Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 375 - Drug Screen Actor's Guild

Episode Date: September 19, 2019

Do drug screen "accelerants" work? (tl;dr: NO) Also some nut calls with an awful recipe for the worst sandwich ever. Also more vaping news and skeletons that move under their own power (sort of). PLEASE VISIT: stuff.doctorsteve.com (for all your online shopping needs!) simplyherbals.net (Dr Scott’s nasal rinse is here!) noom.doctorsteve.com (lose weight, gain you-know-what) tweakedaudio.com offer code “FLUID” (best CS anywhere) premium.doctorsteve.com (all this can be yours!) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I don't have any corrections from last time. Sometimes I say stupid things. So let's see what kind of show we got today. The vaping crisis continues. This is from Washington Post. Health officials in California confirmed another patient has died of a vaping-related illness

at least the seventh reported death associated with national outbreak of serious lung diseases related to vaping or using e-cigarettes. Now, this one is interesting. So now people in the emergency rooms and the medical examiners are familiar with this vaping situation. So read this and just see what you think.

An unnamed Tilleri County man died of, quote, complications regarding to the use of e-cigarettes, unquote. According to the County Health and Human Services Agency, the 40-year-old had been in the hospital for several weeks before his death, said the department spokeswoman. He had a history of vaping. The Winslow said officials were still investigating. what products he used. Though his death certificate would state he died due to vaping,

the spokesperson said the man also had, quote, some complicating illnesses that she could not disclose to the post. Family members said the man died on Saturday. The man had been using both nicotine, e-cigarettes, and THC vape products. Contrary to what the health department spokeswoman said, the man became ill only two days before he died. And he drove himself to the hospital. They put him on a breathing machine because he was unable to breathe, the family member said.

The doctor told family members the death was due to vaping. Family gathered vaping products for the man's home in his car. One product they found in his car was a black box with gold lettering. And I don't want to give the brand because I don't want to, I don't know if that had anything to do with this. The death was announced Monday the same day. Governor Gavin Newsom took executive action to crack down on e-cigarette use in California, where at least one other vaping-related fatality has been reported in Los Angeles County. Health officials in Tulare County did not disclose the patient's age for the type of e-cigarette

product this patient had used. So far, the county has had three reports of pulmonary illnesses linked to vaping. So just to start from this, this guy used vapes. He had some other complicating illness. You know, it could have been emphysema or he could have had pneumonia or had a myocardial infarction. Who knows? So they, before an autopsy is done, you just go in, okay, so somebody dies and you go in their car and you find a vape pen. You go, aha, aha.

You know, that's, you're literally leaping, you know, that's a little leaping, you know, that's a literal leap in logic and until they do an autopsy that shows that there was some lung damage that they can only attribute to say vitamin E acetate or vitamin D whatever the hell it is or one of the oils or some of these weird essential oils that people are putting in here and then inhaling into their lungs it's not a I don't think this is newsworthy it's tragic 40-year-old guy died. Don't get me wrong. But to leap to the conclusion that it was vape related just because there were vape pens in his

car, it may be. But we don't have any real evidence of that other than he vaped. And who, you know, let's ask I still, and I apologize, I haven't changed the name of my Amazon device in here yet. So I'm going to use the A word. I'm just letting you know. Alexa, how many people vape in the United States? States. Oh, well, go fuck yourself too. Alexa.

Well, she's not functioning. Okay, let me do it a different way then, much less interesting way. How many people vape in the U.S.? Little show prep wouldn't a hurt? Okay, the number of vapors has been increasing rapidly from about 7 million in 2011 to 41 million in 2018. Okay, so that gives us a number we can work with. 41 million have vaped.

There have been seven fatalities. So let's see if I can do it this way. Oh, come on. You know, everything is... What is seven divided by 41 million? What is 7 divided by 41 million? Goodness. It's about 1.707 3 times 10 to the negative 7th power.

Holy moly. Multiply that times 100. The answer is about 1.7073 times 10 to the negative 5th power. So that's the percentage. of people who have died from even if they are vaping. Now, let's find the number of people have been harmed, though. California case came a week after the death of a Kansas resident, which was believed to be the sixth such day death nationwide.

Health officials in Indiana, Illinois, Oregon, and Minnesota have also reported fatalities from sudden onset illnesses that officials link to vaping. Now, even if there's a one in 10 billion chance, I'm not going to do it. And we still don't know. This is the short-term effects. We still don't know the long-term effects. But I'm going to calculate the number needed to harm here in just a second.

At least 380 cases of lung illnesses have been reported, according to the last available tally from the centers of disease control. Okay, so 380 cases of lung-related illness. So really, we can just divide the total number of cases by the, I'm sorry, the total number of people who vape divided by the number of cases to give the number of people that need to vape before we get one case. So let's do that. Let's see. What is 41 million divided by 380? It's about 107,894.7368.

Okay, so about 100,000 right now, 100,000 plus or minus people would have to vape before you got one case of a serious illness. That's still a lot of illness. It's 380 illnesses. It's not an epidemic. They can call it an outbreak. And we don't know, and this is what I've always said, before these kind of acute cases came up, because this has got to be something different. They've changed a process or someone in some factory has changed something

because people have been vaping for quite some time now. And I remember way back in the day, R.J. Reynolds was going to come up with an electronic cigarette. And the FDA said, no, then you know, you can't market something that's, quote, a safe for cigarette. It's just like you can't put vitamins in wine, in cheap wine, to keep the alcoholics from developing Marnocki-Korzikov syndrome. Don't worry about what that is, but it's vitamin-related because, oh, now then you can market it as saying it's good for you, you know? So it's really counterintuitive in the same way that we can prevent HIV by giving people natals so that they're not sharing needles. but, oh, no, you're encouraging drug abuse. No, we're trying to...

So your argument is, if we give people needles, we're going to encourage drug abuse, but your answer is to just let people keep getting viruses, you know, blood-borne viruses, because they're sharing needles because they're in short supply. That's just an asinine answer to this. Obviously, needle programs, it's not the only answer, to our nation's drug abuse problem,

but it is something that we can do to decrease the harm that's being done by our nation's drug abuse problem while we're working on, you know, abstinence and catching people before they start and then treatment programs after they start. And don't even get me started with this BS with the poor chronic pain patients who are particularly in a certain federal program

that are being denied significant amounts of pain medication. I can't even talk about the case that I'm thinking about because it's something that we may go wider with, but it's some of the answers to questions that we come up with are just nonsensical and asinine. Oh, no, let's not vaccinate 12-year-old girls for HPV because somehow we're encouraging them to have sex because now they don't have the fear of getting HPV and cervical cancer. Go F yourself.

We're doing it at 12 to try to catch them before they have sex so that later on when they do and they're exposed to HPV, which a significant, well, let's just ask Siri that one. It's more fun to do this. I know the answer, but it's more fun to hear her say it. What is the prevalence of HPV in the United States? Uh-oh. Well, okay. Well, that's not the problem.

In 2017, the total number of people diagnosed with viral warts in the United States was about 6.17 million people. Hmm. So they're saying, okay, that's just for. warts. They're saying, you know, one in 139 persons, that's not, that's not right. It's higher than that. But anyway, and herpes is a significant fraction as well.

So, you know, the odds are if you have more than one sexual partner and they have had more than one sexual partner, that you will eventually be exposed to HPV. and if we can just knock out the varieties that cause cancer, what's the harm in that? There's no harm. There's nothing but benefit. And we're already starting to see a decrease in the number of precancerous lesions in women who are getting their pap smears done.

So that's awesome. Anyway, all right. So the CDC cautions, the health experts do not yet know the cause of these illnesses and have not isolated. a single e-cigret product as the underlying culprit. The agency said there's been no evidence of a common infectious cause, because that would be, you know, if there was one factory that was producing some oil and it had some fungus in it or something like that,

that would be interesting and easy to fix. But, yeah, this current outbreak is something, somebody's doing something different, and that's where the epidemiologists come in. Epidemiologists are people that look at the spread of disease and try, they're sort of detectives. The first epidemiologist was a physician in London who figured out a cholera outbreak

was coming from a single well in the middle of London, which pretty cool. That was the birth of a modern epidemiology. Therefore, they suspect that a form of chemical exposure has made the patients ill. Officials have rushed to respond to a sudden rash of respiratory illnesses among otherwise healthy people have used e-cigarettes or other vaping products.

Last week, the president announced that his administration would move to ban most e-cigarettes. Okay, okay. I'm sorry. Look, you all who have listened to this show, no, I am not a fan of vaping, right? I make fun of these people with these giant clouds of stuff that they're tooting into their lungs. We know that the long-term effects are unknown. but let's just ask Siri this question. How many people smoke cigarettes in the United States?

The answer is 23.9%. Damn, you all. Cut the shit. One in four are still smoking? Wow. Okay, females is down. They're down to 21.5. Okay. So, So, let's see. What's the population of the United States? Sorry. Okay, $327 million. As of 2018, the population of United States of America was $327,167,434.

Okay, all right, all right. Okay, so what is $207,167,434? 24% of 327 million. It's 78,480,000. Okay, so that's how many people are currently smoking in the United States. Let's see. Let's just do, okay. What is the prevalence of lung cancer in smokers?

Here's what I found. Okay, that's not good. Let's just do for the last year, okay? How many lung cancer deaths have there been in the last year? We're not even looking at... Here's what I found. Oh, for God's sake. All right.

Let me see. How common is lung cancer? Okay, so there's 228,000 new cases of lung cancer. That's about equal between men and women in about 140,000. 2,000 deaths from lung cancer. So, without even doing the math, which do you think is more of a threat to society? In the cigarettes, automobiles, or vape pens. Now, it may turn out vape pens are a very serious threat to society.

If we find out that all these millions of people end up with some sort of permanent scarring of their lungs way down the road, that's down the road I do think they should be manufactured under FDA auspices and using chemicals or

products that are known to be safe and in the combinations that they're given if we're going to do this but to just move to ban this it doesn't seem like the right answer either. So I don't know what the right answer is. I think that vaping is goofy and it may be dangerous. Obviously, there is something going on when you've got 380 people and the one common denominator amongst all of them with this particular syndrome are vape pens. So let's get the

epidemiologists out. They're on it. CDC's on it. They will find out what's causing this. And if it's something not characteristic of the vaping. In other words, if it's something you can change, you can just swap out this oil for a different one, then, you know, go for it. And make them safe because obviously,

well, I think it's obvious. It may not be. Vaping has a potential to be much safer than cigarettes in the sense that you're not inhaling products of combustion. Now, we've got to show that the things that they are inhaling are less dangerous, than the products of combustion.

In other words, carbon monoxide and tar and all the other stuff that you get when you inhale smoke. Because those are things that are carcinogenic. The nicotine contributes to heart disease. But, you know, you can ratchet down if you've got just a solution, you can ratchet down the nicotine

to any number you want to just put none in. So we will see. But I'm concerned about the reporting of this. I'm concerned about some of the knee-jerk reactions, only in the sense that they're not scientific. I'm not a fan of vaping. Okay, I've said that about 20 times, so you already know that. But anyway, all right.

Oh, I had another interesting news report. Researchers studying the process of decomposition in a body after death from natural causes found that without... Oh, wait, let me do this. Without, without any external assistance, human remains can change their position. Ooh, scary kids. This discovery has important implications for forensic science, you think? Often forensic scientists will assume that the position in which they find a dead body is the one the person was in the time of death.

Unless, that is, there is evidence that external factors such as scatural factors such as scatine, or a perpetrator may have altered it. However, new research led by Alison Wilson in Australia now suggests human bodies can actually be somewhat restless after death, which, by the way, there has been evidence for years that the whole vampire myth came from the natural process of decomposition because they bury somebody. And if they dug them up later, they would find, oh, oh, wait. Oh, their fingernails grew after their demise. And what it really is is they're not growing. So growth of the fingernails and the nail bed stops. It does not continue.

What happens, though, is that as you decompose, the tissue around the nail shrinks and retracts, giving the illusion that the nails have grown. okay so if the cuticle and the tissue around it loses its fat and the fluid in it and retracts that will make the nail look like it's moving forward so that's that also these ideas of people being buried alive when they open them up and then they're like in a different position than they put them in oh we must have buried this person alive or they are out oh shit they are vampir that they that they were in there in you know moving around and growing their fingernails and their teeth they'll do the same thing the gums will retract and make it look like the teeth are growing so this discovery which they've not yet reported in a paper they published so i always love these pre publication pre peer review uh articles in the in the just regular journalism um is that

linked to a larger product concerning a project concerning the use of time-lapse imaging techniques to estimate the time since death. This latter project's findings appear in Forensic Science International, colon, synergy. Wow, that's an awesome title for a medical journal talking about looking at dead bodies. I was once a medical examiner when I lived in Vermont, and I got the, journal of the medical examiners society, whatever, and they would have interesting articles in there about, you know, toxicology and stuff.

But there was always two or three articles about the most horrendous deaths that they could come up with. There was pictures of people have been run over by 18 wheelers, and it just showed, you know, their chest with this big divot. You know, it was like a normal chest

and then just this big depression where the wheel was, and they'll show pictures like that. or they had a guy that gave himself a concrete enema and died from that because I don't know if you're aware of this. Those of you who have ever worked with concrete know that it is an exothermic reaction, meaning that when you mix those things up with water and as it starts to harden, it gives off heat. So if you give yourself a concrete enema, it will cook you from the inside. And that guy died. There was another person.

They had images of people who had died by autoerotic exfixiation with the Hansen video still on the thing. And a couple of them, the most notable one I remember, was a guy had given himself a champagne enema and then got alcohol intoxication or, sorry, alcohol intoxication and was doing autoerotic asphyxiation, which if you don't know, they strangled themselves. and what this guy was doing he didn't have a device he just had a noose and he would lean against it while he masturbated watching these videos and he passed out and that was the end of that so and they love this stuff i mean it's all it's all tragic no question about it but um i don't want to say they love it they revel in it you know here's another just horrendous death that we investigated well anyway so they love doing this stuff uh for the research the investigators had access to a donated human body, a mature male who died of natural causes. The researchers recorded the body's full decomposition within the premises of the Australian facility. God, I'm having a rough day today. I didn't get any sleep last night. I apologize.

The Australian facility for taffinomic experimental research after. Oh, how clever. The only body farm in Australia. There's one in Tennessee. They have a body farm where they just, you can donate your body to that and they'll just plant you in different poses and in different stages of being buried and watch, you know, what bugs eat you at what stage and that kind of stuff. And that has value because if only a dermested beetle is cleaning up your bones, that's the

only bug that's going to be inhabiting your body at, you know, say the end stage, and they can kind of look at when they find a body in the wild, they can see what bugs. And if it's just dermested beetles, well, they can say, well, it's been at least nine months or whatever. You know, I'm just throwing out numbers, but the findings from research projects, such as the current one, often help forensic scientists develop more accurate ways of determining essential information, including time or place of death at a crime scene. So in this research, the investigators were able to make sure that scavenging animals

that might feed on decaying flesh, delightful, could not reach the body and thus alter its position. Sure, if you're being gnawed on by, you know, a pack of raccoons, they're going to move you around a little bit. The team took photos of the decomposition process of the body over more than 17 months

and found that the remains appeared to move to move on that own. For instance, while they initially placed the arms alongside the body at one point, the researchers note the arms shifted and were flung

to one side. Must be ghosts. We think the movement relate to the process of decomposition? Oh, really? As the body mummifies and ligaments dry out, yes, of course. Wilson and colleagues believe that understanding when such shifts are likely to occur during the process of decomposition could help forensic scientists provide more accurate estimates of the time of death. Yeah, sure. If you find a body that is in a place where animals could not get to it, then if the arms are flung around, maybe that always happens at two months. who knows.

All right, very good. Okay, let's answer some medical questions. Number one thing, don't take advice from some asshole on the radio. Thank you very much, Ronnie B. I couldn't agree more. No bigger asshole than me. Hey, Dr. Steve, I just want to know if the ketogenic diet is the way to go. This is Tim from Iowa.

I'm a truck. Okay, for what? Remember, we always talk about that. You know, people say, is vitamin D good? Well, what do you want to accomplish? Do you want to not get rickets? Then vitamin D is awesome. Let me see.

Okay, I can't answer that. All right. Let's let him finish his question. So the question, it just depends. Driver, pretty active when I'm not driving, although my job is very sedentary. I did lower my A1C from 8.1 down to 6.2 in about a month. So I just wanted to.

Okay, so what he's talking about? He's getting a good applause break there. He's talking about his hemoglobin A1C, which is a measure of diabetes control. So when you, I think most people are familiar with hemoglobin, it's the oxygen-carrying molecule in red blood cells. And it's also a plant, you know, heme is a plant-based molecule that they use in Impossible burgers to make them bleed. And I thought it was kind of gross that they put heem in there, but it is plant-based heem because, you know, nature is very conservative in the sense that if it can use a molecule somewhere, it can use it somewhere else, it'll use it somewhere else.

So plants have heem and we have heem. And we have hemoglobin, and these are these complexes that also have this wonderful property of being able to capture oxygen molecules and then releasing them other places in the body. So the other thing that hemoglobin will do, though, is collect sugar molecules, and they'll build up over time because red blood cells last, you know,

90 to 150 days in your bloodstream normally, unless you've got a disease. So therefore, the amount of sugar that these hemoglobin molecules will collect will be a function of an average blood sugar over a period of time. So the lower, the number, the better as far as diabetic control is concerned. So this guy brought his down from, let's back this up from... In about a month, I'm 8.1 down to 6.2.

Yeah, so he went from really abnormal to being pretty much normal. normal. In about a month. So I just wanted to follow up with you and see if you had any advice for us. Sure. So low carbohydrate diets, particularly for diabetics, are a way that you can induce diet control of your diabetes a lot of the time. I'm talking about type 2 diabetics.

Type 1 diabetics don't have insulin. Dietary management, you know, they've got to eat the right things, but they've really have to, they have to be checking their blood sugars frequently and dosing themselves to keep their blood sugar down. That's why this artificial pancreas is really an important step forward where you have a constant blood sugar monitoring and then constant amount of insulin that's being adjusted based on the peaks and valleys of the blood sugar. So that'll be a great advance until we can get real pancreas and do islet cell

transplants. islet cells are the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas, when we can successfully transplant those into a type 1 diabetic and they function, then that'll be a functional cure for type 1 diabetes, and that's coming. So type 2 diabetes are folks that have loss of insulin sensitivity. A lot of times this is genetic can be related to weight, but it's really related very often to carbohydrate intake. So you're taking a lot of carbs.

You get an insulin spike. You're with the glucose spike. And if the insulin spikes, if you're not just tuned up perfectly, if the insulin overshoots, then your blood sugar will drop and the body will start to turn down the sensitivity to that

blood sugar signal. Because the body doesn't like low blood sugar. It doesn't particularly enjoy high blood sugar, it really in the acute phase really doesn't like low blood sugar because there's not enough energy available to do just the day-to-day work of the body. So when you get this low blood sugar situation, the body's response to that is to turn down

the sensitivity to that signal until now you're getting these high blood sugar spikes and the body doesn't respond at all. So those people have high insulin levels and they have high blood sugar. blood sugar levels and that's type 2 diabetes so one thing that you can do is increase your exercise to burn up more sugar burn out some glycogen and some fat cells and try a lower carbohydrate diet and what that basically does is erase those blood sugar spikes and when you do that the body starts to tune itself back up again and turn on the sensitivity to the insulin signal because there aren't these wide variations in blood sugar anymore.

And over time, you can actually, some people, not everybody, can go off their medication and just stay on a lower carbohydrate diet. Now, there are low-carb diets and there's low-carb diets. You will lose weight if you do this, what I call the Hillbilly Atkins diet, which is what we see around here with, you know, my relatives, is, you know, well, I just eat steak. and bake and put mayonnaise and cheese on it

and that you will lose weight and your blood sugars will normalize on that diet but it's not a healthy diet the reason they're losing weight is because they're malnourished they're missing out on all kinds of macro and micronutrients and then they wonder why they're shitting bricks with this constipation

because they're getting no fiber in their diet so a proper I'm a fan of all kinds of different diets I don't think there's one particular diet that is perfect for humans vegan diets have their thing and low but I've seen fat vegans too

eating all those potatoes and pasta and stuff so a low carbohydrate diet with plenty of green leafy vegetables and lean animal protein and there are really no bad fat

but but there are good fats. Some fats are better than others. So using extra virgin olive oil that I like to get at Abingdon, an oil company, a little plug for them, or someplace like that that that produces, you know, the highest quality

virgin olive oils because you can actually cook with those. A lot of chefs to say, well, you can't cook with the virgin olive oil. And yes, you can if it's produced, you know, the stuff that you get in a big giant can is not going to be as great as some of

stuff that's very carefully prepared. But anyway, so olive oil, mono-unsaturated fats, and polyunsaturated fats like canola oils and things like that are really, those kinds of fats are actually probably good for you. So, in moderation.

So lots of green leafy vegetables, lean animal protein, and, yeah, go easy on the saturated and trans fats. We've talked about this before. Trans fats bad.

Trans everything else? I'm all in. No, but trans fats are bad. And, you know, solid fats in and hydrogenated oils and stuff. You can see that on packaging. If you see hydrogenated vegetable oil, what they're doing is turning perfectly good fats into bad fats by hydrogenating them. What it does, it turns them solid. And a little bit easier to work with.

if you're trying to make something that's not just a goopy mess. So, anyway, it's good for food texture and not so good for your health. Now, Mediterranean diet? You know, I do this Noom thing. And one of the things I liked about it was they said, look, there's no one right diet. It's whatever diet works for you as long as it's healthy. And they encourage people, you know, try a keto, try paleo, try Mediterranean diet. There's data that shows that it's good.

be a vegan there's definitely data that shows that it's good so um you know just find something that works for you get you to your ideal body weight and doesn't make you ill and uh it's all about just mitigating risk all right hey buddy let me tell you something i got this condition around my my extremities you know where your knee is and your elbow is you know that's In there that's on the, you know, your skin, right? Yep. I got this shit that can only be described as like a chicken skin, you know? I don't know what the fuck today.

He's all bumpy and like itches and it's dry. Yep. I mean, it's like a plucked chicken. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I got it. It's dry skin dermatitis and you will get some of these things sometimes around places where where there's a lot of stretching and twisting, particularly elbows and knees,

exactly as you said, as you're stretching and relaxing the skin over those areas, they can get thickened. The supermodels, look, supermodels may not always be road scholars. Some of them are. But what they are geniuses, and have genius IQs on, is supermodel stuff. And back in the day, what every supermodel was using on their skin was this stuff called NIVA, N-I-V-E-A.

And they would just slather it over their skin to keep their skin smooth and supple. If it's good enough for them, and that's their business, you know, if their skin starts looking blotchy, at least now with Photoshop, you can do something about it. But, you know, you didn't want to be walking down a runway with scabby knees and stuff. So they will use that stuff. The other thing, there's this stuff called Bagbaum. that's also a skin moisturizer. And then the most extreme of them all is a thing that you can buy at Amazon. You can go to stuff.

Dottersteve.com if you want to. And it's called lanelor. It's L-A-N-O-L-R. And it's pure lanolin cream. And lanolin, not for vegans, because I believe it's sheep derived. But it is an incredible. skin moisturizer and

softener and you can use it like if you have those fingers and they crack and stuff we used to give people

lanelora and they'd say it was the only thing that ever helped them so you could try that

and if none of that works then see a dermatologist because you may actually have a condition you know it's not impossible that what you're

describing is actually psoriasis okay all right very good um I want to oh yeah

let's do this one yeah I got a question for you. I ask a lot of people this, and most of them say they hate the idea, but only a Southern woman would appreciate this. What would you think about a sandwich made out a white wonder bread with mayonnaise and pepper and fried chicken skin?

Do you think that that would be delicious, and do you think that it would have any nutritional value? I mean, you got all the boot with it. Bride chicken skin sandwich. Mmm. All right, very good. A fried chicken skin sandwich. So you would have to fry the bread for me to touch Wonderbread, though, because I'm not touching that stuff.

We used to call that robot death bread back in the day. So I got out of that in college and never gone back. But there are fans of Wonderbread. So I went to very well, oh, what is this website? very well fit.com and they have a nutrition calculator so you could put a recipe in and it will print you out one of those nutritional labels like you see on food right so I put in two pieces of white bread one tablespoon of mayonnaise and then I couldn't find fried chicken skin so I used bacon so two strips of bacon so it's not perfect but okay so one serving of this is 370 calories

It's not the worst. Total fat is 29 grams, which would be 37% of your average daily. And I would say chicken skin, particularly if you get several pieces of it, it's going to be more than two. Let's multiply that times two. Saturated fat 5.5 grams is 28% of your average daily value. So if you eat three males a day, you're getting a third. Sodium, 24%. let me hit the

had to hit the old cough button there sorry 26 grams of carbs so obviously because of the wonder bread this would not be good for a low carb diet dietary fiber is zero so this will not help your stools

total sugars 4 grams not that bad let's get to the to the nutritional value of it though vitamin D is zero calcium 23% iron 8% and potassium zero.

And I'll tell you this, they ain't no vitamin C in this either. This, you know, for a treat every once in a while, you could maybe have a chicken skin sandwich. When I eat at Kentucky Fried Kernel, I like nothing more than eating the skin

off the original recipe. Anyway, all right. Let's hit this one. Hey, Dr. Steve, what's gone? And I just have a quick question for you. Long story short, I was over 350, 360 pounds, started doing keto, got down to about 270 in about six months.

I decided to join the local fire department in New York, so of course everything is volunteer. I do have to take a drug test, and about four weeks ago, I was still using the THC cartridges, Now that everyone's dying off that stuff, and the fact that did the fire department, I stopped that about four weeks, stopped off at Amazon and bought some drug tests, and I'm still popping positive. So I don't know if you had any insight of how to clean the system out. I'm hearing checking water. I'm hearing detox pills, and I'm hearing detox pills don't work. So I'm curious if you had any insight to help me to make sure I can pass this thing as I've been clean, I've been clean, but still popping positive. I know that they said, the bigger you are, the longer it can take.

Yep. It's fat soluble. So trying to lose the weight on top of that, too, which is helping. But any inside would be great. Thanks. Yeah, you're absolutely right. So THC is fat soluble, which becomes a reservoir. So if, and fat soluble just means what it sounds like.

It can be stored in fat cells and then re-release to the body over time, which is why there is this real iniquity. in drug testing in this country. I'll posit this to you again. Would you rather, as an employer, have an employee who is all coked up on Monday at work and had a negative drug test on Wednesday? Or someone that smoked pot on the weekend

two weeks ago and stayed in the house and listened to music, but was positive on their urine drug screen on Wednesday. This shit, there's not justice in this. I think anyone, and you've got to pick one of the other. I think most people would choose to employ the person who smokes a little pot on the weekends rather than the one that was coked up at work and had a negative. But that's the way it would go, or it could go that way.

So, because cocaine is out of your system a lot quicker than THC is. Now, I'm concerned that the urine drug screens that you're using, I mean, I know they don't sell joke urine drug screens, but you may just go grab a different one at CVS or something and just see. Those are not as sensitive, by the way, as the ones that they will use at work. And there's cross-reactivity and other things, and they're not perfect. So get a different brand and see because really after 30 days, you should be below the threshold of detectability, even if you are a chronic heavy user. So if you use once, it might be out of your system in a week. If you're using it three times a week, it might be two to three weeks. And if you're a chronic heavy user, everyday user, it can take 30 days, maybe six weeks.

And they're getting more and more sensitive. And let me tell you something about these accelerants. or things to accelerate the clearance, it doesn't work. You could drink a lot of water, but remember this stuff isn't water-soluble, it's fat-soluble. And so that's not going to help you very much. They do say, you know, void your bladder right before you go in and drink some water. Now, what they're looking for, though, they're not stupid, okay? The people who are testing you listen to the same podcast you're listening to, at least some of them do.

and they have access to the same information on the internet that you do. So what do they do? They can test for a golden seal because that's out there. That golden seal will help clear. So they'll test for that. If you test positive for that, that's a red flag to them that you're trying to get out of, you're trying to accelerate the clearance of drugs from your system. Nyacin's another one that I've seen. They can test you for that as well.

So, be cognizant that these things that you're taking to clear, and they'll look for hyper-deluded urine as well. You know, people have just drank a gallon of water before they went, and don't do that. We already know from the water challenge that that's dangerous, so don't drink so much water that you're going to make yourself sick. So, but after, you know, 30 to 60, well, 30 days to 45,000. days you should be clean if you were a chronic user of vape pens. And remember the THC in those things is very potent and therefore it's going to hang around longer. And if, yeah, just like you said, if you're a big dude, it's going to last a little bit longer. So just give it some more time. Go get a different brand of urine drug test and do it. And then if it turns out to be positive

and they give you a hard time, you can always say, well, that's not possible. Don't say any more than that, don't lie. Just say, oh, that's not possible. We've got to test me again. And you may fall under the threshold at that point, particularly if you were very low. Let me through, while we're talking about this, there are employers out there that say, look, you can use all the CBD you want because it's legal if it's hemp derived. But if you test positive for THC, we're going to fire you anyway. Some of the T8, or the CBD oil out there, well, it should have no more than 0.3% THC in it. So it's like men have a lot of testosterone, a little bit of estrogen. Females have a lot of estrogen, a little bit of testosterone. You know, cannabis, setiva plants or pot plants have a lot of

THC and a little bit of CBD, and the converse is true for hemp plants. So the FDA has said that some of the CBD that you're buying from maybe some of the more fly-by-night places may have more THC in it than they're allowing and they can yank it from the market if they see it. But if you've got it on your shelf and you're taking it, you test positive at work, and they have a zero tolerance policy and they don't give a shit whether you're taking CBD or not, they just know you tested positive for THC. That's going to be a problem for you. Now, the answer for that is to find someone that has seen the data on the CBD oil that they're

selling. And this will normally be in a pharmacy. So I have a friend who is in the business of making CBD oil. And I've seen their data. I mean, they send it off to be analyzed and you can see it. And when it comes back, then they can dilute it to using MCT oil, is what they use, is medium chain try to glyceride oil to dilute it to whatever concentration they want. So if their oil that they press or isolate has 2,000 milligrams per ML,

then they can dilute it to 1,500, 250, 125, and sell those things separately. And you can look at the GC mass spec, and it will tell you exactly how much CBD is in there, how much other things, how much THC is there. So you want to be able to see that, or at least be able to trust that the person that you're dealing with has seen it and knows that what you're getting is not going to get you in trouble at work, okay? So do that, and very important because I don't want you guys to get in trouble. Because, you know, CBD oil has a lot of interesting salutary effects for different things, including preventing seizures and kids with refractory seizures,

decent for sleep, decent for anxiety. I'm a fan, but you've got to get the right stuff. And when you're buying it from, I don't know, some fly-by-night place, and you know what they are, and you know who you are, be careful because they may be perfectly honest, but whoever is selling to them is not. So you want to vet your supplier until this stuff gets regulated a little bit more. All right. Hey, thanks for being with us this week. We can't forget Rob Sprantz. Bob Kelly, Greg Hughes, Anthony Coomia, Jim Norton, Travis Tep, Lewis Johnson, Paul Fatscharski, Eric Nagel, Roland Campo, Sam Roberts, Pat Duffy, Dennis Falcone,

Ron Bennington, and Fizz Wattley, whose early support of this show has never gone unappreciated. Listen to our SiriusXM show on the Faction Talk channel, SiriusXM Channel 103, Saturdays at 8 p.m. Eastern, Sunday at 5 p.m. Eastern, on demand, another time at Jim McClure's pleasure. Many thanks to our listeners whose voicemail and topic ideas make this job very easy. And go to our website at Dr. Steve.com for schedules, podcasts, and other crap. Until next time, check your stupid nuts for lumps, quit smoking, get off your asses and get some exercise. We'll see you in one week for the next edition of Weird Medicine. Thank you.