The Checkup with Doctor Mike - Are Everyday Chemicals ACTUALLY Harming Your Health

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

I'll teach you how to become the media's go-to expert in your field. Enroll in The Professional's Media Academy now: https://www.professionalsmediaacademy.com/Buy Dr. Aly Cohen's book "Detoxify: The Everyday Toxins Harming Your Immune System and How to Defend Against Them" - https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Detoxify/Aly-Cohen/9781668033531REFERENCES:From Dr. Andrea Love:Glyphosate references: https://www.immunologic.org/references/glyphosateFood dye references: https://www.immunologic.org/references/fooddyesGMO/biotech references: https://www.immunologic.org/references/gmoshttps://www.immunologic.org/references/vaccineshttps://www.immunologic.org/referencesFrom Dr. Aly Cohen:Bai, S. H. and S. M. Ogbourne (2016). "Glyphosate: environmental contamination, toxicity and potential risks to human health via food contamination." Environ Sci Pollut Res Int 23(19): 18988-19001.https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27541149/Novotny, E. (2022). "Glyphosate, Roundup and the Failures of Regulatory Assessment." Toxics 10(6): 321.https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35736929/Vandenberg, L. N., et al. (2017). "Is it time to reassess current safety standards for glyphosate-based herbicides?" J Epidemiol Community Health 71(6): 613-618.https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28320775/Yilmaz, B., et al. (2020). "Endocrine disrupting chemicals: exposure, effects on human health, mechanism of action, models for testing and strategies for prevention." Rev Endocr Metab Disord 21(1): 127-147.https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31792807/Aljadeff, G., et al. (2018). "Bisphenol A: A notorious player in the mosaic of autoimmunity." Autoimmunity 51(8): 370-377.https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30590961/Huang, R.-G., et al. (2023). "Endocrine-disrupting chemicals and autoimmune diseases." Environmental Research 231: 116222.https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37224951/Thompson, P. A., et al. (2015). "Environmental immune disruptors, inflammation and cancer risk." Carcinogenesis 36(Suppl_1): S232-S253.https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26106141/Bradman, A., et al. (2015). "Effect of Organic Diet Intervention on Pesticide Exposures in Young Children Living in Low-Income Urban and Agricultural Communities." Environ Health Perspect 123(10): 1086-1093.https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25861095/Lang, C., et al. (2016). "Personal Care Product Use in Pregnancy and the Postpartum Period: Implications for Exposure Assessment." Int J Environ Res Public Health 13(1).https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26751460/Follow Dr. Aly Cohen:IG: https://www.instagram.com/thesmarthuman/Website: https://alycohenmd.com/Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aly-cohen-md-facr-0b570749/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb6NhglVIu6ruM19QNhpJDwFollow Dr. Andrea Love:Twitter/X: https://x.com/dr_andrealove?lang=enIG: https://www.instagram.com/dr.andrealove/?hl=enLinked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrea-love-phd/Substack Newsletter: https://news.immunologic.orgWebsite: https://www.immunologic.org00:00 Intros03:15 Autoimmune Disorders In Young People27:03 The Farm Effect / Plastics39:50 Leaky Gut / Pesticides51:54 Organic vs. Synthetic1:06:50 Environmental Working Group / Dirty Dozen1:24:10 Precautionary Principle1:30:18 Glyphosate1:43:40 GMOs / Accessibility1:54:35 Claims In The Book1:59:35 Access To Data2:20:20 Polio Vaccine / Awareness2:28:20 Appeal To NatureLet’s connect:IG: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/instagram/DMinstagramTwitter: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/twitter/DMTwitterFB: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/facebook/DMFacebookTikTok: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/tiktok/DMTikTokReddit: https://go.doctormikemedia.com/reddit/DMRedditContact Email: [e-mail] Producer: Doctor MikeProduction Director and Editor: Dan OwensManaging Editor and Producer: Sam BowersEditor and Designer: Caroline WeigumEditor: Juan Carlos Zuniga

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Absolutely. And also, I'd like disclosure of who we work for. I don't work for anybody. Is there a chemical-based payment for it? Oh, it's a paid-shill comment. Yeah, I mean, I'm worried about that kind of exposure. Do you mean, like, who our sponsors are? She thinks I'm a paid shill because I'm defending chemicals.

I'm curious. I'd like to make sure. Here is, like, a central tenant of pseudoscience is that they say, oh, well, synthetic chemicals bad, and I'm going to lump all of these different chemicals. But you're saying they're all good. No, how is that any better than what you're claiming I'm doing? Welcome to the Checkup Podcast. On this episode, we're answering a simple but loaded question.

Are the everyday chemicals in our food, water, and homes truly wrecking our health, or are we overreacting? Our guest today is Dr. Ailey Cohen, rheumatologist and environmental health advocate who says that everyday chemicals were exposed to are the number one cause of most acute and chronic health conditions. She's here promoting her new book, Detoxify, which really hammers the message that these toxic chemicals are not only all around us, but we shouldn't wait for more research to be done before we act. Given the gravity of her claims and expertise required to properly explore them, I invited microbiologist, immunologist, and biotech scientist, Dr. Andrea Love, to give her perspective on the matter.

Fair warning, this discussion is probably the most spirited we've had on the podcast thus far, and I certainly didn't expect the dramatic turns it took through several of the segments. It truly highlights how passionate both guests feel about the topic at hand. Without further ado, please welcome Dr. Ailey Cohen and Dr. Andrea Love to the Checkup Podcast. Miller Light, the light beer brewed for people who love the taste of beer and the perfect pairing for your game time. When Miller Light set out to brew a light beer, they had to choose great taste or 90 calories per can. They chose both because they knew the best part of beer is the beer.

Your game time tastes like Miller time. Learn more at millerlight.ca. Must be legal drinking age. I'm Andrea Love. I have a PhD in microbiology and immunology. I specialized previously in academic research in infectious disease immunology. So understanding host response to infection and how, you know, the immune system mediate symptoms and resolution of infection. I now work in life science as biotech,

where I focus on technologies and assays for preclinical, translational, and clinical research for vaccine development, cancer, immunotherapy, cell and gene therapy, pretty much anything related to biomedical science. And I also do science communication through immunologic. Cool. How about yourself? That's a tough gig to follow. Thanks for that. So a physician, Dr. Elykoe and I'm trained in internal medicine, then board certified in rheumatology, went on to do training with the Dr. Andrew Wiles program for integrative medicine and became board certified.

And all this time also, which we can get into or not in the show, but was learning environmental health haphazardly. and basically, you know, started to write textbooks and books on this topic. And then at this point, I'm merging all of 22 years of clinical experience and environmental health and integrative into a perspective that I think is relevant and urgent for our times. Got it. And I'm a primary care doctor. So I'm neither an expert in any of these fields.

But I see the struggles that my patients have, both in making a decision of what products they should buy, what products they should avoid, what they read on social media. And as we know, there's a lot of misinformation in social media. There's sensationalism, there's fearmongering, and we even see that in our politics these days. So very complicated for the average person to parse through all that data. So I'm excited that I have both of you here today to sort of get down to the bottom of things and figure out what's what, what we should be looking for, what is a bit too scary

that we shouldn't be focusing on. and find that sort of middle ground that we could all agree on. I'm curious, Dr. Cohen, for you starting in your practice, you're working, or you're still working, right, as a practicing rheumatologist, what were you seeing in your patients that made you start thinking there's something else going on? It's not enough what I'm doing based on what I've learned through my residency and fellowship training. Well, I started to see younger.

I mean, the blunt part of this is I started to see younger people presenting with autoimmune and immune disorders at, you know, ages that you would normally expect and was also as very interesting as they had no family history. And when I began this process, even 15 years ago, I had an inkling there was something else going on besides family history. And then I had to learn about how there's other aspects that affect how genes are expressed, our diet and our lifestyle and how they affect disease risk and presentation. And really, that's how I got started is to see more of what I didn't want to see. Unfortunately, it matches the epidemiologic, you know, numbers worldwide. In the United States, 7 to 14 percent of the U.S. population is managing, you know,

some type of autoimmune disease. So that's about, you know, 30, 24 to 30 million Americans. So it's rising. We have to figure out why and how to put a plug in this. issue or at least try to maintain our health in any way we can. So, you know, that's what I'm trying to do. So take me through the book and what role do you think the detoxification and the environment plays in those numbers? Is it the whole thing? Is it partial percentage of those individuals are suffering as a result of the environment? Well, yeah, you know, with humans, as with everything that's human related, it's conflicting because we have so many varied lives. We have different genetic predispositions, our lifestyle changes, our role and our risk for developing a

whole host of diseases. So when I talk about this topic, I say, you know, whether you develop any kind of illness is a dance between your genetics, your environmental exposures, and your lifestyle. And you can actually control a great deal of two out of those three. You know, we like to say that, you know, when you put your mind towards some of those activities that we now know scientifically, with robust studies, change your outcomes through a variety of mechanisms, which we can get into, you really do have much more control over your health than you think you do. And when I talk about environment, I say this is one of the key things we have to get a handle on because we can't wait for other people to regulate. We can't give in the problem,

and we really can do this for ourselves. We can do this through reduction of exposures, through reasonable methods, and then we can also extrapolate that to reduce our disease risk. So, you know, it is something we can handle. I know during my residency training, the environment was a very small, if at all, covered topic. Maybe pollution, asthma, something very surface level. Perhaps in an autoimmune focused residency, you have more education on that. But I'm curious, where did you end up getting all of your information, your data? how did you start compiling all of this?

Yeah, well, unfortunately, even today, 20, 25, we're not getting any of this education. I wish my residency did have that information or even my fellowship, which is focused, obviously, on the immune system as a rheumatologist. So my loading up of data and information and asking the right questions really started 15 years ago when I was really quite surprised that I didn't know this material because I was researching why my dog was sick. That's really the start of my whole career in environmental health. And he himself had gotten sick at a young age with no family history and, you know, four and a half year old gold retriever. So I think what happens is you get struck by a bad

situation sometimes. It hits you in your heart, your Kishkas, so to speak. And you spend a lot of time trying to figure out the science to establish a cause and effect. But the cause and effect is not always direct. And I started following the papers that were available even 15 years ago. People like my co-author of Fred Baumsal, who was largely responsible for having BPA removed from plastic baby bottles in 2012. And I started looking at all the research and reaching out to the authors and really trying to figure out if this was true. Because again, when you're trained in medical school and medical training, you believe that is it. You believe there's nothing else that can affect your opinions about how you go through life and how you make choices and what disease risks we can

avoid. So it was kind of relearning what I, not relearning because I believe in science. Obviously, I treat with medications and, you know, I really walk a fine line between just learning both sides of the stories and things that were just left out and still are in medical training. When you say both sides of the stories, which both sides? Well, you know, both sides of the stories, meaning when doctors, and this is happening now, roll their eyes when patients go to see them and say, hey, doctor, what can I eat that might help make my flares in lupus and rheumatoid arthritis reduced? Or why did I get this disease? What can I do about, you know, exercise?

And does that make a difference? Or if I go gluten-free, is there a benefit to it? Or, you know, there's just a million questions that I think patients are now asking. They're getting smarter. They're getting sicker, but they're getting smarter. They're getting more inquisitive. and a lot of, unfortunately, I think, the medical institution, not the doctor's fault, it's the training fault. You know, I look at the system as the place to fix it. I'm always looking at the system approach.

And that's really walking the fine line is really trying to measure as much science into the equation and using medications when I'm thoughtful and judicious about them. But really incorporating lifestyle and diet and, again, chemical reduction as a really great starting point, because we know that has such an effect. Why can't we integrate all aspects of human health and lifestyle into our teaching to patients? Yeah, I see. I'm curious on your side, Dr. Love, from a research perspective, has this epidemiological shift been noticeable for you in terms of people having higher levels of autoimmune conditions? What have you seen on the lab side and what has been the cause that you guys suspect that that is behind this uptick?

Yeah, it's a great question. And I think it really underscores the conflation of this topic. And it's something that is really prevalent in social media and kind of the influencer industry, because when we talk about autoimmune disorders, there's over 90 different autoimmune disorders. And they're all incredibly multifactorial, right? And a rheumatologist only deals with connective tissue, rheumatologic disorders, which is not the scope of all.

autoimmunity, that would be more under the scope of a clinical immunologist. But when we're talking about autoimmune disorders, we have pretty good data about some of the contributors to many of these, and we have pretty good data about ways to manage these types of conditions. But the hallmark or the central theme of autoimmune disorders are that your immune system, which normally should tolerate certain self-antigens. Antigens are proteins or molecules that are present. Normally it should ignore them and that establishes a feature of tolerance, meaning it encounters things on your cells or things that you ingest. It's the same reason that food allergies are not nearly as widespread as they could be theoretically because your immune

system encounters them and it's like, hey, I don't need to have a reaction to that. because this is something benign. In certain instances, that is not the case. And that immune response leads to an inflammatory cascade where inflammatory chemicals are produced. It recruits and activates a variety of different immune cells. And these are going to be different depending on what type of autoimmune disorder we're talking about. And that can lead to tissue damage or cellular damage and changes in the function of a person. What creates that shift from this is a bad?

non substance to now it's treating it like a hostile invader? So there isn't one single answer, right? There are a lot of different contributors to this. We know that there are certain viral infections that are players in this. So there are certain types of viruses that can establish latency after primary infection. And that means that they, while you recover from the illness and the infection itself, the virus, because of the nature of the genetics of it, can actually exist. your body kind of hanging out indefinitely until something happens.

And what that something might be, it's going to be different depending on the person. Sometimes it's an acute immunosuppression, like say they're a solid organ transplant recipient and they have to take immunosuppressin medication so they don't reject the organ. That could elicit something. There are, and there's a variety of different types of viruses that are associated with that. Some of the herpes viruses, some of the papilloma viruses. Like chicken pox and shingles. Exactly.

So that's a herpes virus. These can establish latency in the body. There's been Epstein-Barr virus is also a herpes virus, and that has been associated with the development of multiple sclerosis. But there's others where it's pretty idiopathic, and we don't exactly know what kind of elicits it, particularly if we're talking about things like type 1 diabetes, which is an autoimmune disorder,

where your pancreatic islet cells are destroyed, and as a result, you can no longer produce insulin. that is a very different pathology to something like Vidaligo where your immune system destroys the melanocytes in your skin leading to this patchy pigmentation, right? The way that you're going to treat those things are wildly different, and that's really why you can't lump autoimmune disorders into a single bucket. We also know that there's some gender specificity. Women are about two times higher, more likely to develop certain autoimmune disorders than

others. It's not all autoimmune disorders. There appears to be a role in endocrine signaling, hormone signaling in that. That's also why we see the majority of autoimmune disorders present during kind of middle age, where you start to see kind of increased. But a lot of changes in diagnosis or increased rates or increased prevalence is not necessarily because these things are actually happening more frequently. It's because we actually know how to characterize them better. how to identify these types of conditions better where we didn't have diagnostic tools, we didn't have clinical criteria, and because the symptoms are often nebulous or not necessarily immediately related to each other, it's really hard to put a label on that. And so it's the same

topic that we get into when we talk about autism spectrum disorders, where we see rates increasing in terms of diagnoses, which means an increased prevalence. But it's not because more autism is necessarily happening. It's because the criteria, the clinical criteria, the scope of how you can recognize and diagnose and then manage it is better because we understand more about those diseases. Interesting. Yeah, for me, when I have a patient coming in with symptoms of what I imagine to be a rheumatologic condition, autoimmune condition, I do pretty much the same thing every time. I'm ordering inflammatory markers. I'm ordering double-stranded DNA testing and getting them a rheumatology consult.

So in a situation like that, have you seen a higher diagnosis rate for any of these or all of these immunologic conditions because of some criteria changing? Or is that been stable? So what we're seeing more and more is that you don't always have to fit the criteria for a standard Western medicine diagnosed disease. Of course, in other words, checking all the box. In other words, there's a lot of people that come in to the, into my office with kind of varied symptoms.

They don't always fit all the criteria for rheumatoid. They don't fit all the criteria for lupus. Like they're seronegative, you mean? Well, seronegating, meaning their A&A may be, you know, low or negative. 5% of lupus patients can still have lupus. And then they may have seronegative rheumatoid arthritis is what you're, yeah. So there's a lot of people that don't check all the boxes. That's becoming more and more of an issue where these people fall between the cracks.

and really the only solution has been to give medication if they fit that criteria or else they don't get medication. The whole area of, well, what do you do with those patients besides send them away saying that your labs look great, you look great on paper, and these people are still having, you know, real symptoms, I think is really what's falling between the cracks. What I'm seeing is a real problem in medicine. So let me see if I'm following this right. Is it those people are now in addition being diagnosed with autoimmune?

conditions, whereas in the past they weren't, and that's leading to the uptick of new autoimmune conditions? Well, what's really, I think it's a separate, there's a couple different issues here. I do not entirely agree with the idea that we're just getting better at diagnosing because doctors have 15 minutes to see their patients. It's a very crowded system, and we know that there's been a rise in a lot of these autoimmune disorders that do not correlate with better diagnostic capabilities. in terms of more lab work being done.

Doctors are often not trained even to recognize some of the autoimmune symptoms, even in primary care. It's complicated. We also know, I don't want to get into autism so much, but we do know that there's a lot of, you know, problems in terms of the vaccine argument. I'm, you know, certainly not an anti-vaccine person in general as an immune trained person, immunologic trained person. I've never heard someone referred to themselves.

else as an immunologic trained person. Yeah, I don't know if I said it properly, but I guess the person who's really been in this field and studied and really had a good, I think really great Western training in this area. But we know there's another role here because autism is on the rise. It's actually used to be 1 in 68. Now it's one in 48. Now it's one in 32. And it's actually, that's from 2022 data, I believe.

So we're kind of waiting to see what the next range of numbers is. But the idea that, you know, that environment doesn't play a role when we look at the individual chemicals, when we actually piece apart some of these classes of chemicals, we see not only in the laboratory studies, but also, you know, animal studies. And now we have plenty of epidemiologic studies in humans. I write them in, you know, textbooks and I'm writing, you know, in this consumer book. The idea is that we now have plenty to follow through in terms of exposures, phthalates, for example. Dr. Shauna Swan, she's done some incredible work over the last 20 years, showing changes in congenital boys' genitalia due to thallate exposure and the correlation. We've seen this in animal studies first and then brought into clinical studies. We've seen it with BPA in terms of immune system disorders, the perfluor alcohol chemicals PFAS. There's about 15,000 of them now, and we're trying to get them out of drinking water. I know it's made a lot of news. But they have a role in the immune system too, where they suppress the body's ability to mount a response to vaccine.

So basically dumbing down the immune system. So it has both an inflammatory component potentially and an anti-inflammatory component. Either way, it's disruption, which is what I'm pointing out along with endocrine disruption, immune system disruption. So we know that these chemicals are playing a role, a large role. We know that they're in our body. We know that they are measurable in our urine, breast milk, blood. and we know that they correlate not just from an animal studies evaluation, but also in human

studies. So I just want to make sure we think not just that it's all chemicals that are causing problems, and that, of course, we'd love to say that doctors are doing a better job, myself included, but I think the numbers don't show that it's literally just diagnostic, you know, agility. Dr. Love, how did you come to the conclusion that it is more doctor attribution or diagnosing of the conditions. Yeah, I mean, it's that. And it's also a lot of the other factors that actually do play a role in health. We call those the social determinants of health, right? Things that play a role in health outcomes. And I would not rank chemicals in the environment as anywhere near

the top of that list, right? If you kind of look at the things that impact someone's health and their ability to manage a condition, get a diagnosed, you have, access and ability to get health care, right? We know that people who are low income and don't have health insurance and can't seek health care in the U.S. have worse health outcomes. They have delayed diagnosis of chronic diseases like cancer and autoimmune disorders and lifestyle conditions. They are less able to manage them because they have all of the cards against them. When you talk about socioeconomic factors, that's probably about 30% of your contribution. to your health. The next would be actual lifestyle. So behaviors, health behaviors. So, you know,

I think Dr. Cohen mentioned earlier that nobody talks about exercise and nobody talks about healthy diet and that's just objectively false. Like if you talk to an immunologist, whether it's a clinical immunologist or a research scientist, when we talk about supporting your immune system, the central themes of that are moderate stress, get good sleep, practice hygiene, that's hand hygiene, food hygiene, oral hygiene, sexual hygiene, all of the hygreens, um, maintain an active lifestyle and that's going to be different for different people. Everyone needs a different amount of exercise, but we know that exercise is incredibly important for a lot of our physiology. Um, it also would include things like a diverse diet.

And we know that 88% of Americans don't need enough fiber and that is probably one of these single most important things that we could do to improve health outcomes. across the board for a lot of health conditions. And it also includes things like getting vaccines, going to preventive well visits, getting the actual evidence-based screenings for, you know, chronic disease, acute infections, and so on. So those lifestyle factors, you know, wearing sunscreen, getting your flu shot, you know. But these are all things that improve your health in general, but specifically for immune health.

Yeah, but that's, so your immune system touches every organ system in your body, right? So when we talk about overall health, like the immune system is impacting all of that, right? Whether a pregnant person rejects their fetus, that's because of the immune system. Because the immune system is involved in that temporary immunosuppression across the placenta so that that isn't seen as a foreign object by your immune system and rejected, like what would happen if you had an organ transplant. The immune system is involved in. in obesity, modulating the obesity condition. Also, you know, a lot of the signaling cascades are involved. There's an entire class of macrophages that are specifically involved. They're called inflammatory macrophages. It's involved in cancer. It's involved in autoimmune disorders. It's involved in infectious diseases. It's involved when you go to the gym and have a hard workout and you're sore afterwards. That's your immune system doing muscle repair. So when we talk about overall health, it's all involving the immune system. And so all of these things that are good for overall health are also good for immune health. And when we talk about autoimmune disorders,

um, there's a variety of factors that are involved, right? Aging is a contributor because there's immunosin essence. Your immune system is less able to properly regulate all of the complex pathways that it's involved in because there's different cell types, different organ types, different tissue types, different chemicals and different genes that turn them on and off. Um, there's, as I mentioned, a lot of infections that are associated. with autoimmune disorders, and because we're now able to understand those better and characterize those better, we now understand how they might play a role. For example, the Epstein-Barr-Multible sclerosis connection was really just starting to be teased out a few years ago, and we're still

in that infancy. And so, you know, these things, when we talk about the immune system and the immune system and how it contributes to health, your ability or your, the likelihood, the likelihood of whether you're going to get cancer or not is partially dependent on these modifiable behavior lifestyle factors, right? There's a lot of it that's completely out of your control because some of it happens completely randomly. Some of it happens because an error, a mutation occurs in a certain gene, and your body just isn't able to use nucleotide excision repair or base excision repair, whatever, you know, the case happens to be. And it goes a rise result and that happens to be in one of those three critical oncogenic families and cancer

progresses. And it's also important to note that there's this misconception that family history is the determination. That's not. Genetics is probably 10% of these sorts of chronic disease outcomes or your likelihood of predicting whether someone's going to develop it. And a lot of it relates to a lot of randomness that you can't predict and it becomes really appealing to tell people, well, I'm going to give you a label for this symptom that you're experiencing and people want that solution because it's really scary for a lot of people to say, hey, I don't have as much control as I thought I had. But, you know, the reality is as humans live longer because we're not as we're not sicker than we've ever been. We have incredibly

longevity because of science and health and innovation, right? We were dying at 47. That was our average life expectancy in the early 1900s of acute ailments that are not even on the list of leading causes of death anymore. And that's why our life expectancy is in the 70s. And that's why as humans live longer, that gives our bodies time to accrue damage as a result of living. That leads to some of these illnesses. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip. of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex.

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a sweet rebellion, lighthearted and laced with wood. wit, a gesture made for oneself, discover the new fragrance, mutine, now available in Canada. I'm curious on the flip side of this. Maybe both of you can take a chance at this. The farm effect, have you heard of that? Of like kids who grow up around raw milk exposure, they play in the dirt, basically challenging the hygiene hypothesis. Is there truth to that, that actually some exposure to what we would deem as harmful bacteria, and exposures of that nature. Is that something that we moved away from

that we should consider ways to bring back into society? Or is that like increasing risk without actually getting benefit? Yeah, well, I mean, you're, it's a very good point and it's absolutely true that when we're exposed to more microbes that are non-pathologic, that we build our immune system, period.

And it goes to this point of chemicals, by the way, that when we use things like triclosan and we use some of these antimicrobials that are infused in all... Is triclosan? It's an antibacteria, but it's actually, it's in soaps, but they took it out of, there was such an uproar about the liquid soaps. It's been taken out liquid soaps, but it's been infused into cutting boards. It's been infused into tile sealant. It's been infused into a lot of things because we're afraid of microbes. That's the marketing campaign. But in fact, it works against us. We become more highly resistant to antibiotics when we need them. Yeah, I'm doing, this is just a great point timing wise. I'm doing construction in my basement right now. And I put down floors. The reason, the reason I got them was because they're scratch resist and I have giant dogs. But on the label, it says anti-microbial floor. What does that mean? It means bacteroban, microband, and about 30 other different

types of antimicrobials. And that's a problem? Well, it's a problem because in a world where you are so on routine use of your bathroom or on your flooring, you shouldn't need to have these antimicrobials around you. You want your body to be able to build a resistance on its own so that when you need an antibiotic, which is so routine for, you know, hip replacements, knee replacements, dental surgeries that you and I, you know, you manage with patients, you want to be able to respond to those when you actually need an antibiotic. And when we're infused with all these antimicrobials, which, by the way, are listed as pesticides under the U.S. pesticide listings, they are designed to really knock down microbial. Look, we need a microbiome in our gut.

We have a microbiome on our skin. We have microbiomes in every part of our body, lungs, and that microbiome has been part of us for 4.5 million years. Now you add in 95,000 chemicals that are really is the going number. I mean, of course, it's higher or a little bit lower, but you add that in just the last 75 years of human existence. This is really a problem. So we have to step back and think about that in terms of how do we keep our gut healthier and our skin and all these.

So does the chemical that they add to do the antimicrobial floor coating, does that end up impacting, let's say, my microbiome living on? that floor? Well, it's hard to say exactly, right? Because you're an N of one person. On average speaking, obviously. On average speaking, you would think that if you're knocking out microbes that actually are balanced on a microbiome, it's all about balance. It's, you know, do we have as many or more non-pathologic microbes in these microbiomes, wherever they may be, versus the pathologic? And when you knock down the everyday good guys, you're allowing the potential risk for the bad pathology, the bad pathogens actually to kind of override. This is what we see

in gut microbiome studies, particularly in immune and autoimmune disease patients. Retrospective studies show that the gut microbiome of the gut, which is so incredibly important, 26 feet of bowel, very vulnerable, very thin microbiome that lines the interior of the gut, is very susceptible to things like chlorinated drinking water or, you know, ultra-processed foods. Many of or pesticides on fruits and vegetables. And so it's not to scare people to flip out. I mean, I've colored hair. My kids play lacrosse on artificial turf, like three times a week right now, actually.

It's the idea of how do we take really reasonable, good, you know, practical changes that are based in science, based in really great studies around the world, and put them into use because we can't get these chemicals necessarily out of our lives by regulation. We are living in them. They're in our stuff. And so thinking about where they're derived, how they get into our body, you know, what locations, what activities, what purchases will help us have empowerment over our choices and really kind of change the destiny of our health. I mean, that's really the message here. Dr. Love, I saw you having some reactions.

Yeah. So these are not based in good science, these claims. They're based in cherry picking and extrapolating. So like the pesticides that are on foods, the trace levels that are parts per billion, parts per trillion, that are, you know, in your maybe a trace residue on a conventional food product or the kind of challenge to the hygiene hypothesis and, you know, claims that children living on farms had reduced, you know, rates of asthma or autoimmune disorders or things like that. there's tiny studies that are filled with confounding variables that don't account for all of the features that would determine health outcomes. And in fact, the more rigorous studies show that while an arm of the immune system that's involved in response to helminth parasites, more of an IGE mediated response. Worms for the average person. Yes, worms. Sorry. Worms. Worms and parasitic

infections. It's a very different response to what you have for virus, bacteria, fungal pathogens, et cetera. That kind of arm of the immune system does participate in allergic reactions, but there is not robust data that says kids that don't drink pasteurized milk, you know, have improved health outcomes when it comes to asthma and allergies and so on, right? We know that at an early age, your immune system is educating itself, you know, from when you're born to early colonization, where you start to develop your microbiome. But your microbiome is always changing. It is trillions of microorganisms. And they're dynamic because they're responding to their environment,

right? The claims about microbiome and what's a good microbiome and what's a bad microbiome are way overstated by people who don't fully understand what the microbiome is, particularly when we talk about gut microbiome, but there's microbiome everywhere. That's absolutely true. But those are living organisms that respond to inputs, right? So a lot of the claims that talk about changes in the microbiome, like when we talk about artificial sweeteners versus sugar sweetened beverages, and they say, well, you know, there was this shift in actinobacter, and therefore it must be bad. Well, all it's saying is that that particular carbohydrate, that food for the bacteria, meant that certain bacterial species were digesting it, so they grew and the other ones didn't grow, and then they're going

to shift back when you give them a different food, right? It's the same exact thing that happens to a human as an organism. These are organisms that are always changing. And so you're... What if in that situation, they find that people who have higher levels of that bacteria that ended up growing, tend to be unhealthier. Is that not a fair positive pathway? You would have to control for that, right? So a lot of these kind of

hypotheses, you know, are based on observational studies and those are exactly what they suggest. They're observational, their hypothesis generating studies. So there's a lot of studies where someone with a GI disorder is going in and they're getting a biopsy

of their intestine. And so while they're doing that, they're going to go do some brute force screening of different species of bacteria. And there's a lot of caveats there because, you know, it's just one moment in time. It's someone who has a pathology. You can't necessarily say how it's temporally related and how it plays a role. If it plays a role, it's an observation. So from there you say, hey, well, we're seeing this trend. We're going to now actually conduct something a little bit more robust to better understand that. But we know that, you know, these sorts of claims about chemicals and chemical inputs and, you know, antimicrobials,

you know, this is kind of the hallmark of pseudoscience, right? You take a nugget of truth and then you kind of extrapolate it where we know that there's a reason we don't use antibacterial soaps in day-to-day practice, right? There are situations where you need to use antiseptics, right, if you're going to go conduct a medical procedure or if you're doing a research study and you need a sterile environment. But for most people, you don't want to use antibacterial soap because there's a phenomenon called microbial antagonism where you don't want to wash off the microbiome on your skin and leave it open to potential colonization of pathogens, right? And those are disease-causing microorganisms. We call them pathogenic microorganisms. That being said, using other antimicrobials to treat surfaces to reduce the likelihood of transfer in the context of food.

products where we know foodborne illness is a major concern or tracking in pathogens on your feet. That is not one in the same. The bigger issue when we talk about microbial evolution or antimicrobial resistance is over prescription of antibiotics when they're not needed. And that's a whole other can of worms. But, you know, the concerns or legitimate considerations of limiting the use of antimicrobials is very different than saying these chemicals are harming our microbiome because there's no data to actually show that whatsoever. Well, what about the 95,000? It's an estimated 95,000 since 1940s, 1950s when this really took off. We had an explosion of really good-intentioned chemicals, you know, rayon and nogahide and plex the glass for

fighter pilots and pesticides fighting overseas. And yes, it was really exciting time. We had plastics that fall on the floor and you don't have to, you know, break glasses. So there was, there was a lot of really good innovation. The problem was that at the time that these chemicals were actually really being thrown out and really being generated, no one really followed to see whether or not, A, they get into the human body, how long they last, what's their half-life, how do they break down, and where do they go once they go through the toilet and the water systems that actually end up circling back into us in terms of wastewater treatment information, which we can talk about. But the idea is that we've created sort of this

you know, we've let the genie out of the bottle. And the problem is now we're sort of left to do a lot of work to try to make our bodies healthier and to lower these exposures that we know relate to chronic illness. In terms of the microbiome, yes, in fact, totally agree that the microbiome is fluid and it grows with us. And in fact, with one meal versus another, whether it's high fiber or not, we're going to change the consistency. What's happening with autoimmune and immune disorders and what's been tracked out on epidemiologic studies is that, and even retrospective studies as well, looking at charts and disease diagnoses and going backwards, is that the gut tends to have more pathologic bugs than healthful

bugs when it looks at the balance in many, certainly psoriotic arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, and lupus. And, you know, basically going back to lifestyle changes, including, but not limited to, thinking about how chemicals affect the gut microbiome by what we eat, how our stress changes the pH level in our gut and how that plays out into the growth, excuse me, the growth and the life of these microbes, but also thinking about even the barrier contact. It's not just, you know, allowing the barrier to be loosened up, leaky gut, so to speak, and to allow some chemicals and even, you know, triggered components get across that, that thin microbiome into the bloodstream. that's when we get that inflammatory response.

We don't have to see it. We can see it cellularly when we do blood testing. We can do it through markers and cytokines. And, you know, if people choose to do that. But that technically is a little deeper than I think the average clinician. For sure. That's what I was just going to bring up that. I remember one of my patients mentioned something about leaky gut.

And when I spent some time looking into it, a lot of the sources that I use day to day kind of represent leaky gut as a pseudo diagnosis where it's not real. Do you feel like that's an unjust? I do think it's unjust because here's the thing. Look, I don't go nuts with testing. There's a lot of practitioners that do stool testing. I choose to not do that because I do believe that the gut is so flexible and it changes. So it's a point in time, just like a lot of blood work, a blood pressure even is a point in time.

But I think it's better to use people's resources more effectively. And instead of spending money on a lot of testing that is often done, especially in, say, functional medicine and integrative world, I think for very, you know, reasonable and judicious practitioners, it's best to take some of that money and put it into USDA organic foods, for instance, which we know is the only regulation that we have in the food system. What's the difference between a USDA organic versus a traditional product? Great question. So USDA organic began in the 1990s,

and it took about a decade to get it into the system as something that actually matters. And it really, basically, the main goal of USDA organic is to keep synthetic, chemicals or compounds out of the food system in a way that is reasonably done. So it's not perfect, but it's the best we have. And so under USDA organic regulation for food, because I want to distinguish that from personal care products, which has much looser regulations on that title, it shows basically that, or I'm saying, it regulates basically thousands of pesticides, particularly pesticides and fertilizer chemicals that are allowed to be part of the food that is USDA grown, organic grown.

It also limits, it actually does not allow for any synthetic coloring, any synthetic preservatives like BHA and BHT amongst others. It does not allow, I think I said, food dyes. It also doesn't allow chemicals for food, you know, sensation, like crunch chemicals that are synthetic. It doesn't allow for genetically modified ingredients. So the USDA organic designation, which by the way, interestingly enough, and I talk about this, is kind of a democratization, if you ask, about the food system, because it is now accessible

to everybody. It is not something that's limited to the rich. And frozen USDA organics are actually remarkable because you can get them anywhere now. You can get them in any big box store across the U.S. And they have the added value besides not having chemicals in them, a large dose of chemicals, they also have high nutritional value. So they're nutritionally sufficient because they're flash frozen.

And that really adds to the health of the gut microbiome, the health for our gut, which really plays into, again, many of these studies showing that the gut is critical to the development of autoimmune and immune disorders. What's the difference? You said like synthetic pesticide versus a regular chemical, organic pesticide. What's the difference between the two?

So, you know, this may be above my pay grade because I'm an industrial chemist, but I will say that, you know, when we think about the, first of all, there's over 13,000, I believe is the going number. I have to check in terms of registered pesticides that are used in farming. Some of them are also allowed into the food system. Propylparabins and some of the parabins are actually considered both pesticides as well as foods that can be, chemicals that can be used in the food system and also in cosmetics. So we do know there's a crossover in terms of function.

A lot of these chemicals can have dual purposes. But in terms of which ones are allowed to be in the organic food system and which ones are not, it's not perfect. There are complaints among certain ones, but it's thousands of chemicals different in terms of what can be allowed. But in terms of impact difference, like forgetting that there's 13,000 versus 1,000, what changes for a person if I eat an organic pesticide food versus a synthetic pesticide food is on a practical level, is anything changing in my body?

Yeah, your blood levels will change. So organophosphate pesticides can be measured. Glyphosate can be measured, which is roundup. These levels can be measured in human fluids. And does the presence of those levels mean something practically? So means something, well, we don't know who's going to develop a problem or not, right? But we do know that when they're in your body and your body hasn't been used to these, we know that there's mechanisms, which I can get into.

So there's not only just the gut microbiome interface issue where you're killing off microbes like you would in a field, right? These are pesticides. But you also have the potential of doing things like molecular mimicry, which is when your body basically doesn't recognize these compounds entirely, fights against them. And antigens or antibodies, I'm sorry, antigens or proteins in the body basically are getting caught in the fray. So the body is basically not recognizing, self, self antigens, and that's how autoimmune disorders can be triggered. There's also... And that doesn't happen with organic pesticides. Well, it's, it's, humans are very, you know, there's many confounders, right? When you're talking about human beings and you can't isolate just one chemical to one expression. The reason I think about it that way is if we're going to recommend, say, do this pesticide versus this pesticide, we should have a reason for making that recommendation. Well, the idea is that our bodies are going to have more than a few chemicals in them at any given moment. Okay. Because your body is a sack of chemicals. Oh, absolutely.

It's true. That we can certainly agree on. Yeah. Yeah. So the idea is I'm not calling out one chemical. I never do that. Or one, you know, I'm talking about this is how we look at this holistically. We don't need these chemicals. They're not great for human existence. They're not great for human health. Let's try to cut them back where we can. No, I agree. I agree. I agree. I, I agree. I, I, I'm just curious specifically for the, the reason why is I had the newly appointed FDA commissioner, Marty McCari, Dr. Marty McCari, on the podcast not too long ago. And he said that, he recommends organic foods to people. And I said, that's interesting.

Why? He said they're pesticide free, which they're not because they have organic pesticides. But if we're going to say organic pesticides are healthier, why are we making that recommend? Like you said, your blood levels go up, but we're not sure what to do with that number. if a patient comes in, has sugar in their blood, that could be totally normal and physiologic sugar, or it could be at a level where we call them pre-diabetic, diabetic. So what's the takeaway? So you're getting to mechanisms. So many of these chemicals that have been identified, and this has been

the research for the last 25 years in the endocrine-disrupting chemical research world, which is very siloed because they've been attacked by American Chemical Council and many of the, obviously, the big pharma, big pesticide groups. They are now worldwide in terms of their interaction with their research. I work with a lot of them. They are an exclusive, interesting group of thousands of physicians and PhDs and researchers who have come up with robust information on how chemicals such as pesticides, and again, there are so many, I'm not calling out one or versus another, have effects on the endocrine

system, the human endocrine system. And when they called this endocrine, when they coined this endocrine disruption, this was 25 years ago. And since that time, having talked to some of the forefathers of this, Pete Myers, Fred Vomsal, Terence Collins, they really didn't know exactly how many of these chemicals that they were studying. They started off with BPA. Bisfenolized sort of the poster child for endocrine disruption because it was the first one they got their hands on. And they found that they could mimic estrogens at very, very low levels, parts per million, parts per trillion. But keep in mind, When you take Paxil or when you take lorazepam or you take Xanax or any metoprolol,

you're going to have parts per million, parts per trillion to have the same clinical effects as you're comparing to chemicals that have parts per million, parts per trillion. So I want to give an idea when we diminish the dose that because these endocrine disrupting disrupting chemicals work like hormones, they can have large physiological effects, even at low doses that previously were not designated as harmful. Now we have a lot of information showing what's called non-monitonic dose response. Great papers on this. And the idea that...

What's that response? So basically, when you think of the dose makes the poison. So classic toxicology paracelsis back in the 1560s or 1,600s, I think it was. Essentially, that's the classic toxicology perspective. We think of it, you know, the more you're exposed to something, the more likely you're going to have a reaction. I mean, think 21st birthday, you drink alcohol, you're going to be drunk, you're going to be sick the next day, right? Dose makes the poison. But what was so interesting about the endocrine disrupting chemical world of research, which is, again, world renowned, robust, is that they discovered that at very, very, very low levels, lower than anyone would have expected in conventional toxicology testing, that you could have the same physiologic response as high-dose response.

So instead of having this linear response, you had a U or an upside down you, meaning at those low levels, you had the same response here. I mean, at the low levels as high. And no one bothered to look at that end. And so that's what we're discovering about, I say, wait, not like I did the actual research, but I'm sharing this information because it's so well done, that the idea is that the chemicals that are now mimicking human hormones, which have been physiologically conserved through evolution. to do very big things with very small amounts, thyroid hormone, insulin, growth in development, fertility hormones, development in utero to develop male or female genitalia, brain changes to basically turn into a male brain or a female brain, you know, endocrine sensitive hormones that affect cancer specifically. When these chemicals are able to mimic in vitro and human

epidemiologic studies, we now understand that they can do more than we thought they could. And when you're a soup of chemicals, because we're getting them from everywhere, right? We don't always get smacked in the face by these chemicals, but we can measure them in blood and urine. And I'm not suggesting people go do this. I say everyone's contaminated until proven otherwise. It's 2025, and we love our stuff. But the idea is we can start to remove some of these higher yield exposures by, you know,

thinking about what we're consuming, thinking of our body as a sponge and a vessel, when you start to change behaviors, when people give up, you know, conventional foods and diets to incorporate more organic diet, they do have lower levels in their blood and urine where it's actually tested. So the idea is that we can make changes, not for every chemical group, because perfluoralkals may not be able to do that, but we can make a distinct difference. So molecular mimicry, gut microbiome effects. We know that inflammatory conditions, I'm sorry, inflammatory changes, a various number of cells, T-regulatory cells, and F-CAPA-Beta, these are monitoring immune system cells and cellular surveillance that actually keep an eye on this

in terms of what we now know, even at the cellular level, when we're exposed to certain chemicals. So it's not just what we think about when we're walking around in daylight and going to work and going to school that it's going to smack you in the face. we're talking about very, very small amounts over time, compounded by mixtures, and we have mixture studies to show this, that it's not good for human health. It's not that you have to flip out. It's how do you do this in a very reasonable way? And I'm teaching three physician programs on this. I'm writing two textbooks and a consumer book to show not to flip out, but how do you do this in a reasonable way so that your gut does thrive? You get healthy path, you know,

that you can use medications, that you can do all. of this, but do it in a judicious way. I'm still stuck on the why we're recommending the organic chemical pesticides versus the synthetic ones. I will show you all the studies if you need me to. Yeah, I mean, maybe I can help me. Maybe I can jump in because the National Organic Program was adopted in 1990 and it has restrictions on what type of chemicals you're allowed to use, what types of farming tools

you're allowed to use. but it really is nothing more than a marketing ploy. There's actually no criteria for nutrition or safety in the National Organic Program whatsoever. And so the USDA Organic Certification is pretty much just a label that was lobbied by National Organic Farmers Associations because they wanted an opportunity to legitimize their farming practices to give the appearance of health, the healthism sheen, right? Ailey made a comment that it was about, you know, making this accessible. It's not about having money.

You don't need to be rich. But the reality is that organic products cost on average 50 to 100 percent higher than their conventional counterparts. And that's pure profit. If you actually look at the profit margin of conventional foods versus organic foods, organic foods are 25 to 32 percent more profitable for the farming organizations. And we're talking big ag, right? We hear the phrase big ag being demonized like conventional farms a lot, but Stony Fields, Applegate, these are huge organic infrastructure.

Organic farming is hundreds of billions of dollars a year. So are you saying that there's no benefit to going? There is no, so not only is there no benefit, there's actually a potential detriment. So first of all, organic farming uses tons of pesticides. They're just naturally derived pesticides as opposed to one's... And what does that mean? I'm going to tell you. So naturally derived pesticides are chemicals that exist somewhere in the ether of nature,

meaning they've been identified existing somewhere on this planet and they have an anti-pest impact, right? So think about a lot of plants try to deter predators, right? So they produce a lot of noxious things to prevent things from eating them, to prevent fungi from infecting them and so on and so forth. So a lot of the organic pesticides are chemicals that are produced by plants naturally, and they've been isolated, studied, and they're now produced by industrial chemical companies to be used as organic pesticides. So these are merely chemicals that exist somewhere in nature. So, for example, pyrethrins are a class of organic pesticides that are used or permitted in organic farming, and a synthetic or a semi-synthetic derivative, the pyrethroids. are approved for use in conventional farming. Now, pyrethroids are actually more stable in ultraviolet lights, so they don't deteriorate

as quickly, which means that a farmer only needs to apply them once or twice in a growing cycle, whereas pyrethrins are very unstable, so they need to be applied repeatedly to have the same pest control effect. And, you know, farmers have to use pesticides. There's no way around it. We have 8.1 billion people on this planet. It's not your backyard affluent garden. Like, if we need to feed people when there are food.

deserts and, you know, malnutrition everywhere. Pesticides are essential, right? And so we want to use the fewest amount possible that have the most specificity, the fewest off-target effects, and most cost-effectiveness, right? So those are actually two related chemicals. One is natural, one is synthetic. They have very similar impact on their target pests. And of course, pesticides have tropism. So an insecticide is not acting on people. An herbicide like glyphosate is not acting on people. Humans don't even have the enzyme that glyphosate targets. But it's kind of a lot of that same rhetoric. So a lot of the organic pesticides, because they're not legally permitted to be tweaked in order to improve the specificity, improve the stability,

reduce the off-target effect, they actually are worse for the farmers because they have to use more of it to have the same desired effect. They're often worse for the environment because they'll target non-target species. So, for example, there are certain fungicides that are used in organic farming that are designed to, sorry, certain insecticides that are used in organic farming to, say, target aphids on soybean crops. But they also kill the natural predators of aphids, the insidious flower bug and the Asian lady beetle.

So now you're killing what would normally kill the aphids on top of maybe killing some of the affids. Now, a synthetic version or a conventional version of that has tweaked specificity, so it's not killing the insidious flower bug, but it is killing the aphids. On top of that, simply because a chemical is natural versus a chemical being synthetically altered doesn't mean it's better, safer, less impactful to the environment, more economically, less ecologically damaging, healthier. And in fact, decades of data have studied health impacts from organic consumption versus conventional something, and there's no health benefit, there's no nutritional advantage. A lot of people cherry pick a study where they look at trace levels of

certain micronutrients like phosphorus and so on. And that's not necessary reflection on organic versus conventional. It's usually the soil or the ecosystem that it actually was growing in, right, because they'll pull fields in Kansas or they'll pull fields from Europe and they'll try to compare the two and those are not comparable sites, right? You have to compare within a region that has similar soil. So when you actually look at some of the data for organic pesticides versus conventional pesticides, there are a lot that are actually worse. So, for example, Ailey lives in New Jersey.

Blueberry farming is big in New Jersey. And in blueberry farming, there are a lot of different mildews and fungi that will kill blueberry plants. There's something called mummy berry. There's something called anthrachnos. and if we want to preserve the berry crop, you have to treat those berry bushes with fungicides. So a fungicide that is approved for use in New Jersey for organic blueberry farming is copper sulfate. Copper sulfate, ironically, is an inorganic chemical, but I'm not going to get into that here. But it's approved for organic farming because organic in the context of farming has nothing to do with actual chemistry.

It's a marketing label for them to upcharge consumers and give them the appearance that they're healthier. So this copper sulfate has an LD-50, so a 50% lethal dose of 300 milligrams per kilogram per body weight, right? So a lower lethal dose means the thing is toxic at a smaller dosage, right? The copper sulfate has to be applied to berry fields up to six times during a growing season. So we're talking spring through, you know, April, March through July, sometimes August. depending on the hybrid of berry that we're talking about. It's to be applied at least six times or up to six times during a growing cycle.

And it has to be applied between one and a half to four pounds of copper sulfate per acre as an LD 50 of 300 milligrams per kilogram. A synthetic fungicide that's used in New Jersey blueberry farming is called Mangazep. Mangazep has an LD 50 of 8,000 milligrams per kilogram per body weight. So 8,000 versus 300. So a higher LV50 means it's less toxic because that means an individual can be subjected to that much more of that substance before hitting that toxic threshold. So that's 26.6 times less toxic than the organic fungicide that's used on the berry crops down the road on the organic berry farm. On top of that, Manka Zeb, because it's been allowed to be chemically altered using what we know about nature and what we know about science.

to improve the specificity and improve the stability only needs to be applied to maybe three times in a growing season. And it only needs to be applied at about 1.5 to 3 pounds per acre. So say we look at kind of the ends of application and we say we have an one acre farm. We are either applying mankazep or applying copper sulfate. You're going from, you know, anywhere from 26.6 times more top. on the copper sulfate up to over a hundredfold times more toxic. If you look at the cumulative application of the entire crop season, and so this notion that synthetic chemicals are automatically bad,

that we want to reduce the exposure of them, and we're going to use some sort of arbitrary blood test to look for conventional pesticides, but we're not going to actually look at the organic pesticides that are used, and ironically, because those are less regulated, they actually don't fall under the purview of the USDA Pesticide Residue Report, which is why they're always left off. And that's why the Environmental Working Group never mentions them

because the USDA doesn't monitor them. They don't regulate the safe thresholds, whereas conventional pesticides, 99.9% of the time, every single crop that is sampled, whether it's frozen, fresh, imported, grown domestically, are below all of the safety thresholds for whatever pesticide we're using. Now, this LD50 that you're talking about, is there a world where this U-curve that was mentioned, where it's a smaller dose perhaps can be more problematic?

Great question. So this non-monotinic dose response is something that has been characterized, but it's not something that is a legitimate concern in the chemicals that Ailey is talking about. And specifically for some of these that are being touted as endocrine disrupting chemicals. because toxicologists do study the lower limits, right? That's how we have limits of detection on all of these assays. We know what these low limits are. Those safety thresholds are assessed. Health impacts are also assessed at the low ends.

Like it's not like we say, oh, we're going to cut it off at 10 parts per mill, and we're just going to ignore everything below that because it's probably not a problem because we have the most sensitive analytical chemistry equipment on the planet. We can detect things in parts per trillion, which for context is like one second of, time in 31,700 years. So these, the range of dose exposures are 100% studied. Now, the studies that

she's referencing are studies where they looked at things like BPA in petri dishes or in animal models. And none of those have actually been reproduced in humans whatsoever. There's actually no evidence of these sorts of chemicals that are being claimed to have this non-monotonic dose response in humans. And it's the exception, not the norm. There are very few outliers of chemicals that might have this effect. But it's why toxicologists actually do really rigorous toxicology studies. So if we talk about something like BPA, for example, because that was brought up, and it's cited as an endocrine disrupting chemical, right? So if you think about how you could interfere with your endocrine system, the substance has to, one, mimic the hormone to a degree,

that it's going to bind to the hormone receptor and exert the physiologic effect of that hormone, right? So if we're talking about something like BPA, it's cited as being an estradiol mimic, right? Meaning it's going to bind to estrogen receptor. Estradial is the active version of estrogen in our body. Well, if you look at how similarly it binds to the estrogen receptor, well, BPA binds a thousand to 10,000 times more weekly than estrogen. aisle does to the estrogen receptor. So in order to actually exert an endocrine effect, it would have to outcompete estrogen. So if it's binding 10,000 times more weekly than your natural hormone, that means you need to be literally blasted with BPA in order to actually

experience some realistic consequence of this. And there's actually no human evidence to support this. Again, the studies being cited are looking in petri dishes where they're just dowsing monolayers of cells growing on a piece of plastic with BPA and are like, hey, look, this gene that's involved in estrogen signaling got activated, therefore it must be an endocrine disrupting chemical. Well, that's not what happens in your body because in a petri dish, if you pour this delicious water on it, you know what happens to those cells, they explode because that's what happens to cells if you pour pure water on them.

But that's not what happens when you drink pure water because your body's a lot more complex than a petri dish. So if you actually look at the data in humans for BPA, well, BPA is actually rapidly metabolized any amount that you would ever be theoretically exposed to through absorption, say, gets into your bloodstream. It's less than 2% of your potential exposure. We're talking nanograms of BPA. It's rapidly pulled out and filtered by your liver and then excreted within hours.

So it's not accumulating in your body to lead to kind of. long-term effects either. And so endocrine disruption is a real phenomenon, but it's being co-opted by people who are trying to scare people about chemicals that actually don't have real-world impact that are not actually posing a risk to your health. But there are things that are endocrine disrupting chemicals, right? Or hormonal contraception is a legitimate endocrine disrupting chemical. It's an intentional one, right? It's being done so to interfere with your reproductive cycle for a desired outcome. But, things like parabins, which again, also bind 10,000 times to 100,000 times more weekly to

estrogen receptor than actual estradiol BPA and these sorts of things. No one's being exposed to levels of these chemicals that would ever have an actual impact on their health. And it's kind of this like epitome of like fear mongering and risk perception gap, which is this belief that is created by people who scare people about synthetic chemicals versus natural chemicals that cause them to unnecessarily fixate or fear fabricated risks or risks that don't actually play a role like singular food ingredients or singular pesticide residues, but they're not looking at big picture things like preventive health and overall lifestyle habits. But we have pseudo-persistance. Okay, so pseudo-persistance by definition is the fact that

whether or not you're getting a tiny bit of dose of BPA from a canned food, which is the majority of our intake of food. It's through cans, can exposure, because that's what lines... Do you have a citation for that? Yes, I do. I do. I actually, you know, I'm not here to battle. I'm just trying to, you know, share. What we know is that BPA gets into our body as one example of many chemicals, right? There's many bisphenols. Bisphenol A happens to be the one that was blocked out of baby bottles in plastic. Because its evidence was so... robust. Now, unfortunately, we couldn't get it out of everything else that we have BPA. It's one of the, actually the highest production volume chemical internationally, believe it or not, and in the U.S.

But here's what the issue is. We get exposed by these chemicals in so many different ways. BPA is just one of many. And so when we talk about the underbinding or the lack of binding to a receptor when we're being inundated what's called pseudopor persistence, meaning like even if it has a half-life of six to eight hours, which BPA does in the human body in a healthy human being, we're still getting it from every meal that we're eating. We're still getting it from things that we're drinking from, from our plastic water bottles. What does pseudo-persistence mean? So it means that it's persisting because we're getting multiple exposures over time so that you could get a leg up on breaking it down, hopefully through physiology, which I talk about in the book,

how to harness our body's ability to break some of this stuff down. But if you're always getting exposed to a chemical through our, you know, processed foods and ultra-processed foods, through pesticides through, you know, the types of foods we choose. But you're just lumping thousands of different chemicals into a bucket of chemicals. Because that's what humans are exposed to, unfortunately. Humans are exposed every day to thousands of chemicals. Yes. And your body is made up of thousands of chemicals. You're essentially saying that you can take all of these completely disparate chemicals that have completely different functional

groups, structures, dosage, exposures. There are over 1,000 identified EDCs in all of the literature. If you go to CDC.gov, even the U.S. government identifies this. What you can do is you can do a petriottish study and you can doubt themselves. These are human studies. These are epidemiologic studies. I have a whole textbook of it. And there's multiple textbooks out there that I didn't write. I think we need to really make sure we have references if that's possible. And also, I'd like disclosure of who we work for. I don't work for anybody, is there a chemical-based payment for it?

Oh, it's a paid-shill comment. Yeah, I mean, I'm worried about that kind of exposure. And you can take this out. She thinks I'm a paid shill because I'm defending chemicals. I'm curious. I'd like to make sure. I think here is like a central tenant of pseudoscience is that

they say, oh, well, synthetic chemicals bad and I'm going to lump all of these different chemicals that have... No, how is that any better than what you're claiming I'm doing? I said none of that, actually. Well, you're saying that humans are exposed. It's no big deal. It's not that bad.

It doesn't find that much. I don't have that many. Let's try to understand one another. I didn't actually say any of that. So when you're talking about chemicals, you have to parse them out, right? You can't say, oh, well, this herbicide that acts on, this plant enzyme is and BPA and paribins and, you know, whatever other chemical. We're going to lump them all into the same category and say, well, we're just going to add up all these levels. is exactly what the environmental working group does when they create their

great organization, by the way. EWG is one of the most prolific anti-science organizations on the planet, and they actually published an anti-vaccine study in the early 2000s, which claimed that the chemicals and vaccines were causing autism. But what the EWG does is basically they say, okay, well, these strawberries had five residues detected on them at parts per trillion, which each of them. them individually because an herbicide is a very different chemical class than an insecticide or a fungicide. And that means that the way your body interacts with it is going to be wildly

different because they all have different functional groups. They all have different chemical structures. You can't just say, oh, well, I ingested all these chemicals and therefore they're all going to act synergistically because that's not how chemistry and biochemistry works at all. But what the EWG does is they say, okay, well, this one was three parts per trillion, this one was 20 parts per trillion, this one was 40 parts per trillion. They're all different. different classes of pesticides and all of them are a thousandfold lower than the safety threshold, which is already very conservative for these conventional pesticides. But because there's three of them or because there was four of them, we're just going to say it's dirty because there's four

different pesticide residues, even though all of them are well below safety thresholds and none of them actually pose a risk to human health whatsoever. And we're going to label that food as dirty. But this other one who there was only one pesticide residue detecting, and it was still below the safety threshold, but it was a hundredfold below the safety threshold. Still safe. Still totally safe, right? But there was only one of them. That one's going to be clean because there's just

one chemical detected on it. That's their tactic when none of those foods are harmful at all whatsoever. And so they scare people, particularly lower income people, away from eating conventional produce, which is cheaper, perfectly

nutritious, perfectly safe, and actually more ecologically beneficial. because organic farming yields lower food products per acre. So it's expensive to maintain those standards. It's actually only 5% more expensive to grow, and it's 32% more profitable. So it's all profit margin. Do you disagree with the environmental working group classification of them lumping in multiple different chemicals and using that as a way of calling a food dirty?

Because I've heard of the term dirty dozen. Yeah, the dirty doesn't clean 15. And here, I'm not here to represent an organization. I don't work with them. I mean, I work with them. It's a really great organization. You consulted with them. It's on your website.

Well, I consult with them because I did CME programs. So you're a paid consultant with the environmental working group. No, no, I was never paid. You were never paid by the environmental working group. A thousand percent. Well, they never paid. $13 million a year. Let's leave the payments out of it.

I did that as an educational. I actually traveled around to 30 different CME programs to teach people about endocrine disruption. So here's the thing. I'm not going to nitpick whatever they have on their site. I have no control over it. What I'm saying is I, their messaging is very clear. that when we are exposed to chemicals that we now know their physiology can be harmful to human

health, it's a great idea to think about not being exposed. The dirty dozen clean 15 is actually saying out of the conventional fruits and vegetables that are tested every year. By the way, they use national agricultural. They use the national pesticides report, which they omit that the thresholds are all 99.9% of the thresholds are well below the safety regulations. They're testing the surface residue. They're testing the residue. They don't test anything. They're testing the residue. anything. They just pooled. They just take the data that was already collected. They are taking the data of the conventional fruits and vegetables that are tested randomly throughout the United States. And what they said was, listen, if you can't afford USDA organic, you just don't have

access or whatever number of reasons you may not choose, these are some of the dirty dozen, the dirtier types of, what they mean by dirty is the higher residue. They call it contaminated. They use the phrase contaminated to scare people from eating. Is it contaminated? It's not contaminated. Well, I'd like to, let me just finish. I'm just saying that the way they designate Dirty Dozen Clean 15, it's a way that they've been trying to help out the public in terms of what they can say, you know, listen, if you don't have access, here are better choices.

Typically, the Dirty Dozen are 12 of the produce that basically have risen to the top of having, in general, higher levels of pesticide residues on their surface. It doesn't talk about the inside of the fruits. It's really on the surface. And so most of the Dirty Dozen consists of those fruits and vegetables that have a skin. And you'd think that, you know, it's absorbent.

So you're more likely to have some contaminant residue on the skin, whereas the Clean 15 are conventional choices that have lower levels, which may be better choices in the event that you don't have access to organic. But if it's below the safety threshold, why do we concern ourselves with this? Below the safety threshold, who's designating the safety threshold? That's actually a question. I don't know. The dozens of safety agencies globally.

So what does that mean? Their food safety authority, the FDA, the USDA and the EPA have been entire. Let's talk about lead, for example. No, no, no, we're not changing the subject. You're trying to move the goal. You're trying to move the goal. The health oversight committees, the FD&EPA. These are not.

Well, wait, let's finish about the pesticides. We're not talking about the politicians. We're not talking about the political appointees. We're talking about the scientists and toxicology experts. Exactly, which we're talking about that people in the industry is a non-profit. It's an incredibly strong. And so we have to be thinking about what is right for human health. It's a third party academic testing.

It's not within the government necessarily. The EWG is not a third-party academic testing. They're not doing the testing. They're the communicators. They're the communicators. Let her finish, and then you'll get a second to reply. The idea is that we have never known much about endocrine disrupting chemicals unless it was the studies of third-party testing from academic centers using NIH grants and such, right?

We do not require manufacturers in the United States for cosmetics, for food, for food industry chemicals to be tested for safety or toxicity in the products or for in humans before they go into the products that they're used. Okay, that's just a given. That's the United States market, right? So the only thing we're left to is things like the USDA organic and or the data and science that comes from third-party testing and academic centers and shared information around the world.

That is how we now know about endocrine disrupting chemicals. We also know about immune disrupting chemicals from some of the work that we now know can extrapolate into the immune system. So we know that there's more to these chemicals than saying, oh, they're no big deal. We created them 75 years ago. They have no health effects. It's just not true. So there is good proof that they have health effects. Yes, and I'm happy to supply all of those studies for you. I mean, I really am, because what I want people to understand is there's no perfection here. This is not, I'm not a purist. I'm a realist. And I think most people would say that living in the United States, you have some good and some bad, you have good and bad,

you know, you know, take the good with the bad. But the idea is that we now have more bad when it comes to human health. And we're seeing that in epidemiologic studies. But you don't think that has more to do, hold on, Dr. Love, you don't think that has more to do with just like lifestyle choices? Absolutely. No, it's not just chemicals. I'm not here to just say chemicals are the only issue.

It is our lifestyle. If you're not sweating, you're not helping to remove chemicals. If you're not sleeping well with good quantity and quality, your glymphatic system, which baths our brain and our spinal cord, which has been shown in beautiful studies to help reduce chemicals. We all agree, and that's kind of a well-understood concept. And diet, sweating is not detoxifying. It's a, it's a temperature regulation feature of your body. Well, that's not true because we can test this. We have 9-11 studies that show even methamphetamine studies from the New York Police Department. You can look at trace secretions, but that's not a detoxification path. We've had this

physiology for millions of years. But I want, I want the answer to the EWG, whether she agrees with that that assessment of how they assess risk when they're using the USDA pesticides residue report, which, as I mentioned, doesn't include any of the organic pesticides. So they're telling people that these are contaminated with conventional pesticides when they're not. They're all well below safety thresholds, and those safety thresholds have a human correction factor added to them. What does that mean?

So they take the no adverse effect level. which is determined by a variety of different types of in vivo and in vitro studies. And then they put a human exposure equivalent to this, which is usually at least a hundredfold to a thousandfold multiplier to further reduce that. So they'll see the risk is and then they're going to start that level a thousand. And then they're going to bring it down another thousandfold to make it extra conservative. So you're saying that's your threshold for safety, which is it's it's extra conservative to account for high risk individuals, right?

say pregnant people, young children, elderly, et cetera, right? And then these pesticide residue reports are saying that, well, 99.9% of all foods tested and all pesticides assessed are below those safety threshold. So there's no world in which those conventional produce items are contaminated or dirty, and that language is intentionally fearmongering. Well, let's not get to intentions. I'm curious. Well, when it comes to the EWG, it's intentional because their donors are organic.

large-scale organic farms. But I mean, just for us to understand here, conceptually, what's happening. So you've described this concept by which you decide, you've come to the conclusion that they're safe, even though they're called contaminated. Do you agree with that? So we could simplify it at least to a point that argument. You know, I can't say that everything is safe or not safe. They should be identified by the chemicals, which we now know, there's over a thousand known

and reported endocrine disrupting chemicals within our synthetic compounds since the 19, whatever, 40s, 50s that we've been studying. So it wouldn't be good science for me to say that everything is bad. What I want people to think about is there are some things that we now know to be true about these chemicals that can be harmful to human health. We know that from epidemiologic studies. We know this from not just, you know, mouse research. When you say epidemiologic studies, you mean you've seen people who consume foods that have

pesticides? Right. You know, well, people like, for instance, children that are exposed to phthalates, you know, they'll follow them at birth and moving through age two and six. and eight in terms of their behavioral changes, in terms of any identifiable behavioral risk. There's the Chamaco studies, for instance. They've been looking at a really interesting cohort

out of California. They followed these mother and children pairs for literally, I think, 25 or 30 years now. So just like Enhan's data that physicians need to rely on where there's CDC testing every two years to look at what is in the human bodies. And what was the outcome of that? So Enhanes studies, where we get a lot of our

data from. This is from our own CDC data where we can extrapol. So what did those studies show that? So that the exposure to many of these chemicals has been on the rise. We're now expanding the list of chemicals that are being tested every two years because we have such a growth in chemistry, in our environment. And so what we're seeing is that the epidemiologic studies that you're claiming that don't exist, which do exist, are also from European countries. But what do they show? They show that when you're, well, it depends on the chemicals, right? So the bisphenols have been shown to do endocrine disruption. They have immune disruption capabilities.

When I see an epidemiological study, I think of, okay, we'll track smokers, and we see someone who smokes versus someone who doesn't smoke, and we put them into two cohorts, and we see people who smoke have higher rates of COPD. Fair to say? Then in this group, you're saying there's research that looked at groups of people exposed to BPA. They're correlations. They're not causations.

They're not causations. What's the outcome? What are they measuring? Is it just that we're seeing an unhealthier population? So we're seeing, well, it depends, again, on the chemicals that are being studied because we have groups that are being studied all around the world with different chemicals. We have heavy metals, certainly in China and Asian studies. You know, there's lots of more heavy metals and air pollution that we're seeing.

But now you're lumping topics. Hold on a topic. Yeah, let me just try and keep this straight because I really want to understand it. When we talk about pesticides, we're talking about pesticides being unhealthy. synthetic ones. And then I ask you a question like epidemiologically, what happens if someone consumes this pesticide versus organic pesticide? And you say there's studies and then we move on to studies about heavy metals. Right, right. But can we stick to the... So sure, let's stick to it. The point is is that human beings as individuals are exposed to many chemicals over a lifetime. So it's very hard to

study humans individually. That's a given, right? I agree with that. That is a very difficult thing to do because we are exposed by different things every day. And it's not just from food. It's from drinking water. It's from cosmetics and personal care products. It's from feminine care products, right? Intravaginal exposure, so on and so forth. But what we do know in terms of certain classes,

like phthalates have been some of the most well-studied in terms of one compound group. Enormously, I wouldn't say enormously, I would say very well-studied, especially from a large group of researchers led by Shauna Swan and her crew. but internationally, we know that there are changes that the higher the exposure, say for instance in pregnant women, the higher the exposures to thallates during pregnancy correlates, correlates,

and is associated with higher risk for developmental changes in babies, whether it is the cryptocytism and lack of dropping of testes, whether it's inogenital distance. For a defense, got it. So that's one outcome for one class. It depends on really what you're testing. So I'm curious how we get from there, because there's a lot of things that are associated with. How strong is that association? For example, we don't need a randomized controlled study to know that smoking is harmful

because the association is so powerful. And it's repeatable, it's testable across many populations across the globe. Are these studies to that level where the association is so clearly proven? Or are we seeing some potential association? So you're saying, better be safe. Why not even try it? For cautionary principle, you're absolutely right. Is that your strategy?

So some studies have much more robust in terms of causation associations. I'm sorry, not causation, associations. And some have less of an aggressive association. But the idea amongst so many chemicals that we have to wrap our head around, right? Not everyone is going to be a toxicologist. I'm not a toxicologist. I don't know every nuance about every chemical. I'm a clinician, right?

I'm just trying to interpret some of the best studies that I'm aware of and put them into usable, tangible, practical information. Precautionary principle is a really well-understood commentary of the idea that we don't need always hard and fast, cause and effect data to make reasonable changes. And that is really the motive here, is to really get able to think. So that's interesting. Dr. Love, I think this is a good time for us to talk about it because I remember I did a short on black plastics. There was a big article that came out. There was a big correction that came out afterwards where they said anything with kitchen utensils, anything that you're using. that ends up in your mouth could be a risk because of recycled black plastic. I made a short about it.

A lot of people made a short about it, but you were very outspoken about it. Is this precautionary measure that's being recommended not something you vibe with? And if so, why not? Yeah. So it's, it's, you know, the precautionary principle is a, an approach that certain organizations and political lobbyists or, You know, I mean, you see it in science as well. But basically, it is kind of the difference between hazard and risk assessment.

And so a hazard assessment is making a or asking the question, is there a world in which in some hypothetical, at some hypothetical exposure, some hypothetical outcome could be harmful, right? it's it's asking or it's it's it's asking is there some grain of possibility that something could be dangerous right whereas a risk says i'm going to take that hazard and i'm going to ask is qualitative versus quantitative exactly so the analogy is a shark in the water right a shark in a water in the water in the ocean and a shark attack is a hazard but if you're standing on the beach, there is zero risk of that hazard is going to pose any harm to you. It's only once you're physically swimming in the water, that now that hazard, the shark, and the potential attack from it, becomes a risk. And even within that, there's nuance, right?

How close are you swimming to that shark? How long are you in the water with that shark? What species of shark is it? Is it an aggressive species? Yes. So precautionary principle essentially co-ops the hazard approach. And it says, well, if there's any hypothetical situation in which this exposure to this thing could be harmful, then we must try to avoid it at all costs. But not only is that not realistic, it's not practical, and it's also very selective, right? The proportionary principle is often applied by organizations like the Environmental Working Group, and they use it to apply to conventional pesticides, but they ignore the potential risks of all the organic pesticides that are used like copper sulfate and all of these other substances that are used

at much higher quantities than the conventional counterparts. And they don't ever use the precautionary principle on those, right? And so when they create these lists and they're scaring people away from conventional produce, well, they mislead people to believe that organic foods are pesticide free. In fact, if you look at survey-based studies with dietitians conducting the research, over 95% of people say that they avoid or they choose organic food, even though it's double the price because they believe it to be pesticide-free, but it's not. And that language is specifically done by organizations like the Environmental Working Group to scare people from conventional foods.

And so the precautionary principle is not a viable path when you're a human that exists in a world, right? Because then you wouldn't drive a car, which has thousands of fold times higher risk than the parts per trillion of, you know, some sort of pesticide, you know, milathon, melathion that might be on a food item, right? Or, you know, going to the movie theater or mowing your lawn. All of these things have risk, right? So if you were to apply the precautionary principle, then you would be sitting paralyzed in a box because you wouldn't be able to do anything. The reality is you have to take a realistic risk-based approach to your life. And that's really where this risk-perception gap comes into play because this type of rhetoric scares people about things that are not the

big picture, right? These tiny trace residues of chemicals that no one's saying that they're good. No one's saying to drink, you know, a cup of pesticide. But the flip side or the flip argument is, well, these are bad. Therefore, you should eat these other pesticide, you know, these other foods. That's not the solution. On top of that, none of the food products are doused with pesticides, right? Pesticides are used at very specific parts of a growing cycle, and they degrade, they, you know, deteriorate. They're not, nobody's like spraying finished produce with pesticides. And so these sorts of fixations are not actually looking at things that pose a real risk to health.

So this is interesting because I just did a whole debate on Jubilee against about 20 anti-vaccin they're probably more vaccine skeptic individuals. And what I came away from in that conversation was that they, individuals have different risk tolerances. In fact, I asked one of the police officers in the final part of the debate, what do you judge a safe activity to be? And he said, well, nothing's safe.

And I said, well, look, like being in a field, yeah, there's bacteria below, there's lightning above, and you could say that's not safe. So you have different risk perception. And everyone kind of sets their own standard. For example, I'm a professional boxer. Most people will say, are you nuts? that's one of the riskiest things you can do. And they're right because the risk of that is immense.

But I've accepted those risks and I've understood those risks. So I perceive that risk as acceptable to me. Isn't it fair if someone says, I want to remove as many chemicals and be sort of in this precautionary principle? Isn't that a reasonable approach or you don't find that to be the case? So if that is feasible in your lifestyle, but the solution is not buying organic because those are still covered in chemicals, right? Like this is the false dichotomy, right? It's a fixation or a demonization of synthetic things over natural things without context. Like if you want to reduce your chemical exposure, then you need to apply that to chemicals writ large. I agree with her. And your body does not care whether a chemical is synthetic or natural. It only cares what the functional

groups are, what the chemical structure is, and how it actually interacts with your body. If you take vitamin C and you extract it from an orange or a green pepper because they have lots of vitamin C too, that vitamin C is going to be chemically identical to vitamin C that is synthesized entirely in a laboratory. Your body does not care whether it came from a natural source or whether it was synthesized. But it's required by the body to have vitamin C. It's not required to have glyphosate in your body. Well, glyphosate is not part of human physiology. Glyphosate is not in the body in any measurable amounts. Well, it gets into the body from the food we eat. In parts of In parts per trillion. I want to do a little tutorial on glyphosate because it's used as the poster

child. Glyphosate is an herbicide and it acts on an enzyme called ESPS in plants. It is an enzyme that is used to synthesize specific amino acids that a plant needs because a plant photosynthesizes, right? It's not eating food. So it needs to make its own amino acids so that it can grow and have structure. So those amino acids are used to create structural proteins for a plant. When glyphic, so let me be clear. just say it very explicitly. Humans do not have this enzyme. Other animals do not have this enzyme. Insects don't have this enzyme. It is specific to plants because they're photosynthetic organisms. Glyphosate binds to this enzyme and it prevents the production of these amino acids. As a result, the plant wilts because it doesn't have these structural proteins and it dies.

So it's used as a broad spectrum herbicide. It replaced other herbicides that were not broad spectrum that targeted grasses or targeted broadleaf. And those herbicides were actually way worse for us, for our health, for the environment, for farmers who actually are the ones that are going to be exposed to any of these things in a measurable amount. So glyphosate is an herbicide, and we've been able, or scientists, agricultural scientists, were able to take a different version of the enzyme that's in bacteria that is not impacted by glyphosate. And they put it in six different plant species that we grow in the U.S., that enzyme isn't impacted. So those plants that have the bacterial version, they can grow in the presence of glyphosate, while the weeds that would

strangle those crops that are essential to produce food can still grow. So glyphosate is only applied to crop fields at early emergence, right? When seedlings are coming out when they're vulnerable, right? They're not applied later in the growing cycle. And they're applied so that we can, farmers can control the weeds without having to use other chemicals, other herbicides like metalloclore and alloclore, which were several orders magnitude higher toxicity than glyphosate. Glyphosate is much more safe. It's actually safer than the organic herbicides that are used in organic farming, clove oil called eugenol and 20% acetic acid. Those are twice as toxic as glyphosate is for context. But glyphosate is paired to genetically modified seeds. It is not. And it just needs

multiple sprays. What does that mean that it's... No, so one... So in other words, it has gotten to the point where the genetically modified seeds that were paired and originally designed, I believe by Monsanto, but who knows which companies are now, you know, doing this now. Essentially, the glyphosate was paired to the genetically modified seeds in order to make it so that the seed would thrive and that as an herbicide, it would kill off the weeds around

it, right? But what ended up happening after, you know, decades of now studying this is that it was requiring more and more glyphosate spraying because it was becoming resistant. So just like antibiotics become resistant when they're exposed to, you know, when you're exposed to more and more of them, you become resistant, I should say, from them working, you know, or bacteria become resistant. I'm sorry if I'm not saying this correctly. So what I guess what's your quibble with this? I mean, before I address it. So my quibble is if you're going to argue and say that, you know, other types of pesticides that are used in organic farming are, you know, really more toxic, I'm throwing this back

to you and saying that we have thousands of pesticides that are registered, that we now know that if they're paired, which often they are to genetically modified seeds require, they go through resistance, they go through the fact that they have to go through multiple sprayings, and that we end up getting more glyphosate in our food system just by the mere fact that we have to keep spraying them. So the idea that it's somehow saving us from extra sprays is not true. It's just simply not true.

Well, it's saving farmers from having to use other herbicides that are worse. Well, two and six half, you know, it's actually not. It's actually not. What's the alternative? Listen, listen, here's the idea. I'm not here to battle. I'm not here to, you know, support. I want to finish my thought about

the glyphosate because she brought it up and she opened the door and I want to address this misinformation that has been going on for 30, 50 years. But what is the glyphosate misinformation? Oh, so the claims that glyphosate and GMOs are harmful, that it causes leaky gut, that it causes celiac disease, that it's causing cancer. I mean, glyphosate is the poster child for demonization of both conventional farming and

GMOs writ large, and usually by people who don't actually understand chemistry or genetic engineering. We'll get right back to it. Do you agree with that description that it's been blamed for all those things? I believe there's science behind what I'm saying in terms of being harmful. Well, do I believe that it's being demonized? Well, not demonized, that it's being connected to all of these harmful health effect. Well, we know it's associated with genetically modified seeds that there are risks. Look, we know how to make strawberries, you know, temperature resistant to freeze.

There's good forms of genetic modification. It's the bad forms of- But this is about glyphosate. Yeah, in terms of glyphosate, it has been linked towards extra production of glyphosate. say more sprangs, more in the food system, more in the human body. And that correlates with a potential for higher risk for cancers and a variety of other health conditions. So there's plenty of information to look this up. Like the IARC, the WHRC for International Agency for Research on Cancer. This is something that I actually spent some time looking into because I know that

WHO and the IARC came to very different conclusions when it comes to their stances on whether or not there is a cancer outcome or perhaps a possible cancer outcome. And they came to different stances. And my understanding, and I'm curious if either of you have a stance in this either direction, my understanding is that the WHO was looking at a different endpoint than they, sorry, the EPA was looking at a different endpoint than the WHO. The EPA was not taking into consideration the multitude of chemicals that were used in addition to the glycoposphate, so they weren't using a mixture.

They also were not looking at the way that they were not, they were looking at how people get the chemical into their body as opposed to workers being exposed to it, overspray and the workers getting exposed to it on their bodies. Is that the correct understanding? No. It's not. What's the correct understanding? So can I go back to the. Galifacea.

So, so this compound is, as I mentioned, they put a bacterial version of this enzyme into six different crop species. It's not impacted. There is an emergence of certain weeds that have developed resistance to glyphosate as would happen to any chemical. It's not unique to glyphosate. This is not causing harm. It's also not leading to extraordinary excess use of glyphosate. In fact, the majority of excess use is by residential homeowners because they over-apply glyphosate to control. Which is banned now, by the way. It's actually not. It's not. It's not. Yes. It is not. It is objectively not banned.

For residential use. It is not. I mean, it was 2025. It is 100% not. You got to Google this. This feels like it would be easy Google. And also the European Commission re-reuped glyphosate's registration until 2033. But it's taken out of every park in the United States.

Miami. New York is discussing. Well, wait, you were saying you were going to make some claim about it. I want to, I want to finish. So glyphosate is more cost effective, allows farmers to use, safer herbicides in order to control weeds. It's only used at a specific growing cycle. And when people might be exposed to it, it would be on like a soy-based product, usually something that had soy soybean oil or so on. And the levels that people are exposed to that might be in these

products, they're detected by urine, right? So urine is a waste product, which means that your body is excreting it like it's supposed to. And so they're finding things like 319. to 400 parts per trillion of glyphosate in urine samples. What those people that say that fail to leave out is that they also looked at people who said that they eat organic food and the levels were the same. So this is not uniquely because of conventional foods versus organic foods. And there's also no health impact of these levels because, one, your body literally does not have this enzyme.

There's no plausible mechanism of action. especially at those levels. Now, when we talk about the cancer claims, it's really important to understand that the IARC or the International Agency for Research on Cancer is one working group of the WHO. There is a different organization entity within the WHO called the Joint Expert Committee on Food Additives,

the JECFA, and they have also done safety assessments on glyphosate. But the IARC is the only the only agency, I don't even want to call it an agency because it's a working group that performs hazard assessment, not risk assessment. Now, in the context of glyphosate, the president of the IRC, or at least the president at the time, a gentleman named Christopher Wilde, he actually omitted the largest epidemiological, longitudinal study of farm workers in glyphosate exposure. 55,000 farm workers and over 12,000 of their spouses track them for several decades. It's called the Agricultural Health Study. And they were looking at adverse health outcomes as a result of being exposed to glyphosate for years as farm workers.

And there was no relationship to glyphosate exposure and cancer outcomes. This is why over 20 different scientific expert agencies around the world. not just EPA. This is European Food Safety Authority, Health Canada, New Zealand and Australian Food Safety Agency, Japan Health Safety Agency, France, it's called ANCS, or maybe that's the Brazilian one, but Brazil, France, Germany, et cetera, European Commission, they have all definitively stated and repeatedly definitively state that glyphosate poses no risk to human health, whether we're talking about farm workers who are exposed to higher rates of it, or trace inconsequential exposures through food consumption.

There's no data. Glyphosate is probably one of the most studied chemistries on the planet because of misinformation from organizations like the environmental working group, like moms across America, and other agencies that kind of paint themselves as these champions of health, but in reality are actually undermining 50 years of data. And if you talk to farmers, this threat to their livelihood and also the threat to their safety because they're the ones that are going to have to switch to a worse herbicide if glyphosate gets banned, it's also going to lead to billions of dollars in food cost, which is going to be transferred to consumers. Now, when we talk about genetic engineering, glyphosate frequently gets conflated with GMOs because, as I mentioned, we took this bacterial enzyme and we put it into certain crops, and that's technically what makes them a genetically engineered crop. but glyphosate and GMOs are not one and the same.

We use genetic engineering for countless things. Strawberries. There's actually no GMO strawberries that exist. But when we think about genetic engineering, the same science that's used to create G crops, it's the same science that we use to create cell therapies for cancer. It's the same science that created golden rice, which allowed farmers in the Philippines to grow rice with vitamin A, because vitamin A, legitimate vitamin A deficiency is a major cause of pediatric blindness and death.

And that was approved. It was developed in the 1990s. GE crops undergo the most rigorous field and safety studies of any crops grown, conventional, organic, or otherwise. It was developed in the 1990s, golden rice. It was approved in the Philippines for farmers to grow in 2021. And a judge, because of misinformation, scaring people about GMOs, rescinded that, this last year in 2024. So now we go from a developing nation that golden rice would literally save millions of children's lives to now farmers being told they're not able to grow this. And this

was provided, you know, patent-free. You know, there's a lot of claims about how it's all this big ag kind of evil, you know, monopoly. But when we talk about things like BT eggplant, which allow farmers in developing nations to grow eggplant with fewer insecticides, well, that was provided patent-free, low-cost, so that GMOs have actually reduced the amount of pesticides that we've been able to use collectively over the last 20 years, and it enables farmers to increase food yields because these sort of scientific tools are innovation that improve our health. But we know that- But you're not against GMOs, right? So genetically modify, and again, this is not even what I focus on when I'm trying to, you know, educate even, you know,

high school students and these are specific topics that are really should really require depth they require a bigger conversation and probably more specialized um conversation than i can even share with you but you know genetically modified engineering in and of itself as a concept is quite remarkable right picking up genes and moving them into other areas that may make that product better for humanity better for human existence but i think the biggest argument and this is as far as i'll go because I want to step back and try to give more of a perspective on chemicals because I'm not here to just argue over organic versus non-organic. There's so many areas that we can talk about.

But essentially, it's taking organisms, I'm sorry, genetics from a living organism and putting him into another living organism and putting him in a code that actually transforms that genetic for generations to follow. And I think that's sort of the biggest issue as to what degree are those genes taken, what are they control? What are the potential for harm to be, you know, to come of that transfer? And I think that is really the biggest issue is when you modify food, which was never meant to be modified in general, right? Just like medications and, you know, humans have, I'm not done. I'm not done. I'm not finished. I would love to be able to finish my thought. So the

idea is that, you know, human technology and human science is remarkable. I'm a big fan, right? I love medicine and I love all of the things that have extended human life for sure. But there are also problems that have come along with our scientific inventions. And I think that it's fair to say that when you're thinking about even chemicals, which is really the area that I want to talk most about, is that not all one chemical is going to just smack you in the face or make you, you know, unless you're getting, you know, arsenic in a decent amount, right? The idea is that in, and I say this because I myself live in a world where I color my hair and my kids play, you know, I'm drinking out of a plastic. Well, you have your risk tolerance that we talk to

exactly. It's life is risk benefit ratios, right? We learn this in medicine. We see this So I'm curious about that ratio for you. The way that I was able to make that decision for myself to go box was because I'm aware of the statistics of higher rates of neurologic damage, chronic disease. Right. You know, you have chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Parkinson's, Alzheimer's. So I'm aware of those risks.

But in this scenario where it sounds like the knowledge on what those risks are a bit cloudy at the very least because there's clearly some debate here, how is one able to make that risk The debate here is not exactly the most, you know, the high level in terms of what I consider making people's decision making. I think people need to read, you know, books and studies that actually elicit really where the science is. And I think this is just sort of not the entire entirety of the conversation. But the idea is that we have so much information from well-done studies that are done not just on animals, which we can control all the confounders, all the different components that make it so difficult to study in humans. And the idea

as to really say, listen, let's step back a second. We were not exposed to these chemicals. We know there's a correlation, not a causation. We know that disease in terms of chronic health conditions. We know heavy metals are related to higher rates of cardiovascular disease. We've seen this. This just came out in JAMA, like not even a couple months ago, but we've been seeing this in our medical journals, which is unique because it's making its way into Western

medicine, whereas we said in the beginning, we're lacking sort of that connection between lifestyle and exposures and really what we're dealing with human lives. But when we step back and we see that a lot of these human-made compounds were never really meant for the human body's immune system and endocrine system to manage, that they do have potential effects at low doses of exposure over time. How much time? We don't know that in every individual. Do we have problems potentially when you have mixtures of thousands of chemicals? From all the things we love to do and put on our bodies. Yes, the potential is there. And so the idea is not to say all good or all bad. I've never said that. It's really to start thinking about what we eat, what we drink,

how we filter our water, if we filter our water. Why would that be important if you know about the wastewater treatment plant system in the United States? It would make sense to filter to some degree if you can. And guess what? It's not too costly to do so. So it's an idea of stepping back, looking at medical anthropology or anthropology and evolution and saying human beings are now thrust into a modern day environment where we're exposed to so much stuff we know a lot about a lot and a little bit a lot and we need to think about just taking our lifestyle and our exposures and adding them to the picture of human health that's it yeah for me i have a question just with my patients let me get this one point out because i think it's valuable for i think i have to advocate for my patient

group here working in a community health center water filtration is not cost effective for them like that's just not realistic. I can't get them. I mean, we're talking about things that actually limit VOCs with just a carbon block. I can't get $10 medication. So like it's a different world

that I'm practicing medicine. And I do understand that. I'm not here talking to just the higher echelon. I really want people, I want to bring it down to a point where people do recognize this is something we all deserve to think about

for sure. And perhaps put into motion. So like you're saying it's not to sphere monger or to not say all chemicals are bad or all these things. But then in your book, I'm reading and you're recommending changing pipes in one's home to get rid of PVC and I mean. There are people that can do that. Why shouldn't they be afforded the same information is even?

But do we know that that's doing it? You're saying that only people that are poor deserve certain information and older and people with more means. I mean, I should start with Americans getting help access. Well, we know lead is not good for people. So we would think that, you know, that's been proven that they're completely different substances. Well, PPC is polyvinyl chloride. It's part of our piping. It's certainly more solid because it's solidified. It's not the liquid form that, you know, we hear about in train derailments. That's many of the liquid in the VOC versions of vinyl chloride. But the idea is to piece out who deserves what knowledge to me is not fair.

Because it's not based on necessarily economics. You can walk in to a high-price supermarket, I mean a department store and buy, you know, a $50 lipstick that's just as toxic as you would walk into a local CVS or Walgreens. So I'm trying to let people know that it's not a matter. first of all, autoimmune diseases don't just affect the lower socioeconomic because they're not getting your food and they're not exercising and, you know, that was one of the things that my ears perked up. Autoimmune disease and immune diseases, well, because in terms of just, I don't even know

what that was about, but the idea is that all humans have the same risk of developing immune and autoimmune diseases at this point. We know that. We know that certain, certainly minor socio-economically challenged environments have higher rates of air pollution, have higher degrees of exposure for manufacturing, have higher rates. So what did that argue against your point about eating organic foods and making these lifestyle changes? Organic is not the only recommendation in the book. I mean, there's literally hundreds of recommendations. But I want to understand because you said that, you know, people should be avoiding all these man-made chemicals. So why should they not be avoiding the natural chemicals because, you know, you wanted to undermine the dose makes the poison,

but that's actually the central tentative toxic. I'm talking about. I mean, I just, compounds that are synthetically made that have been derived over the last 50 to 75 years. There are many that we use and we like. I like my hair coloring. It's a benefit ratio we choose. What's an organic compound? You omit all of the, so for example, let's talk about like Salison, right?

Salison was the precursor. derived from willow bark and it has analgesic properties. It's aspirin. It, no, it's not aspirin, actually. It's salison. Salison has potentially very severe adverse effects. And thanks to chemical synthesis, we converted it to acetyl salicylic acid, which is aspirin. And sulfacalic, which is another drug I use for my patients. So acetylacelic aspirin is manmade. It has better safety profile. It has better analgesic properties than the natural salic. So why do you you have a problem with man-made chemicals? Well, who has access to Salison?

Well, you're proving my point. You're undermining man-made chemicals. What I'm saying is everything I recommend... What about copper sulfing? You don't have a problem with copper sulfing is information that should people choose to prioritize. Okay, there are people that prioritize perhaps getting their hair done versus getting a gym membership.

You know, these are the choices we make. And I'm not judging because I have my own issues. I don't like to cook all that much. And I like my hair colored. My point is, is that I think people should be able to have the information to choose what they want to use. Well, they should have accurate information. Well, what's the information that's inaccurate here? What's the information that's inaccurate?

That synthetic chemicals are writ large causing harm and natural chemicals are totally safe. And you should do this 21-day something to detox your body when your organ systems do that for you. Have you seen the 21-day process? plan? I've read your book. How did you read the book? I was provided it to read during my prep for the episode. Okay, good, good, good. So, but you can see from the, so I know that, I know that you said in the, in the opening that you believe that environmental exposures are the number one cause of chronic and acute diseases. And as we talked about autoimmune disorders. What's the claim? Sorry, say that again. She said, well, actually I have the quote, hang on. I believe that environmental chemicals are the number,

one cause of most acute and chronic health conditions, that's on page 22 of the book. So that's objectively false. That is inaccurate information that the entire book is premised on. I believe. I believe. Yes, you believe. Based on the literature, it's not based on the literature at all. What do you believe? So why do I believe this? Because I'm correlating all of 22 years of rheumatology and understanding what I'm seeing, not just in my own practice, which is a very small practice, but is correlated to the epidemiology, which is stated in the book that we're seeing a worldwide epidemic of these immune and autoimmune disorders. We're seeing food allergies, which is not autoimmune. We're seeing lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, 1% of the human population

has now been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. We know that there's immune disorders from a variety of different exposures, including even medications, many of which I use. The point I'm trying to make is that our world has changed drastically. And we have to be thought. about what we eat, what we consume, how much medication, how long we're on the medication, is it solving the problem? I use them all the time. What I want people to do is be aware and understand that there could be harm from some of these exposures. That is the biggest take-a-home, take-away from us. There could be harm for certain exposures, and that's why the dose makes the poison and the actual identity of the chemical and the identity of the exposure matters, right?

The central theme of this book is that environmental chemicals are the number one cause of acute and chronic illnesses and goes into a litany of synthetic chemicals, bad, everything else we're not even going to talk about, when if you looked at the biggest determinants of both acute and chronic health outcomes, environmental chemicals are not in the top five, right? We're talking about healthcare access. Yes, lifestyle, but we're talking about corporate talking, when we talk about lifestyle, when we talk about lifestyle, we're not talking about diet, exercise, sleep, stress

management, fiber, eating foods that you're talking about. Not eating organic versus conventional. That is a small piece of this whole book. Actually, you had many, many chunks on organic in the book. So, sue me. I'm talking about one aspect that is a large component of human existence, which is eating.

Yes, and drinking is another component that we should be driven by evidence-based guidance. And that's why when you talk to all credible registered dietitians who are the experts on clinical guidance for diet, they all say that messaging that tells people that organic good, conventional bad does way more harm. But I also said if there is conventional food and you would like to make it cleaner. There's no reason to make it cleaner.

There's no reason to make it cleaner. Can I bring up an interesting point? Yeah. Like the topic of cleaners is an interesting topic. Like we're talking about the floors in my house having an antimicrobial surface and we're talking about how that actually might be. harmful because they're cleaner. So cleaner is not better. Cleaner is not necessarily better, but we do not think that chemicals help human physiology. They were never meant to part of the

human body for millions of years. So this is just the appeal of nature. So the idea is cleaner being better. Well, cleaner with synthetic chemicals is not necessarily cleaner or better. Cleaner like removing harmful topical chemicals and residues could be very beneficial to your gut microbiome. We know that because we've seen. Because the question is how strong as the cook? That's my question. How strong is the... Could. Could.

What do you mean? Like you said that they could be harmful to your health. There's so many studies, you know, the idea that I'm going to quote each study and talk about... Well, I mean, if the whole claim is we need to detox from these chemicals, we need to know harmful there. So the idea. So the idea is that any... Because you wrote a book on it, so you should have the data, right? Any given...

I've written three books, two are textbooks with Oxford University Press. So they've been peer reviewed. You know, it's just, it's insane that I'm having to defend this particular topic at such a detail. out of way. But what I want to do is I'm trying to help you and the audience understand that this is not a pick and choose which chemicals bad and all chemicals bad or this one's only bad and this one's more bad. The perspective on the book, the perspective on everything I've ever taught on, is that we have to think about the individual studies that we know are available for those classes, which are robust. And then we need to decide how we want to add that into our life

and choices, just like you said with boxing. We can all choose whether or not we want to go with organic or not. Look, when I go out to dinner, it's not like I'm looking in the kitchen to find out what they served me. I'm choosing to go out to dinner to have a good time and I'm overriding those other components in my brain that I might have more control at home or in my workplace. You know, those are the kinds of choices we make. The goal here is to lower exposure overall because if we lower over exposure and we don't have these testable chemicals in our bodies, we are less likely

to see what we see in the studies that show possibly. Possibly. But again, that's worth something because we're sick. So the idea is I'm correlating it with life overall in terms of our risks. You're putting more strength on that correlation. Because I'm seeing it.

I'm a clinician 22 years. I've been studying this avenue of not just endocrine disruption was the beginning of my work was, is this true? I mean, I myself was a skeptic, right? If I didn't learn in med school, I certainly wanted to figure out if this was real or not. Fifteen years later of understanding that, 22 years later of clinical medicine in rheumatology, there's no rheumatology situation that's clear cut. I mean, medicine is very, very, you know, it's messy. It's messy. It's messy. And not everyone's symptoms correlate to an actual disease. You have to go through everything.

So I'm just trying to weigh in on how to make people healthier by thinking more judicious. I think that's the only real disagreement here. And my question is to you, Dr. Love, for individuals who perhaps, if you look at a level of a chemical that they're exposed to, we know that it's significantly below threshold. But then perhaps we don't have data to say over the course of their lives, they're at this low level. Is there a potential risk that we're not accounting for because of the length? of exposure as opposed to the level. Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. And it's a,

it's a reason why there's a difference between a clinician and scientists, right? Scientists are the ones that conduct scientific studies and they ask all these questions, right? That's why we look at, or toxicologists look at both chronic and acute exposures when also setting all of these safety threshold. So a chronic exposure assumes an exposure of that level every single day for the course of a human life. So all of these pesticides, any regulated chemical, and again, that excludes organic pesticides because they don't fall under the regulation and also excludes all the dietary supplements, which also don't fall under regulation. But we have data for those values, both the acute and the chronic levels at which there might be a health risk, right?

And so those are assessed based on the actual chemical itself, the nature of the chemical, right? What class of chemical is it? What functional groups that chemical has? Because a chemical is not just the sum of its parts, right? We hear that rhetoric a lot when they're like, oh, the aluminum in this thing, when it's not elemental aluminum, it's a salt and it's an ionic compound, and that changes the behavior of that chemical dramatically, right?

So it factors that in. It factors in how it's metabolized, right? Is it metabolize through renal metabolism, through blood-liver metabolism, how is it excreted? Is there potential for interaction or receptor binding in humans? And it factors all of those in when it assesses these chronic and acute levels, right? So, yeah, I mean, there are things that we know can accumulate in our bodies, right? We know things like vitamin A, which is fat soluble, can accumulate more quickly than a water-soluble vitamin. And the same is true for any chemical, because again, everything is chemicals.

You're a sack of chemicals. Your body produces orders of magnitude more formaldehyde than what you would be exposed to and all sorts of things. And so those things are factored in, right? And so when you're having that conversation, if someone's trying to make, you know, an evidence-based risk assessment of what they should focus on versus what they should, you know, what they shouldn't focus on, those sorts of things would be included because we have scientific. that actually do this work, like this rhetoric that this work isn't been done just because someone doesn't know about it doesn't mean that that work hasn't been done. Well, to be honest, the chemistry that is released to the public, we have active ingredients

in pesticides and we have inactive ingredients. Why does the public need to know? So, in other words, for instance, we just had a water spill in our kitchen and we had a remediation company and they sprayed an anti-mold agent, which I was not happy about because I was at work and I didn't realize they were spraying it. So I asked to see what was on, you know, what they say was, oh, it's all natural, right? So I looked at the MSDS report, which is basically the chemical sheet that talks about what's in this product. Okay?

And then everyone has access to this, you know, for any chemical, technically. Yeah, I think my like landscapers would send that over before. Yeah. And so at the very top you see an active ingredient that's 0.005%. And you're like, oh, that's so little. That's nothing. I don't even know the name of that compound. it's, you know, something from organic chemistry.

Then you look at the very bottom and you see inactive ingredients and it's basically 99.99 of what's left of that spray. And it's proprietary. So what I think we're missing here is when you're saying that the scientists... Meaning it's a private blend.

It's like Coca-Cola. It's like what's in supplements. People have a proprietary blend. But the thing that's interesting is that what's what we, know about pesticides and the agricultural community is that they don't have to release all of the science to the public. That's a fact. So when I'm saying trying to think about what we are putting in our bodies, you think about, well, what are we not being told? Because there's no

requirements to actually reveal the entire constitution of those products. Because of the proprietary blend. Because the proprietary blend. And I think that has to be waiting here. In the situation that Dr. Love is describing, where she's saying that the chronic amounts are tested, the doses are tested. We don't know that. You disagree that that exists? I disagree that we are being made aware of all of the science. See, they're not required to do these tests.

But she's saying that they exist. Well, this is going to be a matter of- They actually are required to do the test. Where is this testing actually? Well, where is the testing done? Within all of the toxicologists versus. Why do you care if it's released to the public? Because you're, the answer is where do people get the information that these levels are being tested at parts per million, parts per trillion, parts per billion.

You tell me where that material is. All of the toxicology regulatory agencies conduct all of these data. So if you wanted to understand what's been tested released, where do we get to see it as the public? So I'm going to answer that after I finish my sentence. So like, for example, European Chemicals Agency, they have everything that's ever been registered and tested. and that includes excipients, adjuvants, it includes any sort of emulsifiers or anything. These are additive agents. Additive agents that would allow for distribution to ensure that it doesn't get degraded, stability, et cetera.

Same sort of things that you would see in regulated medications. Now, these materials are all available. You have to contact the regulatory agency. The issue becomes when there's this mentality that, well, we should have, free access to this because what's going to end up, it's going in our bodies. I'm speaking right now. Wait, wait, hold on. Why wouldn't you want people to know that? Because only 28% of Americans are scientifically literate. That is ridiculous. You're saying they're too dumb to care what goes in their body. I'm saying that because they have misunderstanding about chemistry and they've fallen for

rhetoric that- Who are you to say they have a misunderstanding of chemistry? I mean, this is humans should have a right to know what they're putting in their body. You wrote a book that's based on avoiding Synthetic chemicals and not natural chemicals. But are you able to get this data? Which is the appeal to nature. That data is either not required. It's similar to cosmetic chemicals. They're proprietary.

They're not regulated by two wildly different organizations and entities and have very different laws behind them. That may be true, but they're both not in the United States. They're not required. It's not like the European Union. It's not like other components. We are not privy to the components in these ingredients. That's not true.

privy. What does that solve? It solves. Well, if it depends. Would you want to know what's in 99.99% of something that's sprayed in your kitchen? Well, I don't want it there. And there's a lot of other alternatives. Why don't you want there? Because why would you want something in there that you're going to eat, breathe, your kids are going to play with? Your pets are going to lick their paws. Why would you want that? Well, I would want it there if the regulatory agency told me it was safe. I would like that too. But what I'm saying to you is that the problem comes from when these chemicals are created. they are not required by U.S. manufacturer, by U.S. government to not only test for safety and toxicity, particularly in vulnerable populations. That sounds like you're talking about supplements. Vulnerable populations like pregnant women, children, elderly, immune compromise. These are the vulnerable. So the point I'm making, if they create the rules and they create the compounds and they're allowed to put them in anything that they'd like, which, you know, this is U.S. manufacturing.

We, as consumers, I'm saying, you know, put on the stop block here and just say before you put that into your body without being well aware of what's in it, why don't we think a little bit about choosing alternatives or reducing exposure? The regulatory agencies are not checking. Like, forget about the disclosure. They're not checking them. They're not, well, we don't know because they don't have to say that they're even checking. But you're going to, parts per billion. But can you ask? So you say you can request where can you get this data that's transparent that they're going to tell you that they did For this conversation, can we get the data?

Any chemical that is regulated where we're talking about a medication or a pesticide, the full... Medications and pesticides are two different bodies. We have the FDA. And pesticides are very different. We have a totally different regulatory system for FDA. You just conflated cosmetics and pesticides. Because those are not regulated. They're not regulated.

Pesticides are regulated. So with pesticides, let's say. And they're registered. So you can go and look up the registration, not just of the active ingredient, but the actual brand formulation, even if there's like, say there's an extended release version and there's a quick release, you can get the registration of every single one of those. And that has the safety profile. It has all the safety data and has all the top of technology data. So, but you're saying the data is not accurate or just hard to get? Well, it's not only hard to get, but this,

this does not exist for organic pesticides because they are not regulated. Independently of the distinction. The point is, is that when you look up these, these chemicals, they don't pull into studies. that show when they've been tested in... They'll give you the compound, the shape, half-faults. They'll give you some of the structural information. But they're not giving you safety data. They're not giving you necessarily the safety data that we want because they can decide they can cherry-pick

what they choose to show the public. Can I make an analogy? Yeah, of course. I'm flying on a plane this week. I have no idea what Boeing does and putting that plane together. I have no idea how they check the screws. I put my blind faith.

them because... Would you want to know? No, absolutely not. But that's you. But the reason why I think it's illogical to worry about that from a mental health standpoint is that there's so many anxieties that face us every day. No question about it. But should you want that information? Should you, and by the way, getting on a plane, you might argue, is a little different in many ways than consuming certain foods over time. It's probably less safe. Well, it depends on how you perceive it, right? You know, it's your risk benefit ratio. I'm saying in terms of the unknown. Like I'm sure, If I really- Well, should we all live in the unknown?

Is that the argument? Well, I think that there has to be some level of trust that the regulatory agencies are doing their duty. That's what I'm saying. Which we should trust and audit those agencies, no? Well, but they're not auditable because there's huge lobbyists behind. There's these lobbyists behind organic farms and supplement companies and wellness industry. There's a lot of lobbyists everywhere. But let's say, because if you're trying to give some practical advice, right, that seems like it's your goal for it.

especially to make this big distinctions change for chemicals. Wouldn't it be to say, I don't trust that they're putting out the data. I'm going to call in my book for better oversight, being able to audit these agencies, as opposed to saying, let's hide from the chemicals because we don't yet know. Up until this point, up until this moment, we just got red dye number three out of the market, right? So I'm saying, listen, this is great. We have a movement towards thinking about the food chemicals. We knew that red dye number three was a problem in 1990 when they got.

rid of it in cosmetics. Now they're finally getting rid of it in food, right? That's been a little controversial. So I'm curious your take on it. You can be contrary. Look, you could argue everything's controversial. For everything pro, you've got a con. And we know this in medicine too. This is a little bit unfair. I'm just curious. Well, it's not unfair in the sense that my point that I want to make. Because you can't equate every stance that subjectively someone may have about it. But I'm saying in this honest scientific literature, there's some debate about whether or not red dye number three truly has human harm. Is that a fair statements to say it's fair to say that the animal studies precautionary principle is fair enough to say

that if it's harmful in animal studies then we should be thinking about it in our littlest most vulnerable people our children and even our own bodies but fair to also reasonable mind can take it the other way like for example if one of my patients says don't put your stethoscope on my chest it's going to give me cancer unreasonable thought can I disprove it with 100% certainty I can't but I can say with reasonable certainty so I think in this situation we can say with reasonable certainty, there's some disagreement surrounding grad dynamite. I agree with you. I'm not here to say anything's hard and fast because these studies can all be in one way or

another, not a big enough end or, you know, participants or maybe they didn't, maybe they didn't account for lifestyle before they went into this study or, which is my argument for a lot of mistakes. So there's like a hierarchy and a strength level of always. My goal is to just give people at least the ability to say, listen, you have agency over your body, you can decide whether or not you want to know about the bolts or not. You can decide if you want to go play, you know, do boxing. I decide every time I get my hair colored, which was this morning, whether or not I wanted to do that.

These are the choices we make. But to say that we shouldn't know anything about anything to be protected and shelled off from real making, from decision making, especially at different economic, socioeconomic levels or knowledge base, I think is not fair. And that is the idea is that we should be thinking about precautionary principle. And not only that, guess what? They're great swaps. There are great alternatives. That is the messaging I've always given.

Here's a little bit of the problem. Here's a lot of the solution. The idea is that you don't always have to say, oh my gosh, I'm getting rid of this and I don't know what to put in its place. We have so many options now and they actually are affordable. That is the messaging that I'm really trying to share with people.

But the swaps are not better. They're less tested, less safe, more expensive. You mean a lipstick with lead versus something without lead? or something without parabins is less. That's an extreme example. That's wildly hypervolve. Let's take a simpler example. People should have a choice as to what they put on their body.

Let me use an example. So paraben fear was based on the same premise as BPA fear, right? It's an endocrine disrupting chemical, right? So what ended up happening is that lobbyists and wellness influencers kind of pushed this rhetoric that parabins, which are actually an incredibly safe antimicrobial that's used to prevent contamination in both medicines and cosmetic products. for a hundred years, use it at a tiny level because that's all you need to control mold and bacterial contamination for things that you dip into repeatedly in your humid bathroom.

But because of this false rhetoric that they were linked to cancers, which was based on a terrible study that essentially showed that their instrumentation was contaminated, but this caused all this fear because people didn't know what parabins were and they relied on people in social media and media to scare them about chemicals, which is one of the harms of giving all this information without context, without appropriate education. So what ended up happening was companies were like, well, people don't want parabins. Even though parabins are overwhelmingly safe and there's actually no human data that shows that it's a cancer risk, they're not going to buy these products anymore.

So they have to kow to the public perception, which is part of the process. that we're in these days. And we have cleaned our products because of it. We actually don't. We actually don't. So what ended up happening was some companies omitted preservatives outright. And we saw a huge uptick in contamination and infections as a result, including... Not true.

That is not true that I've ever heard of. I have actual data. So I know you don't have data, but I'm a scientist. Please put it on the website. No, we'll have it up. There was spikes in ocular infections because parabins are used in certain opposites. pothalmic treatments as well as contamination and bacterial infections from preservative-free lotion, skincare products, baby wipes, and so on. I have a very long list because I did an

extensive presentation at a cosmetic chemistry conference on paraben specifically. So one route was no preservatives. We're going to market it as preservative-free because preservatives, just like synthetic chemicals sound scary, even though they actually improve the quality and quantity of our lives. the other option was other companies opted for alternative preservatives, one of which is methyl isosthiazolinone or MIT. Now, MIT is also an effective antimicrobial. It has about 10% allergenicity. So what ended up happening was when companies switched to MIT over paribins,

huge rates of dermatologic allergies, skin allergies, were happening because this was being swapped out in cosmetic products. lotions, makeup, et cetera. So you're swapping for a safer, more well-studied preservative because of public outcry and chemophobia and misinformation for a less safe, more allergenic preservative because of all this misinformation. So you can provide information to people, and I think that's what we should be doing, but it needs to be the accurate information and factual information and not information.

Well, that's in the eye of the person, the eye of the beholder. No, it's actually not. This is based on empirical data. Empirical data is what determines objective reality. What we have instead is not objective facts and evidence-based information. It's the appeal to nature fallacy and also telling people that they shouldn't trust companies, scientists who have dedicated their career to studying chemical composition, how they interact with us, how they are excreted by our bodies.

But instead, we should go and make our homemade at home. home products which have no safety, no regulatory, no oversight, no chemistry knowledge, and that somehow is the safer alternative when that's objectively false, right? You can't make up facts. You have facts and you have opinions or anecdotes. Do you think that the idea that parabins were excluded unnecessarily? Well, paraben are still being used in lots of products. But I'm saying in these examples.

Right, right. Well, you know, the idea is that, again, we're going with this sort of the minutia of one chemical or there are so many chemicals that are used to make up lots of different products. The question is, do you want to choose products? And I'm not a toxicologist. So I give resources. Things like Clearia, Yuka. These are apps that are all fear mongering misinformation. Okay. So they're all bad according to her. But what I want to say is that they're based on the appeal to nature fallacy and the environment of working group claims. For people who have a lot of reactions to chemicals in general, they're very, very useful. They're very useful. Well, I don't understand why we can't be looking at those to make our own decisions on rating. Can I give a practical situation where I think this actually played out historically in kind of an interesting point for the time being. When the polio vaccine was first released, we did a huge video on this.

We hired a medical researcher to help us get really the best date on it. And what we found was when the polio vaccine came out, there was a cutter incident that happened as a result of the polio vaccine where one lab mismanufactured the vaccine. They messed up. They didn't kill the virus. And as a result, this vaccine actually ended up giving kids polio. Kids were paralyzed, kids died. I think I've heard this story. Terrible story. It was the worst vaccine situation in history. The reason why that happened was the lab messed up because all the other labs made it correctly. Public outcry happened. They said, get rid of this vaccine. This vaccine is so bad. Look what it did to these children. What ended up happening is we swapped to a different vaccine,

an oral vaccine. This vaccine actually ended up giving people true polio because it wasn't the same type of polio vaccine that was given before. What ended up happening is because of public outcry. We literally overcorrected and ended up giving a vaccine that while while type polio was eradicated, lab type because of the vaccine was still happening. So I worry about these situations where we overcorrect because of a chemical and then come up with a solution that might be worse than the initial problem. You know, there's no question. Do you think that's an issue? I think that's, you know, these are great stories and anecdotal and I agree and I think I've heard that story. And we've never been perfect in a lot of things. Truly, humans are, you know, not perfect people.

Of course. But the idea is that, you know, the idea in terms of what I do, and I'm trying to stay in my lane and really talk about the work that I do and what I write about and what I post on, is to keep people conscious not to create outcry. I'm not a dramatic person in my life. It's really to really just give people an idea where issues may exist, give them really. reasonable resources should they choose them or not. And I do give those lots of resources that are managed and evergreen and taken care of by other people because that's what they do for a living. That's what their jobs are. It's not me to tell which brand to do. I don't even endorse brands. I don't endorse products at all. I've chosen not to do that so that the work that I teach people is unbiased. That is how I've chosen to do the work I do. But I think what you're saying is, you know, how do you control human outcry? We are so complicated. as human beings. And very little, I would say especially now, our thresholds are much lower. We get very hyper excited about problems. And it's really a harmful thing. I do agree with you. But when it comes to messaging about chemicals, I'm simply saying, think about what we put on

in and around our bodies. Be conscious. Here's some resources to look up. Here are the companies that I know are looking them up as well and have rating systems based on their science that they pulled. These are the things that we now know could potentially be harmful. It's not all black and white, never been. It's how do we make our bodies less vulnerable by, you know, not bringing in things that we know potentially have harm. There's a lot that we have potential harm with when it comes to chemicals. So I just want people to think not just about chemicals, but how do we fix our lifestyle to be back more like, you know, anthropologic, you know, early man, right, or woman? how do we exercise how do we move well i don't know if we want to live 20 years life expectancy well

well you know listen we are living longer but we are also living pretty sick we have on average six out of 10 people have chronic health conditions and that's because we don't have and so a lot of that could be a doctor well that's why i think a good point for us to end on is to talk about the things we agree upon yeah which is the exercise component sure the decreasing of processed foods getting more fiber in our diet which have chemicals absolutely everything has chemicals yeah Chemical is a complicated word. So you made a quote. You said, I won't lie.

Eating mostly organic foods and buying chemical-free consumer products can be expensive. So I've come up with some hacks and tips to save money while making safer choices, which I share throughout this book. Now, everything is a chemical. Like, we need to understand that your body is a chemical. It's acetic acid. Agreed. Your actual body is made up of a network of chemicals. Like, your cells are chemical networks.

Your cell membranes are chemicals. Like if you don't fully understand this. But everyone understands. Yeah, I don't understand. What's your point? Yeah. You're saying that we should be avoiding synthetic chemicals. Synthetic chemicals.

There's nothing inherently bad about a synthetic chemical. In fact, many synthetic chemicals take- That's a very large statement to make out of 95,000- But isn't it equally large to say that it's dangerous? Yes. But the difference is that I'm asking people to think about what they personally choose. So let's talk about their personal experience. to think about when they do a remediation in their home, which tile they put down, what do

they choose to put in their home? You know, I decided to use ceramic tile in my office because I didn't want carpeting. I didn't want a bunch of synthetic fibers. I didn't want to trap things. I didn't want. But that's the thing. These are choices that we have a right to make. No one's arguing about your choice to make, arguing about your choice to make that.

But why would, as a doctor, you would recommend someone to not get carpet in their home from a synthetic carpet? Oh, I'm not sure if I would recommend. I'm saying that I personally chose to do that because of these reasons. This is why. But there's no science behind those reasons. Well, there's not going to be science behind everything in life.

Do you know who has to do the science? Scientists. Well, no, you have to raise money. Scientists have to do the science. Where did they get their funding from? You just said that you trust to do really good science. You just said that you trust these apps

to make these product recommendations, but your whole book is telling people to not trust scientists and trust your anecdote about your farm. farm. So it's a great question. So they're pulling from a lot of the same data is from what I understand is they're using some of the ATDSR data, which is the, I can't even remember what the acronym is, but basically it's the chemical data that they have found from MSDS forms as well. And they've put it along with, along with epidemiologic studies, animal studies,

occupational studies of these exposures. So they're combining what is given to them by the manufacturing of these chemicals, along with studies that are not shared by manufacturing, which is how these play out in real life situations, be it animal or human studies. So they're combining a lot more information to give to those, you know, to add to those recommendations. And so it is what we have. It is not perfect, but it is what we have. These apps make money by getting subscribers that they scare about products. And the products that they rate as bad have synthetic chemicals or use conventional farming or have preservatives. So very much it is the appeal to nature fallacy. And the reason that the appeal to nature fallacies is because it's the false belief

that natural substances and chemicals are inherently better, safer, superior. When we know that the dose does in fact make the poison with everything and there are lots of natural substances that are incredibly harmful at low doses, there are lots of natural substances that are safe at high doses. And the same is true for synthetic substances, right? The source of a chemical has no bearing on its safety or potential harm. And your entire book is antithetical to that. It tells people that they should be scared of synthetic chemicals by and large without any context and that they should not have any issues trusting any sort of entity that is

making money by telling them that they should only source natural products. Not exactly. Is this a situation where because there's so much. many chemicals. Like, for example, I'm going to do a patient situation. It's a big topic. So a patient comes into my office, says, doctor, I want to live the healthiest life possible. Tell me what chemicals I need to get rid of. Based on that and based on the information that's been provided today, I think the answer to that patient is, I don't know, put your focus elsewhere. Yes. Is that fair for me to say? Or you think that's what you got from this conversation today? Well, because

it's too broad of a topic to be able to make a statement that is, broad brush. So let me answer that question because I really, I really want to tell you what I actually tell my patients, just like you have patients and I have plenty of patients myself. What I always talk about is what are the highest yield changes that make the most sense. Correct. Okay. Highest yield. That's very reasonable. So what are we exposed to the most? What we breathe, right? So maybe you don't want to have so many synthetic chemicals in your home, which is economically sealed. But your broad brushing synthetic chemicals now is bad. What do you mean? Because you're saying you don't want to breathe synthetic.

Pure oxygen, you would die. In a lot of synthetic air fresheners handles, there's a lot of synthetic chemicals that go in that are not disclosed on the candle, the Yankee duty candle or whatever it is you have. They're not disclosed in your air fresheners. Remember, cosmetics and cleaning products in this country have no desire and no need and no requirement by U.S. government to reveal what is in their products. But what third party academic testing is showing,

and by the way, they have to fund. their own studies. So we don't have money free-flowing to do every study on every chemical that could potentially be harmful, which is why the argument, at least the least the messaging I want to give, is that because we can't have more of these academic third-party unbiased studies. We should say, I don't know. Well, we should say, let's be thoughtful. I don't think we don't, we don't say just, you know, roll around in them. It's more to be thoughtful. So when I think about what I tell patients, it's not complicated. I simply say, Think about, as you said, unprocessed foods is one area that we now know plenty of study.

Western medical journals, you know it and I know it, have higher race of cardiovascular disease, stroke, Alzheimer's, dementia, cancers, a variety of cancers. That would make sense to think about the quality of your food by reducing processed and ultra-processed foods, which on average have lots of more chemicals than more natural foods. But it's not necessarily because of the chemicals. It's not the chemicals. Well, it's a variety. It's the macros as well.

It's the low fiber. It's the oils that potentially could be more harmful. Let me put it this way. Process ultra-processed means that the food has been treated in some way. Cutting it is processing it, right? So like there's some degree of processing. So why did you say ultra-price? I want to see your definition of ultra-price.

So for me, ultra-processed as an example would be like a Doritos chip, something you can't make in your own home. Fair enough. And the reason why I think ultra-process foods are unhealthy is that they- low nutrition, low nutrition, you want to eat them a lot, your satiety triggers are all tricked. Okay. But it's not because ultra-processing the food is harmful, but it's because the companies have chosen to ultra-process them in a way, which makes you want to eat more of them.

Isn't that fair? Well, that's one aspect of ultra-processed foods. It doesn't mean that the chemicals are not harmful too. It does because we have those data. We know that many of the chemicals that are in these foods can actually not only increase the size of stem cells turning into fat cells and directing them. But these are all hypotheticals. They're not. We have studies on adipocytes and containing, these are lipophilic chemicals.

Petri dish studies. For instance, BPA is one of the most well studied. I urge you to put these on your website. I will give you the best studies that you. Well, I'm happy to see the studies. But I want you to know that the chemicals that are put into some of these foods are specifically, they have not been required to do testing. And the testing that has been done has been done by organizations and academic centers that are choosing to look at these to see how they affect the human bodies. trials in my experience has shown is that even if you consume these ultra-processed foods in reasonable amounts, which very hard and you're impossible to do because of how they're manufactured and they're tricking your body. But if you were controlled in a metabolic ward and you're given ultra-processed foods, your outcomes basically stay the same. This is why I think that the chemicals are not the major factor here. So I would disagree with you based on plenty of literature on food quality is not just, and by the way, poor nutrition is such a key aspect of human health. Sure. Because When I talk about removing environmental chemicals as best you can within reason, I'm also talking

about the ad, which is the four A's that I discuss in the book. Assess, avoid or swap. The third A is ad, which is the nutrition that humans are not getting over millions of years that we are deficient on, which I would hope you would agree with, vitamin D, magnesium, some of the B vitamins. And that's because we're not eating them. Exactly. Exactly. But not because we need to get a bunch of supplements. But here's the thing. Some of these chemicals have also been shown to affect DNA methylation, which is how genes are expressed, the epigenetics of our genes. I mean, we didn't get into more mechanisms, but I'm happy to go there. I think epigenetics is out of your scope.

The idea that we are also exposed to chemicals that can affect gene expression is something that should really be looked at hard and fast. We have a lot of data on this. So it's not just taking away triggers or components that could really irritate the immune system. the endocrine system, it's also how do we offset with certain nutrition, nutrients that we know offset DNA methylation and epigenetic changes. We know that. I think I have a really good point. B vitamins, omega's, for all of us to end on this exact topic.

And that's currently our administration has been talking about making America healthy and all these statements by talking about foods. But our budgets to do all the research that you're saying is required, and I think we all agree is required, it needs to continue. I've never said wait for Godot. You know, my argument has always been, listen, again, back to precautionary principle. You can take red dye number three out and we can all clap. We have six potential P-FOS chemicals in our drinking water system that was put on, you know,

on hold from, you know, being managed in our drinking water system, which, by the way, only manages 91 chemicals since 1974 Safe Dringing Water Act. So we have a water component that I talk about in terms of high-yield change to patients. We have a food component. But guess what the take-home message is. we can't wait for our regulation to happen because, again, it takes too much money. But we need it to happen. Well, we need it to happen.

But it's not going to happen in our lifetimes where we're getting sick. You and I are not going to live long enough for all of those chemicals to be evaluated in a... You think we won't be able to add more chemicals to the safe drinking act? The chemicals are being added. I'm saying to the checks of the Safe Water Act. Oh, they're not going to be added because it has to go to manufacturing, getting into our water system, which is our lakes and our streams. that goes to the way farming industry works.

It goes to way manufacturing is allowed to dump certain degrees, certain amounts of chemicals into waterways. Waterways become our drinking water. Sewage becomes our drinking water. This is a huge topic. I'm not following. Are you saying we shouldn't do this research? Of course not.

I'm saying if you want to do this research, that's great. And I applaud it. But we need it. We need it. Because like right now we're saying it may be causing these things. It might be so swath. So let's put it this way. while we're waiting for this wonderful research, which I applaud, while we're waiting in the moment now when I'm seeing patients walking in at age 14 with rheumatoid new onset or lupus with no family history, with Crohn's disease, with MS, the vast majority of immune disorders that I see as a rheumatologist, while we're waiting for those studies to get done, which I applaud. I'm on the same page. We have to do something to at least consider what we're doing with our bodies. And it's being thought,

and judicious about what we eat, what we drink, what we breathe. It's not complicated. It's more about being thoughtful. Well, it's very complicated. Because removing red dye number three sounds like it could be a win, but it's what are you replacing it with? What dye are they going to put to replace a right down? There are natural forms of coloring. And coquineal actually has higher rates of allergenicity as a red coloring. There's no question that regrettable substitutions exist. Let's talk about BPA. It's like good intentions creating bad outcomes. That happens all the market, guess what? It was flooded with BPS, BPSIP, BPF. These are called regrettable substitutions and we know them. They're throughout history. Well, that's why I think before we make a swap recommendation,

we should know what we're swapping to. Absolutely true. But our system is really a problem right now. I agree. It's been a problem and we can agree on that. So what I'm saying as a doctor who's very worried about patients, very worried about my own family and myself getting sick from our environment, from whatever that exposure may be, let's be thoughtful about what we eat, what we drink, what we put into our bodies, what we put on our skin, what we use as tampons. Let's think about what our body is absorbing because we have plenty of good data that is precautionarily telling us these are good decisions to make in terms of swapping or removing or reducing. We don't need all of the chemical cleaners that we think we do. Why do we need a door cleaner and a carpet

cleaner and an oven cleaner and a sink cleaner and a window cleaner? Why don't we take vinegar and add a little castile soap or a little warm water and a little bit of, you know, or why don't we look for resources that can help us choose better if we're not going to make our own concoctions, all of which I put in the book, by the way, I'm putting these ideas into people's hands because guess what? They're smart enough to know and have agency over their body no matter what their education level is or their income is. They have a right to be healthy. And that's what I argue in this book. And that's what I'm sharing. Sure. Well, I look forward to getting the data so we can compile it and perhaps do a part two. Happy to share. So thank you both for your

time. Appreciate it. And where can people follow you on social media? So under the smarthuman.com is my website. I have courses. I have a bunch of stuff there and also Ailey Cohen, A-L-Y-Cohen-M-D. And that's also been, you know, an area that people can reach me. And I hope people will follow and check it out. Cool. How about yourself, Dr. Love? My website is immunologic.org. And my social handle is at doctor. Dot, Andrea Love. Cool. Thank you.

This was a tough one to moderate for sure. A lot of claims, a lot of terms, and definitely some drama. After sitting through the discussion and then re-listening to it, I think the main issue I have with the entire detoxifying stance is that it often skips logical steps, which are really important. For example, we don't have quality evidence proving that organic food is healthier, yet Dr. Cohen throughout says that if we want to be precautionary, we should avoid conventional produce. Well, to be precautionary, you should do something that's proven to be safer. And organic

is not necessarily proven to be safer so that idea doesn't quite come together. Ultimately, while I agree making some simple swaps like getting rid of single-use plastic, especially in the kitchen, and washing your produce could be reasonable, the many steps recommended throughout the book go too far for what we actually know about environmental chemicals, and therefore, in my opinion, and it's bordering on fear-mongering. I want to thank both Dr. Cohen and Dr. Love for the spirited and nearly three-hour discussion. Hopefully you enjoyed this lengthy conversation.

If you enjoyed it, please don't hesitate to give us five stars as it truly helps our podcast find new viewers. And if you want another great conversation, check out my debate with Dr. Kay about Eastern versus Western medicine. Really worth a watch. And as always, stay happy and healthy.