The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Reduce Your Toxic Burden And Prevent Exposure

Episode Date: November 28, 2022

This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, Paleovalley, and Beekeeper’s Naturals.   Environmental toxins can wreak havoc on your body. And our bodies can only handle so much. There is a threshold, and when it’s passed, toxins can’t effectively be processed out of the body and are left lingering. When our toxic load is maxed out we start to see symptoms and dysfunctions.    In today’s episode, I speak with Dr. Casey Means, Harriet Washington, and Maggie Ward about reducing your toxic exposure, the compounded effect of toxic exposures, and more.   Dr. Casey Means is a Stanford-trained physician, Chief Medical Officer and cofounder of metabolic health company Levels, an associate editor of the International Journal of Disease Reversal and Prevention, and a lecturer at Stanford University. Her mission is to maximize human potential and reverse the epidemic of preventable chronic disease by empowering individuals with tools that can facilitate a deep understanding of our bodies and inform personalized and sustainable dietary and lifestyle choices.    Harriet Washington has been the Shearing Fellow at the University of Nevada's Black Mountain Institute, a Research Fellow in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School, a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University, and a visiting scholar at DePaul University College of Law. She is the author of Deadly Monopolies, Infectious Madness, Medical Apartheid, and A Terrible Thing to Waste, a book that looks at the devastating consequences of environmental racism—and what we can do to remedy its toxic effects on marginalized communities.   Maggie Ward, MS, RD, LDN, is the Nutrition Director at The UltraWellness Center. She holds a master’s degree in nutrition from Bastyr University and focuses on using whole foods for holistic nutrition therapy. In addition, she completed her requirements to become a registered dietitian at Westchester Medical Center in New York.   This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, Paleovalley, and Beekeeper’s.   Rupa Health is a place where Functional Medicine practitioners can access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 20 labs like DUTCH, Vibrant America, Genova, and Great Plains. You can check out a free, live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com.   Paleovalley is offering my listeners 15% off their entire first order. Just go to paleovalley.com/hyman to check out all their clean Paleo products and take advantage of this deal.   Right now until November 30, Beekeeper’s is offering my community 30% off. You can receive this offer sitewide by going to beekeepersnaturals.com/hyman or use code HYMAN at checkout.   Full-length episodes of these interviews can be found here: Dr. Casey Means Harriet Washington Maggie Ward

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. There's about 70 million, I think, deaths every year, but about, I think, 9 million are from toxins. And those are something we just don't know anything about from a perspective of traditional medicine. Hey, everyone, it's Dr. Mark. As a busy doctor with multiple jobs, I'm all about tools that make my life simpler. And since testing is something I rely on to help almost all my patients, I was really excited to learn about Rupa Health. Hormones, organic acids, nutrient levels, inflammatory factors, and gut bacteria are just some of the many things I look at to find the most effective path to optimal health for my patients. But that means I'm placing orders

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While we can't eliminate all toxins, we can do things to try to remove them, and we can reduce our exposures by choosing non-toxic alternatives to what we put in or on our bodies. In today's episode, we feature three conversations from the doctor's pharmacy on how toxins affect our health and the importance of reducing our toxic load. Dr. Hyman

speaks with Dr. Casey Means on her top tips for reducing and removing toxins from our lives, with Harriet Washington on the specific challenges minority populations face in terms of lead, pesticides, and other toxic exposures, and with Maggie Ward on the functional medicine approach to identifying toxins that are contributing to illness. Let's jump in. There's definitely some easy practical tips that we can do to kind of help ourselves. I think the first one is eat real clean, sustainable, sustainably grown food. You know, this is the basic building block of the body for improving biologic resilience. And if you're eating whole

foods that are grown in a clean, sustainable way, you're getting a lot of the way there. It means that you're getting the micronutrients that are going to help your body process these chemicals. It means that you're getting the different plant chemicals that are going to upregulate our antioxidant defenses and our anti-inflammatory pathways. It means that you're getting the different plant chemicals that are going to upregulate our antioxidant defenses and our anti-inflammatory pathways. It means that we're going to be avoiding pesticide exposure, which is an obesogen. It means that we're not buying things that come in plastic. So just by eating fresh, whole, clean, sustainably grown food, you're hitting a lot of the different boxes with the obesogen problem. Within whole foods, there are some that are extra special. So of course, cruciferous vegetables, which are

going to have the sulforaphane that activates our antioxidant defense system. So this is the cauliflower, broccoli, kale, bok choy, cabbage, sauerkraut, these things that are directly going to change gene expression to protect us from some of these obesogenic chemicals. Then, of course, it's like, what's your food stored in? So we want to avoid plastic storage as much as we can and really try and opt for glass and other materials. And now it's so easy to find this stuff. You can go on Amazon, you get glass Tupperware, glass water bottles, aluminum or ceramic, things like this. And again, it's not just about BPA. I think that's a little bit of a... We often now look for BPA-free plastics, but plastics contain as many as 15 endocrine disrupting chemicals. So BPA is just one, and it's great that it doesn't have that,

but there's other things like BPF and BPS and these other chemicals that we know are endocrine disruptors. So be the weirdo who brings the bamboo fork and knife in your purse to the takeout restaurant. Be the person who always has the glass water bottle and who brings your own storage containers because these things actually do add up and make a difference. Be the weirdo. The next category that is really important. Be the weirdo. Be the weirdo. And give these things as gifts. I have a running Google Doc of gift ideas. And a lot of them are becoming basically these types of things like give people the portable, reusable wood cutlery and things

like this that they might not think about, but that can really help their health. I am someone who loves personal care products. I love cosmetics and all this stuff. And so this one has been really important to me, figuring out how to basically reduce the toxins and toxic load of all these products I'm using. And so I think this is really low-hanging fruit. So basically, look at your bathroom, look at your shampoos, conditioners, lotions, makeup, deodorant, toothpaste, and probably throw out most of what's in there and look for the brands that have very few ingredients that are ingredients that you recognize and know and that are approved ideally by the Environmental Working Group website, which has basically a registry of all personal care products.

You can just walk through the store and search things on your phone and find out what is least likely to be toxic. So I've really moved away from a lot of the complex products to things like for moisturizer, like you can use organic coconut oil or jojoba oil. You can use castile soap like Dr. Bronner's for dish soap, for hand soap, for body soap. You can use vinegar and water for disinfecting sprays for your countertops. It's actually, once you get on this train, it's quite easy and there's so many great brands these days. It's not that hard. Yeah, it's super important. And then of course you need to give your body the things to detoxify, right? Right. And actually supplements can be helpful

in that regard. Whole food, of course, is the foundation, but supplements like vitamin C, curcumin, probiotics, resveratrol, vitamin E, these have all been shown to have basically resilience boosting effects on our ability to process toxic chemicals. And I think the last one I would mention, I mean, we could go on and on forever about how to avoid these, but I think another important one is air filtration because air pollution is such an under-recognized contributor of chronic disease. And so getting a really high-quality air filtration system actually has been studied and has been shown to have a clinical effect on mitigating the effects of toxic air pollution. So really personal care products, whole foods, making sure you're including cruciferous vegetables and anti-inflammatory

foods, avoiding plastics, and getting your air under control, and maybe supplementing with some high-yield supplements. Those are definitely some of the things that we can do that are pretty simple to avoid the impact, the mega impact of these chemicals. Yeah. So don't be too depressed because there's a lot of things you can do to reduce your exposures, to upregulate your own detox pathways. Things like saunas are great, very good for detoxing chemicals, making sure you're eating a lot of fiber, which helps you eliminate the chemicals. And sometimes you need a more aggressive detox protocol with the doctor, but it can be a very effective strategy for people. I saw a report recently, which sort of shocked me. And we know about 11 million people die every

year from eating bad food, not enough of the good foods, which I think is probably an underestimate. But there's about 9 million people that die every year from the environmental toxins in the environment. So it's a huge cause of global deaths, which makes it really high up there. I mean, there's about 70 million, I think, deaths every year, but about, I think, 9 million are from toxins. And those are something we just don't know anything about from a perspective of traditional medicine. But thank God functional medicine provides a way for you to assess and treat those problems. So it is a real problem. We should definitely all be focused on it and we can shift the market by changing what we

buy and what we purchase and what the demand is. So that'll also help. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark. During these winter months, people are always asking me how to support their immune systems. I like to try to help them reframe immune health to understand that it's not always about making the immune system work harder, it's helping it be smarter. And that means giving our bodies the right ingredients for the immune cells to work effectively and understand when they're up against a real threat. And this is where proper nutrition comes in. But since our food quality is not what it used to be, it's helpful to have a little extra insurance. I discovered this Propolis Immune Support Throat Spray from Beekeepers Naturals.

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I think, that is not really understood about these exposures is that although we can trace lead's many multifactorial effects on the body, including brain damage that is subtle enough not to be diagnosed very often. What happens is you have children who are exposed antenatally, you know, when the damage can be the worst. Yeah. Oh, prenatally. But what happens is that, antenatal, that's what I meant. Yeah.

Yeah. But what happens is that it's not diagnosed until problems appear, and then it's not diagnosed as lead poisoning. Part of the problem is when you have an exposure that precedes the discovered symptoms by 13 or 14 years, or even by 20 years, it's really hard to tie it to the initial exposure. So what's happening with a lot of African American children is they're being exposed by things like not only lead and PCBs and even pesticides that have been long banned but still find their way into our food and water, but also, you know, a lot of these things, even alcohol is a factor. Sure. So what happens is

when they exhibit behavioral problems at 15, they might get a diagnosis of conduct disorder. Some psychiatric diagnosis describes their behavior, but doesn't get to the heart of the problem. So it goes unrecognized. We don't see the connection between behavioral problems, between failing in school, between failing in employment, not being able to hold a job, to the initial exposure that happened when they were very young. The developing brain, of course, is excellent and sensitive to certain things. And the thing that many people, I think, are not aware of, and I was insufficiently aware of,

is that we know this, Paracelsus said the dose makes the poison. Sure. We know that. So anything, including water, can kill you if you drink too much of it. Yeah. Marathon runners die of actually drinking too much water. Their blood gets diluted and they get seizures from low sodium in their blood. Yeah, it's true.

Right. Infamous case of the radio station that had a competition who can drink the most water. A woman died because of that. She took in far too much water, sodium level went down, and she was dead. So, but, you know, what we don't pay attention to often enough is the fact that timing also makes the problem. Industry scientists will often... When, the when you get exposed. Exactly, exactly. Industry scientists will often say, oh, the amount you're talking about is too small to cause a problem.

That might be true in a full-grown healthy adult with good nutrition. But if you're talking about exposure of a child in utero, of a newborn child whose brain is still developing and who is making these neuronal connections that happen with this exquisite choreography, you know, certain structures are developed on a certain day, neurons migrate on a certain day, and exposure that day can be devastating to the brain. Maybe a week later, it wouldn't have harmed the child. Maybe a week beforehand, it would have had no effect. Certainly an adult would have had no effect. But at that particular time, the wrong exposure can cause a lifelong disability. Not enough attention paid to that, I think.

Yeah. And I think what's also true is that a lot of these chemicals are studied in isolation. So they go, well, it's a little bit of this. How can it hurt? But the truth is we're exposed to hundreds and thousands of these chemicals. They're all synergistic, and they actually might not just be additive. They might be multiplative. In other words, one plus one isn't the effect of two.

It might be the effect of 100 or 10. And so when you look at the sort of the study done by the environmental working group on 10 newborns, they looked at their umbilical cord blood. I mean, this is before they take their first breath. And this isn't, it's like poor African American community. This is just the average person. They had 287 known toxins in their umbilical cord blood before they took their first breath, including about 211 neurotoxins, things like mercury, lead, phthalates, pesticides, glyphosate, flame retardants, PCBs, even DDT, even though it's been banned for years. And what's fascinating is in this country, you know, we shoot first and ask questions later. And I think in Europe, they say, well, you have to

prove that this chemical is safe before we include it in anything. In this country, it's like, well, you know, let's use it and see what happens. Exactly. I address that in my book early on, the precautionary principle, the idea that one should test chemicals as they do in the European Union before human exposure.

European Union does that. But we only test after someone's been harmed or reports of harm. And Philippe Grandjean at Harvard has listed over 200 chemicals known to affect people's neurological development. And most of them are not adequately tested before use in humans. And many of the ones that are approved here are banned in Europe. Exactly. So in the European Union, where they don't even release a chemical if the prior testing shows it's harmful,

here we don't test until later. And then after people are harmed or the reports of harm, the most common refrain you hear from the industry is it'll be too expensive to remedy this. It'll be too expensive to test our chemicals before we use them in humans. But that's not true. If you look at the expense of not only doing the test to certify their toxicity, but also compensating the victims, treating the victims, settling the lawsuits, it's far more expensive to wait until after people have been harmed to test them.

But it's easier for industry because they've become so adept at deflecting management. It's true. It's sort of nebulous because you think about, okay, well, people drink too much soda. You can measure their blood sugar, and you see they get diabetes, and you can make a connection.

With environmental toxins, there's so many. They're so diffuse. They're everywhere in our skin're everywhere in our skincare products, our household products, in our food, in our water. Baby food. In our air. I use the example of baby food. Right. I haven't painted yet.

In our homes. I mean, it's just, you know, we're surrounded in a sea of environmental toxins and it's invisible, right? And so the problem is how do you start to connect the dots like you've done in your book and tell the story in a different way that gets people activated about solving this? That is so true. Remember thalidomide?

Yeah. You know, which caused birth defects, profound birth defects, phocomelia in young children after their moms took a lot of pregnancy. No arms, legs, nothing. Yes, yes. Well, David Rowell said that if thalidomide had caused a 10-drop decrease in IQ rather than the dramatic birth defects, it'd still be on the market. Of course, yeah.

I mean, I read, I'm researching my book Food Fix coming out in February, that because of pesticide use, and by the way, most farm workers are brown and black in this country, and Hispanics particularly are affected, and there's a loss of 41 million IQ points just from the use of pesticides because of the exposure of farm workers to these chemicals. And that's just one chemical or a few chemicals. It's not the total load of chemicals, which is what really determines our risk. So how do we start to sort of think about

this in a way that connects the dots better scientifically? And also, how do we change the healthcare profession so that people start to think about toxins? Because the average doctor knows nothing about toxins or food, which are the two primary drivers of most disease. And even worse, I write in my book about the fact that some doctors who are well aware that their patients of color have a strong exposure to toxic substances don't address that and pre-name the visits. They don't know how. And when they've been asked why, one of the things they say is that,

well, these are people who already are saddled with so many challenges, survival challenges, just, you know, putting food on the table. And it seems so burdensome to then also tell them, you know, be careful about the fish that you eat, be careful about, you know, the air quality in your home. So they just don't address it, you know. But that silence is deadly. You know, people are unaware that these things are killing them as well. And so how can they be expected to take action against them?

How to address it is really difficult. I think one thing that we definitely need to stop doing, no, start doing, is I address the synergy you talk about in my book that is so important. It's not like one plus one equals two. Exactly. It's so important, the fact that a single exposure and two exposures may add up to more than double the risk, right? So these exposures, that means that the picture is almost certainly worse than what we think it is. If we're measuring the effects of one toxin, we're only getting a woefully small point of the picture. And public health structures should take that in mind because very often industry's mission is to mitigate the damage.

Industry's mission is to keep its product on the shelves and to keep from being legislated and to make sure people are continually exposed to it. That's their profitable stance. And so they employ a lot of doubt. You can't prove it's really our product that's their profitable stance. And so they employ a lot of doubt. You can't prove it's really our product that's causing the problem. You can't prove it. And they... It's too diffused, right? Smoking is a cigarette. You get that. But this is so many things. How do you regulate 80,000 chemicals that are out there? In Anniston, Alabama, that's what happened. You had so many pollutants in the area that they actually, for a while, were engaged with pointing to each other.

Oh, it's not our PCBs. It's the lead down the road. It's the DDT that's still in the water, you know. So, unfortunately, another public health. So the cement companies are fighting with the, the coal companies are fighting with the pesticide companies. And the answer was, you're all responsible. You know, you're all responsible. You're all guilty. But one public health development that can be problematic in cases like this

is the focus on individual responsibility. That's a good thing in general, right? It sounds good. And we should be responsible. We shouldn't smoke or drink. When you turn on the tap and poison comes out, it's hard to be responsible. Exactly. But now we're talking about things that people have, individuals have no control over. And you can't evoke it. But that's exactly what has happened in the past. If you look at Baltimore in the not so distant past, they had public health workers coming to Baltimore homes

and showing mothers how to clean their floors with spic and span implication being that you're not cleaning that you know your homes are filthy and that's why your kids are sick. Their kids were sick because lead was everywhere. Lead industry had sold lead toys, lead paint, lead exhaust from the fuel and mothers and fathers could do nothing to stem that tide and yet this blame the victim continues. So we have to be really careful with personal responsibility because it can easily end up being a blame the victim. Oh, yeah.

It's also true with food. I think when you talked a little earlier about food swamps and food deserts and food apartheid and segregation around food, and it's hard to be personally responsible when you aren't able to have access when you aren't taught what to do when you don't know how to cook the right things when you literally been disenfranchised from your traditional foods or healthy food is simply priced out of your market right you know there are no uh supermarkets nearby going to the supermarket involves taking a taxi you know know, or finding transportation.

And it's too far away. So you resort to what you can find nearby, which is going to be very poor choices. Right, you know. So these Hobson choices that parents have to face, like, you know, do I go to McDonald's and feed my whole family within my budget? Or do I spend a lot of money to go to the supermarket that I really can't afford to do more than you know once every couple months um yeah or do i buy some soggy vegetables and try to make a meal out of that i mean that's not a choice they should have to make yeah i mean it's a you know there's a friend of mine runs a company called thrive market and they lobbied a number of

years ago to try to get snap to be able to be used online food stamps because it wasn't and uh there was a recent study done looking at actually what would happen if that was implemented and hopefully we'll get past in 2021 to allow the snap to be used online but then you can get cheaper access to food home delivery of groceries you know so that would be great you know basically you know your your food desert ends at the beginning of your internet connection, which most people do have. And so I think that the linkage between environmental toxins and the loss of our intellectual capital is not something that most people are aware of. Years ago, gosh, probably 20, say 26 years ago, I lived in China and I got mercury poisoning from living in China. Plus I had mercury fillings, plus I had a lot of fish. So the combination of the pollution and all the rest of it caused me to have mercury toxicity. And I just had no idea. And I went to doctor after doctor. I had neurologic symptoms. I had muscle damage.

I had autoimmune issues. I had chronic diarrhea and irritable bowel. I had severe brain fog and fatigue and memory issues and couldn't sleep. I mean, it was just a mess. And I went to doctor after doctor to doctor, Harvard, Columbia, here, there, everywhere, and got no answers other than take this pill, take this drug, suppress the symptom. You're depressed.

Yeah, you're depressed, whatever. Which you probably are because you're sick. I was, but it was depression was caused by the mercury. Right. And I finally saw this naturopath and he's like, you should check for heavy metals. And I did and I was shocked. And I had, you know, I've probably done 10,

20,000 mercury tests over my And I had, you know, I've probably done 10, 20,000 mercury tests over my lifetime with patients, probably more. And mine was in the top, you know, 10 that I've seen of all patients. And I learned how to really detoxify. So we're going to get into it today. But first of all, tell us about how prevalent these toxins are. What are some of the things that we should be thinking about? And how do these toxins impact our health? What are the kinds of conditions that are common that we see related to toxicity that we often mistake as something else? Right.

I mean, and like we were saying before, it can be anything, right? You can get toxicity and have any type of condition. I think what is probably most common are neurological, you know, and that is a spectrum too where you can see kind of brain fog. I think that's a very common, you know, description of what a lot of folks feel. But it can go all the way up into things like Parkinson's, which, you know, with Parkinson's, conventional medicine, we don't know really how to address that. So when we're seeing neurological things, that's one of the things that a good health history kind of tunes us into of like, oh, is this something we're probably thinking some toxins are involved here.

So that's probably the most common thing. But you know, autoimmune conditions, I mean, for so many people, it's toxicity is one of the main puzzle pieces that we're thinking about. Yeah, for sure. Right? I mean, it's food allergies, it's toxins, it's infections. Those are kind of the big ones. Yeah, microbes. Yeah. And metals always have been a big one. I know you've been checking for mercury and lead forever, but now we have more testing looking at different types of pesticides, different types of solvents, plastics. And like you said, they're out there

and unfortunately more and more prevalent. And I think too, the toxicity you're talking about that kinda is more recognized in conventional medicine, we kinda look more at body burden, right? Like these things are- What is the total load of these things over your lifetime? Right, this is building up and maybe not very high in someone's blood sample

when you check, but it's being stored in fat tissue and organs and things like that. Yeah. So now we have more testing and look at different metabolites in the urine and things like that, that would indicate that there's toxins in there. And it's true, you know, it affects a lot of different things. You know, my friend Joe Pizzorno wrote a book, I think it's called The Toxin Solution, maybe? Maybe that's not the title. Yes, you know this. Joe Pizzorno wrote a book, I think it's called The Toxin Solution, maybe? Maybe that's not the title. Joe Pizzorno. It's a great book, but he really went into the scientific literature.

This is not some, oh, you're toxic and you need to detox and it's some fad that'll die. This is really deep science about the role of environmental toxins in human health across everything from obesity and diabetes, which is a huge cause of that. We call these obesogens, right? To autoimmune disease you mentioned. At low levels, these can be immunotoxins and they're often called autogens as opposed to obesogens. They cause autoimmune disease. And they cause neurologic issues, whether it's autism or Alzheimer's or Parkinson's

or various kinds of neuropathy. It can cause gut issues, because it affects your ability to digest your food. It can cause hormonal issues, cancer, sex hormone issues. Environmental toxins are well recognized to be interfering with a lot of our cancers and being a contributor to cancers. And unlike you said, infertility.

So across a spectrum of diseases, whatever you show up in the doctor's office with, the likelihood that toxins are on the checklist to think about is pretty high. Right, right. And we do that, right, in our packet that we have everyone fill out. We do, at the Ultra Wellness Center. At the Ultra Wellness Center. We do a. And we do that, right? In our packet that we have everyone fill out. At the Ultra Wellness Center.

At the Ultra Wellness Center. We do a very detailed toxin history, right? Right. Like what, you know, are you getting exposed? Do you have an exterminator come in? Do you, you know, get your clothes dry cleaned? How often are you eating fish? What type of fish are you eating?

And just from a good health history, right? That really can key you in of like, okay, this is somewhere we have to look at. So, you know, just kind of being a detective, right. And having the time to spend with someone, I mean, just even here, you know, the doctors spend so much time with the patients going through everything, but when I meet with them for their food, you know, there's usually the first time they're telling what they're eating. And I'm like, you know, so you're eating tuna. How often? Twice a week. Oh my God. I have so many stories. I remember this guy was really poor once and he all he did was eat tuna every day and after like many years he was just mercury toxic and was chronically ill yeah you know just remind me this patient i had she she lived in the

bronx when she was a little kid and her family was very poor and uh she had cockroaches crawling all over her when she was a kid and mice and this and that. And she just was so obsessed with getting rid of all that. So, she moved to the suburbs in Long Island and she decided to have an exterminator come and spray in and out of her house every single month. And she had a huge barrel of atrazine, which is now banned, which is a toxin. And in her garage or, well, yeah, she had so much nasty stuff in there. And she had really bad Parkinson's at 50 years old. And I've seen this over and over when I hear people's stories.

Farming is a dangerous profession, not because of farm machinery, because of the exposure to chemicals, right? Glyphosate and all the pesticides. And we know that farmers have the highest rates of Parkinson's disease. So it can make you overweight. It can make you have diabetes.

It can cause heart disease. It can cause cancer. It can cause autoimmunity. It can cause neurologic issues. It can cause cognitive impairment. It can cause depression, chronic fatigue. I mean, you name it. I have chronic fatigue syndrome, among other things.

And so that was really sort of a wake-up call for me to really understand and study our body's detoxification system. But in traditional medicine, what's really done about this? Right. And well, that's the tricky thing too. You're talking about affecting the gut and gaining weight. I mean, your ability to detoxify starts going down. So you have this toxic burden and it's increasing and then people's guts are leaky and they're not eliminating as they should. And that toxic burden becomes that much more of an issue. So it's really a lot of it is obviously avoiding exposure where you can, which is tricky in this day and age, but also really ramping up the body's ability to detoxify. And again, nutrition is a

huge part of that. Yeah. And it's so interesting with traditional medicine because it's just off the radar. You know, like it's food. I mean, food doctors understand that food, you know, if you eat too much sugar, you get diabetes. And, you know, if you don't eat fiber, you get constipated. I mean, there's some understanding. There's like zero when it comes to the role of environmental toxins. Right. Is a focus for diagnosis or treatment. And in functional medicine,

we really focus on this extensively and we do it through, like you said, a very detailed history and through various kinds of testing. So we test a lot of things, both the load of toxins, we test our ability to detoxify, and we also look at genetics.

So can you talk about some of the diagnostics that we use that are different here at the Ultra Wellness Center and functional medicine? Right. Genetics is a really important one. I mean, it's never going to really give us a definitive diagnosis, but when people have, and we kind of get into it a little bit more with some of the food, certain genetic variations that compromise their ability to make something like glutathione, right? Glutathione is our most potent detox molecule. And there's some of us, we make it, but some of us don't make it very well given our genetics. So that's something called GSTM1. There's these certain SNPs and there are several in the detox category, several in the oxidative stress category, several in methylation,

and they're all connected to detoxification. Basically, you're talking about slight variations in our genes that affect our ability to detoxification. Basically, you're talking about it like slight variations in our genes that affect our ability to detox. Right, and I think we see those people, right? We're seeing the folks that are at a higher risk because of their genetics and not being able to detoxify. So even if we don't know their toxic load, if I see some of these genetic variations, I'm proactive and I put some more food or supplements

that are more directed towards their genetics, which is really the way, you know, functional medicine I think is, you know, going. So, the genetic testing is really important. We do a lot of different heavy metal testing, urine toxic metal testing, which is the provoked urine test. Yeah. That's what really looks at the body burden. So, there's a chelating agent, which basically binds on to heavy metals and will pull them out of the body. Because if you's a chelating agent which basically binds on to heavy metals and will pull them out of the body. Because if you just try to look at metals in the urine, unless you just had a really high exposure, right, you're not going to see it in the urine.

So this kind of pulls out what might be stored for someone. So it's looking at mercury and lead and arsenic and thallium. Mercury and lead are probably the ones we see most often. And checking your blood blood is that okay or you can check your blood i won't get into this case study i mean we do come we have folks that come back high in mercury and lead or arsenic um so you can check blood levels but you know blood's turning over what every three months or so so if you have ongoing exposure or you happen to catch it right when someone was getting a more acute exposure, you'll see it, but many times it's not there, right? Right. So, you have a normal blood test.

Right. But actually be storing all these metals in your tissues, your organs, your liver, your brain, your kidneys. And you know, the doctors will say, well, we checked your blood, it was fine. And you know, sort of like the joke where the guy, you know, has dropped his keys on the street and he's looking under this lamppost and his friend comes by and says, what are you doing? He says, I'm looking for my keys. He says, where did you drop them? Well, I dropped them down the street. He says, why are you looking over here? He goes, well, because the light's better. Well, that is not the right approach. Yeah, look in the shadows, right?

So, what happens in traditional medicine, we look at the blood test because that's what we do, but it's actually not necessarily the most accurate view of what's going on. Right, including with nutritional testing, right? You're not going to see a lot in the blood. So the functional testing we do with a lot of nutrients is very different. So, you know, that's a good example. Heavy metals, we do now what's known as a tri-mercury test, which I think is excellent. It's looking at recent exposure, so they're doing a blood test,

but they break it down between methylmercury and inorganic mercury. So methylmercury is typically the form that we're getting exposed to from environmental stuff like fish and food and, you know, if there's coal burning areas. Then inorganic mercury, if your amalgams, your silver fillings are maybe still off gassing, that's, you're going to see the inorganic mercury be high. So they're checking- So what you're saying basically is that if you have what's called silver fillings,

which are really mercury fillings, they're not silver, they're over 50% mercury, over the course of your life, you're chewing, you're chewing gum, you're grinding your teeth maybe, and they off gas. And we know this is true, and we can measure the mercury from your fillings, and when you see someone who has no fillings, they don't have any of this inorganic mercury. People have a mouthful of fillings. It's high.

And they get them out and the inorganic mercury goes away. And they get better off. Yeah, absolutely. So that's been really, this test has been really helpful for our practice over the last few years of trying to determine how much mercury that person is now getting exposed from their amalgams. And then they look at how well you're excreting it. So what are the levels in the urine and the hair? You might correct me, but I think inorganic is usually coming out through the urine. Methylmercury comes out through the hair.

So if you have some current exposure and you're also not seeing it get excreted, you can assume that person probably has a fairly high body burden. And we do this constantly. A lot of it is just more nutritional supplements and food, really support that person to detoxify, obviously get them to stop eating fish or, you know, if they need to get their amalgams out, get those out. But the mercury goes down and their clearance goes up. So that's been a really great test for mercury. It's very good. And you know, the whole thing about the fillings, I just want to sort of

jump back on that because you go to your dentist and go, oh, it's perfectly safe. It's fine. There's no studies on it. And they don't even consider it an issue. But the interesting fact is that most dentists don't use the mercury fillings anymore. They use the white fillings, even though they say it's fine. The other thing I often say to the patients that I have is, well, ask your doctor, why is it okay to put the mercury in your mouth?

But when they remove the filling, to put the mercury in your mouth. When they remove the filling, they can't throw in the garbage, it has to be regulated by the FDA as toxic waste. So it's okay in your mouth but it's not okay to throw in the garbage. Right. And it was really interesting is the FDA just came out with a statement September 24th which basically said that certain groups should not have fillings and that they're a higher risk from the off-gassing and the vapor from mercury fillings, including pregnant women, women who are

wanting to get pregnant, nursing women and their infants, children before six years old, people who have neurologic issues like we talked about, mercury-related ones like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, or MS, people with kidney issues, and people who have allergy to mercury. That is fascinating to me because this is a review to 20 years of data. And finally, the FDA. And the FDA is not a progressive group, right? For them to say this, you know it's got to be bad.

It's pretty bad, right? Now, it's freaky for people because they're going, wow, do I have to get my fillings out? Do I have to run to the dentist? Just a word of caution. You do not want to go get your fillings out unless you do it with a dentist who follows specific guidelines that are designed to create a safer removal of the malicum. So, you need a special dental dam so you don't swallow them. You need high-speed suction.

You need breathing oxygen. The dentist should be wearing a mask. There's all these precautions that need to be taken and they're usually done by biological dentists and there's a website called iaomt.org which is a dentist toxicology group that is trained to do this properly, you can find a dentist in your area. But I think that you know, if you have any chronic issues, if you have high levels, you can do the tri test which we do here at the Ultra Wellness Center but it's really important to make sure that you are doing it properly. And I would never, if you're getting new fillings, never get silver fillings. So this is shocking to me that the FDA

is finally, you know, in September. Shocking and sad, right? Like it's taken this long. Well, yeah, because it's so politically heated because all of a sudden you've got millions and millions of people with these silver fillings in and you're going to have a run on dentist and people are going to freak out. And it's not a cheap procedure to take these out either, right? So it's not easy for everyone, even if you can find a dentist. But yeah, I mean, and to your point about I've had several patients over the years say I've had these in for 40 years and we test them and they're still off-gassing.

So, you know, it's definitely a big issue for a lot of folks. So that probably is the most testing. We do look at, you know, solvents and pesticides. The testing's been a little bit harder for some of that. Some of the labs we can't get like we did before, you know, with COVID. I think there's just been some issues, but we do use Great Plains quite a bit for looking at different metabolites again of pesticides and solvents um one of the labs that we use through cyrex who's typically our food sensitivity testing um company they check for

antibodies or immune reactions to toxins so you don't necessarily have really high levels of these toxins but small amounts can provoke the immune system for some people. So when someone's got an immunity and we're suspecting toxins, if they're coming back reactive to a lot of different, again, they're looking at like benzene, which is a solvent for maldehyde, different parabens and metals. When they're showing reactive, we know, okay, we got to work with this person to help them detoxify to calm down their immune system because that's definitely something that's driving their inflammation. So that's been a really helpful

test. I mean, it's a little harder than, for example, like if your blood sugar is high and you're eating donuts and bagels and having soda every day, you kind of know that's why it's happening. Well, if you have a chronic illness, you don't 100% know if it's the mercury or the pesticides or the chemicals. And so, you kind of have to design a way of living that is a low toxin lifestyle. And I think, you know, I would like to go through a few cases of how we sort of would approach these patients. But we really focus on, one, identifying the source,

two, identifying the patient's own burden of toxins, the patient's ability to detoxify. And then we focus on how to upregulate the body's own detox systems and remove the toxins. And I remember one case of a woman who had all these issues and she really, really had lead levels. And and i'm like where's the lead coming from she's a very wealthy lady and i was like where it's coming from and it was just hard to figure out and finally sort of asking questions well you know uh what kind of glasses do you have and what kind of plates do you have

and yeah because i remember walking once to buy wine glasses in our local kitchen shop and there was the five dollar wine glasses and there were the $50 wine glasses and the Rydell crystal wine glasses were $50. I'm like, why are these so expensive for one glass? He's all because they're made with lead and they help the wine taste better with the lead. And I'm like, okay then. Pay for your toxins. Yeah.

So she had all these crystal pitchers and crystal glasses that were full of lead. And I'm like, okay then. So she had all these crystal pitchers and crystal glasses that were full of lead. She had all these plates that were designer plates from Italy and France that had these glaze that was lead glaze. We got rid of all that stuff and she stopped using it and her lead levels came way down. Yeah. Yeah. So, and that's the thing though, right? It takes asking some questions and doing a little detective work to figure out. So once you get an exposure, it is, you know, you know, there's a high level where, where is it coming from? Which again, you can't always determine, but, but many times you can. And, and again, I think the food quality, we'll talk over that with the case studies, but, you know, are obviously you want to avoid foods that are sprayed and everything, but like Joe Pizzorno

talks a lot about this is that once foods are sprayed, you know, the natural compounds that you make, these phytochemicals that work as antioxidants and are really important for our detox pathways are not nearly as prevalent because they don't make as many of those phytonutrients when plants are sprayed with these chemicals. So when you buy organic, local, you know, sustainable food, you're minimizing the toxins coming in, but you're also now getting more medicine. So you're getting a double benefit. Right, exactly.

So you're getting more of the chemicals that help you heal and detoxify and less of the toxins. Right. And the reason the wild organic foods have more of these protective chemicals is they have to work harder to stay alive. Right, they got to protect themselves, right. They're not given all kinds of like chemicals like pesticides and herbicides that make it easier for them to

survive. Right, exactly. So the chemicals they make to protect themselves from environmental insults like pests are good for us. So you kind of want them to be being exposed to stuff because then the food quality is so much better. And that's, I think, the conundrum we're in is that there's more toxins and our food is not protecting us like it used to be able to. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. One of the best ways you

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