Realfoodology - Why We Should Care About Low Testosterone with Dr. Sam Madeira

Episode Date: July 27, 2022

104: Dr. Madeira’s mission, passion, and life work is to help you find your unique root cause, and transformative path to healing and guide you to maintain a state of health and vitality throughout your life. He is Board Certified by the North American Board of Naturopathic Examiners (NABNE). He joins me to talk about men’s hormones, the decline in testosterone we are seeing in men, the importance of organic food & how it affects your hormones, and so much more! Check Out Dr. Sam Madeira: Dr. Sam Madeira on Instagram https://www.apollohealthclinic.com/samuel-madeira-nd-bsc/ Show Links: Vitamin D Lamp Non-toxic dish and hand soap - Code REALFOODOLOGY saves you $$$ Operation Ranch Hand Sponsored By: Organifi www.organifi.com/realfoodology Code REALFOODOLOGY gets you 20% OFF Magic Mind http://www.magicmind.co Code REALFOODOLOGY gets you 20% OFF Check Out Courtney: Courtney's Instagram: @realfoodology www.realfoodology.com Air Dr Air Purifier  AquaTru Water Filter EWG Tap Water Database Further Listening: Achieving True Health and Vitality with Dr. Tyler Jean

On today's episode of The Real Foodology Podcast. When you ask this question, what's the root cause of low testosterone? The biggest thing I think are the toxins that the moms and the grandmothers are exposed to and that's passed on to their sons. Exposed to before preconception, during in utero and as you know breastfeeding and then their first year of life is going to set up that boy that teenage boy or that young man that 20-something-year-old man with low testosterone hey everyone welcome back to another episode of the real foodology podcast i'm your host courtney swan Today's episode, I speak to Dr.

Sam Madeira. He is board certified by the North American Board of Naturopathic Examiners. He received his doctorate of naturopathic medicine and his bachelor of science degree with a major in herbal sciences, both from Bastyr University. We talk about men's hormones, the decline in testosterone that we're seeing in men at a rapid pace. Also, why we should care about the declining levels of testosterone in males. Talk about the importance of organic food, how it affects your hormones and your overall health and so much more. This intro is short and sweet because I just want to get straight into the episode. I hope that you guys love it. And as always, if you could do me a huge favor, leave a rating and review for the podcast. It helps so much. I really appreciate your support.

And if you're feeling so inclined, if you want to post about it on Instagram and tag me at real foodology, it would mean the world to me. I hope you guys enjoy the episode. Something that I've really been working on in my own health lately is my sleep. This is something that I struggled with for a really long time. I was not consistent with my bedtimes. One night I would go to bed at 11 p.m. Another night I would go to bed at 2 a.m. And I just got to a point where it really wasn't serving me. And obviously I was exhausted during the day.

It was affecting my work and my productivity. So the ways that I've been helping to support my sleep and get better sleep are plugging in my phone an hour before I even start getting ready for bed. That way I'm not on a screen. I can allow my body to start relaxing. And then I also take Zen from Cured, which is an amazing supplement that helps support my body and helps me get relaxed and ready for bed. It contains a blend of reishi mushroom, ashwagandha, chamomile, passionflower, and broad spectrum CBD. There's no melatonin in here. I know a lot of people want to avoid melatonin because it makes them groggy in the morning. It has things like,

I said, reishi and magnesium and CBD and ashwagandha, passionflower. These all kind of help calm the mind and reduce anxiety to get ready for sleep. The thing that really drew me to Cured is that they take their CBD very seriously. You can go online and look at all the lab reports. They test all their products. They show exactly how much CBD is in there. So you know you're getting a really good high quality product. And they also use organic ingredients,

which if you know me at all and even listening to the podcast, you know that organic is really important to me and it should be important to us all. Also, if you really want to up the ante, get their raw CBN. This is their nighttime hemp oil. And I take that in combination with the Zen and it has really been helping me sleep. If you guys want to try Cured today, go to curednutrition.com.

That's C-U-R-E-D nutrition.com. And you're going to get 20% off when you use code realfoodology. We really don't talk enough about the importance of liver health. And I think a lot of us don't think enough about all of the things that we are being exposed to on a day-to-day basis. Pesticides that show up in our food and water, not to mention chlorine and farm runoff and pharmaceuticals in our water, additives in our food, lotions that we put on our body on a day-to-day basis, makeup, any sort of cleaning products that you're using in your home. There is so much stuff in this modern world that we are being exposed to on a day-to-day basis. And our bodies have to filter

that out and get it out. And our liver plays a huge role in that. This is why it is so important that we do things to protect our liver and make sure that it is functioning at optimal levels. So I take something every single day to protect my liver, and that is called Liver Reset from Organifi. It has trypfala in there. It also has organic dandelion extract, organic milk thistle, and of course artichoke leaf. All of these help to support the detoxification pathways of the liver and for all was starting to take things that supported my liver. And one of them was all of these properties that are in this liver reset. If you would like to get liver reset, make sure you go to Organifi.com slash real foodology. You're going to save 20%. That is O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I.com slash real foodology,

or you can also just use the code realfoodology at Organifi.com. We were just talking about how in our modern society, we are getting sicker and sicker as a population. And I just love that you practice what you call root cause integrative medicine. And this is something that not many doctors do, but is becoming increasingly more important with the rise of chronic diseases in this country. We need more and more doctors asking these questions. What is the root cause of this? What's happening? What is causing your body to do this instead of just looking at the symptoms and throwing pills at it. So can we first start out, Sam, with talking about how you got into this and what you do?

Absolutely. Yeah. So in the, it was a long time ago now, it feels like five lifetimes ago, I was very sick. At least I've felt horrible. I had chronic fatigue. I went from, you know, in high school years from like honor roll student, varsity athlete in some sports, very active in multiple extracurricular things and just full of energy to sleeping, you know, 15 to 17 hours at sometimes and just not having any energy to show up for things, sleeping through morning classes. And I mean, literally the whole morning, not just the first class, like maybe some people will do as teenagers because they need to get more sleep. And so I had chronic fatigue syndrome without a really a diagnosis for, you know, and I was seeing, I saw first MD pediatrician, okay, you're depressed, here's thyroid medication,

declined the antidepressant because I knew I wasn't really depressed. It was more like a physical medicine, you know, biochemical, physical thing, not a neurological neurotransmitter thing. So I declined that and I never really took antidepressants at that point. And like a lot of people are prescribed, right? And then, you know, referred to a counselor. Of course, in our teens, most of us have things we need to talk to somebody about. But none of that really got to the root cause. There were some mild improvement, temporary improvements. And then graduated high school, graduated college, graduated naturopathic medical school, still chronic fatigue syndrome, lots of infectious stuff, chronic sinusitis.

And eventually, after unraveling this stuff for the last nine and a half years here, basically, or more really, I mean, since 1999, seeing naturopathic doctors, but didn't know that I had, you know, reactivated mono, Lyme, common infections, Lyme disease. I grew up in Northern New England and went to high school in Massachusetts and in the late 90s and early 2000s. So, you know, all those things, I was exposed to a lot of ticks. And we knew about Lyme disease, but it was kind of like, oh, that thing's over there. You know, that's not us. And so anyway, I got a diagnosis from a great doctor, Dr. Paul Anderson, who is one of my mentors and teachers. And I was shadowing him for half a day every week for a year after naturopathic medical school here in Seattle,

at Bastier University in Seattle. And essentially started to unravel, okay, well, what would be the best treatment now that I have this diagnosis? And I never have like put myself out there on social media or publicly and when I've done public speaking and stuff at events and things like that, or podcasts really as like, hey, I'm a Lyme recovered person, or I'm a Lyme warrior, because I don't believe in identifying with my diagnosis. And I did a post on that on Instagram recently because I just feel like that prevents us from recovering. And that's a temporary state. That's not who I was before I got sick. That's not who I am now.

You know, there's still things that I'm unraveling about my health. Over the last year, it's been mold toxicity and stuff like that, that I've had multiple exposures throughout my lifetime. And, you know, I'm 40 now, so it's four decades. So, you know, as we, it's kind of almost a cliche now, but as we say in our communities, you know, health is not linear. And I think a lot of people as patients or clients get frustrated with us, doctors or health coaches or nutritionists, because they're

like, oh, I'm mostly better. But this little thing over here, this big thing over here is still happening, or we just discovered this. And why don't we deal with this first or at the beginning? And it's kind of like, well, you got to start somewhere. You only have so much time and resources and financial resources to dedicate towards recovery. So it really is that kind of peeling of the layers, the levels of the onion back or the orange, if you will, if you don't like onions.

Well, yeah, that's usually how it goes, right? Like as you, it's kind of like when you pull a string from a sweater and then it starts unraveling. It's like you have to slowly uncover all these different layers that you didn't know were there before. And as you start healing things, different things come up. And yeah, it's just all, it's a journey and a learning experience. And I find it interesting that almost everyone that I interview that works in this space has had some sort of health issue that they were dealing with themselves. And they were they felt like they had no other options. Like they were basically pushed into finding this route because our modern medical

system is not set up for the chronic diseases that we're dealing with today. And it's really disheartening, but I'm so grateful for people like you that are starting to practice this root cause medicine. And we're really helping people to get to the root causes because so many people are suffering and we're just throwing more pills on top of more pills and just more side effects and then pills to counteract the side effects. And it's just like, when does this end? Like, why, why aren't more people asking like, okay, but what is happening in the beginning stages of this before I take all the pills? Like, why can't we figure out the beginning of it? So anyways, I want to dive into hormones because I know that hormones are your specialty.

And I've talked a lot about women's hormones. So feel free to any of these questions that I ask you also if you feel like speaking to the women's side of it as well. But I want to kind of go into men's hormones because we don't really talk about that a lot. So something really disturbing. I read this kind of recently and I want to hear your thoughts on this is that male testosterone is decreasing at a pretty rapid level right now, right? And they're saying that like college age men are on average now they have testosterone levels of like around a seven year old man.

Why are we seeing such a decrease in testosterone in males right now? Yeah, that's a really good question. I think it's multifactorial. I mean, being a more integrative medicine practitioner and, and really, you know, my training being in naturopathic medicine as my like general training and then all the extra trainings that I've done after that in specialties. That's really been the mystery question, the million dollar question that I've really worked hard on trying to figure out, not just for my patients, but for myself. Like, okay, so if I don't have enough energy today, why didn't people test all of my hormones? Why did they just test my thyroid? Or when I did start

seeing naturopathic doctors, why did they just test my thyroid and adrenal hormones, or only do salivary cortisol and not my DHEA and DHEA sulfate and these things that, you know, practitioners get really kind of stuck in their ways, you know, no matter what type of practitioner they are. And I'm sure I'm the same way to some people. I may not be their, you know, their cup of tea or their flavor of the month. But basically, the root causes, I think, can be boiled down to several different things, traumas, men, and I'm talking about right now physical traumas, but psychological too. If someone's had a really stressful job that's been like multiple instances that are traumatic or super stressful that they're just like constantly looking over their shoulder after age

38 in their career because the younger people could take their job. I'm in Seattle, it's similar to Silicon Valley, kind of corporations, similar corporations, similar ageism in the corporate tech environment. So that's a thing. And that kind of correlates with the crash in testosterone that I see for guys happening, yes, after age, you know, in their teens and their 20s. But usually, by the time they're my patient, they're in their at least their mid 30s or early 40s, you know, around 38 is probably the average age of the male that I see. And I think that shocks a lot of people because they think like, oh, it's like male menopause, like wait until you're 50, then get your testosterone checked. And it's like, by then they've probably, their marriage is completely a train wreck if they

are married or their relationships are non-existent because they don't have a sex drive or they're, you know, they have no libido and they're looking at, you know, they're maybe in marriage counseling or taking antidepressants or Viagra, Cialis, et cetera. And like you said, we're just treating the symptoms, you know, and in some ways, sometimes testosterone therapy may be treating the symptoms. Sometimes that may be the best thing that need to do either for a year or two while they're working on the root cause, or that is the root cause. Like the low testosterone is why they are on the antidepressant and that gets them off the antidepressant and that lowers their Cialis dose, et cetera. And now they're not taking as many things because they feel so good and they're stronger. They're going to the gym more, they lose weight,

they reverse the insulin resistance. That was part of the reason why they had low testosterone. So, you know, you have the trauma. So I've had patients who've had blunt trauma to their testes, whether that was in sports or like a long time ago, a patient had a, I think it was like a jet ski accident where they ended up slamming into the console of the front of the jet ski. Concussion. Yeah. Ouch. Big time. Yeah. Guys who have had multiple concussions. And when I look back on my life growing up with two brothers in Northern New England, climbing trees, playing contact sports, you know, just literally, you know, fighting on the playground, all those things, you know, no one was like, oh, you have a concussion. They were like, can you count to three? How many fingers am I holding up? Okay, you're good. Let's go suck it up. Good job. Like, all right,

he's on his feet, sit on the bench, walk it off. You're a man. Good job. And that's really, I think, also part of the psychology of men's health is or men's disease men's pathology is this kind of suck it up mentality and I think there's something to be said for that I definitely think guys need to have a backbone and a spine and have this kind of rigor and toughness to us I mean we don't want to lose that. But when you're sitting in front of your doctor or your nutritionist or therapist, it's like it's time to take the mask off and put down the gloves and say, hey, I'm suffering. I'm hurting. I'm here for help. I may not share, you know, I'm not expecting like patients to share their whole life story with me in the first

meeting. Although as a naturopathic doctor, we do want to basically know everything that we could need to know to help them. And, you know, there's toxins, environmental toxins where, you know, you buy a new couch or a mattress and it may have flame retardants on it. There's laws in California where mattresses don't have as many flame retardants, but, you know, mattress companies were getting sued because people were burning up in their homes. And I guess it happened enough where they said, okay, we got to spray all these mattresses or soak them in these chemicals before we put them together and sell them. So there's tons of toxins and, you know, we can get into those details and weeds if you want.

And, you know, even, you know, just like a city like you're in L.A., you said lots of car accidents, people get whiplash. They're going to get a minor concussion, most likely that's never treated. You go to your chiropractor that's covered by your car insurance, but your brain's not treated for that. Yes, getting your neck adjusted can kind of help the brainstem and whatnot. But, you know, really, did you see a functional neurologist? Did you get in a hyperbaric chamber? Did you do IV therapies? You know, did you go and work with a cognitive therapist on like, hey, you need less screen time to limit these things so you can recover and things like that. So there's just a lot of things that, I mean, I've been lucky enough to have to, the silver

lining of having multiple concussions is I've had to do the recovery so I can work as a doctor still. And with that recovery, I've seen, oh, these are the things that I need to address in my recovery. And it's not always as simple as just take this supplement or, you know, eat more beef liver or something or whatever you hear online, right? Although that does help. It does help.

But you also need to address what's happening that's causing the testosterone to decrease in the first place. I've noticed a huge shift in myself in the last couple of weeks. I don't know how else to explain it other than I just feel like my brain is on fire lately and I mean that in a good way, not in like a, I need to go see a doctor way. I mean like my cognitive function feels like on point right now. My focus, my productivity, just overall, I feel like my brain is really working with all cylinders firing.

The only thing that I can attribute it to that I have changed is I drink Magic Mind every single day now. Well, I should say I should revise that. I drink it Monday through Friday because I give myself a break on the weekends because I don't work on weekends and I don't feel like I need to take it. But I've really noticed a difference because I will say the first time that I started taking Magic Mind, I would really just kind of take it when I felt like maybe I just needed to take it that day when I needed to have like a super productive day. But what I've found is that when you take it more consistently, you see better results over time. And I have found that for myself. I really see the difference. If you're wondering what Magic Mind is, it is the world's first productivity drink. It's a little shot. It has matcha. It

has some nootropics in it and some adaptogens. All really help with cognitive function, productivity. They have given me a code to share with you guys. If you go to magicmind.co and use the code realfoodology, you're going to save 20%. That's magicmind, M-A-G-I-C-M-I-N-D dot C-O and use code realfoodology. I want to mention something or I want to go to something that you mentioned that's important for people to understand. The flame retardants in our couches, our beds, et cetera, these are endocrine disruptors. And that means that they're going to disrupt our hormones. And this happens with men and women. And it's one of the many, many reasons that we are seeing higher rates of infertility. And then like you were saying, too, we're connecting that to lower levels of testosterone.

And I think it's important for people to know that, that it's something else. I know it's something else we have to pay attention to, which is like so annoying because like everyone's like, you're telling me I have to buy an organic mattress now. And I'm like, you guys, it's actually really important. You spend a third of your life sleeping on that bed. So you want to make sure that you get good mattresses that are not spraying and using all these chemicals that are disrupting our endocrine systems. And I want to ask you, so for people that are wondering, okay, so why do we care if testosterone levels are decreasing outside of infertility? And, you know, I feel like there's this attack, not even I feel, there is this attack on masculinity. So there's probably some people being like, oh, men can use less testosterone, you know, which I totally full heartedly disagree

with. I think we need more masculine men. I think it's weak men that are actually destroying society because when masculine men are in their full masculine, they are in their honesty and their integrity and protective and et cetera. I could go on and on about that. But outside of like libido and masculinity, why should we care that this is affecting men's health? Like how does this affect men's health when their testosterone is low? Yeah, that's a great question. It affects their whole health. So the focus right now is on hormones, but it affects brain health.

So if you have a family member with dementia right now, or you're worried about getting dementia, if you've had a concussion or brain injury, you know, they can see dementia starting in people in different types of brain scans, you know, 20 to 30 years before they have dementia or Alzheimer's. So, and they're not the same thing. Alzheimer's is different. And I'm not a neurologist, but you can listen to people like Dr. Amen and other people out there talk about these things. And a lot of it is insulin resistance and insulin is very important. Basically the insulin levels go up because it's screaming at the cells to say,

hey, let the glucose into the cells so you can make energy. But the cells become basically deaf to the insulin. And then there's like leptin resistance and stuff like that, which happened with obesity. And, you know, you have this epidemic of sleep apnea that goes along with that metabolic syndrome and increasing weight size. And I mean, for me, I'm I've always been a tall, thin guy. And when I go to buy like a suit or dress pants and a jacket in the U.S. for my whole life, pretty much. And I started wearing dress clothes at a young age growing up and where I grew up. It's like I was fitting into something like for like a like a clown costume. You know, I'm like, what is going on? Like, I'm not I'm not emaciated,

you know, I'm, I'm the weight, I'm, I'm a healthy weight when I look at my weight. So I always was like, had this complex growing up of like, man, do I need a gain like 50 pounds or 30 pounds? No, like everyone was, has been obese for a long time. And the average BMI and BMI has its weaknesses. But unless you're a linebacker with like a huge percentage of muscle mass is like 30. You know, a lot of people that I see have a BMI of around 30 and they get into, you know, between 20 and 30 and they're like, all right, we're good here. And I'm kind of scratching my head thinking, are we? I mean, you still have multiple health problems. This is why your gut screwed up and the roundup in your food and all this stuff and the roundup in your wine because you're drinking wine a lot or beer a lot.

And beer. Yeah. And for guys, it's often beer. I mean, on the West Coast, a lot of people like wine, right? So you're getting a lot of roundup in those drinks, maybe not so much in liquor, maybe distilled out if it was on the corn and something like whiskey. But yeah, and that's another thing with men's health is the level of drinking that has become normalized. I mean, Harvard did a study and they said 14 drinks a week is okay for adult male.

I mean, if you're drinking 14 drinks a week, you're an alcoholic. If you're having two drinks a night after work or two drinks a day, and you don't ever take two days off or three days off, it's like you're trending towards alcoholism and your liver enzymes are gonna show it. It may take three years and

you may have the genetics where you just, you know, you're very resilient and, you know, you had ancestors that drank like a fish too, so you're fine. But in men's health and men's, you know, when you sit down with guys and you're like, OK, well, how much do you drink? And usually I say, hey, and I mean this on this podcast, too, while we're talking about it, there's no judgment in anything I'm saying. It's kind of this kind of shock that we've let things get this out of control. that the guys that probably doing the study are drunk and they're getting paid off by the beer company to say 14, you know, drinks. So someone can finish a 30 rack in two weeks or something. It's just getting crazy. I mean, that may be fine for a couple of years in college. Um, if you don't care about what you're doing in college, but, um, that's all fun and games, but on a regular basis, like into your thirties, forties and fifties and onward, you games, but on a regular basis, like into your 30s, 40s and 50s and onward, you know, finishing half a bottle of wine every night and normalizing that,

um, that's not healthy and that's not a healthy lifestyle. Most people I know in the fitness industry don't drink at all. You know, if they're doing a fitness competition, they won't drink at all for six to nine months out of that year. And even when they do drink, it's very rare and minimal, you know, one drink a night, a couple nights a week. And it's seen as like eating cake or a cookie, you know, it's like, I don't want anything to do with that, because that's going to throw off my results. And obviously, we're not all in the fitness world. But I think if that could spill

over into everyday life for more people, and more people could find ways to reset their nervous system without having to get really high, or tipsy or drunk, you know, barring maybe a special couple special holidays a year, you know, have some fun. But, you know, really what I've seen is like four drinks a week max is kind of like a healthy number or none for some people if they have other health problems that, you know, if you're trying to get rid of toxins and mold, and you're trying to balance your hormones, overwhelming your liver for male or female with alcohol and other recreational drugs is just not going to be conducive to health. And there's a study out of Lancet, I think about five years ago or four years ago now, that said

any amount of alcohol is seen as unsafe. And they did a huge population study between the UK, which is a heavy drinking group of countries, to Pakistan, which is a Muslim, mostly Muslim country, really low alcohol intake. And they said, hey, we thought there would be a minimum acceptable amount, but we can't. And these are MDs and PhDs. This isn't like a bunch of health nuts like us that are like really about clean living. These are regular conventional people. And they said no amount. And that was out of London. So, you know, they drink a lot there. They like to have their cocktail hour, like probably more than most people realize. And, you know, if you go to Scotland or something like that, they're selling milk thistle in the stores everywhere. So there's an awareness that, hey, this isn't good for us. Let's add some milk thistle to people's

life so they can protect their livers. But yeah, that's also part of men's health. And is this, and I think with that kind of toughness or what people have deemed toxic masculinity. I think it's just toxic culture because I see it with this archetype of like the superhumanist that people think they need to live up to. And then they have shame around not living up to this archetype that's this superwoman or superman that they'll never live up to in their job or their family life. And then they're, you know, shitting all over themselves about it and shaming themselves all about it. And with that shame, they have no release valve. And it's like, well, what am I going to do with this shame? I'm not, you know,

I'm a tough guy. I'm not going to talk to the therapist. I'm a tough woman. I'm not going to go meet with therapists. I'm not going to tell my friends that I'm suffering. I'm just going to have another glass of wine and suck it up and we'll keep going. So I think it, and I see it a lot with parents, mothers in particular, mothers take on a lot and there's this martyrdom with parenthood, with fathers and mothers where they put their kids before them. And I think we should, as parents, put our kids before us. But there's a point where it's like, if you're not healthy enough to take care of yourself, how are you going to be there for your kids for the rest of their lives and be able to not be a

health liability? And that sounds harsh, but if you're really sick and your kids are adult kids and they're having to spend their resources and time taking care of you because you sacrificed your health to take care of them, it's kind of like a loss on both ends. You know, the balance sheet is zero on both sides or negative. And there can be a lot of resentment around things like that or kind of like unsaid, unmet needs and blah, blah, blah. But I think as a culture, we have these patterns and they're passed down through generations. They're passed down through cultures and communities. And that's what plays into what people have labeled toxic masculinity. You know, if you have a family where everyone's been in the military and that it's a military family, they're going to have certain

cultural norms that other people outside of that family would say, wow, that's just crazy that you guys don't ever talk about this. Like, look at this elephant in the room. I can see it. They're like, nope, we don't talk about that. We don't, you know, we don't talk about that. And with that comes these behaviors where people have to have an outlet. And that's usually, you know, things like alcohol or in places like Seattle, you see a lot of cannabis use. And right now it's fentanyl. Fentanyl is killing people over the U.S US and cities on the West Coast because they got

addicted to opiates. Maybe they had a car wreck or a motorcycle accident, and now they are given opiates for their surgery and they're hooked on them. And then fentanyl is taking people out because you only need a little bit and then you're done. So I think it's a big, when you ask this question, what's the root cause of low testosterone? The biggest thing, I think, are the toxins that the moms and the grandmothers are exposed to, and as breastfeeding and then their first year of life is going to set up that boy, that teenage boy or that young man, that 20 something year old man with low testosterone. If they didn't have Lyme disease, if they didn't have concussions,

if they haven't had a major trauma, blunt trauma to their head or their testes. You know, they don't, if they don't have a known chemical exposure, like playing with mercury or lead exposures to lead paint or lead gasoline or other ways, it came from the parent. So, and that's not to shame anybody. That's not to shame the mom. I mean, there's I I have relatives that would tell me stories of chasing the truck spraying DDT and running in the spray in the summer like it was like water. So I know I hate hearing that. I've heard that before. And it's really upsetting.

Yeah. Yeah. They just didn't know. I mean, that's the thing that I always, I always like to reiterate this for people listening. If anything that we ever bring up brings up any sort of shame, it's not, I like to remind people of this. It is a choice whether or not you decide to feel shamed when someone is sharing the truth about something, whether it's data that we're sharing, experiences in life or whatever, you have a choice to either decide to take that as something that you should be ashamed of or take it as something to empower you to do better in the

future because no one's perfect. Everyone, we're all fucking up through life. Like no, none of us even know what we're doing, you know? And the more you learn, the more you realize that you know nothing. And that's what I've learned on my journey of health and nutrition. And instead of, you know, as I'm learning, instead of going, oh my God, I'm, I'm so ashamed that I was doing X, Y, and Z. And it's been hurting, you know, it's been harming my health for years. I use it as empowerment to go, okay, well now I know, like I was doing the best I could then, but now I know better and now I'm just going to do better, you know, instead of like reveling in this, like, um, not reveling, but like marinating in this shame and just, yeah, I don't know. This is something I clearly feel passionate

about because no one can make you feel shame. And it makes me sad because I don't want people feeling when they're given the truth about science or about like health and ways that they can better their health. I don't want someone going away feeling ashamed about the choices that they've made in their past. I want them to leave feeling empowered to do better because now we do better. Now we know better, we do better. I also wanted to make a comment really fast. Something that you said that I think is so important that I don't hear a lot of people talking about. When you were talking about parents and how they will suffer and they'll let their health suffer because they're so concerned about taking care of their kids, it's actually so important that you don't allow that to happen

because we forget that kids are so moldable, especially when they're little. And if you are not practicing healthy habits and you are just letting your health go to shit and you're not taking care of yourself, your kids are going to emulate that. And you're not showing them healthy habits. Like we forget that half the battle is literally just being the best version of yourself because your kid is going to emulate that, you know, and obviously you can teach them things and show them things. But the biggest takeaway that kids get from parents is how the parents live their lives. And if you want to be the best parent that you can for your kids, you want to get in the healthiest, best shape of your life. Also too, it's more fun because you want to have the energy to keep up with your kids. You want to live a long time and you are depriving your kids of all of that

if you're not taking care of your health. I agree. Yeah, it's huge. And, you know, kids ideally wouldn't be needing to be the caretaker while a child. And if a parent is, you know, super sick, that can also change the dynamics there or vice versa. The child's really sick and the parent can always be worried about that child, even though when they're not sick as an adult. So, you know, there's professional therapists out there. There's life coaches out there. I think there's a time and a place for all those things if that calls to you. And, you know, I'm a big fan of my patients and clients like using all the resources, you know, I'm not everything to everybody and I'm never going to be that everything to everybody. I mean, yes, as a naturopathic doctor, we have training and

in counseling and life coaching, essentially. And we're trained by PhD therapists to do those basic motivational interviewing counseling skills. But I'm not a licensed therapist. You know, I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm not a family therapist. If someone has that stuff going on, like, ask for help. And I think that's what a lot of this comes down to in men's health and women's health. Adults asking for help and getting the help they need and being tenacious and being an advocate for your own health and saying, you know, I tried working with that person. It didn't work.

I'm not going to get caught up in this anymore. I'm going to switch to somebody else. You know, that practitioner didn't work for me. It doesn't matter if it's a nutritionist, a therapist, an MD, an ND, and a functional medicine MD. It's finding who is going to be best for you at that time. And you can rotate people. You could have someone that was great for you for two to three years, and it's time to have a new fresh pair of eyes, look at lab tests and look at objective data to say, hey, have they ever looked at this? Or, hey, I, you know, for me, I last month or two months ago, I just completed a 10 hour mold certification.

And like I said, in the beginning of this podcast, I've been looking at mold more with myself and my patients. My patients that saw me eight years ago didn't get that part of who I am now. So practitioners evolve too. We get more training so we can come back around and say, hey, I have this new training. I would like to do this new lab testing, or I'd like to have you fill out these new questionnaires and look at things differently with a fresh pair of eyes. But yeah, absolutely. There's, you know, I think it's a life. Once you realize, once you get into this, it's a lifetime. It's your lifestyle. It's not something that you go to someone once or twice a year and then you're like, all right, well, you know, they're in charge

and I'm just going to do what I want out here. Know what you're doing every day in your life. Like we're talking about like the mattress and, you know, your cleaning products, your car, you buy a new car. Well, your car's off-gassing. That new car smell may be awesome to you, but it's not awesome to your cells and your body and your brain and your gut and your heart and your lungs. So you got to detoxify from that. So there's always going to be things in life the way that our environment and our society is. It's been for a long time better living through chemistry. And, you know, you got to buy food that isn't grown with chemicals.

Like you got to drink things. You know, if you like beer, get an organic beer. If you like beer that much, like maybe brew your own organic beer. Put herbs in it. Beer used to be medicinal. Wine can be medicinal. You can put herbs in wine. You don't have to, you know, take as many herbal products now. So I think like one of my missions and things I've done in Montana and stuff is like herbal medicine, making classes, health classes, health workshops is to basically say like, let's look at lab tests. Let's look at, you know, let's do a deeper dive into this category because you're having this problem still, or you have autoimmune disease. Let's look at your gut health and, you know, mitochondrial health, these things that they're asking about because they have, you know, brain fog or chronic fatigue or low hormones and your hormones aren't going to work well if your mitochondria are trashed in your endocrine glands.

So you can do that deep dive. But maybe the first thing to do is figure out how to make your home environment as healthy as possible. If you live in the West and you don't have a good air filter, and there can be forest fires every summer, get a good air filter. That's like number one, healthy air in your home. I would say everyone should get an air filter regardless of where you live because the off gassing of the furniture, even cooking, um, there's a lot of different things that we're exposed to and it's more than just like the pollution outside your apartment that's getting

in. Yeah, that's very true. My air filter, if I don't shut the bedroom door where it lives most of the time, and I just have it going all night while I'm sleeping, when I'm cooking, that will just fire up automatically and start filtering the air more. So yeah, you're right. There's a lot of things we don't think about like that we do every day. Cleaning products, candles. Hopefully people listening know better now than to use the toxic

cleaning products and the toxic candles. But we're all learning, again, as I've said earlier, so no shame. How does food quality play a role in men's hormonal health? And are you a proponent for organic food? Yeah, I'm a big proponent for organic food, and I have been for a long time. One of the jobs I had one summer while I was in college is I worked on an organic vegetable farm in my hometown in Vermont. And it was a very hard job, long days, long hours. But I'm friends with organic farmers. I've been buying or eating organic food and food right out of my parents' garden when I was a kid.

And I think people don't realize that if something truly is organic, the certifications actually do matter. I think that's a big misconception out there, especially with guys. Guys are like, whoa, does organic really matter? Blah, blah, blah. Yeah, it does. Especially if they have a state and USDA organic labels. Some of these state labels like Oregon, Washington, Vermont, Maine, they have California, the state is actually more strict than the USDA label, the way I understand it. And I've interviewed on my podcast, a friend who's an

organic farmer, vegetable farmer in Montana, in Whitefish, Montana. So we went into all these details, and he knows way more than me about this, but eating organic is step one, as much as possible. If you have to start anywhere, you know, follow the whole dirty dozen clean 15 environmental working group. But even then eating more towards your climate, right? So if I'm in Seattle or Vermont, I'm not going to eat mangoes in January, right? So it's like, and if I'm pre-diabetic, I shouldn't be eating mangoes or bananas anyway, because it's tropical fruit. You should eat that if you live in the tropics.

And even then, you probably wouldn't eat that if you're pre-diabetic or diabetic. So it's really eating to your constitution, eating to your climate, eating towards your, your health and fitness goals with macro micronutrients, but also, um, eating clean. And a lot of these protein powders, for example, because a lot of people are using protein powders, I'm mentioning this and I'm seeing this come up with my patients who are talking to bodybuilders, um, instead of listening to their doctor, they're getting protein powders at Walmart or online or Costco and they have heavy metals in them. They have junk in them.

And our- Natural flavors, artificial sweeteners. They're garbage. They're absolute garbage. Yeah. And it's, I mean, it would just be better to eat more protein in your diet. Also, people don't always digest high protein very well. So you have to figure out constitutionally, should you be trying to eat a steak a day or be on a carnivore diet? Is that right for your

constitution? Maybe you reverse your autoimmune disease in six months or three months on a carnivore diet, and then you can go back to like a paleo diet and start introducing fruits and vegetables and see what you react to. However, I look at every individual as, okay, what's the best thing for you based on who you are? What did your ancestors eat, you know, 200, 500, 1,000 years ago, before we had, you know, this farming the way we've been farming for a while now. And basically get away from all the cash crops. So get away from all the grains, the corn, the soy, just get away from that. All that stuff has chemicals on it, or you're contributing to the problem. So by not supporting the problem, we can change the

problem. And if you can, grow your own food. You know, I don't own a big farm. I've grown zucchini on my deck in the summer and had massive zucchinis and planters. I've had tomatoes that I've grown, cucumber. So anything that you eat a lot of that you're like, hey, I'm spending a lot of money at the grocery store on this organic, figure out how to grow it at home and then maybe grow enough of it. And you can freeze those carrots, you can freeze those root vegetables and make soups in the winter with broth and stuff. So I think getting, you know, it puts more responsibility on us. And that's the way it used to be. I mean, we used to grow our own, everyone used to grow their own food, or at least have a small garden, even if it was a planter box.

I remember visiting my grandmother outside of Philadelphia, when she was still alive, and I was pretty young, maybe 12 or 13. And she even had a garden in the back of her apartment where it didn't look like much, but she was growing things out there. So if she can do it, we can do it. You know, it's like she's an old lady. So I think a lot of us, if we get back to gardening, you may be able to fix a lot of other problems or symptoms people are having. Anxieties may go away. You get more sunlight, more vitamin D, more endorphins.

You're standing with your feet in the ground. Grounding's really big now in our communities. And you kind of like solve a lot of problems just by doing that. And if you don't have the land for that in cities like Seattle or Portland, there's group gardening plots, you can just go join a community garden and, you know, volunteer an hour a week. I love that. Oh, you know, I want to ask you because I get this question a lot on Instagram. I speak a lot about the importance of getting sunlight and getting vitamin D, but I'm very fortunate that I live in California and

I get a lot of messages from people that are in Seattle, Washington. And they asked me, they're like, what do I do if I don't have consistent sunlight? If I want to get vitamin D, um, obviously there's supplementation, but do you think there's any validity to those sun lamps? Yeah, there's, is it like Serti or something? Vitamin D lamp? Yeah, I can't remember what it's called. I'll look it up for everyone listening and put them in the show notes. Yeah, I think there could be something to that. I have a patient right now, I'll check their vitamin D again soon.

And I think that's all they're using when it's not summertime. I think there could be something to it if it's like a UV, is it UVB rays, right? They give us vitamin D. So I think that combined with a red light could really help with seasonal affective disorder. There's a lot of debate right now about taking a lot of vitamin D long-term and technically it is a pro-hormone and there's just a lot of things that mess up with our vitamin D mold messes up with vitamin D wearing sunscreen yeah yeah sun sunscreen actually that's a great point sunscreen is a huge endocrine disruptor and I see people all the time spraying themselves and their kids down with this toxic sunscreen spray head to toe. Really, you know, if you can decrease the sunscreen, just use like a zinc oxide or

on, you know, like your cheekbones, your nose, ears, maybe your neck. And then if you're starting to get too much sun, get out of the sun or wear a t-shirt and cover up. If you're working in the sun, then you should be wearing, you know, if you're out all day, like I used to be when I was farming and landscaping and doing construction, you want to wear a hat, of course. And, you know, shirt and stuff. I was in long sleeve, short sleeve shirt and pants pretty much all summer while landscaping in humid Vermont weather. So I think we need to have a cautious respect for the sun, but we also need to worship it at the same time. So get outside, get some sunlight, you know,

first thing in the morning, again in the afternoon. Don't overdo it. Don't sun your genitals like some people are saying to do on Instagram. We all know that account. Yeah. My brother is sending me these things from this account and he's like, is this legit? I'm like, no, please don't do that. Don't burn yourself there.

So I think some people have gone a little too far. Like, yes, there is something to be said for we have more testosterone when there's more sunlight. We have like an annual kind of flow of our hormones. Men and women make more testosterone from spring through early fall. And maybe that accounts for like the quote unquote spring fever where people have like a higher libido in the spring. And there's something, there's a whole biochemistry of like pollens in the air that could be increasing that too maybe. Pine pollen is androgenic hormone increaser for testosterone

for men and women. So maybe there's something to that for that. I was going to go out spring fever with people just having higher libido. But yeah, you don't need to sun your genitals. And I mean, if you want a suntan nude, by all means, go for it. But you don't I don't think you need to be careful there. And yeah. So tan nude by all means go for it but you don't I don't I think you need to be careful there and yeah so um in all seriousness I think people are more sun phobic than they should be in general generally speaking you probably see that in LA people putting on all kinds of stuff

yes oh yeah everyone's wearing hats full body clothes all the time. I mean, I see people on Instagram now saying that you need to put sunscreen on the second you wake up in the morning, even if you're going to be in your house all day. I'm like, this is guys, this is too much. This is too much. Um, cause we do need sunlight. Sun charges are mitochondria. It is like a battery for us. You know, it's like a battery charger for us. Obviously, like you were saying, we want to be smart. If you're going to be in the sun all day, you don't want to like burn yourself to a crisp. But there are also ways to slowly build up your tolerance to sun exposure. And if you're not burning, you're fine.

You just don't want to burn. Right. Yeah, I used to live in Arizona and I didn't have a car for most of the time I lived there. I was biking everywhere when I was in college. and, you know, it was high altitude. So a lot of sun, high altitude sun. And I never really burned. I was always getting a constant, continuous sun exposure. And I was by end of April, I looked completely different, you know, I was very tanned.

So I think it's these weekend warriors who are going out, they're like in their office or working inside from home now all week. And they're like, oh, let's go on my buddy's boat. And then they get drunk and burnt to a crisp. Burnt to a crisp. Yeah. Yeah. That's a problem.

You don't want to do that. Yeah. And then I think it's Weston Price Organization has talked about sunscreen and skin cancer. And basically, if you're baking a toxin into your lymphatics and your skin and your subcutaneous fat underneath your skin, that's not good. And that could be causing your skin cancer for a lot of people. And there was just a massive recall of sunscreens and the majority of the very well-known conventional sunscreens that everyone uses like banana boat, et cetera. They were all on there and they were being recalled because they contain something called, I think it's oxybenzone is what it is. But essentially they realized that when that is, when the UV rays hit that, it actually causes cancer. So people are spraying this stuff and spreading it too. It's not just the

sprays, this stuff on their body to prevent cancer. And it's actually contained, it contains these ingredients that cause cancer. I'm sorry to laugh. It's just like, it's just crazy. We're just being so inundated with chemicals in our modern world. And like you said, look for a zinc oxide sunscreen. You want to buy the non-toxic ones. EWG, which is the environmental working group, it's ewg.org. They have a sunscreen guide and they break down all of the safest sunscreens and they show you all the ingredients in there and they have a bunch of reports and basically they just show you the best sunscreens that are the safest for you.

Absolutely. Yeah. That's and I think I feel your laughter too. It's this absurdity like why do we have to do all this work? Shouldn't these organizations like the EPA and the FDA, these three-letter government agencies, I don't want to say all their names, but we get the idea. Shouldn't they be trying to protect us? Of course they're not. But it's frustrating to be like, oh man, I need to stop using bleach. I need to look at this sunscreen. I need to look up my water database, get a good water filter.

Oh, what's the best water filter? Oh, it has to be reverse osmosis. Now I need electrolytes every day. And it gets, like, I feel the frustration because there's some conventional things that I need to switch out. And I'm just like, well, I haven't found a good alternative. We tried in our house at a health food store in Montana, a natural, so-called natural dish soap that is like a pod powder that is break up and it was all natural, very clean. And our dishes were covered in this stuff. Like it didn't break down.

It was not a good product. So I think there's some good products out there and maybe, you know, some of them I've seen people use like branch basics and recommend that if you like that. Do you like that brand? I do. I will say I don't really like their dishwashing tabs as much. I've seen them work for some people and it's weird. They worked for me in the beginning, but I went back to my seventh generation dishwashing stuff just because it was not the branch basics, basics wasn't cutting it. But I will say for actual cleaning products, like spraying for cleaning the toilets, the bathrooms, everything. I love branch basics. I'm a huge fan of them in that regard. And then I have a different non-toxic laundry. I don't like them

for laundry very much. It was not cleaning my clothes and it kind of felt like they were gray. And then I have a different non-toxic dish soap that I really like. It's called Levant. And for everyone listening, I will link everyone. So if you guys want to try it, I'm a huge fan. It smells amazing. It looks really pretty on the counter, which is important to me. I love an aesthetic and the smell is not toxic fragrance. There's no fragrance in there. It's just like a really clean, I believe they use, what is it called? Essential oils. Well, I have two more questions for you. One, I want to go back a little bit to the food because I think this is really important for people to understand. Are these the pesticides and herbicides that we're spraying on our food impacting our hormones?

Yeah. So from my most recent research and understanding conversations with people like Anthony Jay, who's a PhD and wrote Estrogeneration, he's a PhD biochemist, does a lot of work with genetics, consults with people, is that Roundup is a, so it disrupts glycine and the mineral balance in the gut and the gut microbiome. Also a correlation with autoimmune diseases and other issues. But it's also estrogenic. It's an estrogen hormone disruptor itself. And that's, I believe, animal research level. They're never going to do that on humans. Yeah. Well, we are the experiment right now. They're doing it on a very large level, but we are not consenting. Exactly. Yeah. There's a lot of that been going on for a long time, this non-consent. So, and then 2,4-D is a broadleaf herbicide that can be bought on Amazon and online.

It's carcinogenic. The International Association of Research on Carcinogens, IARC, which is basically an organization that branches off of the World Health Organization. And they're, as you can imagine, extremely corrupted and kind of bought off by these chemical companies. So they won't label things as carcinogens. They label 2,4-D and Roundup glyphosate as probable carcinogens. And what I say to people is you probably don't want to get cancer, do you? So let's probably not throw the Russian

roulette bullet in the pistol and in the revolver and play this game. So let's just eliminate these things as much as you can. The problem with something like 2,4-D, and this is through conversations with people in agriculture, is 2,4-D can get aerosolized. So let's say your neighbor's spraying it, you're walking your dog in the morning, you have no idea what you're breathing in, what you're being sprayed with. I mean, I've seen people be spraying while I'm walking my dog in Washington State, in Florida. They spray ranches, spray around the ranch. People spray their dandelions in their backyard, which is just a sign of our ignorance, how far we've been removed from our roots, literally our roots. And folk medicine is that

dandelion root is great for your liver and you need to use that every spring to detox. So when the dandelions are coming up, just dig them up, stop spraying them. Make tea with them. Yeah, cook them in your oven a little bit and then grind them up in a grinder or chop them up, stop spraying them. Make tea with them. Yeah. Cook them in your oven a little bit and then grind them up in a grinder or chop them up. Eat the leaves in a salad. The leaves are diuretic, great for the kidneys and the liver as well. So we need those bitters to get the bile moving, reset the GI flow. But yeah, so going back to these herbicides, there's a great, there's a book about this. It's called Operation Ranch Hand.

So in Vietnam, there is a large group of the army spraying Agent Orange, Agent Purple, Agent Yellow, all these different, basically herbicide sprays to take down the jungle so that they could fight, see the enemy, right? Easier. And they, all these guys who are spraying it got cancer and most of them died. And then they brought it back and they started using it in farming because they're like, well, we have all this 2,4-D. So that was one of the main ingredients in Agent Orange. And 2,4-D, like I said, is sold over the counter like Roundup is. You're not going to use Roundup on your yard. It would kill your whole yard.

You're going to use 2,4-D and you should never use it. And this goes back to like, why do we have a lawn? Why do we have a lawn, you know, in a place like Arizona or LA? Why do you have a grass lawn? Grow native plants, you know, have a garden that matches your climate or grow a garden, like I said before, and stop trying to look like you're like the Buckingham Palace in Arizona. I used to live in Arizona. It was just ridiculous. I'm like, why are we spent whether they're wasting, you know, we would have water shortages in the summer. It's like you couldn't shower, but your neighbors over here watering their lawn with their water

allocation. You're like, hey, you know, the guy next door probably needs that for his garden so he can feed his family. So we have huge things like paradigm shifts that are happening, need to continue happening. And this plays down to our hormones because the way that we're interacting in our communities, in our environment, you know, just recently they sprayed around where I live. A lawn organization came and started, they said they were going to spray herbicides, bring all your stuff inside. But that gets into the groundwater,

that gets into the lakes. Then you're swimming in the lake all summer. You know, in Florida, they have the red tides. Yeah. Well, sorry. And I was just going to say, because I think a lot of people don't think about this. So when they come and spray that in the yard

or your neighbor's spraying it or whatever, and then your dog is outside in your yard, is getting exposed to those pesticides. If you have young kids, if they're rolling around the grass, if they're crawling in the grass, if they're that little, they're also getting exposed to that. I, uh, I was at a conference recently and there was a woman speaking about this and her entire life's work is based around helping people in their communities get these pesticides and herbicides out of their local parks, golf courses, neighborhoods, etc. Because she's trying to raise awareness around the rising, the skyrocketing rising numbers of childhood cancers. And also, like I said, it's affecting our pets and um I will I'm gonna I'm gonna have a lot of

show notes for you guys today I need to find that woman's contact because like I said she she helps people go after their neighborhood watch and you know everyone that's like spraying in public places and raise awareness for this because people don't know that this is affecting us on so many different levels and then I have one more thing I want to say about the glyphosate for anyone that is still wondering and questioning because they just call it a probable human carcinogen. I urge you to go look up Bayer right now. So Bayer bought Monsanto and Monsanto is the, they were the originators of glyphosate, otherwise known as Roundup. And they are getting sued out the ass right now because so many farmers have been taking them to court

because they've gotten rampant cases of cancer. And they're winning. All these farmers are winning because they are able to prove that this glyphosate is causing cancer. Yeah, it's a huge deal. And there was like that big lawsuit with the groundskeeper in the North Bay

in Vallejo, California, who's spraying Roundup for decades. And he has lymphoma. It's the non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and breast cancer. The two most common cancers people get is that lymphoma. And I've seen it in patients where they have a lymphoma and it's caused by mold and Roundup exposures and 2,4-D probably as well. And you can test for these things. I mean, I test my patients, but doing all this stuff first, and I love that lady's contact information too. I'd love to contact her because I, you know, it's so hard as an individual, even if you say, hey, I'm a doctor. This is really bad. No one listens. You know, people aren't like, oh, really? Let me hear what you have to say about this. They're

like, shut up. It's safe. You know, so and people defend their paradigm, you know? Yeah. Or I've found a lot of people feel really helpless because I have a lot of people that will write me messages on Instagram and they just, you know, I literally had multiple people write me this yesterday because I posted something about the pesticides being sprayed and multiple people wrote me just saying, I'm so disheartened. You know, they're spraying my kid's school or they're, you know, they're spraying the parks that I take my kids to and I don't know what to do. And my answer is the same to every single person. I'm like, just start complaining, like get a group of parents together.

Go to these places and show them the reports and show them the science, show them the data that we have and encourage them to start using different things. And, you know, there's a lot of different resources. There's a lot of different stuff that we can be using now outside of Roundup. And it's important that people understand that there are things that they can do. Yes. Yeah, I think that's great to empower people and power in numbers. Like you're saying, if you get a group of parents together and you all come to the school and you say, Hey, um, let's figure out a way to not spray this stuff. Like you're poisoning our kids and you're going to destroy their hormones while

they're developing. Um, and that's a huge concern in the childhood cancers and their autoimmunity and pets dying of cancer. It's so common now for someone to be like, oh, I just put down my dog again because they have cancer. And the vets are like, oh, it's this breed, it's that breed. It's kind of like, well, no, it's the toxins that are in the dog parks and the parks where the dog's running around in the grass. Absolutely. And the dog food, the processed dog food. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff, but it's absolutely part of it. Okay, I know I said that was my last question, but there's one more I really want to ask you about because I don't think many people think about this.

Do you know about the BPA and receipts? Yes. So this is something I think I did a deeper dive into this for Instagram posts a couple of years ago because we have like Men's Health Month twice a year in November and June. So receipts, there's BPA on receipts, but then there's BPF and BPS. So if you get a BPA-free plastic water bottle and it says BPA-free sticker on it, which they're now selling those to, of course, it probably has BPS or BPF in it. And the bisphenols, it just gets worse. So they basically replace, this is the way it works in the world of toxicology and chemical companies. They release a chemical. They don't have to prove it's safe in humans. They don't have to do testing until there's like lawsuits. And then there's like with the Roundup, then there's lawsuits. And then they have to say,

okay, you have to come up with something different now. They come up with something different, that something different is always worse than the first thing, which was already really bad. So BPF and BPS are, and I think F is worse than A and S. So yeah, it's just, just don't use a plastic water bottle. Use like a clean canteen, stainless steel or a glass water bottle that has like a rubber thing around the outside. So you break it, it bounces or something. But or you can use hydro flask is good. Shana Swan has a great book called Countdown about male fertility and infertility epidemic and how this is affecting. She was on the podcast. Oh, nice.

Her website is super good about, and you can go to Environmental Working Group, Silent Spring Institute. But basically, yeah, I was looking at all this stuff And then her book came out. I was so glad her book came out. And she was on Joe Rogan's podcast to get more exposure. Because when I talked to patients about fertility, there just wasn't a lot out there until her book came out. And, you know, really people, it's like ancient Greek when you get into this stuff with them. But yeah, the BPA receipts, I would just say get, don't get a paper receipt. Just get it texted to you or get it emailed to you if you need to keep a record for accounting. A lot of places are still using paper receipts. You can just say like, hey, throw in the bag. It's kind of hard. We live in this world. We all live in the matrix, so-called matrix here.

We got to do our best. And then, you know, the rule of environmental medicine is decrease exposures first, increase toxic clearance second. So, you know, if you have an infrared sauna or you have things to help you detoxify at home, that's awesome. But if you're still getting exposed by, you know, you have a huge wine collection you're going through every weekend or you're, you know, grabbing all the paper receipts

or maybe you work as a cash register, you work in retail and you're handing out paper receipts. Wear gloves. Yeah. Because I read something today, actually, that the BPA in receipts is, I don't remember the exact percentage, but it is significantly higher than in plastic. And it seems so simple. You just grab a receipt and you're like, oh, I'm not really getting a lot, but we're actually getting exposed to a ton of BPA in those receipts. So I refuse any receipt.

Everyone laughs at me because I'm like, no, don't hand me that. I don't want it. And I always tell the cashiers, I'm like, you should probably wear gloves because you want to protect yourself from that. But anyways, I want to be mindful of your time. So I have a question that I ask all my guests before we go. What are your health non-negotiables? These are things that no matter how crazy busy your day is, you prioritize them for your health. That's a really good question. My health and non-negotiables. Well, I always get outside even if it's bad weather.

I kind of have to. I have a dog and he has seen it walked. So I'm really big on exercise and I have been my whole life. And that doesn't always look like weight training. It can be a walk. It can be a hike. But yeah, getting outside and exercising is a pretty big deal, even if it's just a mile. And that would be a minimum.

I think my average is about six miles of walking a day total or more. So sometimes seven. The other thing I'd say would be sleep. If I don't get enough sleep, it's just going to be a bad day no matter what. So at least seven hours of sleep. And I have an Oura ring. I've had an Oura ring for almost two years.

Nice. Same. Yeah. So I can tell what's going on there and, um, I'm probably going to buy the new chili sleep pad cause it doesn't have any coils in it. I don't know if people have heard of that, but it's, um, a cooling pad that you put on your bed. So it helps you, um, sleep better. It's kind of like a hack you can do to get better sleep results because it's just, it's hard, you know, even with air conditioning sometimes to get your body temperature low enough in the room temperature low enough. Especially for men though, like men are furnaces at night. I mean, that's your testosterone. That's if you, that's one of the

ways, you know, your testosterone is pretty good. I run very cold. I'm like, Ooh, having a cold pad under me while sleeping would be horrible for me. But yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of, a lot of guys I work with, I'm like, how are you sleeping? And they're like, not good. I'm like, let's try this. If this doesn't work, you're getting a sleep study. But, um, and that's the other thing you know the sleep problems and sleep apnea is a huge testosterone killer um but yeah sleep and exercise um and water and of course i try to eat well but if you know all all things that all else fails it's sleep exercise water so love it the good ones well please tell everyone listening where they can find you. Yeah. So you can go to my website or Instagram. So the website is ApolloHealthClinic.com.

Instagram handle is Dr. Sam Madeira. Doctor spelled out all the way. And then Madeira spelled like the wine. It's Portuguese. And yeah, so you can find me there. I'm posting a lot on Instagram. More now. I took a month off, but that's where you can find me. Awesome. Thank you so much, Sam. This was great. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to today's episode of The Real Foodology Podcast. If you liked this episode, please leave a review in your podcast app to let me know. This is a resident media production produced by Drake Peterson and edited by Chris McCone. The theme song is called Heaven by the amazing singer Georgie,

spelled with a J. Love you guys so much. See you next week. The content of this show is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for individual medical and mental health advice and doesn't constitute a provider patient relationship. I am a nutritionist, but I am not your nutritionist. As always, talk to your doctor or your health team first.