pollutants and especially PM2.5, these particulate matters that are 2.5 and bigger can be things. And I regularly, I know that these things work because

Starting point is 01:20:00 I monitor the air quality inside of my house using a few different devices that are there. So when my air filters on, my air quality on average in the house in different rooms is anywhere from like a 93 to 100 on a scale of 100. When it's off, just from the leakage and the off gassing inside, the air quality can quickly drop down to like the low 70s, which I know long term is not a good situation, right? So we talked about water quality, air quality. And then, you know, generally speaking, once you've started to move away from the ultra-process foods, you know, focusing on, as you were mentioning, more of a Mediterranean-style diet where you're getting all the healthy things

Starting point is 01:20:38 that are being added in. Is there anything else that we missed, like, exercise, which I know you're a big fan of? Yeah, so it turns out that vigorous exercise is equivalent of three and a half to four hours of exercise running or swimming a week is associated with a 20% decreased risk developing Parkinson's disease.

Starting point is 01:20:55 And numerous studies have demonstrated that exercise for people with Parkinson's disease is very beneficial. usually enough exercise to make you sweat. But other than that, it's dealer's choice. Everything from yoga to ballroom dancing to bicycling to tai chi have all been shown to be beneficial for people with Parkinson's disease. So I recommend if people can do so at least an hour a day of exercise if they have Parkinson's disease. And I always say if I had Parkinson's, I would do two hours a day.

Starting point is 01:21:27 What are some future studies that you'd like to see? conducted in the space of Parkinson's, which is your area of expertise, to build on top of the body of work that you've gathered and collected in your book, ending Parkinson's disease, a prescription for action. I would love us to be able to get an assay and to look at people with Parkinson's disease compared to like age-match controls and see if they have higher levels of pesticides in them, if they have higher levels of trichloro-ethylene in them, if they have greater evidence of exposure with air pollution. I think that would be an enormously beneficial study for the field would really

Starting point is 01:22:09 give us additional evidence that my hypothesis about environmental toxins causing Parkinson's is even more robust. And most of this research is not research that I've done. Most of its research that my friends and colleagues have done. So I think that would be a fantastic step. And then I think we need to think just from a risk-benefit standpoint, even in the absence of proof, you know, very few, very few things in life, or can you prove an absence of proof, what are we doing in terms of dry cleaning? I mean, is per chlorathylene, is a dry clean cloth soup worth an increased risk of cancer? Is it worth an increased risk of Parkinson's? I think the answer to that is clearly no. I think we can do lots of things in our society to prevent our exposure to these toxins.

Starting point is 01:22:55 I wanted to ask you, as you started to put your name out there and write a book, which not all researchers in this space, you know, go to that next level. But I so appreciate it because at the end of the day, it's these consumers and advocacy who are trying to make better decisions and choices. Have you received any pushback from peers in your space? So why all proceeds from our books are being, authors are doing all the proceeds from the book to efforts to prevent and end Parkinson's. I think some like I was skeptical about the role of environmental toxicans in Parkinson's disease, I wrote the book. And so as I wrote the book, I became increasingly less skeptical. I think even my co-authors were skeptical, even though one of them had done research in 2000 in the most

Starting point is 01:23:43 cited study this century demonstrating that chronic exposure to a pesticide called rote-known led laboratory animals to develop the clinical and pathological features of Parkinson's. I think they were skeptical. Now, some of them are even greater evangelist. Evangelist. Evangelical. than I am. One's more concerned about glyphosate than I am, for example. And I think there's still resistance in our community. I'm actually sitting here writing a paper in which we're debating whether genetic or environmental causes are the principal factors underlying that Parkinson's disease. We obviously think it's environmental ones. I think we're gradually making headways. I think the newer generation, younger physicians, this makes a lot more into. sense. They're a little bit more exposed to it. The idea that that environmental toxins and that pesticides have adverse health consequences is not like newer rocket science to them. That's what they grew up thinking and being taught. I think it's a little bit harder for Zoom. My other colleagues

Starting point is 01:24:46 who think Parkinson's might just be a natural consequence of aging. I obviously don't think that's the case. The real challenge is getting is informing the public. And that's why the work that you do is so important, Drew, because the people who change the course of these diseases aren't neurologists. The people who change the course of diseases are ordinary Americans and ordinary people from all different parts of the world. Those are the people who led the March of Dimes. It wasn't like Jonas Sock wasn't leading the March of Dimes. He's the beneficiary of those dimes that led him to develop a vaccine that had led us to have a nearly world free of Parkinson's, along with Albert Sabin. You know, the people who changed the course of HIV weren't infectious

Starting point is 01:25:26 disease doctors. Many doctors refused to care for people with. HIV. Many hospitals refused to admit patients with HIV. And it was people in the 1980s in New York City and in San Francisco who changed the course of HIV, you know, were blamed for their disease and confronted enormous stigma against them, enormous discrimination and made a lot of people, including many of us, uncomfortable. But by changing the dialogue around HIV, they have prevented millions of us, including possibly you, possibly me, from ever developing HIV. What a wonderful gift. And it was, you know, people most directly affected by drinking and driving as Candace Leitner, I think she's from California, whose 12-year-old daughter was struck by a drunk driver and

Starting point is 01:26:14 killed four days later. Four days after her daughter's death, she started an organization that would become the Mothers Against Drinking and Driving. Americans, 10,000 Americans fewer die from drinking and driving each year because of the work of man. 10,000 Americans, think about that. 10,000 communities aren't bearing a teenager in their school because of the work of Candace Lightner and mothers against drunk driving. These are the heroes. These are the heroines.

Starting point is 01:26:42 These are the people who change the course of diseases and allow us to live longer, healthier lives, lives, free of unspeakable suffering. Powerful. As we wind down here, Dr. Dorsey, I wanted you to, just for a quick moment here, you know, you mentioned something, which is that you are writing a paper where you're debating with peers that are in your space about what are the primary contributors to Parkinson's. Is it genetic or is it these environmental aspects, which you firmly believe, and you're building on top of the research of other individuals who also believe that as well, too,

Starting point is 01:27:14 if you had to steal man the argument that people who think it's genetic, because, you know, I'd love to hear that because as a layperson, I'm thinking, you know, this is new, right? Like, yes, we may have not had the level of sophistication and diagnosis that we have today, but isn't it so clear just like our rise in obesity that this is a new phenomenon? So what would somebody who thought that this was genetic if you had to take their side for a second and argue on their behalf, what information are they looking at that would even lead them to that conclusion? So one, there are some purely genetic causes of Parkinson's disease. They account for about 1 to 2% of people with Parkinson's disease who have a pure genetic form.

Starting point is 01:28:01 They usually have a very young age of onset, and so there are some, they're rare. They exist. There are other genetic causes, you know, up to 15, maybe 20%, they might push it, were their genetic risk factors. The people, these 15 to 20% of people, they have a less, than 50-50 risk of developing the disease. So even if you are in these 15 to 20 percent, your likelihood of develop, you're more likely than not to never develop Parkinson's but that's what they would say. And then they would say these genetic risk factors combined with aging work, living longer lives. And as you live longer lives, your risk of Parkinson's goes up. Turns out, as you live longer lives, your risk of lung cancer goes up too. Doesn't

Starting point is 01:28:46 mean that it's due to the aging is, I think it's due to longevity, these diseases take many years to unfold. And then they would argue that we haven't identified all the genetic causes of the disease. And so that's what I think they would make the argument that there are some rare genetic causes. There are some genetic risk factors that account for 15 to 20 percent of people who have the disease have these. They're known, by the way, the genetic risk factors to interact with pesticides, for example. So that's a great explanation why some people exposed to pesticides develop the disease and why some don't. And that there are research to be done. and we'll find other ones.

Starting point is 01:29:22 I kind of think it's unlikely. We've, you know, sequence the human genome for 20 years, and we've made huge headway in our terms of knowledge. If they're hiding, they're hiding really, really, really well, and then that it's tied to aging. But lots of diseases are tied to aging.

Starting point is 01:29:38 It just doesn't mean, you know, you don't put a laboratory mouse in the lab and let it live for a long period of time and then spontaneously it develops Parkinson's, that just doesn't happen. They have to be exposed to these toxins for this time. I appreciate you taking their argument for a second and looking at their lens so that our audience can benefit because they're not the expert that you are, you know, who's having these conversations. And obviously, you don't agree with those conclusions that are there and that you feel, correct or if I'm wrong, the evidence is so strong, which is what we spent the last hour and a half on, that there's a high likelihood that these are being driven, Parkinson's disease in particular, by these environmental factors.

Starting point is 01:30:19 and there might even be natural experimentations, not perfect, but I have heard you talk about some natural experimentations that have happened between different communities showcasing, I believe it was in the military, that, you know, you expose these individuals and the rates of Parkinson's disease go through the roof. Yeah, I mean, so the contrary is, listen, we know in Canada, they looked at rates of pesticide use in different areas of Quebec,

Starting point is 01:30:49 and compared to race to Parkinson's. There was a near perfect correlation between rates of pesticide use and rates of Parkinson's in Canada. As you know, there's almost nothing that has a perfect correlation. You know, if you took the height of athletes and their likelihood to play basketball, it wouldn't be a perfect correlation. But a near perfect correlation between rates of pesticide use and rates of Parkinson's in Canada, same thing has been done in France and found the same thing.

Starting point is 01:31:15 Rates of pesticides in different vineyards in France had a near-perfectious. correlation with rates of Parkinson's. We know that within the United States, there's a tenfold variation in the rates of Parkinson's. Genetics don't vary tenfold, whether you live in Arizona or in Kansas. And we know there's a five-fold variation in rates of Parkinson's worldwide. Areas the world that are most industrialized like the United States and Canada have a five-time higher rate of Parkinson's, adjusted for age, than areas of the world that are less industrialized like sub-Saharan Africa, and air is the world that are undergoing the most rapid industrialization like China and India, which have increasing uses of air pollution, increasing uses of trichloratylene,

Starting point is 01:31:55 have the fastest increasing rates of Parkinson's disease, trichloratlin, especially in China. So there's tons and tons of evidence that these things are tied to environmental factors. We also need to recognize that there are diseases that are almost purely environmental. Lung cancer in the United States 100 years ago almost didn't exist. I'll say the lung cancer deaths in the United States 100 years ago were almost zero. It was so rare that doctors considered lung cancer when they saw it a once-in-a-lifetime oddity. They gather all the doctors and students around to show them because they never thought they'd see a case. Wow.

Starting point is 01:32:33 That's because cigarettes were introduced in the early 1900s and then 25 years after cigarettes were introduced. You see a beautiful and corresponding rise, not beautiful, terrible, corresponding rise in the rates of lung cancer. smoking decreases in LA in the 1960s and 70s, and you see decreasing rates of lung cancer. I'll give you another example. You have maybe some teenagers or some moms with some teenagers listening. I asked with my friends about acne. Why in the world do all American teenagers get acne? What would be the purpose of getting acne?

Starting point is 01:33:02 And she goes, it might be a disease of Western civilization. So I looked at an article from the Archives of Dermatology that looked at hunter-gatherer populations from Papua New Guinea and Paraguay. and they looked at thousands of these hunter-gatherers, including teenagers. You know how many cases of acne they found in these populations? How many? None. Not a single one, not a blackhead. And that's because they thought because industrial desired ultra-processed foods have a high glycemic load,

Starting point is 01:33:31 these high levels of insulin production and production of acne. I'm not a dermatologist. I don't know if that's the right explanation. But there are lots of diseases that just don't exist and didn't exist in different parts of the world. And I think that's a huge, excellent, huge indicator that our environments are determining our health. Some of your people have listened to Blue Zones, the Netflix documentary. And they conclude that when they look at high, these are all communities with high rates of centenarians, 100-year-olds. And the guy who did it really nice job, he includes in the end that is our environment that's dictating our health.

Starting point is 01:34:05 And I think that's true for our health in general. And I think it's particularly true for Parkinson's diseases. It's a great and powerful reminder. Dr. Ray Dorsey, this has been fantastic. Thank you for coming on the podcast and highlighting your work with us. Again, please, everyone, pick up a copy of the book, ending Parkinson's Disease, a prescription for action. This has been beautiful.

Starting point is 01:34:26 How can our audience continue to follow along with you and some of your co-authors on this journey of awareness and advocacy that you're on? Yeah. So if any of your listeners can't afford a copy of the book, they can just email us at info at endingpd.org with their mailing address and we'll send them a copy for free. If you can't afford a copy of the book, you can email us at info at endingpd.org and we'll send you one for free. If you can't afford a copy, please purchase one. You can get at Amazon. You can get in the library. You can get lots of different locations. All the proceeds for all the

Starting point is 01:34:58 authors are going to efforts to prevent and end Parkinson's disease. If you have a story, if you work in dry cleaning, you develop Parkinson's disease, I'd love to hear from you. If you have a question, related to Parkinson's cities, you can just email us at info at endingpd.org. Powerful. Dr. Ray Dorsey, thank you. You are an incredible communicator. I'm so thankful that you wrote this book. And on behalf of you and your colleagues, you are the one that's on the tour because you have an incredible ability to highlight the world that's possible if we got to the root of removing these toxicants and that we don't have to. head towards a direction where every decade of so, our lifespan here in America continues to go down.

Starting point is 01:35:46 There's a different way of going about things, and you've laid it out in your book and on the podcast today. Thank you very much, Drew. Thank you very much for creating this an opportunity to help improve the health of not only our brains, but our bodies and ourselves throughout Southern California and the country and ideally wonderful. Hi, everyone, Drew here. Two quick things.

Starting point is 01:36:11 Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share it with a friend. Share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter. And it's called Try This.

Starting point is 01:36:38 Every Friday, yes, every Friday, 52 weeks a year, I send out an easy. to digest protocol of simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health. We cover everything from nutrition to mindset to metabolic health, sleep, community, longevity, and so much more. If you want to get on this email list, which is, by the way, free and get my weekly step-by-step protocols for whole body health and optimization, click the link in the show notes that's called Try This or just go to Drew Perot.com. That's D-H-R-U-P-U-R-O-A. HIT.com and click on the tab that says, try this.

Dhru Purohit Show - Neurologist Reveals The 3 Shocking Reasons Why Parkinson's Disease & Other Brain Disorders Are On The Rise (Rebroadcast)

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