Dhru Purohit Show - Parkinson's Disease is the Fastest-growing Brain Disorder - The Step by Step Plan to Minimize Your Risk with Dr. Ray Dorsey

Episode Date: July 30, 2025

This episode is brought to you by Vuori, Momentous, and Bon Charge.   Over 10 million people worldwide have Parkinson’s disease, and that number is expected to double in the next decade. The majority of cases have no genetic link. Today’s guest believes there’s a strong connection between Parkinson’s and exposure to environmental toxins, often occurring decades before symptoms appear. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down for round two with Dr. Ray Dorsey to explore the main drivers behind Parkinson’s disease and the alarming rise in cases. Dr. Dorsey breaks down the everyday lifestyle habits that may increase our risk, along with the research behind trichloroethylene (TCE), the primary toxin he believes is fueling this epidemic. He explains where TCE is most commonly found, the industry’s deceptive practices around its continued use, and the simple behaviors we can adopt to reduce exposure and protect our families. Dr. Dorsey also highlights the systemic barriers to meaningful change and what we can do to raise awareness and drive prevention forward. Dr. Ray Dorsey is the director of the Center for the Brain and the Environment at the Atria Health and Research Institute. The center’s mission is to identify the root causes of brain diseases, from autism to Alzheimer’s, so that we can prevent them. With his colleagues, he wrote Ending Parkinson’s Disease and The Parkinson’s Plan, which detail a new path to preventing and treating this terrible disease. In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Dorsey dive into: The main drivers behind Parkinson’s disease (00:50) Trichloroethylene (TCE) as the leading cause of developing Parkinson’s disease (6:11) Why TCE is still prevalent (11:45) How Parkinson’s disease impacts a patient’s daily life (19:01) The increased risk associated with living near a golf course (23:28) Extensive studies on mice show toxins as a major driver (32:32) How to mitigate your risk (42:29) Diets high in animal fat contaminated with concentrated pesticides (49:04) Beverages that can contribute to or reduce your risk of Parkinson’s (1:00:30) Why genetics is not a major factor in developing Parkinson’s (1:05:58) The impact of air pollution on Parkinson’s disease (1:09:39) TCE testing and the detection of toxins in breast milk (1:16:52) What we know about Superfund sites (1:22:04) The history of dry cleaning and the challenge of creating safer alternatives (1:34:14) Obstacles to progress in public health (1:39:03) Identifying the root cause of the disease before treatment (1:43:50) The urgency of prevention and the high stakes (1:54:04) Final thoughts (1:57:33) Also mentioned in this episode: Website - The Parkinson's Plan Book - The Parkinson's Plan: A New Path to Prevention and Treatment For more on Dr. Dorsey, follow him on Instagram, LinkedIn, or visit his Website and Atria. This episode is brought to you by Vuori, Momentous, and Bon Charge. Right now, Vuori is offering my listeners 20% off their FIRST purchase. Get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet at vuori.com/DHRU and discover the versatility of Vuori Clothing.  Support your energy, bones, and resilience with The Women’s Three: Iron, Calcium, and Vitamin D3—formulated by experts, made for women. Head to livemomentous.com and use code DHRU for 35% off your first subscription. Right now, Bon Charge is offering my community 15% off; just go to boncharge.com/DHRU and use coupon code DHRU to save 15%. Sign up for Dhru’s Try This Newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Ray Dorsey, welcome back to the podcast. You know, over 10 million people around the world are living with Parkinson's disease. And that number is expected to double in the next 25 years, making it the fastest growing neurological disorder on the freaking planet. But here's what most people do not know. You and other leading researchers now believe this isn't just bad luck or just genetics. it's largely a man-made disease driven by the things that we're doing every day, starting even in our youth. So let me ask you, nobody wants Parkinson's disease, but just to demonstrate how much this is connected to our daily lives,

if you as a top doctor in the space wanted to fast track someone getting Parkinson's disease, again, we wouldn't wish that on our worst enemy, but just to make a point, How would you design their daily routine? If you wanted to get Parkinson's disease, one way to do that. We're in Los Angeles is to go to the Central Valley of California, become a farmer, spray a pesticide called Paraquot, which is used to kill weeds. It kills the weeds that Roundup doesn't kill and spray it on corn or cotton, probably, or soybeans in the Central Valley. You wouldn't want to wear any protection of equipment.

You'd want to drink your water from a well so that the pesticides you spray in agricultural areas can contaminate your well, which could be downstream of the farms. You would want to make sure your output is dry cleaned daily with a chemical called perchloralethylene. Yeah, we're talking about regular dry cleaning. Regular dry clean. The most commonly used dry cleaning chemical about 60 to 70 percent of dry cleaners in the United States use a chemical called perchlorophylline. That and his cousin trichlorifylene had been associated with a five-prachline.

100% increased risk of developing Parkinson's disease. You'd want to breathe polluted air. So maybe when you weren't farming, you'd want to come down to the little bit further south into Los Angeles and breathe high amounts of polluted air. When you were farming or maybe bicycling, you wouldn't want to wear a helmet so that if you fell off, you might get a concussion. What about your diet? Your diet, you would definitely not want to buy organic produce. You would want to buy lots of produce with lots of pesticides on it. Do not, whatever you do, don't wash the pesticides off because you want the residues of the pesticide

on it when you consume it. For weekends, you might want to go hang out near a golf course and especially one that's sprayed with lots of pesticides. So it's, you know, pristine and green. If you wanted your kids to get Parkinson's 2, you might want to send them to a school where they regularly spray pesticides on the school and on the playground as well. You wouldn't want to sleep well at all. You'd want to have fragmented sleep. You would certainly not exercise. I think most of your listeners would know that. And sure, I think you could substantially increase your risk of Parkinson's disease with just a few things in your life. You know, a lot of people are listening to this list. And maybe outside of becoming a farmer and spraying pesticides and working on a farm,

there are millions, tens of millions of Americans who are doing the exact things that you're talking about. They're not getting enough exercise. They're eating produce that's not organic. They are living within a mile of a golf course. We'll talk about that in a second. They're breathing polluted air. They're drinking polluted, unfiltered water at home. and they're regularly getting dry cleaning, just thinking nothing of it.

How is it that you've become so clear that these man-made things, this man-made soup that we're living in is the driver of this explosion of Parkinson's disease we're seeing when places like the Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic say, sure, lifestyle plays a little bit of a role, but it's largely driven by genetics. What do you know and what have you been convinced of that they don't know? So in 2018, I was an academic neurologist. I had the gift of a sabbatical. And I read the work of my colleague, Dr. Caroline Tanner,

who's not only a Parkinson specialist like me, but after becoming a Parkinson specialist, she got so concerned about the environmental causes of Parkinson's disease that she got a PhD in epidemiology. So she did all the training, become a neurologist, a Parkinson specialist, and so concerned that she then did a PhD in epidemiology from Berkeley, and she quietly and diligently over 40 years has demonstrated that numerous environmental

toxins, including pesticides, certain pesticides, dry cleaning chemicals, and air pollution are likely linked to, associate with, and contribute, and if not cause the disease. And so that's what fueled my colleagues and me to write our book in 2020, ending Parkinson disease. After that came out, we have some pushback from our colleagues, and probably most of my colleagues still don't agree with the contention that we did. And then I started asking people with Parkinson's disease why they got the disease, which you know sounds a little bit unusual.

You would think that neurologists would be asking people with a disease why they got the disease. But I think in American medicine, reflexively, we go from disease to treatment without ever pausing. You know, someone's depressed, they get an antidepressant, and the anxious get them anti-anxiety. If they have Parkinson's, give them. a medication to replace the dopamine that's law. I asked them why. And then I started cross-examining or asking my patients that I would see clinically why they got it. And so I'd ask them, where did you grow up? Did you grow up on a farm? Did you drink well water? Were you

exposed to pesticides? And most people will know if that's the case. But it turns out in the United States that Parkinson's rates are higher in urban areas in rural areas. So pesticides couldn't be the full explanation. And then that got me to this chemical trichloroethylene. Let me see if I got this molecule. I think I showed it to you last time. And this has become my obsession because I think it might be the number one cause of Parkinson's in the United States. So your listeners know that water is made up of three atoms, H2O. It turns out that trichloroethylene is made up of a whopping six atoms. It's got two carbons in black, one hydrogen in white, and then three chlorine atoms in blue, hence it's named trichloroethylene. The dry cleaning chemical that's widely

used today is per chloroethylene. All it does is substitute this hydrogen with another chlorine Adam. Dr. Tanner and her colleagues have shown that trichlorathleen and likely per chlorathleen are associated with a 500% increased risk of Parkinson's disease. Incredible. And then so there's one small study in Denmark that shows that female dry cleaning workers have a not a 15%, not a 50%, not 150%, but a 1500% increased risk of developing Parkinson's very small study. Take it with several grains of salt, but of all the occupations it looked at, it was the number one risk for developing the disease. But the chemicals not just used in dry cleaning. So I should have said earlier on that the farmer likes to repair his tractors and likes to use a degreasing chemical called trichloratylene

to degrease his tractors and clean his tractors. It was so widely used in the 1970s that two pounds per American were used. It was found in typewriter correction fluid. It was used to decaffeinate coffee. So if you drink decaffeinated coffee in the 1970s, you might have been drinking this chemical. It was used as an anesthetic for pregnant women. And so some people asked me pregnant women to have higher risk of Parkinson's from that era. I didn't see anything on that, but there's actually one study suggesting that anesthesiologists who might have been using that chemical may have had a higher rate of Parkinson's disease. It now contaminates, it's used in a wide range of industries. It's estimated 10 million Americans worked with the chemical mechanics,

Silicon Valley, if you were cleaning off electronics, if you were a printer, if you were a painter, or if you were an embalmer, if you did varnish working, these are all associated with the disease. And then it contaminates scores of military bases in the United States, especially at Air Force bases. We opened up our new book of the Parkinson's plan with two women who went to the U.S. Air Force Academy where athletes ran track, became physicians, served in Afghanistan, became mothers,

practiced medicine. And then within one month of each other in their 40s were diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Oh my gosh. And we tell why they may have developed Parkinson's disease and trichlorathlon looms large in their stories. So I think I read the work of Dr. Tanner and then I started asking patients why they got it. And I uncovered all these kinds of stories from people who served in the military, people who worked with it. I'll tell you one story about trichloraphylchlorifylene. So in addition to being linked to Parkinson's, it causes cancer.

It contaminated the marine-based Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. Were Marines who served there had a 70% increased risk at developing Parkinson disease. And it caused so much cancer, including male breast cancer, that they created a swimsuit calendar. The male Marines create a swimsuit calendar of men who had breast cancer showing off their mastectomy skull. I don't know if that's funny, if that's true. tragic, a little bit of both. So with that information, I was seeing a patient. I see the last of my patients via telemedicine.

And I was seeing a priest. And he had Parkinson disease. And I was asking him to read off his medications, you know, just get a sense of what other medical problems he might have. You know, taking a stat and taking blood pressure medication. And then he said to moxifin. Moxifin is a drug to use, used to treat breast cancer. And so it would be very unusual for a man to be taking tamoxifen.

And I said, why are you taking tamoxifen? And he goes, I had breast cancer and male breast cancer. Like, how's a priest getting Parkinson's and male breast cancer? He must be of it and been exposed to trichloratylene. But he's a priest. I mean, a priest isn't hanging out, you know, degreasing cars, you know, for example, or not hanging out in Silicon Valley, cleaning all silicon wafers. And I said, did you ever work with this chemical?

And he goes, no, no, I was just priest. And I said, well, what did you do before you were a priest? And it turned out when he was like in his early 20s or a teenager, he worked in textile manufacturing where he was likely exposed to the chemical. And so that that exposure, we know that the exposures that lead to Parkinson's disease, just like cigarettes, you don't smoke a cigarette and get lung cancer the next day is decades later. So it's the same thing with Parkinson's, that the exposure that leads to people gaining Parkinson's when they're 50s, 60s, and 70s likely happen when they're in their teens or when they're in their 20s

or when they're even younger. So here is a guy who got exposure likely to this chemical. in his early 20s and 30, 40 years later is manifesting, or 20 years later manifesting with cancer, 30 years later manifesting with Parkinson's disease. You hear enough of these stories, you get convinced. And then there's just been the amount of evidence that's coming out since the first book came out is only reinforcing the notion that Parkinson's is largely due

to environmental causes. There have been some very large genetic studies that have shown, for example, that among Americans with Parkinson's, that only 12.5% of people carry a genetic cause or genetic risk factor for the disease. That another way, 87% of Americans with Parkinson's disease have no known genetic cause or risk factor. You know, I listen to you, our audience listens to you. People on YouTube are watching you and they're like, this gentleman, this doctor, this researcher is so clear about this. And he has the facts and the receipts to support it. And yet, this chemical in particular, right, the trichlor aethylene.

Yeah. It's one of the 25 things you talk about inside of your book, the Parkinson's plan. Everybody should get a copy. It's one of them, but it's one of the biggest ones. You even called it,

it might be the number one reason why we're seeing an explosion and why Parkinson's disease is the fastest growing neurological disorder. So if you're so clear, why is it that this chemical is still out there in the world damaging the lives of so many people out there?

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Check out the women's three at live momentous.com and use the code Drew, D-H-R-U, for up to 35% off your first order. That's D-H-R-U at Live, L-I-V-E, Momentus, M-O-M-O-M-M-E-N-T-O-U-S.com to save 35% off your first order. So the good news is in 2024, the EPA ban trichlorethylene and perchlorathylene. That ban was initially frozen in 2025 with the new administration. My understanding, my understanding is that ban is likely to take hold. In California, which is often ahead of the curve on many of these issues, has banned perchlorethylene and the use of dry cleaning. And my understanding is that per chloroethylene may not even be used as a dry cleaning agent in California. So there is hope. I said when that ban was passed that future generations cheered because they're going to be spared the effects of cancer.

This chemical has been around commercially since the 1920s. So for 100 years, trichlorathleen has been causing cancer. A century of cancer from trichlorathleen. The cancer's linked non-hachin lymphoma, prostate cancer, multiple myeloma, renal cell carcinoma, liver cancer, likely brain cancer, likely leukemia, and children. Unfortunately, the ban will help prevent future cases, but up to 30% of ground war in the United States has already contaminated with this chemical.

Over half of Superfund sites in the United States are already contaminated with this chemical. Scores of military bases are already contaminated with this chemical. And then people have already been exposed in future generations, and in the future, they're likely to develop it. But if we clean up our environment and the banning of these two chemicals is an immense step to do that, future generations will be spared the indignity of Parkinson.

You know, your book and this conversation so far can be very scary to a lot of people. But you're not trying to scare people. You're just trying to share the truth because people's lives are already being devastated by not just Parkinson's disease, but also these various forms of cancer. Some of the same things that contribute to Parkinson's are also contributing to cancers, what you're telling us here today. And that's why you are not leaving the conversation. And so anybody who's listening, you know, we're going to be getting into a preview.

You have 25 different things that people can do that will help mitigate their risk. You've talked about a few of them that are here. And we're going to get into more inside of this conversation. But let's take the human side of this for one second. Fastest growing neurological disease. There are some people today that know somebody in their life that has Parkinson's disease. Maybe somebody listening has it and they have questions. we'll get to some of those questions of are there things that they can do to slow the rate of

progression. But for those that are not familiar with just how devastating this disease is, give us an idea. Tell us the human side. Is there a patient you've taken care of that highlights how this disease can completely upend your life? Yeah. So when writing the book, I'll give you a little vignette. I was writing the book and I reached out to some colleagues of mine who have Parkinson's disease to give me feedback on it. And, you know, as a doctor, we want to give patients hope. And so when describing the disease, I talked about how it's treatable and, you know, people can live highly productive lives with it. We've had people serve as congressmen with Parkinson's. We've had people serve in the U.S. Senate with Parkinson's disease. Brian Grant, former Los Angeles Laker,

likely had Parkinson's while still playing the NBA. We've had people walk in space with Parkinson's Michael J. Fox has written three books. It has a fourth book coming out and has starred, I think, in three sitcom series since having Parkinson's. So I had some of that in the book, and she's also a physician and has Parkinson's. And she says, Ray, you're not quite communicating how terrible of this disease is. And Michael J. Fox and Brian Grant, every time they write their book, they say Parkinson's suck. Some people say I don't wish it on my worst enemy. It robs people of their dignity. It robs people of their independence. One caregiver said to me, this is no way to spend your goals in years. The first thing that happens after you're diagnosed with Parkinson's disease is your phone stops ringing, right? You can become socially isolated.

Your friends want to spend less time with you sometimes and not more time. Why is that? You know, I think they're afraid of the disease. you know, you take slower to do things. It's harder for you to eat. It's harder for you to communicate. I think people view that it's a burden on themselves and maybe burden on those around them. You know, in the United States, there's 30 million caregivers in the United States.

Number one reason for being a caregiver is brain disease. And so people suffer a lot with Parkinson's disease and they suffer in silence. And we've had suffering before. as part of the human condition, it may be, but preventable needless suffering need not be. There was a HIV activist in San Francisco and here in Los Angeles and in New York City had this great slogan and it was silence equals death because for HIV, silence equals death. Because there was initially no federal response. Doctors refused, some doctors refused to care for individuals.

Hospitals refused to admit patients and the HIV community found their voice, change the course of HIV. The incidence, number of new cases of HIV today is at its lowest level since 1990. It's possible because of their heroism, their courage that you and I perhaps don't have HIV. And it's possible because of their heroism and courage that HIV may disappear as a major clinical entity if we continue to fund efforts aimed up preventing and treating this disease may disappear as a major clinical entity in our lifetime. We have not done that for Parkinson's disease. silence doesn't equal death for Parkinson's disease, although Parkinson's is now the 14th leading

cause of death, so you can make that argument. But silence equals suffering and profound suffering, not just for the individuals with the disease, but for all of those around it. And that what motivates me, because when I see someone with Parkinson's now, I get pissed off. Because I see their future, and even if they're doing well in the early stages, the future is not always great. Quite frankly, usually is not. And I hate it. And I get pissed off. Sometimes I think I get pissed off more than people with the disease. And I think it's my job.

Here I am a neurologist of Parkinson's Specialist. You see all these nice things about me. But isn't it my job? It's in the job of my peers and colleagues to answer the bell. If Parkinson's is the world's fastest growing brain disease, whose job is it to stop it? And I think it's mine. And I think it's my peers. And I think we're failing.

That's what Michael Oaken and I say in our introduction in the book is that we're failing in the Parkinson's community. and we got tired of failing. And so we put forth a constructive plan. You mentioned these 25 things individuals to do. Chapter 10 is a plan for things that we can do as individuals, things that we can do as members in our own community, get rid of pesticides in our kids' schools, our golf courses,

and things we can do as societies to end this disease for once and for all. You know, you mentioned golf courses. And I want to set you up for this one, because a lot of people saw the headlines, if they were paying attention to CNN, Fox, BBC, NPR, headlines say, researchers say, if you live within a mile or two of a golf course, you might have an increased chance of getting Parkinson's disease. I live here in Los Angeles.

My home is probably within two miles of three golf courses that are there, even though I don't live on a golf course. And I think there are a lot of people that are listening today, if they've heard this for the first time, give them the background and how worried should they be if they're one of those individuals that is living nearby a golf course just like me? Can I read a story? Please. This is from our book on a chapter called The Brain's Front Door and the section is called Two Green. And this was written before that study came out. Like most exercises, golf can be beneficial for individuals with Parkinson disease. One small study even found that golf improved

performance on a walking test more than Tai Chi and was more likely to be continued by those with the disease. A 2021 review concluded that, quote, regularly playing golf can lower the risk of falls and older adults with Parkinson's disease and demonstrates the potential to improve quality of life. However, we've had to ask a more ominous question, could living near a golf course increase the risk of Parkinson's? In 2013, two neurologists thought that question was worthy of investigation after they found that 19 of 26 patients in their cohort with Parkinson's lived within two miles of a golf course. And 16 of the 19 lived down when. Beginning at age 10, Carl Robb, a tech entrepreneur lived in suburban Charlotte, North Carolina,

right next to the 13th hole of a golf course. If it rained, golfers would cross his family's white picket fence and take shelter under their covered porch. As a teenager, Carl was looking for a summer job and joined the golf course. Sod squad. Every morning he would help redo the greens and repair divots on the course. He liked the camaraderie of the team and the opportunity to play tennis after work. At age 17, Carl's left foot started to twitch. Then he noticed that he dragged his left foot and that the wear on his tennis shoes was uneven.

His voice became softer and members of his family would tell him to sit straight. Carl was concerned in the year before the internet, he started visiting the library. He read medical books and became convinced that he had a brain tumor. He saw nine different doctors over six years before being diagnosed with Parkinson's at age 23. Carl, a graduate of the University of North Carolina, was working in Washington, D.C. when he became an early adopter of online dating in the early 1990s. He began corresponding with a web developer at AOL. Their conversations were going well and eventually Carl disclosed his condition.

She was not faced by the disclosure because Carl made her laugh. His future wife, Angela, later said, I love the man, not the diagnosis. Carl says, Parkinson's disease has given me a purpose. This brought me a wife and a business partner. Angela and Carl have worked together on numerous entrepreneurial endeavors, including the development of a stylist to use on touch-stream computers. The U.S. Postal Service became their biggest customer.

Both Carl and Angela are fierce advocates for the Parkinson's community. For 20 years, Carl visited Capitol Hill on behalf of those affected by the disease. And for six years, he served on the board of the Parkinson's Action Network. Angela has given voice to caregivers across the country. And in 2015, the White House recognized her as a champion for change. So that's the human story behind the data. So this study was led by Dr. Brittany Krasnowski, who's a geographer. She's at the Barron Neurological Institute in Phoenix.

And she worked with her colleagues at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Rochester, Minnesota has great data on the number of new cases, the incidence of Parkinson's disease. So she was able to marry that data on the number of new cases with Parkinson's disease, overlay it with maps of golf courses in Rochester, Minnesota, and then add data on water supply in that community. and she found that individuals who live within one mile of a golf course in Rochester, Minnesota, have a 124% increased risk of developing Parkinson. Wow.

Break it down a little bit further, right? It's the pesticides on the golf course that is the biggest contributor. So, sure, if you're playing golf, that's one thing. But if I'm understanding correctly from your guys' coverage and you communicating about it and some of your colleagues on Twitter is that it's also people who live, nearby who may not be playing golf but are drinking from water that's contaminated. Yeah. So this is a little bit like smoking and secondhand smoke.

You're not the ones putting the spraying the pesticides on the golf course. You're just living nearby. So you're not the one smoking the cigarette in a bar. You're the one a couple of stools down who's just breathing the smoke from the smoker in the same establishment. And that's why we got rid of smoking and bars and the like. So we think it's pesticides because the use of pesticides, I think it's up to 80 times higher on golf courses per acre of land than it is in agricultural areas. Some of these pesticides, especially a pesticide called chlorpyrifos, which has been found on over half of apples in the United States.

So if you've eaten an apple in the United States, you've likely eaten this pesticide chloropurifos has been widely sprayed on golf courses. I can't say if it's that particular pestide in particular, but that's a particular. example that's been associated with Parkinson disease. It damages the dopamine producing nerve cells that are lost in Parkinson disease. Now Dr. Krizenowski then demonstrated that people who got their water, who got their water supply in that area may have been prone to contamination from those pesticides. We can't go back and test the water to see if it was. That's her major concern. I'm actually even a little bit more concerned, not so much about the water supply, about what

people are inhaling. As I alluded to in the book, there was one study that in living down the wind of the golf courses might be it more concerning. It turns out that Parkinson's, which we think of as a brain disease, actually might have its origins outside of the brain. So Parkinson's a brain condition might have its origins outside the brain. In 2003, a very smart German pathologist named Heiko-Brock demonstrated that most of the pathology, the earliest place that you find the pathology of Parkinson's disease is either in the smell center, the olfactory bulb, or in a nerve called the vagus nerve that goes down to the gut. And in 2019, one of my colleagues in Denmark, really smart physician named Dr. Pair Borgheimer

and his colleagues postulate there are two forms of Parkinson's disease and other Louis body disorders, one that begins in the gut and then an ascends up the vagus nerve and then it goes to the part of the brain that's responsible for sleep and controlling parts of the nurse that we don't control before going to the part of the brain that's affected in Parkinson's disease. That's he says it's a body first form of Parkinson's. And more commonly for Parkinson's is a brain first form of Parkinson's disease in which the pathology begins in the olfactory bulb or the smell center for the brain.

And then it makes one stop in O'Hare called the part of the brain called the amygdala before reaching the part of the brain that's affected. classically in Parkinson's. This is Santra Nigra. So if you say that parganese either begins in the gut or begins in the nose, it begs the question, what's causing it to begin in the gut or in the nose? And I emailed him and I said, pair, what, Dr. Borghammer, what do you think about toxics that we ingest, potentially leading to Parkinson's ascending up the vagus nerve and then reaching the part of the brain effect in Parkinson's? And how about toxins that we inhale, like pesticides from a golf course, for example, inhaling and leading to Parkinson's beginning and the smell center and then going back to the brain.

He was on the skeptical side, but open-minded and we investigated and we put forth a paper called the body, the brain, the environment, and Parkinson's disease, arguing that in chemicals that we inhale like pesticides sprayed on nearby farms or nearby golf courses could lead to Parkinson's beginning in the nose or that we ingest, for example, and contaminated well water that could lead to Parkinson's beginning. of the gut. It's mind-blowing. These aren't causative studies that are out there. They're correlative, but they add to this volume of data that you guys have, knowing that chemicals are a huge driver of why we're seeing this explosion in Parkinson's disease. Yeah, and the evidence isn't just these studies. If you put a laboratory mouse and you let it age, it never spontaneously develops Parkinson's disease. The only way the mouse develops Parkinson's disease, the only way the mouse develops Parkinson's is if you manipulate its genes or exposure to toxic chemicals. And it turns out that these chemicals like Paracquot have been shown by numerous academic

investigators to reproduce the features of Parkinson's disease, including tremor, and cause loss of dopamine-producing nerve cells in the brain, which were found in Parkinson's disease. It turns out that research reporting by the Guardian, the British investigative newspaper, The Guardian, indicate that the manufacturer or manufacturer of Paracot, had done their own animal studies in three different mammalian species, in mice, in rats, and in rabbits, and demonstrated that when the company's own researchers exposed those animals to Paraguat, they developed the features of Parkinson's, including a tremor.

The remarkable thing is that they did those experiments in the 1960s, fully 30 years before academics had reached that same conclusion. So it's not just these epidemiological studies. We have laboratory studies to do it. We have studies not done by academics, and according to the Guardian studies done by industry. At some point, you might ask yourself, what evidence would you want to have to make the conclusion?

Are we going to take farmers and expose them to working with Paracot for 30 years and farmers to work on organic farms and then follow them and then see who develops Parkinson disease or not? in this book we quote a retired Marine Master Sergeant Jerry Insminger who served at Camp Lejeune where trichloricolethylene contaminate the water likely contributed to his daughter dying from leukemia and he goes the benefit of the doubt belongs to the people

not the chemical. That's an important message for everybody who's listening today because sometimes somebody will listen to this podcast. They'll go to their well-meaning. Neurologist or doctor, family friend, whatever it might be. I'll say, hey, I've seen some of this research. And it doesn't matter what category this is in. I hear from my podcast listeners all the time.

This has even happened with me when my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. Knock on wood, she's doing great. That was a while ago. But we've gone to doctors, including people who have listened, and said, hey, I saw this interview and I was reading a little bit of the research. or at least the summary of the research that's out there. And this is something that I feel like I should be a little bit concerned about. What do you think about that?

And often, again, well-intentioned, well-meaning people that are out there in the medical community will say, well, there's not enough research that's there. And when it comes to this topic, I think an important question that everybody has to ask themselves is, are you going to be waiting for that perfect study, which may or may, not ever happen in the way that we want to, or are you going to take a precautionary approach

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and let the benefits add up effortlessly. Let's say I'm wrong in that these chemicals aren't contributing in Parkinson's disease. Well, we know these chemicals cause cancer. So the downside is that we haven't prevented Parkinson's, but we've prevented cancer. We know that these pesticides are linked to intellectual disabilities. So we've prevented intellectual disabilities. We know some are linked to ALS. We've prevented ALS. So even if I'm completely wrong, we will prevent it lots of other health benefits. But I think we've been duped.

I didn't know about these risks. I had heard a little bit about pesticides, but largely I had never been told what these environmental causes of Parkinson's disease were. And I trained at some of the top institutions in our country. And I think some of that is deliberate. You know, the tobacco industry had doctors advertising the health benefits of cigarettes. I was taught in medical school that you couldn't become, if you prescribed an opioid to a patient in acute pain, they could not become addicted to opioids. That we were under treating people with pain.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that the companies, social media companies, knew about the toxic effects of their products on teenage girls for years. years before they came into the public domain. The lead paint industry had a boy advertising the cleanliness benefits of paint when they likely knew that lead paint leads to loss of IQ in children. I think we've just been duped. And I was duped and I was duped on opioids. And I think I've been duped on Parkinson disease. You know, it's a little humbling.

And sometimes it's good to be humbled. And then once you realize it, once you see it, I think it's really hard to unsee it. And it's really, I think incumbent on people like me and my colleagues to prevent people from getting these diseases. It's our job as physicians to prevent people from getting disease. And you're doing a great job of that with your book, with your awareness, being on podcasts, and essentially going straight to the people. only a small percentage of people will read ever a scientific study, but they're still important and they're important to get out there. But when I see researchers like yourself, take the time, write books, go on podcasts, talk to the people, there's an activation. There's a groundswell

that ends up happening where people are like, how the hell could we have allowed this to happen? And to protect our future generations, we need to do something about that. You have a responsibility. If you get sick after you figured out your plan, isn't your responsibility to make sure your kids don't get effective with the same condition? Absolutely. I mean, I think that's it. I'll tell you a story. So for the first 10 years of my academic career, I worked on a different neurological disease called Huntington's disease, which is a devastating disease that causes involuntary movements, dance likes, movement, behavioral changes, dementia.

And it is almost purely genetic. I don't think I said the word environment once when I just talked about Huntington's disease. One of my colleagues, an amazing man is a neuroscientist who's working on Huntington's disease, and his name is Dr. Jeff Carroll. And he comes from a family that's at risk for huntington's disease. And he himself carries a gene responsible for Huntington's disease. And so he knows he's going to get Huntington's disease.

But he didn't want his kids to get Huntington's disease. He did something called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis in which you can select an embryo that doesn't carry a particular genetic mutation to make sure that it's not passed on. And I think he has two children and he's done that successfully. So he knows every day of his life that Huntington's disease is eventually likely going to kill him, but that his kids will be spared that indignity. They will be spared that suffering, that they will be able to have children and spouses and live a life that's free of Huntington's disease. I can't think of a more powerful contribution, a more powerful message that someone with a disease can do than to say, hey, this disease is ending in my family with me. And I think we need to do the same thing. I think 1.2 million Americans, I don't want to add to their burden, but 1.2.2 million Americans that nearly 12 million people around the world can say, hey, we are going to be the last generation.

You and I, part of that can be the last generation to bear the burden of Parkinson's disease in any large numbers. and that future generations can live in a world where Parkinson's East is increasingly rare instead of increasingly calm. Let's pick back up on the golf course conversation. What are one, two, three things that people that are in that situation, like me, I don't live next to one golf course, I live next to three. What are a few things that we can be taking to mitigate the risk of getting that exposure potentially, through the gut in our water if it's unfiltered, or potentially through the nose in breathing it and it making its way to the brain,

the pesticide specifically. So in our book, we have the Parkinson's 25, 25 actions individuals can take in their everyday life to reduce their risk of Parkinson's, and if you already have the disease, 25 things that might slow the rate of the disease. Number 18 is be mindful of the greens. I'll read you what we wrote.

Those who live or work on golf courses may have a higher risk of Parkinson disease. There are three other studies that have demonstrated that green space workers, including landscapers, have higher risk of Parkinson's disease. What are golfers to do? Ask your favorite course or club, what pesticides do they use and when they spray?

So you could do that. Encourage them to use less. Why can't golf courses use 50% less? Have them consider safer alternatives. So not necessarily use the most toxic pesticides, but can we have safer pesticides? Some of these pesticides are 50 or 60 years old. in the interim, avoid playing on courses just after they sprayed and don't lick your golf ball.

Swallowing pesticides is not healthy either. But there are lots of things. So if you're a landscaper, you can use the protective equipment to do it. You can ask them, can we use safer alternatives? So I am not increasing my risk of getting Parkinson's disease in the future. The price of being a landscaper on a golf course need not be Parkinson's disease. It need not be cancer, which is higher among individuals exposed to pesticides. If you live near one, you can close your windows.

You can buy an air purifier. We have an air purifier running right here in the room right now. So you could do that. If you get your water from a well, you should have your well tested and have it specifically tested for pesticides to make sure you're not getting exposed. And then regardless, I put a carbon filter, water filter. Used to be on our faucet, but now it's in our refrigerator so that we reduce our exposure to chemicals. that are in our water. So close your windows, air purifier, water purifier, contact your golf course.

You know, if people like you make your voices heard, golf courses will change their practices. They don't want their golfers being at increased risk for Parkinson's. That's not good for business. They don't want their landscapers at increased risk for Parkinson's. That's not good for their health insurance at premiums. There are lots of things that we can do to change the course of Parkinson's. You know, in the book you talk about there is a playbook that big tobacco used. And we're seeing some of those same tactics here.

Is there also a chance, especially now that a lot of the country, health and wellness, is becoming mainstream, not just across the political aisle, but young kids even are really waking up to the idea that we don't want to live with these burdens. And as you've mentioned, some of these influences can start as young as being a newborn or even. even potentially when you're still in your mother's womb, being exposed to a golf course or a country club or whatever, air quality. Is there any potential for some of these companies or places to have liability? Is there a potential that if they knowingly are putting these chemicals out there, that there would be legal liability? So there have been lawsuits. I've not been a party to these lawsuits where farmers who've worked with Paracquot have sued the manufacturer after they've developed Parkinson's disease. And so there have been lawsuits, you know, a million Marines, their family members and civilians were exposed to trichlorathylene and the drinking water at Camp Lejeune, the Marine Base in North Carolina between 1953 and 1987. And the federal government passed.

the Camp Lejeune Justice Act removing sovereign immunity and allowing those lawsuits to come forward. So, yes, there are legal remedies. I always say that legal remedies happen when we failed to take policy actions to prevent them, prevent these actions from happening. You know, earlier in our conversation, we were talking about a day in the life of somebody who you would want to, kind of jokingly, but not so jokingly, induce our fast track Parkinson's disease with, what behaviors, actions. And you said something, and I had to take a double take and say, okay, I'm going to come back to that conversation. You said that ideally we're doing

our best to buy organic produce. Sure, there are still pesticides that are used, but some of the worst offenders are not going to be used typically with organic produce. But then if we're eating certain things that are not organic like an apple, I thought I heard you say something like, don't wash the apple if it's not organic. Can you explain that? Oh, no, no. If it's, you should wash, so our number one recommendation is to wash your fruits and vegetables. Okay, so even if it's even if it's not organic, wash it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So maybe I got tripped up a little bit because you were giving us the opposite. You said, don't wash it if you want to get Parkinson's disease. Yeah, okay. So number one is wash your produce, even your organic ones. Pesticides have contaminated

our food supply, remnants of pesticides are found in 20% of common foods. Organic produce, dairy products, and meat can reduce or exposure, but can still have unsafe residues of pesticides. To wash your produce, at least with water, by the way, when the Department of Agriculture measures pesticide residues to determine what's safe for us, they do it after they've washed the fruit for 15 to 20 seconds. Wow. And consider simple vegetable washes.

I use a little bit of soap because I worry about pesticides that dissolve. solvent fat. And so I want to wash it off with a little bit of soap. I get it from a, from a grocery store, $4 for a small bottle, vinegar or salt solutions too. On the topic of food, here's a few of the things listed in your book that kind of blew my mind. And one of those is continuing down this line is that if somebody wanted to accelerate their likelihood of getting Parkinson's, in addition to produce, which we've talked about, they would eat a diet high in animal fat, especially conventional meat and dairy, meaning non-organic, non-grass fed, non-regenerative meat and dairy, which contain concentrated pesticides.

Talk a little bit more about that. Pineapple growers Association of Hawaii petitioned to use a pesticide that belongs to the same family as DDT called heptoclore to protect their pineapples. And so they used heptochlor to spray on their pineapple crops and the pineapples are just fine. But then they fed the green leafy part, the top part of the pineapple, which had been also sprayed with heptochlor, and they fed it to cows. Now, heptochlor, which belongs to this family, pesticides called organochlorines, which DDT is part of, dissolve in fat.

So when the cows are eating this heptochlor-laced chop, the green leafy top parts of the pineapple, what do they do with the pesticide? They concentrated in their milk. And so that milk makes its way onto the shelves of stores in Hawaii. and that they tested the milk in Hawaii and they found heptochlorine in it and it led to a recall of milk. It turned out that some researchers including Dr. Caroline Tanner, who I mentioned earlier, were doing a study looking at aging in Hawaii. And they found that high milk consumers in Hawaii had higher rates of Parkinson disease than people who consumed less milk. Then they looked at the brains of people who drank high levels of milk and they had fewer nerve cells that produced dopamine.

the part of the brain that's affected. Pacti chlor in this class of pesticides leads to the loss of these nerve cells in the laboratory. And then they looked at the brains of the individuals who were high consumers of milk, who had fewer dopamine-producing nerve cells in the part of the brain that's affected, and they found the residue of heptochlor, the pesticide in their brain. Wow. And so these pesticides get concentrated as they move up the food chain. In chapter one, we tell the story of individuals who developed a rare neurological

disorder that had ALS, Parkinson's, and dementia all as part of it among the indigenous population in Guam called the Chamorro, who during World War II, during the Japanese harsh occupation of the island, went to the jungles and would eat a seed called it a cycad seed and produce tortillas out of it. Normally, under normal peaceful circumstances, they would take three weeks to wash the seed because they knew it had a toxic chemical in it. And that toxic chemicals called BMAA. It's fat soluble.

It damages the mitochondria. And so these individuals, five or ten years after eating this seed without proper preparation, developed ALS, 10 to 15 to 20 years later, some developed what looked like Parkinson's disease, 25 to 30 years later to develop dementia. Three neurological diseases, all neurogenital diseases. The brain is nerve cells are highly dependent on any. energy production from mitochondria, a mitochondrial toxic consumed, eaten leads to these three diseases in the same population.

It turned out they didn't just eat cycad seeds, but they evidently like to eat flying foxes. Flying flockses like to eat the cycad seeds as well. These flying foxes are like bats. And so they would devour these cycad seeds. And where do the flying foxes do with it? They concentrate it in their fat. So when the chumorra were eating the flying foxes, like in a coconut broth, they would have be eating the toxin at a hundred times the level that they

were getting it from the seed. And so then this would be concentrated in the humans as well. So we have lots of examples of where fat soluble toxins get into the food supply are concentrated as they move up through animals. And therefore, when those animals are eaten by humans, humans are exposed not only to that that animal, but they're exposed to what that animal ate. And so when those animals are eating unhealthy food that has toxins in it, those can get concentrated in their fat and make their way up the food chain. And of course, the brain is covered with fat.

So one solution is making sure that these animal fats that we have and dairy can be a healthy part of a diet for people. If they do well with it, I unfortunately don't do well with dairy. I've always had issues with dairy, but I would like to include in my diet, but I can't. For those that are having it, choosing organic. Yeah. And so I like yogurt myself and I like cheese and I buy organic yogurt and I try to find organic cheese is a little bit harder to do.

But yeah, I mean, I like cheeses so much that I get concerned that there's a particular cheese. I eat that it's not organic. And every time I eat it, I eat it with a tinge of concern about, what might be hiding in it. I hope the dairy producers aren't spraying pesticides on the grass that the cows are eating. And then in addition to that, meats in general, what I'm hearing from you is that if a large percentage of your diet is coming from fatty cuts of meat, fat from dairy, you're going to have some exposure. Probably even if there's organic, organic is going to be a lot less. So it's not about not eating these foods.

Of course, it's shifting to organic, but it's also making sure you have a good source of plant fats that are there, especially if you're trying something like a ketogenic diet or something else where you're going to have less upcycling in the food chain of these concentrated versions of pesticides. Yeah, so there are people who know far, far, far more about nutrition than I do. But I get less concerned about nutritional content per se of food, so long as you're eating food. I get concerned about what's in that food. So I get concerned about the pesticides that are on the apple. I get concerned about the pesticides that are being concentrated in the animal products. There are several studies that suggest that a Mediterranean diet, high in fruits and vegetables, low in animal products might be beneficial for people with Parkinson's disease.

It might even reduce your risk of ever getting it. I tend to think those studies might be uncovering the fact that certain chemicals, pesticides are being concentrated. Certain pesticides are being concentrated in animal products as they make it their. way up the food. Are there any non-animal products that are foods in the food system or supply chain that tend to be things that you're worried about? For example, I was in touch with this group called the glyphosate free project. We were using them for a product that we were making to test it to say that this product doesn't have glyphosate, even at the smallest levels,

and it didn't have glyphosate. So we were able to get that certification, put it on there. And I was asking them, I said, are there products, that just tend to have a lot of glyphosate exposure. And it's not that we're exclusively saying that glyphosate is linked somehow to Parkinson's disease, but more part of this classification of just minimizing our pesticide exposure. And he said the one that we see all the time is oats. And we see that oats just accumulate because of how they are made and often processed by a lot of plants that also do wheat. where they're using glyphosate as a desiccant,

that they just tend to even, even sometimes if they're organic, they just naturally accumulate a lot of pesticides as part of that. Is there anything that you guys have come across? Yeah, so the environmental working group had a study come out. I think a couple years ago that found a weed killer in a very popular cereal that's fed to children,

you know, cereal that people that babies are eating has weed killer in it. We give you this 20 things that we can do individually in our society, and one of them is, number four, is stop subsidizing the use of pesticides. The U.S. federal government spends about $15 billion a year on farm subsidies. Most of that goes to conventional farming, which uses pesticide. In the United States, the two most subsidized crops are corn and soybeans, and according to the U.S. Geological Survey, the fields of those crops are the two most sprayed with the United States.

paraquot. In essence, billions of taxpayer dollars are subsidizing the production of crops on fields that are sprayed with millions of pounds of paraquot. The Department of Agriculture does have a few programs to incentivize organic farming. However, the size of these programs is approximately 1% the size of the subsidies for farms using pesticides. If we're going to subsidize farming, we should support programs that improve rather than harm the health of farmers, real communities, and consumer. We just need to change the structure of what we're doing because otherwise you're going to lose your mind trying to figure out how to avoid exposure. Why are we spending taxpayer dollars, your money, my money, the money of those listeners on the production of crops that are

using pesticides that harm farmers increase the risk of Parkinson's disease and that harm consumers. We need to stop. It's a systemic issue that needs a national solution because we can do our best. And you are giving people, largely a lot of the people that are listening to this podcast or people like me that are like, great, if something happens and I'm rooting for a lot of the people that are in the NIH right now, that at least are having the conversation about toxins and best sides and other stuff. And I also know that they're within an administration that, as you mentioned, you know, reverted a band on froze, froze a ban, froze a ban temporarily. We'll see where it ends up hoping that it goes in the right direction. froze a ban on something that there's a lot of evidence on regarding cancer and Parkinson's disease, the trichloria ethylene. Yes. You don't have to wait for the national government to do this. So I used to live in Rochester, New York, and the suburb of Rochester is called Henrietta,

and I gave a talk at the Henrietta Public Library, and the Henrietta Town Supervisor was there, and he said that he had not signed a purchase order for pesticides that entire year. And so he wasn't spraying it on golf courses. This is before the Gulf Course studies came out. He wasn't spraying it on the medians. He wasn't spraying it on the public lands in his town, the town of like $20,000, you know, middle class, maybe upper middle class suburb of Rochester, New York. If this kind of action can happen in Henrietta, New York,

why can't it happen here in Los Angeles? Why can't it happen in Sherman Oaks? Why can it happen in Pasadena? These are all things well within our realm of control. You can call golf courses and ask them to stop spraying toxic pesticides. We can call our kids schools and see, what they're doing. We can see what sports fields are using. If we ask some questions, we can get answers that will prevent the health of our children. And now that we know that the seeds of

Parkinson's disease are planted at an early age, think about the Marines who are 20 years old. If you don't get exposed to these chemicals when you're long, you're setting yourself up to not get Parkinson's, to not get Alzheimer's to not get cancer. Let's talk about a couple things on the list that are common things that people drink and their role in this. conversation. The first one, again, if you wanted to accelerate or be more likely to get Parkinson's disease, one of the things that you would do is number four on your list. You would enjoy conventional wines, non-organic wines. You'd enjoy conventional wines with pesticide notes, essentially, you know, grapes that are conventional are some of the highly, most highly

sprayed things in the agricultural world. All of that stuff, a lot of it. ends up in the wine. And you even noted that 90% of tested French wines had pesticide residue. Talk about wine. Yeah. So one of my great colleagues, Dr. Alexis Elbas, did a fantastic study in which he looked at rates of Parkinson's in French cantons that had vineyards. And he correlated it with the amount of pesticides sprayed in these French canton. And he found, a near perfect correlation between the amount of pesticide sprayed in these cantons with vineyards and the prevalence of Parkinson's. A near perfect correlation. You almost never see this in science. That study actually replicated an earlier study done by Dr. Andre Barbeau and his colleagues in Canada

in the 1980s in which they looked at the rates of Parkinson's in rural parts of Canada and correlated it with pesticide use. And correlation, the highest correlation is one, is a perfect correlation. They found that the correlation between amount of pesticides used in real parts of Canada and rates of Parkinson's was 0.967. Then the consumer reports of France, an organization called K. Chaucer, my French is not good, tested French wines. And they tested everything from relatively inexpensive to more expensive Bordeaux. And they found the residues of pesticides in nearly every bottle of wine that they tested. They founded less levels in organic ones, but they still found it in organic ones. So one of our recommendations in the book, if you don't want to get Parkinson's disease, is to drink organic wines.

And if you think about it, if we can produce organic produce, we can produce organic wines. We can even produce organic golf courses. There's one in Martha's Vineyard that doesn't use pesticides because they were concerned well before all the studies came out a bit of the effect of the pesticides contaminating their aquifer. So they didn't want their aquifer to become contaminated with pesticides. If we can produce organic produce, if we can produce organic wines, we can produce organic golf courses. And if we're going to subsidize the production of any of these goods and services, how about we subsidize those that improve our health as opposed to those that harm our. People are listening.

Businesses are listening. Government is listening. Your local community is listening. It takes raising awareness. And hopefully this podcast is a big part of that for people who are listening. And your book, too, again, highly recommend picking up the book. filled with a ton of action items, and we're just covering the surface of it, because that's what you can cover in a two-hour podcast together, but you can go a lot deeper in it. And on the note of

the wines, I even see, I have no affiliation with any of these companies, but I even see companies that are out that are saying, hey, we're testing our wines for pesticides, and we're presenting and putting out the reports. And maybe there will always be some level of exposure. again, even organic produce will use pesticides, but trying to get away from the worst offenders that are out there. And why are they doing that? Because people are concerned. So they're looking for better options. And there's entrepreneurs that are out there that are creating it. Okay, one more drink. And this is a little bit of a different twist. Number six on your list. If you wanted to accelerate your risk of getting Parkinson's disease, you would skip coffee or only drink decaf.

you'll miss out on caffeine's protective effects against Parkinson's. Talk to us about that. So number six is have a cup of caffeinated coffee. Caffeine consumption is associated with a decreased risk of Parkinson's. Caffeine is associated with a decreased risk of Parkinson's. Caffeine may protect the dopamine-producing nerve cells that are lost in the disease from the damage that results from exposure to environmental toxicants. The benefits appear to be present regardless of your beverage of choice, e.g. coffee or tea,

but are not present with decaffeinated beverages. Of course, caffeine has its own health risks, such as an anxiety and headache, but you now have another reason to enjoy your morning cup of coffee. Another reason to celebrate. And if you can, make it organic. Yes, there you got. Perfect.

And luckily, if you do drink decaf, the decaf today is often Swiss water press, as I guess they call it a method. It doesn't use all these harmful chemicals that are there. that's not all of the decaf. There's still a lot of traditional decaf that's out there that uses a lot of solvents and other things. But you'll see companies advertising, often companies that make higher quality coffee that says, hey, we just use this Swiss method of it.

Anything else you want to add to that? Yeah. So in 1977, because of the chemical trichlorethylene be found in decaffeinated coffee, the FDA banned the use of trichloratylene for the use in decafane coffee. I want to switch to the topic of testing. and I have a few items here that I want to review that a lot of people are asking. You know, if you go to Google again and you search what's the cause of Parkinson's, a lot of people come across these websites that say it's largely genetic and you flip the script.

You've told us earlier that genetics is maybe 12.5% of this situation. Among 10,000 people tested by the Parkinson's Foundation and in a fantastic study called PD generation, allowing free genetic counseling and testing to Americans, and I believe Canadians with Parkinson's disease. They'd publish the results in Brain in 2004, 10,000 individuals. I think about 8,000 had samples that could be analyzed for genetics, and only 12.5% can carry either a genetic cause or risk factor for the disease. 87% did not. And only about 1% or 2% of genetic causes is it sufficient that the genetic mutations by themselves cause the disease. Even the most common genetic cause of Parkinson's, the United States is a mutation in a gene

called Lark 2. Two to three percent of cases with Parkinson's are due to this mutation. But that mutation, only 40 percent of people with that mutation will develop the disease. That another way, the majority of the people with the most common genetic cause of Parkinson's will never develop the disease. These individuals might be at higher risk for exposure to these toxic chemicals. So it turns out that that genetic mutation, Lark 2, increases the activity of a protein, also called LARC2, trichlorethylene, which I showed you earlier, guess what it does in the laboratory? It increases the activity of that same protein.

So the environmental causes, contributors to Parkinson's are in many cases replicating the pathology that we see with the genetic forms of the disease. And sometimes you'll hear doctors, and I'm sure you do this too with your baby. they still will be asking people, hey, has anybody in your family had Parkinson's? And even if they think that it's largely driven genetically, which I bet a lot of doctors still do believe that, even though the science is switching as you've been sharing, the ones who are more aware like yourself also know that, hey, if you've had somebody, sure, there may be a genetic component, but also, too, people who are related, especially in the same family, tend to have similar lifestyles, grew up in similar areas.

So they have a lot of similarities in terms of what they've been eating, drinking, living, growing up, exposed to. So that's still informative, but for not just the genetic reasons. Yeah. So Sir William Gowers in 1880s wrote the Bible of neurology in England. And he talked about his patients with Parkinson's disease. And he said then over 100 years ago that only 15% of people with Parkinson's, have a family history of the disease.

That same finding has been replicated by numerous studies, you know, 15 to 20 percent of people suggesting that the genetic contributions is modest. If you rank order diseases by the heritability, certain diseases are at the top, type one diabetes, schizophrenia near the bottom is Parkinson disease, breast cancer, and risk of death. So that tells you that the environmental factors are playing a role. We've even done, Dr. Tanner, has done twin studies, and she's looked at the rates of Parkinson's among identical twins and fraternal twins. If something's purely genetic or highly genetic,

the rates among the concordance rates, number of twins that will share the same diagnosis will be really high among identical twins and lower among fraternal twins. She found almost no difference, suggesting in 1999 in the Journal of American Medical Association, that for most people, genetics plays a very modest role and that environmental causes are the principal contributor

to Parkinson's disease. The evidence is all around us. We just need to take action to prevent people from ever getting it. So if environmental factors are driving this man-made disease, are there tests where we can get a chance

to get a snapshot of some of these worst offenders, chemicals, pesticides that are in our body that we're potentially being exposed to to get some sense of how bad the problem is of what we're being

exposed to. So since we last spoke, I have a new job. I now work for the Atria Health and Research Institute in New York, a city is founded by Alan Tish, who says everything in health care is designed to treat you after you get sick and nothing is aimed at preventing. And we need to go from a reactive, sick-oriented care to a proactive preventive form. And he does that through a high-end concierge practice that's aiming to prevent people from getting diseases and a nonprofit research institute aimed at preventing the diseases for everyone. And I'm creating a center focused on the brain and the environment for the Atria Research and Global Health Initiative.

And our goal is to do exactly that. Can we measure these chemicals in either people's bodies or their environment so we can assess what they're likely being exposed to and take action proactively at a young age, people like you, people in their 20s, maybe when people are thinking, women are thinking about becoming pregnant to decrease the risk that they're passing on these chemicals. through their placenta to their unborn child. Can we measure these chemicals, pesticides, trichlorathlon,

other chemicals in people's bodies at an early age that we can prevent them getting exposed? And can we measure that in people's an environment? So most of us have a thermostat at home, which measures the temperature in our home, which maybe we should be measuring the concentration of particulate matter, little pieces of dirt and soot that are make up smog in Los Angeles

when we look outside the window. Maybe we should be measuring the concentration in particulate matter in our home so that we can take air purifiers and reduce that. Maybe close our windows if we live near a freeway. Maybe we build homes away not only from golf courses but away from freeways. Maybe we situate schools and make sure that they're not near busy streets or we put up barriers that decrease the exposure air pollution. If we start to measure these chemicals in our bodies and in our environment, I think one we're going to be concerned. about what we find, and two, will be able to better take actions to prevent people from ever getting these diseases in the first place. So important. You know, even here in my studio in Los Angeles,

when we built it out, I always have in my office, in my studio, in my bedroom especially, I have these air monitor devices. You know, there's plenty that are out there. And when we built out the studio, I saw like these sound dampeners that we use. They have polyester on them. You have paint that was here previously. You have all sorts of things. And the VOC count on the meter and the parts per PM2.5. Some of these most dangerous particulates that are known to be implicated in Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, as you've shared, even cardiovascular health. Yeah. It was super high. And so we brought in an air filter. And even for a couple weeks, I didn't even just, I didn't use it while it all sort of dampened down.

And you can't see it's a little bit off camera, but I have my air monitor there. And I always make sure when I'm having this conversation on a scale of zero to 100, that it's at least like 90, 95, and that I'll regularly take a look to make sure that the air quality is good. I don't want to expose you.

I don't want to expose me to any of these things. So even in the normal way that we're living our lives, my hope is that we always talk about smart homes and the homes getting smarter. I hope we start bringing in some of this pretty interesting tech that is getting cheaper and cheaper every year so that people can actually see what they're being exposed to on a daily basis. Yeah, if you want to live a short, unhealthy life, refluted air. Air pollution is more disabling on a global basis than high blood glucose than high blood pressure.

It's estimated that you, me, all human beings live three years less because of the effects of air pollution. Wow. I'm sure a lot of that's also skewed by countries like India. China, feels like they've been doing a really good job cleaning things up. India's a little bit behind. I heard on average people die there up to 10 years earlier from things like cardiovascular diseases, et cetera, because of how bad the air quality is. Yeah. So Dr. Parkinson, when he's describing Parkinson's in 1800 in London, he's describing it amongst, among the London fog. Air quality, the level of particulate matter in 1800 London is equal to what people in Delhi, India are breathing in today. It's equal to

what New Yorkers breathe when the Canadian wildfires descended onto New York City and turned the clouds over the sky over the Big Apple Orange. And we can take action to do that. Air quality in Los Angeles is 50 to 90 percent better than it was in the 1970s and 1960s. Air quality in Los Angeles, 1960s, 1970s was so bad people wore masks not to prevent themselves from getting infections, but to avoid the toxic effects of air pollution. Air quality was so bad that the governor of California in the 1960s said we should eliminate all unnecessary driving. That governor was Ronald Reagan. And so if we clean up our air even more, we're all going to live longer, healthier lives.

Studies done here at University of Southern California, University of Southern California, Dr. Caleb Finch and his colleagues have looked at women in their 70s who have normal cognition. followed them over, I think, five years or so, and women who lived in more polluted areas of Los Angeles and other parts of the country had greater rates of cognitive decline than people who didn't. People with Parkinson's disease who are exposed to high levels of air pollution have increased risk for hospitalization related to their Parkinson disease. These all suggest that, one, that air pollution plays a role in who develops the disease and plays a role in the rate of progression of disease. It also suggests that this never, never too late to act. If this study's being done in 70-year-old women in California and in the

United States, it suggests that it's almost never too late to take actions to improve our air quality. And you mentioned China, which used to have the worst air quality in the world and still has some of the cities do. China now has the fastest cleaning air in the world because they recognize the toxic effects of it. It was so bad in China that wealthy schools would be. build domes over playfield so kids could play soccer outside without breathing polluted air. Wow. Who would have thought China's leading the environmental cleanup? You know, they're at a very high level to begin with.

Totally. I think over the 50 most polluted cities in the world, a few years ago, China had like six of them. India had like 13. And, you know, but this is a global issue. Middle East has a lot of, unfortunately, a lot of high levels of air. Are there any tests that you know while you and your team are working on new solutions? Are there any tests that you know of that can be looking at, for example, some of these dry cleaning chemicals that we're most worried about that have been banned in some states, but not all states? So we're doing a study right now.

Shout out to my colleagues at the University of Rochester and University of Minnesota. we're trying to see trichlorothylene dissolves in fat, and that's why it's really good as a degreasing agent. And I mentioned that pesticides can concentrate in fat. And it turns out that other chemicals like trichlorothylene can be contaminated in fat. And so we're trying to see if we can measure trichlorathleen in the breast milk of women. And so we know that one way people do biomonitoring of pesticides is they measure the fat soluble chemicals in the breast milk of nursing women, and they find pesticides in them. And we want to see if we can measure it there

and then perhaps see if that's linked to where people were living. So if they were living near a contaminated Superfund site, they were living near a former dry cleaning site or site known to be contaminated with this chemical. There is no reason. We know the enormous health benefits of breast milk. There's no reason that we should be, that women should be passing toxin's from themselves

onto their children who have developing brains that are much less protected from these chem. To piggyback off of that, if somebody pregnant, not just had a child, just an individual who's just thinking about this, any age group, are there any at-home test or doctor tests that are out there that you're aware of

that can look for trichloratheylene? So we spent the last three months at my new thing looking to see what you can do. You can measure it in blood and urine. If you're actively being exposed to the chemical, you will find it in your blood and urine. One study done in Italy in the 1990s looked at the men in the general population of Italy, and they found TCE and the blood or urine in three quarters of men in Italy. That's how common it was.

It's made one in 12 workers in the United Kingdom worked with a trichlorathlon. 10 million Americans worked with trichlorithylene. So those tests can be done. I'm embarrassed to say I've never ordered such a test. Here I am writing all of this and I've actually never ordered such a test. We're going to work to change that. Is the concern also too that just because something might be there transit transitory in the blood or the urine, but because these toxins end up being lipophilic, they go to fat cells.

Yeah. That also a home test could maybe give a false positive unless if you have daily exposure that's there, you may not know sort of the stored exposure of toxins. Is that a little bit of the concern? So you can, so there have been a few studies that have, for example, found high levels of pesticides in the blood or in the fat of people with Parkinson's disease. You know, ideally you would want to measure this over time because maybe if you want to the dry cleaner will be in your blood and urine from you're going to the dry cleaner that day.

But, you know, a week later, it might not be there. I do get worried about it storage. But again, these are largely unanswered questions. And why are they unanswered? It's worth asking why we don't know. And this ignorance isn't just an accident. It turns out of every Parkinson's research dollar, only two cents. Only two cents of every Parkinson's research dollars focused on preventing the disease.

There are homes in Los Angeles and in Miami that are sold for more money every day than we as a society invest in trying to prevent Parkinson's disease. That's crazy. And a lot of those homes, I know those homes, they're on golf courses here in L.A. We as a society spend $50 billion a year caring for people with Parkinson's disease. If we prevented just 1% of Parkinson's disease, the economic benefit would be $500 million. The economic benefit to Medicare alone, which is expected to no longer be able to meet its financial demands by 2033 or 2034, would be $250 million. $250 billion is equivalent to what NIH spends on Parkinson's research last year. So there are enormous consequences. That's just 1% of preventing disease.

You mentioned previously that individuals, largely, these are folks that are on the lower ring of the economic totem pole are living by these superfund sites. and sometimes it's even accidents that end up happening. There was that famous train accident that happened in East Palestine, was it? East Palestine, Ohio. East Palestine, Ohio. There was some good news, which is that the NIH just came out and said that they're going to be devoting some resources to studying the long-term health effects of the population, largely working class, lower on the economic totem pole, doesn't always have a voice, is often. and forgotten in this news cycle, media cycle, people move on. So that was a win. What do we know about these Superfund sites? Is it just chalked up to pesticides? Is it other chemicals that are

there that we're really concerned about? Yeah. So Superfund sites are these most toxic sites in the country that are designated by the EPA by the federal government for cleanup. So I actually went to East Palestine, Ohio, because I was curious. And so that train accident released a chemical called vinyl chloride. It's used to produce PVC pipes, you know, those white, big white pipes, which are just polyvinyl chloride. It turns out that polyvinyl, that vinyl chloride is very similar to trichlorethylene. Instead of having three chlorine atoms, a vinyl chloride just has one. So it's the same chemical as trichlorathleen minus two chlorine atoms, and it's known to cause a cancer, I believe. And so over half of Superfund sites in the United States,

States are contaminated trichlorothylene. I think something like 20 million Americans live within a mile of a Superfund site. I think 70 million live within three miles. Don't think this is not affecting everyone. Indeed, if you are lower socioeconomic class, if you are from a minority group, your increased likelihood of living near this. I in Rochester, New York, suburban Rochester, lived in a nice suburb called Pittsburgh. You know, lots of doctors were on my street. I was living within five or ten minutes of four, four sites that were contaminated with trichlorethylene or poor chloroethylene.

I was driving past them for years and not knowing. One of them, a former metal fabrication facility, and from the 50s, 60s and 70s had evidently been using trichlorathleen and decreasing. If you're a metal fabrication facility, you're going to decrease. metal and that plant business went left and a new like office park was built that office park was trying to do some expansion and so as part of that expansion they tested they had to do environmental testing when they tested the groundwater and soil they found this chemical and

a concentration of a hundred thousand parts per billion the safety standard is five wow They measured the TCE in the indoor air in this office park, five or ten minutes for where I live in suburban Rochester, and they found unsafe levels, and they put a remediation system in place. We don't know for how many years people were breathing in the unsafe levels of this chemical in this office park. We don't know who developed cancer or if anyone. We don't know who developed Parkinson's disease, if anyone. No one has done those studies. No one has asked those questions. That research has never been done.

And it's not just that. In the book, we talked, one of my friends as an attorney with Parkinson's disease, and I asked him one day, Dan, you know why you have Parkinson disease? And he goes, no, but lots of people in my law office got sick. And it turned out that he worked downtown Rochester, New York, in an office tower that was immediately adjacent to a former dry cleaning site that was known to be contaminated with tri-chlorathleen, perchlorathleen. We assessed 79 of the 82 partners who worked in his law firm. Of those 79 partners, four had Parkinson disease, and 15 had a cancer related to this chemical. We looked at a control group, a comparison group, and we found that only one of 75 attorneys had Parkinson's, and only four had a cancer related to that condition. So these are everywhere.

This isn't another person's problem. This isn't every person's problem. and we need to take action to prevent all of us from getting Parkinson's disease, all of us from getting cancer, and we need to be especially attuned to the needs of those with the fewest resource. Just a few miles down the road over here, we had the Los Angeles fires that one part of Los Angeles fires that completely destroyed the Palisades community.

It also destroyed Altadena as well too. There was other small fires that were there, some in Malibu, but the one in Palisades in particular is the closest one to this location. A lot of my friends live in this area. A lot of my friends lost their home. A lot of my friends are trying to decide, do they rebuild, et cetera. I didn't lose my home, but I don't live that far away from there. And my wife and I regularly ask, how do we know how bad it still is? In a way, even though they're doing construction, taking out the top soil,

the Army Corps of Engineers are here, and they're taking it, and they're dumping it to other parts of LA where they have these super fun sites, they're still largely not a super strong incentive for anybody to really find out how bad the situation is. And you had electric cars burning homes,

PVC piping, old homes with the best, asbestos, old homes with, lead paint, et cetera. If I was curious at all about sort of checking the same way that you checked, you know, if you're living by a Superfund site or what you're being exposed to or this law firm, is there anything that I could be doing besides maybe collecting samples myself and finding a lab to go and test them? So we're trying to look at that. So there's precedence here. So the World Trade Center, not from 9-11, they've done studies on the individuals who cleaned up the World Trade Center. And they have found that those individuals have had higher rates of health complications and higher rates of dementia.

And so I get lots of emails. If people want to email me, they can email me at info at pdplan.org. And I got an email last week from a firefighter who was concerned about a fellow firefighter, who had Parkinson disease and was concerned about the effects of firefighting on terms of their risk for getting Parkinson disease. We just need to be a lot more serious about protecting those who serve us and a lot more serious about protecting our environment. We all want to live long, healthy lives.

You know, it's a gift to be alive, right? The odds of any one of us being alive is astronomical, right? It means all of our parents, you know, for me, didn't die in Vietnam. grandparents didn't die in World War II. Great grandparents didn't die in the influenza pandemic. No one died prematurely from malaria or smallpox. I mean, the likelihood that any one of us is alive is astronomical. It's a miracle.

We should be a lot more serious about allowing us to have clean air, clean food and clean water so all of us can live long, healthy, productive lives. All of us will be better for it. Our society will be better for it. We'll stop spending one in every $5 on six. care in this country and we can change the course of our society in profound and meaningful way. One of the things that I am doing, and I wholeheartedly agree with everything you said, piggybacking off of that and also getting into our next set of questions here,

one of the things that I am doing, just knowing that, you know, when the fire started, we were able to leave town, we went down to San Diego, spent time with our family, and waited for at least the worst or the worse to kind of calm down. But as we know, ash builds up. It blows in the wind, windy day. These metals, these pollutants, they end up in the air. You want to be smart about it. I have air filters at home.

I have reverse osmosis filter. You do the best that you can, right? We're not ready to upend our lives, you know, just yet at least. And but knowing that we, even if you aren't living in Los Angeles and you live outside of Cleveland, Ohio or another big city or middle-sized city that's out there, we're all going to be exposed to some pollutants that are there. So one of the things that I got a lot more serious about after the fires is I started regularly going to sauna. In addition to my working out, which has all sorts of benefits, and I try to work up a sweat. It's tough for me to sweat sometimes,

even in a really hard workout. I don't really sweat that much. So seeing all the data on it, I said, wow, I should be a little bit more serious about going to the sauna and sweating a little bit. So I try to get the sauna that I use. I have access to a few. Try to get it to at least 165, 70. I know the data is mostly on 180 to 200. And I stay there for at least 20 to 30 minutes to try to work up a good sweat.

And then I have some, you know, water and electrolytes afterwards. And I think there's some pretty strong data about that being a preventative and supportive thing. Just anything that can help you sweat. Do you have any thoughts on that? And what are some of the other things that are lifestyle-related, components that we all want to make sure that we get a chance to double down on, not just for Parkinson's disease, but for cancer and anything else you might be exposed to.

So I don't know. There haven't been really, I think, I'm probably not sure if there's been a single study on sauna use and Parkinson's disease. I think the concern, the challenge is that many of these toxins are dissolving fat. And so sweating releases what water soluble chemicals can get out, but fat soluble chemicals, we kind of stick in our body. they're much harder to get rid of. And the principal way, one of the ways, as we talked about earlier, is from nursing when people, when women, pregnant women nurse after they have a child.

You know, we give you 25 recommendations. Let me see some other ones in here. Oh, well, here's one, you know, garden with care. Plants like chrysanthemums, mums do not like to be eaten by insects that many produce their own pesticides. Some of these natural pesticides are linked to Parkinson's. Amateur gardeners who spend on an average of 160 days with weed killers in their yard, for example, have a 70% increased risk of Parkinson's. Gardener should wear gloves and you work extensively with plants. You may want to adapt other protections such as a mask or working in a ventilated area.

Rolling up your windows in traffic. So when I was driving up here from Orange County, I roll up the windows in my car and I recirculate the air because I don't want to be breathing in. all of the particulate matter that is in Los Angeles. You know, cars in L.A. and Southern California always have this like thin film of dust on it. Well, that dust doesn't just accumulate in the cars. You know, some of that we're breathing in. Some of that particulate matter is so small, 1.30th the width of our hair that it's small to go through the nerve responsible for smell called the olfactory nerve,

which hangs in our upper nasal passages and go back directly to the brain. hitchhiking on that particulate matter are toxic metals, lead from leaded gasoline to pass, iron from brakes, platinum from catalytic converters. Turns out that people with Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease have higher concentration of metals in their brain and no one's been able to figure it out why people when focusing on diet, I think it might be coming in through the front door with our brain, which is our noses. We talk about don't poisoning yourself. and not spraying pesticides in your neighborhood.

We talk about making sure that your child's daycare center is not located near a dry cleaner because many of these dry cleaners have these chemicals and they spread, for example, in strip malls, not just to the dry cleaner, but to nearby facilities. In Germany, grocery stores located simply near where a dry cleaner is located, ended up having trichlorathylene in the butter, in the cheese, in the grocery stores.

So in Germany, you're not allowed to build a grocery store near a dry cleaner. Can I ask you a question about that? At least in Los Angeles, sort of the wellness capital of the world or trying to be, you'll see so many of these eco-cleaners that are there. Have you ever dug into that at all? So the green clean cleaners, I ask, and I always ask, where are they using? And the chemical perchlorophyllase often abbreviated either PCE or perk. So I ask them if they're using it.

Most dry cleaners tend to know what it is and they should not in California be using it because I think California banned it. I don't know the timing of that ban. So I just ask them. And like I asked this dry cleaner in New York and he knew all about it. And he actually actually knew about the federal action. So I think people in the industry know just like I think most golf courses know that they're spraying pesticides and that, you know, pesticides health health risk. They may not be aware of the extent of the risk. And many times chemical companies conceal that risk as we highlighted.

from the reporting from the from the from the from the guardian so I do look for the green leaf for the dry cleaners and then I usually just ask but in general my guess is that since you become aware of this research you're just trying to avoid as much as dry cleaning as possible are there other chemicals that are being used that people think is okay right now because I'm asked as well and sometimes they'll say okay great you're not using that do you know what you're using and they're like I hear all sorts of stuff they'll say it's water based solvents which I have no idea what that means, or they'll say,

oh, it's organic. And I don't know too much about dry cleaning. So I don't know. Do you have organic chemicals? Do you not have organic dry clean chemicals? Do you not have organic clean chemicals? Meaning like the history of? No, why do we dry clean clothes?

What's the purpose of dry cleaning? People are trying to get out their wrinkles. No. So our clothes don't shrink. So we're doing all of this, right? We're putting workers and the rest of us at higher risk for cancer and Parkinson's so our clothes don't shrink. shrink through traditional wash water.

Yeah. Yeah. So in the 1880s, we used kerosene and petroleum products to do it, but they had the unfortunate property of being flammable. So trichlorophyllate developed in the 1920s and 1930s, so 100 years ago was used. And then it was supplanted by per chlorophylline, one more chlorine. Atom the 1950s, dominant use of dry cleaning agents. We're doing all this so our clothes don't shrink.

That's a really high price to pay so our clothes don't shrink. I mean, I do have empathy for that as well, too. People buy a really nice, you know, shirt or sweater or piece of clothing. So we have chemists, right? You drive a car. Yep. I'm going to guess your car's not from the 1950s and not from the 1920s. Nope.

You're not driving a Model T Ford. That's correct. Right? You're not flying in an airplane from the age of the Wilbur brothers, right? Correct. So if engineers can come up with safer modes of transportation, chemists can come up for safer chemicals for driving. We just need to use a little bit of. peer pressure, awareness, maybe some legislation to put a fire under the industry to come up

with these solutions. No one's putting their daughter in a car from the 1920s. No one's getting a Model T Ford for their daughter for their 16th birthday. Which would be pretty expensive. Right. But why are we allowing dry cleaning chemicals that we know cause cancer, cry chlorophyline is known to cause cancer for chlorophylline likely causes cancer? Why are we still allowing these chemicals to be used? And just to say it explicitly, California, we had some legislation that was passed, so it's less likely over here. But chances are, if you're in any other state in the United States, they're probably still using these harmful chemicals.

They're still using it. And even if you're not getting dry cleaned, if you live nearby, a dry cleaner, you're getting some exposure. Why aren't we raising the expectations of society? I mean, we have really smart and talented people here. Why aren't we coming up with safer ways to protect crops? Why aren't we coming up with safer ways to dry clean clothes? Why aren't we coming up with ways to have cleaner burning engines so we have are exposed

to the less particulate matter. I mean, you know, we're Americans, right? We're really good at coming up with better ways to do that. We just need to raise our bar and raise our expectations and call upon ourselves to do it. You know, JFK, President Kennedy in the 1960 says we go to the moon not because it's easy but because it's hard. Well, we should be doing the same thing. We can come up with cleaner ways, easier ways of dry cleaning clothes. We can come up with safer pesticides.

We can come up with cleaner burning engines. We can come up with ways to reduce exposure from fat. factories, we can find up kind of, we have ways to reduce exposure to these chemicals in people's homes, schools, and workplaces so that people like Dan Cannell don't have to spend the next 40 years of his life with Parkinson's disease. So people aren't dying of cancer in their 90s from colon cancer. All these things are within our power to do it. We raise our expectations. We form as a generation that we want to live in a healthier society with clean air, clean food, and clean water, not just for us, but for all of us, we can do this.

From your honest perspective as an insider outsider, what's playing the biggest obstacle to making massive progression in this if you had to rank it? And maybe you have a third, but I'll give you two. Is it entrenched research dollars, the sort of big academia that often, again, can be well-meaning, but is not very open to new ideas, new perspectives. Max Planck, the German physicist, Nobel Prize winner said, paraphrasing here, that often leaps in research, we're talking about mathematics, physics, et cetera, but you could apply this to medicine as well, too.

Don't happen when the old guard wakes up and realize they've been doing things wrong, but happen, truthfully, one funeral at a time. They die, new group takes over and has a new perspective. Is it big academia or is it big ag slash big pesticide that has the lobbying interest to not want to change things? If you had to pick between the two, which one is a bigger blockage to making leaps in the areas that you've been talking about today? So science is the production of knowledge, ideally for the public's good.

There's another word called agnotology, which is a deliberate production of ignorance, often for commercial gain. And the tobacco industry did that for concealing its risk of smoking. We've talked about pesticide. We talked about social media. We've talked about opioids. And so I think both are a play. Among those two, I get more concerned about people concealing the risk than academics not being oriented, although there are definitely shortcomings among me and my peers in terms of not looking and asking the right questions.

As I said, I think we've been duped and we have been. I think the biggest driver, if you want change, you need two things. You need one creativity and the second is will. And we've lacked the will to make the chain. I mean, why are we putting soda in kids' schools? Why are we spraying pesticides on kids' schools and playgrounds? Why are we allowing dry cleaning chemicals to be around for 100 years that cause cancer? Why are we continuing to breathe polluted air?

Why are we letting them 1.2 million Americans with Parkinson's suffer in silence? Why are we letting cancer rates in the United States increase among people under 50? Why are we spending one out of every $5 of GDP on sick? care in this country, even though life expectancy from the time I went to medical school today is improved by eight months, eight months, and we spend 50% more on health care today than we did when we were in medical school. We have not summoned the will to change our orientation and to drive the change that's necessary to allow us all to live cleaner and healthier lives. If we do that, we'll all be so much better off for it. We've done this in the past for HIV. We've done that for a March

of dimes with polio. We have done that for Mothers Against Drunk Driving here in California, Candace Leitner, 1984 days after her 13-year-old daughter is struck and killed while walking across the street knocked out of her shoes. She's lobbing Governor Jerry Brown in California to make drinking and driving illegal in all 50 states. Eight years after Candice Lightner found her voice and Mothers Against Drunk Driving found theirs, 10,000 fewer Americans. Americans die from drinking, driving every year because of Candace Lightner. 10,000 families not torn apart. 10,000 schools not destroyed.

10,000 communities not grieving because mothers against drunk driving made drinking, driving socially unacceptable. We needed exactly the same thing for pesticides, for dry cleaning chemicals and air pollution. And if we do that, we prevent not just Parkinson's disease. We decrease ALS. We decrease autism. We decrease intellectual disabilities. We decrease brain cancer.

We decrease Alzheimer's disease. and that's just for neurological disorder. It's a powerful vision of what's possible with us all working together and shining the spotlight on this. You know, so far, Dr. Dorsey, we've been spending a lot of time talking about most of the community out there that doesn't have this incredibly potentially debilitating with the caveat that there's a lot of people that are also diagnosed that are living productive lives. medication has come a long way, some treatments have come a long way, and there are people that want to showcase that they can live a productive life. But for those that are in that category that have a diagnosis, I remember one powerful thing that you shared with me before was that when I asked, what's the first step in their journey? If you're waking up today and you're listening

to this podcast and you have a diagnosis, and you have a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease, what's the first step? And you told me something very powerful. He said, if I knew that there was a bath of water that was polluted, right? The first thing we're going to do is we're going to turn off the spigot and we're going to stop the exposure to the things that could have caused this situation in the first place. Translated over to this, we want to look at these same things and make sure that this individual doesn't have a lot or excessive levels of these exposures. Is that accurate?

Yeah. So the first question, if you get diagnosed with the disease, any disease, Parkinson's, you need to ask your doctor, why did I get this disease? Why did I get this disease? If a smoker comes in and is diagnosed with lung cancer, what's the first thing the doctor is going to tell them to do? Stop smoking. Right.

If a farmer comes in with Parkinson's disease, what should the doctor tell them to do? Stop pesticide farming. Yeah. Stop getting exposed to pesticides. We are not doing that. So we need to make sure the first thing you need to do is find out whatever the disease. If you got inflammatory bowel disease, you got Crohn's disease. My mother lives in Orange County and she was watching CNN.

I saw three consecutive commercials. One was for Crohn's disease. One was for migraine. One was for Alzheimer's disease. And all focused on treatment. And American medicine has a significant and serious flaw in it because we go from disease to treatment. If we don't go from disease to cause, more and more people are only going to get

the disease. The first response to any crisis is to contain it. If there's a fire, you want to make sure the fire spreads and then you go attend to those victims. Right now, all we're doing is tending to the victims and doing nothing to contain the spread of Parkinson's disease or Alzheimer's disease or cancer. Find out what the cause is. Mitigate your exposure to those toxicans that are tied to the disease. That's why we give you 25 recommendations to do it. And then once you figured out the cause, you are the first step getting to a closer to a cure. A prerequisite for curing a disease medically in the United States or around the world is to identify its cause. I'll give you an example. People used to bleed to death from bleeding ulcer. Remember bleeding

ulcers? It was a top 10 causes leading a death in 1960. Do you remember what they thought caused bleeding ulcers? No, remind me. Stress. They thought it was all stress. Switch your job, take some time off, do all this. Nothing. People continue to bleed to death. When I was in training, bleeding ulcers was a common presentation. We had to transfuse blood.

Big mess when individuals come in. Smart scientists, we tell the story in here, postulated that it was due to bacteria. The establishment said, impossible. Bacteria can't possibly live in an acidic environment like the stomach. You guys are crazy. The scientists would even drink. drink the juices from people with peptic ulcer disease and show that it was transmissible,

that it was infectious. And they still didn't believe. We now that peptic ulcer disease is due to H. Pyloria bacteria. We prescribe antibiotics. Almost no one dies from bleeding ulcers. When you find out the cause and the cause can be as not can be surprising, who thought it was going to be a bacteria that was causing bleeding ulcers, you stop bad treatments. So lots of people were getting holding quit jobs, getting surgical treatments for their bleeding ulcers, you can prevent the disease. Bleeding ulcers is no longer a top 10 leading cause of death. If we figure out what the cause is, you're one step getting closer to the cure. Second, you can stop getting exposed to it so you can slow the rate of progression of the disease. So we know that ongoing exposure to these chemicals

might be a reason why some individuals have a rapidly progressing course of Parkinson's, while some might have a slowly progressive course. And then most people, powerful you can prevent it. We'd all like our children not to get the same diseases that we do. If we know what the causes are, we can make sure that our take actions mitigate the risk of that for our children. That's the first thing you should do. Second thing, if you have Parkinson's is you should exercise. There was a great study in the New England Journal of Medicine just two weeks ago looking at the effects of exercise on individuals who've had colon cancer, who had surgery, and had chemotherapy. and they randomized to get a brochure on the benefits of exercise or to get a structured exercise

program with like weekly visits over three years. And they follow these individuals for eight years. The risk of cancer recurrence was 27% lower in those individuals who got an exercise training program. 27% lower risk of cancer recurrence from exercise for people with colon cancer. Risk of death, 37% lower. If you treated 14 people with colonel, cancer after they've had surgery, after they've had chemotherapy, average age of 60, treat 14 of them, you prevent one death. If this is true for exercising colon cancer, what's going to be the case for exercise, long-term studies, exercise, and Alzheimer's disease, and exercise in Parkinson's disease? Exercise releases growth factors in the brain that protect the nerve cells that are being damaged and

dying in the disease. We have great evidence about the benefits of exercise. We should be encouraging people and supporting and enabling people with Parkinson's disease to exercise. And then third is there are medications that can be highly effective to replace the dopamine that's lost. Leave adopas the most effective medication for it. But first ask why you got the disease, take steps to mitigate your exposure to that cause and other similar chemicals. Second is exercise and third is a medications to help. There might be somebody listening today that's saying, hey, I've been diagnosed or I have a loved one that's been diagnosed or a friend. And I'm working with the practitioner, again, maybe well-meaning,

but it's saying my lifestyle has nothing to do with this, right? There may be neurologists that are not as aware. Any tips on where to find somebody open-minded? Or is it better to sort of segment and say, okay, this is my neurologist for this disease? I'm most likely going to need medication or disease modulating therapies. I'll use them for that. But let me not try to convince them to be more than that. Instead, largely a lot of the principles that you talk about here that are in the book,

they can pick it up and just start doing it themselves and find a trainer if they need to find a trainer if they're not used to working out. Or pay attention to their sleep and maybe get an aura ring or a whoop so that they can start to improve the quality of their street. of their sleep. What is your recommendation? In the United States, only 9% of people with Parkinson's see a Parkinson's specialist, someone like me. 50% see a general neurologist, many of whom are outstanding, but most of the time not as well versed in disease. And 40% don't see neurologists of any kind. And those who don't see neurologists of any kind within four years of diagnosis are 20% more likely to fracture their hip, 20% more likely to be placed in a skilled nursing facility, and 20% more likely to die prematurely. So getting the right care is important, and this is true for any condition,

whether it's Parkinson's disease or surgical treatment. We put as part of our plan is that we need to increase the number of centers of excellence for Parkinson's 10-fold. Dr. Michael Oaken, who's the medical director for the Parkinson's Foundation, says we should have a Parkinson's Center of Excellence for every 10,000 individuals affected by the disease so that they are better informed. They know what about the benefits of exercise. They know about the benefits of nutrition and sleep with Parkinson's disease. They know about the Mediterranean diet, and hopefully they increasingly know about the underlying causes of disease.

If you guide a clinician in the right direction, they will respond. If you ask them why they have Parkinson disease, they might go, we're not really sure. And then that might be a question as to why aren't we really sure? And it's okay to make your doctor uncomfortable. You can be respectful about it. You should make me uncomfortable. And it causes people to think and reflect.

And when you start thinking, reflecting good things can come out of that. I had the gift of a sabbatical to think and reflect. I didn't have the gift of a sabbatical for this book. But when you think and reflect, you find out. We found out things in this book that we weren't sure that was true in our first book. You know, you've commented that this book is even harder punching than the first book because we have greater degree of confidence in it. And we have more and more studies coming out that are suggesting exactly what we argued in the first book that Parkinson's is largely a manmade disease.

Ask people why you have disease. Don't let them just tell you to give a treatment. Ask people to do things for you instead of to you. I want to take a moment here to just plug your book because I think it's such an incredible and fantastic resource. So it's the Parkinson plan. Can you read the subtitle on the book? Yes, a new path to prevention and treatment. Obviously, it's going to be available on Amazon and we're all books are sold.

It's available right now. People can pre-order the book. If you think these ideas need a greater voice, a greater airing, please consider buying the book. Michael and I are, Michael O'Kin and I are devoting the vast majority of our proceeds to efforts to prevent and the disease. The more people buy the book, the more you likely get bestseller list, the more you get media attention. And you can set off a virtuous cycle whereby these ideas are spread more rapidly throughout society. And then we're more poised to take the action that we need to do to prevent and treat. Ray, you've called Parkinson's a pandemic.

As we wrap up here, just remind the audience how urgent this situation is. And more importantly, what's at stake if we don't give this? disease and the other diseases that are related to it because there's a lot of lessons that we're going to be learning that can be applied to other things. What's at stake if we continue ignoring the root causes of Parkinson's? The disease is spread and we see that with type 2 diabetes. We see that with obesity. We see that with ADHD.

We see this with autism. These diseases spread and we are never. We are never going to get in front of this by just caring for people with the disease. never train enough neurologist. You'll never train enough Parkinson's specialists. You know, today 200 Americans were diagnosed with the disease and 100 died of the disease. Actually, 250 were diagnosed with the disease. You will never do that. You will never get out in terms of treatment. And if you do, if you're lucky to do it, you'll be, you know, we're threatening to bankrupt Medicare. So there is really no alternative except to eventually prevent these diseases from

happening. You think about like who wakes up every morning trying to prevent breast cancer. Are you saying by name specifically? Anything. But what organization? You know, in healthcare, it's all the incentives are to treat people. Medical institutions make more money the more people are diagnosed with breast cancer. Even the pink ribbon is focused on early diagnosis and detection. So more companies make more money with mammography. Doctors make more money treating individuals. pharmaceutical companies make more money with chemotherapy. Yeah. So going back to your question is that I can't think of anybody.

Yeah. Besides maybe individual people that I know that are passionate about the subject that might have come on this podcast or educating people on social media or things like that. And they're outside the mainstream. Yeah. And so 1 and 8 women get breast cancer. Why do we find that socially acceptable? Yeah.

One and eight men get prostate cancer. Why is that socially acceptable? Listen, I never want to get prostate cancer. I don't want to become incontinent and impotent. I don't even want to see the doctor talking about prostate cancer. I just don't want to get the disease. So we need to ensure that people are, that we have incentives in place for people to focus on preventing the disease.

And some of my colleagues, you know, with some degree of truth, say, all I really care about is preventing Parkinson's disease. And I do that because there are about a thousand of my colleagues, Parkinson's specialists in the country, but the number of us who are actually waking up every morning thinking about trying to prevent the disease is like five. There aren't. And so I wake up every morning thinking, professionally at least, about preventing Parkinson's disease because I think it's incumbent on some individuals, some organizations like

Atria where I work now on focused on trying to prevent diseases. There will always be financial incentive. There are financial incentives to treat people with disease. There aren't financial incentives. There isn't a structure in place to prevent people from getting the disease, whether that's type two diabetes, whether that's autism, whether that's breast cancer, prostate cancer, or Parkinson disease, or Alzheimer's disease. And we just need to make sure that those incentives are in place so that we change the course of the disease so that future generations, just like we've been spared

the indignities of polio, we've been spared the indignities of, you know, typhus and yellow fever, that future generations are spared the suffering from Parkinson's. Well, Dr. Ray Dorsey, on behalf of my entire audience and all the people that you've impacted, I'm just honored that you're one of those people that is waking up every day, thinking about this, how to get the message out there. And that also is very clear. Not only do you have the passion,

but you have practiced the way to talk about this that gets people both excited, a little enraged, but also deeply hopeful about the future. And that's what we're trying to do. We're hopeful. giving you a constructive plan. We're not just like saying the sky is falling down. We're giving you a constructive plan for actions you can take as individuals to prevent and slow the rate of progression of the disease and giving actions that you can do as individuals in your communities.

Think of the Henrietta Town Supervisor, no pesticides in Henry out of New York. If no pesticides in Henry Addick, New York, we can do that across the country and things that we can do in a society to allow us all to live longer, healthier life. The book is out there, the Parkinson's plan. a new path to prevention and treatment. The website is PDPlan. PDPlan.org. We'll link to it in the show notes. Please support the book, support the incredible work,

and even share this podcast with somebody you know that might find this work fascinating. I know I did. I shared it with all of my friends, even in the podcast space, and those that had you on were blown away by your work. And I just want to say again, thank you so much for all the effort.

and everything you do to raise awareness on this important topic. And thank you for making voices aimed at health and wellness for improving the health of thousands, if not millions of people. You and your colleagues play a huge role in terms of getting the message out about ways, new ways of preventing disease. And that voice has been absent, right? And it's actually new people like you and new media like podcasts that are helping reach and educate millions of people, not just the United States, but around the world.

So thank you for all that you do. And thank you for letting me come back on your show. Thank you. Hi, one, Drew here. Two quick things. 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. 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-H-I-T dot com and click on the tab that says, try this.