Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Think You Might Have Low Testosterone? "Artificial Estrogens" Could Be Why...

Episode Date: November 8, 2017

In this episode, interview author and researcher Dr. Anthony Jay about a topic that isn’t discussed much in the fitness space at least, and that’s how estrogen-like chemicals that we’re exposed to every day can lower testosterone and raise estrogen levels in our bodies. Most “testosterone talk” revolves around using diet, training, supplements, and even drugs to boost testosterone production, and while that’s one way to do it, there’s also the other side of that coin: removing impediments to testosterone production, which include these estrogen-mimicking chemicals. Here’s a little sneak peek of what you’ll learn in this episode: - How phytoestrogens and mycoestrogens present in certain plant foods can interfere with your hormones. - Why an imbalance in sex hormones can promote weight gain. - A nasty little trick companies use to make you think their plastics are free of estrogen-mimicking chemicals when they're not. - Five things you can do right now to dramatically reduce your exposure to artificial estrogens and see marked improvements in your hormone profile. - And more... Listen to this episode and let me know what you think! Also, if you like the discussion and want to learn more about how these chemicals affect your body and what you can do to minimize their impact, definitely check out Dr. Jay’s book Estrogeneration. 6:05 - What are artificial estrogens, how are we exposed to them, and why? 7:42 - What are the chemicals that act like estrogen in our body? 11:15 - How are we exposed to artificial estrogens? 13:43 - What are BPA and phthalates? 19:46 - How does high estrogen levels affect our body? 23:38 - What can we do to lower the artificial estrogens levels in our body? 32:59 - How can I measure the artificial estrogens in my body? 36:44 - Why is there a political discrepancy between Europe and America over artificial estrogen? 46:13 - What is epigenetics? 50:09 Where can people find your books? Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

It's amazing how much atrazine, we use millions and millions of pounds of atrazine also, and that's a completely estrogenic chemical, and that's illegal in Europe. So they don't allow any in the drinking water over in Europe, you know, nothing on the crops. Over here, we got these upper limits in our water supply that I think are kind of outrageous. Hey, it's Mike, and welcome to yet another episode of the podcast. In this episode, I interview author and researcher Dr. Anthony Jay about a topic that isn't discussed very much in the fitness space at least, and which should be, and that's how estrogen-like chemicals that we are exposed to every day, all of us can lower our testosterone levels and

raise our estrogen levels. The reason why I wanted to have this discussion is most testosterone talk revolves around using diet or exercise or supplements or even drugs to simply boost testosterone production or just boost testosterone levels. And while that is one way to do it, you can do and take things to enhance your body's natural testosterone production or just introduce it exogenously and thereby raise your testosterone levels. There's also the other side of the coin, which is removing impediments to your natural testosterone production, including these estrogen mimicking chemicals, which can be quite powerful as you will learn about in this episode.

You're also going to learn about how phytoestrogens and mycoestrogens that are present in certain plant foods can interfere with your hormones. You're going to learn why an imbalance in sex hormones can promote weight gain. You're going to hear about a nasty little trick that companies use to make you think that their plastics are free of estrogen-mimicking chemicals when they're not. You're going to learn five things that you can do right now to dramatically reduce your exposure to these chemicals and see market improvements in your hormone profile as a result, and much more. This is where I would normally plug a sponsor to pay the bills, but I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead, I'm just going to quickly tell you about something of mine,

specifically my fitness book for women, Thinner, Leaner, Stronger. Now, this book has sold over 150,000 copies in the last several years, and it has helped thousands of women build their best bodies ever, which is why it currently has over 1,200 reviews on Amazon with a four and a half star average. So if you want to know the biggest lies and myths that keep women from ever achieving the lean, sexy, strong, and healthy bodies they truly desire, and if you want to learn the simple science of building the ultimate female body, then you want to read Thinner, Leaner, Stronger today, which you can find on all major online retailers like Audible, Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play. Now, speaking of Audible, I should also mention that you can actually get

the audio book 100% free when you sign up for an Audible account, which I highly recommend that you do if you're not currently listening to audio books. I myself love them because they let me make the time that I spend doing things like commuting, prepping food, walking my dog and so forth into more valuable and productive activities. So if you want to take Audible up on this offer and get my book for free, simply go to www.bitly.com slash free TLS book. And that will take you to Audible. And then you just have to click the sign up today and save button, create your account. And voila, you get to listen to thinner, leaner, stronger for free. All right. That's it for the shameless plugging. Let's get to the show. Anthony, welcome to the show. Thank you for being so patient and rescheduling with me over and over as my life was tumbling

around. Oh, thanks for having me. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'm excited to talk to you because, you know, we're going to be talking about testosterone, which is a super red hot subject these days. Testosterone boosters are selling more than ever. Testosterone replacement therapy is more popular than ever. I get asked about testosterone all the time. I've written quite a bit about it. boosters are selling more than ever. Testosterone replacement therapy is more popular than ever.

I get asked about testosterone all the time. I've written quite a bit about it. I've also recorded now some podcast content specifically on it, but I haven't spoken about what you're going to dive into, which is, you know, most people when they're thinking about testosterone, most guys, if they're concerned about it at all, their question is how do I boost my testosterone? What can I take, you know, whether it's natural or not, that's going to raise my testosterone, but they don't usually give much thought to the other side of that coin, which is taking the other foot off the brake. So they're, they're like, how can I go faster? And that they don't realize is that there are environmental factors that are going to lower their baseline.

So there's more than people think. You know, I talk to I address this topic all the time and people sometimes accuse me of being, you know, like over the top or fear mongering or whatever. Yeah, like they're making they're making the frogs gay or something, right? Yeah, this is just the science. You know, some of these are more well known than others. And a lot of people are recognizing that. Yeah, BPA, for example, that I should be avoiding BPA, but they don't even know the whole story on that. So it's, it's a good timing too, because there's that doc. Did you see that documentary? It's

called Icarus. Uh, I haven't, but it's been recommended to me by multiple people many times. Yeah. I just started it. It looks really good. It's interesting. It's a, it's basically about a guy who's using testosterone. He's got his foot on the gas pedal like you're talking about. Yeah. So, you know, it's another example of that. It'd be interesting to see, you know, to do a documentary on this. Right. Which is, you know, like lowering your artificial estrogen exposures and therefore raising your

testosterone more naturally. Yeah, absolutely. So let's just start at the top so people know what type of chemicals we're even estrogen exposures and therefore raising your testosterone more naturally. Yeah, absolutely. So let's just start at the top so people know what type of chemicals we're even talking about. So you mentioned artificial estrogens. What does that mean exactly? And how are we exposed to them and why? I use the word estrogenics frequently and artificial estrogens, and they both mean the same thing. They mean anything that acts like estrogen in your body anything that binds your estrogen receptor so just like testosterone just like any hormone you've got receptors for estrogen and sometimes i like to use the example of leptin and bear with me for a second i'll circle back to estrogen and testosterone but like when you eat food your fat

cells secrete leptin it's a hormone and that's one of the reasons fat is considered an endocrine organ because it secretes hormones. And so it secretes leptin. And that goes throughout your body. And most cells don't have leptin receptors. So it just kind of goes in and goes out. It goes into your muscles. It goes out. But your brain has leptin receptors.

So when leptin gets to your brain, it signals. it binds those receptors and tells your brain that you're full you should stop eating and you know to estrogen is the same way you've got receptors in your brain so when you have estrogen in your body you know it's going throughout your blood it gets in your brain it binds those receptors and acts on your brain but and it's involved in male motivation, for example, in lab studies. But also it's in all kinds of other cells throughout your body tissues. It's in the muscles, it's in the, you know, liver, it's in the fat cells, it's all over the place. That's the difference between leptin and estrogen and testosterone. So estrogen, estrogen and testosterone, just ubiquitous throughout your

body. Right. So let's get specific on these chemicals. What are some of them? So I put together a top 10 list for my book to just kind of simplify it. I mean, there's a few more than 10, but I kind of just combined different categories. For example, you know, phytoestrogens is one category. So that's just estrogens that plants, well, hormones that plants secrete that act like estrogen in our body. Obviously the big one there is soy. Everybody knows about soy. Right. And there's some conflicting research on that or supposedly conflicting research. There seems to be a genetic component, right? Some people respond differently to them than others. Definitely. Yeah. And I mean, there's a dose component. There's a lot of, it's complicated with soy because obviously your gut bacteria play a

role too. What I like about the phytoestrogens compared to a lot of the other ones is our ancestors have seen those chemicals. Our gut bacteria have seen those chemicals. Whereas BPA, our gut bacteria have never seen that. You know, parabens, our gut bacteria, these are all completely artificial. So at least with soy, you stand kind of a fighting chance, although i definitely don't recommend it and i actually have a youtube channel and i did a video on soy alpha and beta estrogen receptors i mean there's arguments that you hear vegans make and if you really want to get into the weeds you can just watch my youtube video on that topic because how can people find it it's called chagrin and tonic just like the series of my books so think of gin and tonic chagrin like oh what what's

going on what the hell's going on chagrin like c-h-a-g-r-i-n chagrin and tonic okay good so that's the channel on youtube and then like i say with the soy specifically there's this idea that when you eat soy yeah it's got estrogen i mean everybody admits that everybody knows that you can't hide that fact but the the idea that the vegans are proposing and it's an interesting idea i looked into it it's sounds really good the idea is that it the soy estrogen goes throughout your body and it only binds alpha estrogen receptors you have two different types of estrogen receptors you have alpha and beta and soy only binds alpha and that's involved in a lot of health benefits whereas you know it doesn't

bind to beta the problem is the study that shows that it does show that in one in one figure and like figure one it binds alpha receptor but then they did a totally different experiment with different i mean they did the same experiment with totally different cells right and they found it binds the beta receptor more in the exact same paper so that's just conveniently ignored inconvenient truth so anyway like i say it's a little bit of the weeds there but you know people need to know because there's there are a lot of legitimate scientists pushing soy i think there's a lot of industry money behind it you know there's a lot of you know emotional attachment to it anyway long long story short I avoid so

I recommend people do but your gut bacteria you can't break some of it down yeah yeah and that's that's I've had the same position on it where it's like why I mean why do you have so many other choices for protein and even if you want to stick to plant-based proteins you have so many other choices so it's just not necessary to have soy yeah and another one on the list that a lot of people don't actually know about is mycoestrogen. And again, it's somewhat natural. Our bodies have seen it.

You know, it's toxic. It's bad. It's an estrogen. And it's actually, so myco means mold. So molds literally secrete an estrogen chemical and it throws off our natural estrogen and causes infertility, depression. You know, a lot of these mold symptoms, fat storage, low testosterone, the whole thing. I mean, these are all common health issues with all of these artificial estrogens.

And how would we be exposed to this? Like mold that, you know, would grow in your house that you wouldn't be aware of or? Well, that that's the source for sure. But I think most Americans don't realize how, you know, how high the mold is in a lot of our grains and a lot of our foods in America. Mostly the grains. I mean, pretty much exclusively. A good indicator of that is our regulation is terrible compared to Europe.

You can look at Europe and they have such strict limits on mold estrogen specifically, not just mold toxins, you know, because there's a number of toxins. There's aflatoxin. There's ocrotoxin. There's all these different mold toxins, but mycoestrogen is one of, it's called xerolinone. That's the actual name of the mold estrogen. And the U.S., you know, you look at Europe, they regulate xerolinone, the mold estrogen. U.S. has absolutely no regulation. There is no, you know, restriction, no upper limit or anything. So when the Europeans have a high level of mycoestrogen in their grains, guess what they do? Ship it over here. And in fact, they even have regulations for their animal feed.

So if their cow, you know, if their corn for their cows has too much mold estrogen, ship it over to America. Put it in the human food because that's perfectly legal and they do that. Because we'll eat anything. Yeah. Well, it's's all processed you can't taste it anyway right they got so much salt and all this other stuff in there salt fat and sugar yeah it's it's it's a frustrating thing i mean i you know i can't believe how the more you dig into this one of my chapters in my book was comparing europe versus amer America in terms of regulation with all of these artificial estrogens, BPA, parabens, phthalates, you know, red number 40, that's a red artificial red food coloring. Atrazine is one of them on my top 10 list.

Atrazine is a herbicide. It's number two used herbicide in America. We use glyphosate number one. Treants and stuff like that. Yeah, no, it's a bigger concern than people realize because, I mean, I think, you know, the lignans, this idea that lignans are inflammatory is really interesting and kind of a unique approach. It's Dr. Gundry, I think his name is, with the plant paradox. You know, he's out there telling everybody about lignans. And there's a lot of truth to that. And I'm still kind of learning about that myself,

but, uh, but I mean, the estrogens are really well-established scientists, you know, have been showing this for years now with the grains that, yeah, there's mold estrogen, there's these herbicides that are act like estrogen and, you know, and then you add soy, which of course has estrogen. So you're getting it, you're getting it from a lot of different angles. Yeah. And you had mentioned a BPA, you had mentioned phthalates. Can you explain quickly what those are and how we're exposed to those? Yeah, for sure. So BPA is actually a plastic ingredient.

So people make plastic out of it. It's bisphenol A. The federal government really has done nothing to regulate BPA. I mean, they haven't made it. They have done a little bit, but they haven't made it illegal. I think they need to make it illegal, mean they haven't made it they have they've done a little bit but they haven't made it illegal i think they need to make it illegal but they haven't and 17 states have come out and made it illegal in children's products at least because it acts like estrogen it causes a whole host of problems again fat gains depression lower testosterone bpa you know should be illegal states have made it illegal and but what happens when states make

BPA illegal is companies come out and they make a chemical called bisphenol s bps and the crazy thing is bps acts at least as estrogenic in our bodies at least as much as bpa that's obviously a concern because you can have a label that says BPA free on a plastic bottle, but it can still have BPS. Yeah, it's bullshit. So yeah, it can have the same health problems. So you know, you have to be real smart about that. And obviously, the solution is pretty simple. You can go with stainless steel, glass, you know, things, if you have solid foods, you know, if you've got, I don't know, meats and things like that, plastic is fine. You can put them in plastic. But when you start storing liquids in these BPAs, BPA plastics, it leaches. I mean, there's just no question. In fact, there was a study they did with coffee

and they compared decaf versus regular coffee. They just poured hot coffee into BPA mugs because it's amazing how many mugs people are drinking out of every day that are made up from bpa plastic 20 more bpa transferred into the caffeinated coffee just because there's different molecular properties with having caffeine that pulls the bpa it causes more leaching so there's there's kind of an argument to be made to be more cautious with like juice or you know oils in plastics if you're storing oil in bpa plastic that's a bigger health problem and scientists like me to be frank we haven't been picking that up we haven't you know we've been doing experiments saying oh fats are bad you know look at this study fats are causing these health problems but in reality what are

they storing the fats in these big plastic five five-gallon buckets or plastic bags or whatever, they're storing these fats in the plastic. And it might be completely different if they were to store them differently. In glass, right? And I think that those studies need to be done. They're confusing a lot of people. And there's been some studies that have been done with some of these estrogens. For example, atrazine, I mentioned that.

I'll come back to BPA in a second, but I want to throw this study at you, Mike. You're going to appreciate this. So they gave mice, they had two separate groups of rats, excuse me, two separate groups of rats. And one group, they fed them exactly the same, exact same exercise, everything exactly the same, except one group, they gave low dose atrazine in their drinking water, and the other group just had pure drinking water. And the reason I emphasize low dose is because a lot of people in the Midwest and farm country were drinking atrazine low dose. So this is a relevant experiment. And they found the rats with low dose atrazine got fat compared to the other group, which were normal, even though the calories were the same. So, you know, obviously,'s a huge problem. Yeah. And that's, I mean, that comes down to, I mean, if you want to touch

on the, on the mechanisms you can, but, um, and we know that higher estrogen levels and lower testosterone levels is just associated with higher body fat levels. Um, so that's not surprising. It's through a protein called p-par gamma uh estrogen activates yeah you get it from both directions right you get it from the lowering testosterone and you get it from the increasing estrogen and of course when women are pregnant their estrogen goes way up and so uh you know what happens when you're taking all these estrogen chemicals into your body is that you're essentially imitating pregnancy. You're telling your body that you're pregnant. You're kind of confusing the signaling. And so your body has to say, well, let's store some fat, you know, because that's natural. That's what

mothers, pregnant mothers do because, you know, our ancestors maybe didn't have access to all the food that we have today. So that emergency store of fat for that baby, you know, it had to be there. Also to protect it, right? Because the weight is usually down in the abdomen, uh, just to protect against physical shocks and blows and so forth. It's a great point. Yeah. Yeah. And the heat, you know, like it helps to regulate temperature. I mean, there's a lot of benefits. Like I don't have a problem with fat itself, but, uh, you know, especially for pregnant women is, you know, the healthy levels and all this, but yeah, you definitely don't want to be telling your body that you're pregnant when you're a 40 year old

male or whatever. Go through, uh, your own strange version of what they call it. Manopause. Yeah. Yeah. Andropause. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let me give you a number two, because, uh, a lot of times women hear this stuff that I talk about and they say, well, thank goodness I'm not, you know, it doesn't affect me. And of course, number one, as you know, I'm sure women have low, chronically low testosterone problems too in our country. But also men have about 20 nanograms per liter of estrogen. It's about 20. And women actually have about 20 nanograms per liter up to 400 depending on the time of the month.

They obviously have a range depending on the time of the month. But 20 to 400, it's not that different. But when you start talking about these artificial estrogen chemicals, and again, I list all the science in my book and I put these numbers down because they're really astounding. The numbers for the artificial estrogens we're ingesting are just incredible. A good example specifically is cows where they feed them corn on these feedlots. They've tested the blood from cows on these feedlots and found 700,000 nanograms per liter of atrazine in their blood. So again, compare that to 20 natural estrogen, and obviously you're going to have a huge physiological negative effect. and so forth. Have you seen any research or do you know just based on all of the research that

you have gone through, practically speaking, what does that mean in terms of increasing estrogen levels or mimicking? At what levels are we looking at? Well, I think the easiest way to look at this health problem and see it in our population is to look at well number one obesity obviously just continues to rise but people will say well that's so it's so complex and there's multi it's multifactorial there's all kinds of different factors and that's true but let's switch if you switch over and look at puberty that just continues to you know the age for puberty just keeps dropping and in my book i i have some quotes from different doctors uh from medical journals and they're trying to redefine the normal age

range of puberty because it's so common now to find eight-year-olds and things like this with puberty the going into puberty especially women especially girls yeah especially girls that's a good indicator that you know we're being exposed to too much artificial estrogen. It's really, the science is crystal clear. You give yourself, you know, expose yourself to these things and you get increasing health problems. Another one is breast cancer. Breast cancer is up 250% since 1980. You know, there's a lot of awareness. People are raising awareness, the pink ribbons, the football games, the whole thing. But I mean, let's be honest, how many people are out there saying, look, we need to avoid artificial estrogens. It's increasing breast cancer, you know, rather than just raising the awareness. Yeah. Or like, you know, convincing more women to get

screened more frequently or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, which is fine. I mean, but I agree that you bring up a good point. Yeah. I think it's a lot more fundamental to get to the root cause and say, well, let's, let's stop drinking out of BPA. And I kind of forgot about phthalates for a while. So I should probably circle back to that. And phthalates are, you know, again, found in plastics, but they're not a plastic ingredient. They're more of like a plastic additive, like a stabilizer. They kind of change the properties of plastic to make them more appealing or more flexible or whatever. That's the problem with phthalates. They act like estrogen too. So even with the BPA free, when they don't switch to BPS, like we were talking about before, you find that the darn phthalates in a lot of the plastics. And I kind of have a little guide at the end of my book. It's you can really usually

plastic number two, number four and number five in those little recycling symbols. Those are almost always pretty safe. They're pretty safe. I mean, you know, sometimes companies put phthalates into those. It's really rare. I'd say about 15%. I have some studies that show about 15% of the time they have phthalates. But the worst one is plastic number one.

And, you know, you look on the bottom of your, I don't know, your juice containers or whatever, and you'll see it. I just looked at the bottom of my water jug that I fill up every day plastic one you fucker you're going in the trash yeah I mean I'm sorry to say but like plastic number one is polyethylene terra phthalate and it's got a lot of phthalates and again it depends on the liquid that you have in it and how long it's in it and how hot it is. Those are kind of the three factors for how much phthalate or BPA leaching you're going to get. Yeah. And obviously if you pour hot coffee into something, you're going to get a lot more leaching and it's the molecules are moving. Yeah. I mean, this, in this case, it's just, uh, it's filtered water. It's RO water,

but I'm still just going to not use it anymore. Yeah. I mean, stainless is the best and silicone is good for baby bottles or whatever. A lot of companies are going there now, which is great. Obviously glass is good, but super inconvenient. Yeah. I mean, little change, you know, like little changes. So let's get to that then. What are some, I'm sure a lot of people that are listening are now like, Oh, you know, what can I do? What, how am I, how do I reduce my exposure to these chemicals? Maybe also, are there any, any changes that we can make or any, any supplements we can take or anything that would help our bodies better deal with? Cause obviously we can't reduce our exposure to zero. It's just not possible.

Yeah. And, and our body's pretty good at clearing some of these things, you know, but I have a whole bunch of suggestions. Obviously, the first one, I think, is. What's the lowest hanging fruit? Like, what's the 20% that gives you the 80% of reduction? Well, for starters, filter your water. A lot of people don't even filter it. They're drinking it out of the sink.

Yeah. And birth control is on my top 10 list. You know, ethanol estradiol, that's an artificial estrogen. It's amazing how much it is in the water supplies. It's not so much in, in the Midwest, you know, but it is in the cities, you know, the bigger cities, the populated areas, people urinated out, it comes back through. We don't filter it out. We're good at killing viruses, killing bacteria with all these chemicals, but we're not good at removing these artificial estrogens, especially birth control. So you've

got to filter your water because again, if you live in what kind of filtration, because obviously, I mean, could you be talking about a Brita or are we talking about something more industrial? No, anything with activated charcoal. So most of the, most of them have activated charcoal. You can double check with yours, but sometimes they just call it charcoal, but what they mean is activated charcoal. And what that does from a chemist perspective is it binds lipids, it binds hormones, it binds anything that's hydrophobic. So these, you know, hormones like testosterone, you know, they're like oils, they float on water. So a lot of people don't realize that, you know, our blood is like water. So when you have

testosterone or estrogen or artificial estrogen they can't just go into your blood they have to travel with this hormone uh where with this protein called sex hormone binding globulin shbg which i call it i call it the limo service of hormones right so the sex hormones because so you can have but here's the thing here's the caveat so yeah it's it's traveling on shbg in the limo the estrogen testosterone the artificial estrogen but the caveat is that some of it there's a low level that can just go into the water you know without shbg that's free testosterone free estrogen whatever free artificial estrogen so um and that's what happens you get some of it you know

a certain amount that's in the water supply that's in the water supply can just bind all kinds of different proteins and get transported into your drinking water. But yeah, I mean, but the beauty of activated charcoal is those are the kind of molecules that it grabs. It doesn't grab charge molecules. A lot of people say that. They say that activated charcoal binds, you know, I don't know, like all these different charges. They say it's positive. So it binds negative charges or vice versa. In reality, it doesn't. It binds hydrophobic molecules. So that means no charge.

That means things that float on water and estrogen and testosterone, all these hormones that are in the water, the artificial estrogen hormones, that's perfect. So that's simple. It's kind of, I kind of went a little bit long for that explanation. Yeah, no, it's good to know. So that, so that, I mean, you don't have to, you don't have to get a, an expensive filter per se. It just needs to be one with activated charcoal. And one mistake I do see is a lot of people filter their water and then they put it in plastic. Yeah. Like me. Well, especially in the hot cars and things like that. I mean, you're, again, it's inevitable, like you said, and it is true. We do get estrogens, you know, from different sources. You can't be crazy about this. It is

everywhere. That's one of the difficulties when we study it is because everybody has it. You know, everybody has phthalates right now. So, when you try and find a group, and there are studies, they've got studies where they go up to like northern Alaska and looked at native tribes and compared them to people in the u.s with breast cancer and some of these other things because you can't find groups of people here that don't have phthalates but the so the best best thing you can do is minimize and you you just want to think like what's the easiest thing like you said low-hanging fruit let's filter the water i mean and then just put it in glass or put it in uh you know stainless if you're

carting it around biking you know the grains that are not organic, you want to avoid those. They've got atrazine on them. They're spraying atrazine. So if you're going to eat grains, eat the organic ones. And they've also shown that organic grains have less mold. So you're kind of win-win there because less atrazine, which is estrogen, less mycoestrogen from the mold, which is estrogen. So that's a good easy one to do. I mean, it's a little bit tedious, a little bit expensive sometimes, but yeah, it depends on what grains, I mean, if it's, if it's food you're preparing yourself, uh, you know, in some, I mean, you've, there's, there's, yeah, when, when exactly, like there's, there's, I've written a bit about, um,

there's obviously research on, it's not necessarily as expensive as people think to at least get the key foods, keep those organic, and then just go conventional on ones that are less likely to be as contaminated. And the other one we haven't even mentioned yet was the personal care product. Yeah, I was waiting for you to bring that up. Well, yeah, because it's, again, it's low-hanging fruit. And it's amazing to me how many people are rubbing parabens on their entire body. I mean, your skin is, you know, huge surface area, largest organ in your body, unless you're super obese, which in which case fat is the largest organ in your body. But most people's skin is the largest organ and they're rubbing parabens all over it every day, which is crazy to me. And you think, oh, I'm

washing it off in the shower. Well, do you smell it? I mean which is crazy to me. And you think, oh, I'm washing it off in the shower. Well, do you smell it? I mean, do you smell the fragrance? It stays on your skin. It prefers your skin. It's hydrophobic. It's afraid of water. Can you quickly just summarize what parabens are? Yeah. Well, parabens are just a chemical that they're used in fragrances. They actually carry the fragrance a little bit farther across the room. I mean, to be honest, they're just cheap filler. It's just a, you know, another petroleum product that's just cheap. So that's why they put it in there. Yeah. So it just, it just enhances fragrance.

Yeah. There's a little bit of a benefit in terms of some of the characteristics these people, you know, in these industries are looking for, but at the end of the day, it acts like estrogen in your body. It goes through your skin. again i mean people remember like if for for example one for if you're taking testosterone you can get testosterone creams they don't it doesn't need to be injectable i mean it's like you're saying things go won't go on your skin they get absorbed and now they're in your blood and you know from there it goes all over your body yeah and and it's amazing how much parabens are in our water supply also. A good evidence of that, I mean, obviously we're washing some of it down the drain. Evidence for that is they did a study

where they looked at polar bears in Northern Alaska. They had 11 polar bears, I think, in the study, at least 10. And every single one of them had high levels of parabens in their fat. You know, they've looked at whales, they've looked at dolphins. All of these animals have parabens because it's working up the food chain now. And it's causing infertility in a lot of these animals that are already kind of struggling and obviously we see infertility rising like crazy in human populations as well so you know it's a problem you don't want to be messing with your hormones these are nanograms per liter that's 10 to the minus ninth grams, you know, in a single liter, that's a lot of fluid and a tiny, it's a tiny amount. So I don't know, again, it's pretty easy to look at,

you know, to find products that say paraben free. It's not like a huge inconvenience. People make it out like, Oh, this is so like, this is so inconveniencing me, but, and, and I do, and it is expensive sometimes. on my they're probably a bit more expensive in general but yeah i mean on my website i have a i have some personal care product suggestions at ajconsultingcompany.com and i don't make any money from those i just tell people hey here's what i use that's why so it's ajconsultingcompany.com slash what i use like one word if i don't say that then people ask people will send me emails after the show here. Yeah. Yeah. Say what personal care products you use. I'll get a hundred of them. You know, I don't go through every brand and say, you know, this one and that one. I just say,

here's what I use. If you want to use that. Yeah. I mean, that's how I started with supplements. I mean, it was exactly like, here, here's what I'm using. I even say, I'd be like these, I'm not all that excited about these products, honestly. I think they're better than nothing. So that's why I'm using them. And that's what led me to create my own stuff was eventually I was like, all right, I just need to make the products that I wish somebody else would make basically. Yeah. Yeah. Well, then the other one with the personal care is sunscreen because, you know, it's amazing how much, I think we overuse sunscreen a lot. And I mean, I'm okay with, I need sunscreen. I'm super white. I go fishing all the time on the

ocean, you know, where you just get fried. So sunscreen is great, but some parents, you know, I have kids, we go to the swimming pool for 20 minutes and parents are just slapping on sunscreen and that's fine. I mean, it's okay, but I think vitamin D is good. It's good to get some 20 minutes of sun, but the sunscreen ingredients, I mean, if you look on your list of ingredients on the sunscreen and it's got benzophenone or 4-methylbenzaline camphor, scientists call it 4-MBC. Benzophenone and 4-MBC are both estrogenic. They both act like estrogen in your body. And by the way, again, illegal in Europe. So that should tell you something.

It's crazy to me that they're putting them in the sunscreens. It's, of course, cheaper. And the ideal sunscreen for, you know, for people is zinc. Just anything with zinc without those chemicals is great. Blocks the sun better than anything. It's natural. If you absorb some zinc, I mean, no big deal. That's going to be healthy. So how can you measure or can you measure like, okay, someone's listening and they're wondering, I mean, how many of these chemicals do I have in my body? How is this impacting me? What might happen if I were to reduce my exposure? What would you say to that person wondering those things? Yeah. I mean, unfortunately there's not like a mass produced, you know, BPA to urine test or

something like that. I mean, you can take biopsies and do all these invasive things that scientists do, but you know, that's going to cost a lot. It's really invasive. It's really troublesome. So for the most part, the easiest way to measure your artificial estrogen exposure to track it is to track your testosterone. So get rid of the parabens, get rid of the phthalates, the whole thing, and measure kind of your testosterone before you do that. And hopefully you've already done that at some point in your life, but then, and then measure it after and you'll see your testosterone raise. It's amazing men and women. It will raise. That's great. And for, for getting your testosterone checked, um, there are, I believe there are some online services for this that are less expensive.

Um, like it doesn't necessarily cost a couple thousand dollars to get that done. Especially, uh, I think it's like, it like $380 last time I did it without the insurance company. Okay. But usually if you tell them you've got some symptoms of low estrogen, which a lot of people do because most people are low, the insurance will cover it. Low estrogen or low testosterone? I'm sorry, low testosterone. Okay, right. Yeah, it's actually, I mean, I've never had my hormones checked.

I did a, I got whole life insurance recently, so I had to do, you know, it's just a full panel of checking how all your organs are working and stuff, but it didn't include hormones. And I actually asked if they could include it, but they recommended that I didn't do that because everything looked perfect and that saves you a lot of money. And they were saying, if anything were, even if, you know, they're basically what the person was telling me is, and this was nice to them to say this, that, you know, they're looking for even, even the, a wing of a fly in the soup so they can charge you more money. So if you, you know, I also, cause I was asking initially, Hey, can you throw in hormones and like vitamins and, you know, essential vitamins,

minerals, everything. I'm just curious and um and then so i didn't for that reason just because they're like now this looks perfect dude just go with this and your your premiums are going to be like 30 percent lower i'm like all right cool and then i had someone here at the office looking into oh i was just it's just kind of stoked my curiosity and um what what he had come back with was it was going to be like three thousand dollars in my hormones checked i was like what no like that's not worth it was going to be like $3,000 in my hormones check. I was like, what? No, like that's not worth it. I'm just curious.

I have no particular reason. Well, especially because yours are probably optimized. A lot of people, like they come in with these abysmally low numbers. You know, when we first were able to measure testosterone in the 1940s or 20s or somewhere in there, you know, the average male was about 800. And I mean, we're literally the average nowadays is about average 20 to 30 year old male is about 400. As I say, about half that now.

Yeah. And so there's obviously some problems there in terms of just our exercise, our diet, you know, nutrient deficiencies, estrogen exposures, these things are all compounding that issue. Yeah, probably sleep insufficiency as well. That's just more of a thing these days. And the crazy thing about artificial estrogen is they lower not only your total testosterone, but they lower the free testosterone by increasing SHBG. They have more of that limo. Your body makes more of that limo and it grabs out more of the testosterone. So it's not even available for your body to use. It's driving in the limo, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. And just to clarify that for everybody, you have testosterone. Most of the testosterone your body produces binds to the protein, the SHBG protein, and it's not available for yourselves to use. It's the free testosterone that does all of the cool stuff in the body basically. Yeah. And that lowers with artificial estrogen exposure. Yeah. Yeah. Why, why the big discrepancy on these types of things between Europe and America? I think it's in also in foods. I mean, these are such fundamental aspects of health. Why? Yeah. Well, there's also a big discrepancy, ironically, in our health, in terms of American and European health, which kind of should tell you something but i think that like i wrote a chapter about this in my book my book is called astro

generation and uh because we haven't even talked about epigenetics but i think that's the most compelling argument to avoid artificial estrogen but but first you know i wrote a chapter about like i said europe america and some of the the politics as to why this stuff is even legal. And honestly, I didn't think it was going to even be accepted as part of the book because I figured my editors would say, well, this is off topic, right? It's not really about estrogen. It's about politics. Most of them actually said that was their favorite chapter.

Well, I'm sure that was like their burning question, right? Like, what the fuck is going on? It's a good question. Yeah. And especially as a scientist, like i can give you crazy examples like for example when i publish a paper i do scientific research and i go to these journals like jbc journal of biological chemistry or whatever medical journals scientific journals i actually tell them who should review my paper i have to select reviewers. That's part of the online application.

I select the reviewers for my own research papers. And that's what everybody does. So is that immune to politics? Obviously not. So there's bias within a lot of these studies, especially in terms of when you're talking about diet and exercise and foods and when there's huge corporations funding some of these studies. But the biggest problem, I think, is the corporate influence on our politicians in America. And I think most people recognize that happens and that exists, but that's where most of this originates. And that's just good old-fashioned corruption. I think so, yeah. I mean, for example, there's a woman, a PhD at New York University, NYU. And she, uh, she looked at 168 studies, uh, scientific, you know, pub med studies that were funded by corporations and 156 of those 168

found favorable results towards their products that they were selling. Yeah, of course. So, I mean, that kind of, that says it all. It's basically when you have these corporate influences, you're going to, it's like the shotgun approach, right? Like, well, I mean, that kind of, that says it all. It's basically when you have these corporate influences, you're going to. It's like the shotgun approach, right? Like, well, I'm sure we can find something positive in this data. All right. Well, cool. We got that. Who cares about all the rest?

Let's run with it. And you see that with soy, like crazy, especially. Yeah. Yeah. It's unfortunate. But again, this is something I've written and spoken a little bit about. But, you know, I think where we can as individuals, it's not all just doom and gloom because we can take it upon ourselves to educate ourselves by listening to podcasts like this and reading books like yours and so forth and just making relatively simple changes in our lifestyles that can protect us against the, whether it's just negligence or malevolence, whatever it is, you know, it's not, we don't have to just roll over. Yeah. I appreciate that. Yeah. I agree too. A hundred percent. I've seen your writings. It's

good stuff in my book. What I do for people is I tell them I have three different plans, right? So if you're a pro athlete and I do some consulting with pro athletes, especially stuff in my book what i do for people is i tell them i have three different plans right so if you're a pro athlete and i do some consulting with pro athletes especially baseball pitching and things if you're a pro athlete you want to stick you know like really be careful about your artificial estrogens more extreme than most people you know that one percent difference makes a difference yeah so same thing with nutrition right that's where you have a lot of high-end nutritionists that uh are just get very specific on what foods they're eating and why yeah and i even do dna analysis so i tell people based on their own personalized dna you know what how their detox enzymes are functioning

and all this you know so that's kind of the gold i call it the gold level plan right most people don't need to go to that extreme you know and then i have a silver level plan and then a kind of a bronze level plan like kind of like if you're a college student here's the minimal things you should do to avoid these big artificial estrogens you know i mean there's even different levels of convenience and you know you can do pretty good with pretty minimal work yeah yeah and on the personal care products just to recap on that for women obviously the big one would be any any sort of moisturizer right creams that they're putting on every day. Um, for all of us, there's shampoos. There's what, and what other, what is it? Is it pretty much anything we put on or in our body is worth looking at? Yeah. A hundred percent, especially because in America, the really unfortunate thing

is we're allowed to say fragrancesances which can just mean a blanket term and and they can put parabens and phthalates in the product but they don't have to list it on the ingredients because it'll just say fragrances can then can then they go as far as saying that it's paraben free no no okay okay hey you gotta you gotta ask you remember you know the trans fat thing like good question yeah what is it if it's less than a half a gram per serving i think it's less than a half a gram per serving it's trans fat free yeah yeah you know don't yeah there may be uh 30 servings in that bag but 100 agree yeah that's right i'm actually writing a book another book called blubber brain and it's about good fats and cholesterol and all this stuff oxidized fats yeah i actually met a scientist

a famous scientist in boston who gave a talk and he was saying that i've actually eaten lunch with three nobel prize winners it was one of those three but he said it's cool it's kind of like a bucket list thing yeah right the perks of kind of you know doing your phd in this field but he he said that when he started to discover that trans fats were bad he started to present that data at scientific conferences and scientists were literally laughing at him while he was up on stage like scoffing while he was giving his presentation you know because it was so established that trans fats were good for you they're not just neutral but they were downright good that's an obvious i didn't i actually i actually didn't even know that at

one point it was thought they were good for you i I've only, I've only read a bit about just enough to, I've written some long form stuff on dietary fats. So I read up on trans fats, but not the whole history. That's crazy. It happens in science. I think that's happening a little bit with some of these artificial estrogens, you know? I mean, I don't know if they were ever, ever considered good people that will downsides being downplayed, people will scoff, you know, you put this out there and you say, look, phthalates cause this whole list of health problems. You can cite scientific research and everything, but they're scoffing, you know, but I mean, I made a joke in the beginning about the frogs or put where they're putting in making

the frogs gear at this, the Alex Jones thing, which ironically though, it's actually happening. It's, it's real. It's a real thing, which is funny that his detractors, I mean, there are plenty of Alex Jones is over the top sensationalist, whatever. But ironically in that case, he was absolutely correct. Well, and the numbers for that are telling too, because 200 nanograms per liter of atrazine changes frogs reproductive parts. 200 again you know our natural estrogen between 20 and 400 but in america 200 is allowed legally in our drinking water if they come across 200 nanograms per liter of atrazine in the drinking water they say oh that's okay that's

legit like they don't raise any flags for that and it does cause something called feminization of males you know a lot of people it it sounds political, but scientists are writing about this. That's what they're calling it. You know, having a lot of exposures to atrazine and these other chemicals, it can change not only your reproductive organs, but your brain. Again, obviously your hormones. You know, it's kind of like doing a hormone replacement therapy. Absolutely. If you're getting a lot of these, you know, from different angles.

And the crazy thing, you know, a lot of times scientists, they say, well, the dose makes the poison, right? It's all the time. Or isolating it as a single saying, well, phthalates themselves, you don't really have to worry about it without considering all the different ways we're exposed to similar kind of chemicals and what the collective effects are. I've come across that myself just in reading up on this. Well, the crazy thing about the dose thing is that we store these in our fat cells, you know, up to 10 years, a fat cell can last 10 years. Their average fat cell is about a year and a half. But I mean, so we're storing these things in our fat and then we're dumping them, you know, into our blood when we're trying to lose weight. And what do they do? They signal

your body to gain weight, to grow fat cells, right? Again, imitating pregnancy. So it's hard to lose these things if you've got a lot of fat, if you're storing a lot of fat and you continue to rub them on your skin or you continue to drink them in your water. So it helps a lot of people. I've done consulting for a lot of people that have regained their fertility, especially with avoiding artificial estrogens. a lot of people that have regained their fertility, especially with avoiding artificial estrogens. And see, that's, that's telling just in the, like I was asking earlier, what are the bottom line effects that, uh, you know, that, that are out there. And if you can go from infertile to fertile simply through doing the things you're talking about, I mean, that's powerful.

And then people are spending, you know, how many hundreds of thousands of dollars, like an individual couple just to become fertile. then you know i mean you could have just got some 10 you know 10 shampoo or whatever yeah yeah and let your body fix itself yeah it does that's the natural that's the natural order and then not only that so you go through ivf or whatever and and then but you know increased risk of uh cancer in the mom later and increased risk of problems with the pregnancy birth defects and stuff i mean and i gotta get epigenetics in there too yeah yeah i haven't forgotten about that what's if you want to quickly first just define the word some people listening may be familiar with it but

uh some may not well epi so epi just means upon. So genetics is DNA. So literally, it just means marks on your DNA. Epigenetics, I think, is really, it's just becoming bigger and bigger in terms of just how much information is stored there. I mean, we know that humans can pass a lot of information to the future generations through the DNA. But the epigenetics, I mean, it's just kicking open the floodgates of just how much information we can pass along.

And in how short of a time period, right? Oh, immediately. Yeah, for sure. So like, for example, they discovered epigenetics through the Dutch hunger famine, hunger winter. That was when the Nazis apparently took over the Netherlands, and there was literally exactly a one year famine. And obviously the mothers that were pregnant during that time had smaller babies because, you know, they didn't have much food. But the crazy thing was, was the baby, those babies, the smaller babies had their own babies now recently. And we're finding those babies are now growing up smaller, lighter, you know, this whole thing. And it's because of epigenetics.

So essentially, it's because their insulin-like growth factor, you know, gene, the DNA has different marks on it. I mean, there's probably a thousand different things that are changing, you know, changing in that case. But they've identified real specific ones like the insulin-like growth factor, IGF, you know, and you can point to epigenetics because your DNA wouldn't be changed, right? In a famine, you know, you'd think, well, yeah, again, that baby that was in the womb, yeah, that's going to be smaller, but you wouldn't expect it in future generations.

Yeah, traditionally, you're thinking more in the scope of like evolution, you know. Sure, if that were to go on for generations, then we might see an adaptation, but not immediately. Right, and that's what they're finding. It's really quick now. So especially with estrogen, I think that's the biggest thing, you know, again, nanograms, we're talking about really low levels. It's barely detectable and that's the problem. So you have to have pretty decent technology, even just to measure estrogen. You know, we haven't, scientists haven't been able to accurately measure estrogen in men for that long historically historically because it's so

low the crazy thing about epigenetics with estrogen so estrogen when your estrogen receptor grabs an estrogen molecule when they bind it goes into your nucleus and acts directly on your dna that's why you have so many changes in your body when you have too much estrogen um and by the way testosterone does the same thing they bind it directly to the dna and so you know they can cause all kinds of different changes not just muscle growth you know in the case of testosterone it's a lot of different things and similarly with estrogen it's not just man boobs or whatever you know it's a lot of different things but because estrogen is acting directly on the dna when you're uh eating or rubbing these things on your skin, these artificial

estrogens, they're acting directly on your DNA and they're altering these marks on your DNA. So the whole point of all of me saying this is that it can alter your children. So like you can pass on these health problems. You can actually increase obesity, cancer, and infertility in your cell. You can increase your risk for that and pass that onto your kids. That's scientifically shown already. Those three issues, obesity, cancer, and infertility, just from your personal estrogen exposure. So you can be skinny, healthy, whatever, and, you know, be at low risk for, you know, whatever obesity, let's just say, but then you can have children if you're exposing yourself to a lot of estrogen. And this can be carried out three, four generations.

It's not even, you know, it just keeps going on. So the science is becoming kind of almost alarming in that regard because I think we're underestimating it as a culture of how deep this health problem is. Yeah. Don't abuse your future children. Take care of them now. And yourself. Yeah. Yeah. If nothing else, do it for the kids. So, so you've mentioned a couple of books. One is Estro Generation. People can find that,

I'm assuming wherever books are sold, they can find it online. Yeah. And then you're working on a new book, which people, you mentioned Blubber Brain and people can follow you and find out when that's going to be available. Yeah, I'm hoping that's going to be six months. It's going to be in the same series, the Chagrin and Tonic series. So I'm kind of doing a whole series. I'm going to do one on MTHFR. So I have a couple of books lined up in that regard. I'm also trying to do kind of a side project on epigenetics specifically, just have like a really simplified, a book that's just easy to read for normal people on epigenetics and how, how many health impacts those can have and how to kind of improve your

epigenetics, not just with artificial estrogen avoidance, but other things. And by the way, my goal when I write is to make things easy to read for anybody, not science. It's not scientists specifically. Otherwise I feel like I'm just wasting my time because, you know, if normal people can't read it, then what's the point? You know, I want to, I want to be able to communicate this to everybody because it's a problem that everybody has. Absolutely. Yeah. That's my number one goal in all of my writing. First and foremost, just be clear, make things simple and easily understood and write for the layman, not for the scientists. I'm not even a scientist. I don't play one on

the internet. I'm just good at learning things and then breaking them down and making them understandable. So I think that's absolutely the correct approach. It also sounds like you have an eye to the practical as well. You want to give people things they can do and not just overwhelm them with bad news,. And you know, where they're, where they're just like, well, great. My epigenetics are shit. My kids are going to be shit. The planet is shit. The polar bears are shit. The whales fuck. What the fuck? Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. You gotta be practical. So then on the flip side, by, uh, by making some of these changes, any other changes, by the way,

anything else before we wrap up that you want to throw out there that you'd recommend that, you know, if you have some dietary changes, we have filtering the water, we have the personal care products, anything else that should be mentioned? There's a few other ones, but the biggest one is people microwaving their foods in the plastics. You've got to stop microwaving your food in plastic. It's crazy. That's a good one. Yeah, it's a good one. And red food coloring, you know,. I see people drinking products like liquids, like Gatorade or whatever brand with the red dye. Pro athletes. And that's artificial estrogen. That stuff is,

it's estrogenic. It's acting like estrogen in your body. Stop drinking it. There's no reason to be drinking red food coloring. Good points. I like it. And if you do all this, I think there's also something to be said for the long-term positive effects where, I mean, you have it immediately in yourself, you have it immediately in your children. If enough people individually take it upon themselves to make these changes, I mean, that's how the bigger changes in the world are made. It's one individual at a time. And we can't count, it's clear that we can't count on the government to fix everything for us. You know, we can take it upon ourselves to make ourselves as healthy as possible,

make our kids as healthy as possible. And that ripples out to what could become a much healthier society and much healthier future generations. Agreed. Awesome. Well, again, you'd mentioned your website, but if you want to just quickly summarize where people can find you again, your YouTube channel, again, you had mentioned your website, but if you want to just quickly summarize where people can find you again, your YouTube channel maybe and your website, just so if they didn't catch it when you mentioned these things earlier. Yeah, YouTube is Chagrin and Tonic. And then you can also find my YouTube channel just from my website, my consulting company website. So that's ajconsultingcompany.com. All one word, AJ Consulting Company.

Awesome. Great. Well, this was a great discussion. I'm really glad that we had it. And I'm going to be throwing away my water bottle effective immediately. Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did and don't mind doing me a favor and want to help me make

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