86: Toxic Overload – The Hidden Chemicals Making You Sick with Dr. Christian Jenski

It's not sequestered to the common areas that you think it would be. Oh, this product is clearly toxic or this chemical is clearly toxic. So I can easily avoid those. I mean, it's in the air, it's in our water, it's in our food. And although that sounds incredibly daunting and scary and makes you feel like, well, then I can't do anything, the reality is, is that you can do quite a bit. And that's the point of what we're doing today is, is to kind of inform individuals about where to find these, what you can do about it and how to detoxify your life in this toxic world that we live in.

Welcome back once again to Made for health. It's myself, Dr. Aaron Hartman and my colleague in crime, Dr. Christian Jensky. Hello. Yeah. And we're going to talk about toxicity, a topic that was one of the first things I learned about when I did my functional medicine training. It was one of the first things that helped me think about a different paradigm. Toxins and chemicals be related to chronic health illness. So I want to start off with a statement and go from there. There are over 80,000 chemicals currently recognized by the EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, yet less than 2,000 have actually been evaluated for safety. That's pretty amazing. The bread in your Pantry should have four ingredients, but probably has 30. Your tap water might contain the same solvents used to clean treatment facilities as well as dry cleaning facilities. And your energy efficient home could actually be slowly poisoning you. Today we're uncovering the toxic reality hiding in plain sight. Are these statistics real, Dr. Jensky? Is it true that 80,000 chemicals EPA has not looked at, 2000 have only been tested? Tell us about the elephant in the room that I feel like, you know, as of this year, 2025, when we're recording this, we're just now starting to talk about this publicly.

Yeah, I mean, yes, this is real and I think this is probably like, dare I say maybe even an underestimate. I mean, it's just a growing number of, of things that can hurt us in this toxic soup that we live in. It's not sequestered to the common areas that you think it would be, oh, this product is clearly toxic or this chemical is clearly toxic. So I can easily avoid those. I mean, it's in the air, it's in our water, it's in our food, it's in our supplements, in our vaccines, our medications, it's in our cosmetics, it's kind of everywhere. And although that sounds incredibly daunting, and scary and makes you feel like, well, then I can't do anything. The reality is that you can do quite a bit, and that's the point of what we're doing today, is to kind of inform individuals about where to find these, what you can do about it, and how to detoxify your life in this toxic world that we live in. But a lot of these chemicals are already outlawed in other countries. I mean, if you look at the European literature, the vast majority of things that are freely being poured into our food, into our crops, into our stuff, have already been outlawed in countries in Europe. So this is an issue that goes beyond a personal scale and goes to a national scale and something that needs to be done. And I think already the conversation is starting to be had and hopefully we'll have some movement in the right direction. It is out there and it's been out there. And the other issue along with that is the extent of which these harm our bodies. We don't really know that. We know they hurt us and we know that some are specific for endocrine disrupting and some are specific for cardiotoxicity, and some are specific for just other things. But the question is, what are the long term ramifications and, and how do they affect generations of individuals and can you get affected in utero and can you carry these things on? And the answer is yes, is what we're learning. And that's also scary. So the goal today is to discuss this and then maybe tamp down some of that fear and get to the nuts and bolts of what we can do about it.

Well, I think the amazing thing is that our bodies are made designed, what if you want to say, to actually get this stuff out of our system? Yeah, it's pooping, peeing, sweating, breathing, you know, this stuff out. And so, you know, it's amazing how we have these patients that are toxic, they're sick, and you give them some binders and you sweat and give them some lipids and all of a sudden they feel better.

Yeah.

And so just for me, it just kind of goes back to like, people need to be educated. There's a lot, there's a lot of stuff out there. Not to be fearful, but to be encouraged that yes, there are things that can be removed and your body is just an amazing thing that will start healing once you start pulling the chemicals out of the way. Yeah. And so that's what I think. If we start the conversation with that before we now scare people with all these other statistics and stuff.

No that's the truth. It's when you are able to tap into your body's resources for detoxification. A lot of things get better, but you have to do it in a sequential fashion, which is what we're going to talk about. Because you can get worse before you get better. If you push detox too quickly. If the end organ systems that address it, those final common pathways, especially the gut and the kidneys, they're not ready for it, you're going to cause problems. So you got to make sure that you're setting the stage right and making sure that you're at least analyzing based on that person's history, exposure, maybe testing of what's in their system or what you suspect is in their system and what you're going to do about getting it out, but doing it in a fashion that helps, not hurts them.

So let's talk, let's just, without going into the detail, the 2000 chemicals. Yeah, let's just pick a few. You know, I'll pick one, you pick one. We kind of walk through just so people get the idea. Take this and multiply it by a lot. And that's what we're dealing with. I like to talk, we've talked about arsenic initially because it's something people don't think about. According to the usatsdr, it's the number one toxin of concern in drinking water in our country. And how many people have thought about that? But according to our a branch of the epa, that's the number one thing they're concerned about. Now someone might say to me, well that's a bunch of weird nonsense. One of my wife's favorite places in the world to go, Cape Charles, which is the Virginia eastern shore. You know, we were there on vacation a couple years ago and for some reason I decided to start looking up water quality. And when you look at their thing, the number one thing, the water there was arsenic. And all of a sudden it's like, why is that? And you realize, oh, it's a rural area, that's a beach along the, you know, but it's like a lot of farmland and they're still using arsenic based pesticides, fungicides or whatever in an agribusiness. And so all of a sudden like something that most people aren't aware of is a water contaminant is a big deal. You know, hexavalent chromium is another one I like talking about because people give me the cross eyed like what is hexavalent chromium? It's the Aaron Brockovich Thing, you know. Oh, yeah. All people in our generation know that movie. Aaron Brockovich.

It's in the water. Henrico County Water Report.

Yes, yes. It's in almost every single solitary municipal water report when I get them pulled off of the Environmental Working Group.

Yeah.

And so what are some ones you.

Think about other heavy metals? Lead, mercury, cadmium. You said arsenic, aluminum. I mean, I test for metals and I see these all the time. I mean, lead's kind of everywhere. Mercury is everywhere. We see mercury in vaccines, we see mercury in amalgams, lead and old lead based paint. And it just becomes this issue of if someone has one metal, it's odds are they have many. So I like to test for all of them and ultimately figure out where the source is, have them play a little detective and kind of work on getting it out of their system. But lead will bind to bone. Mercury can cause cardiotoxicity, mercury can cause neurotoxicity. They all hurt the liver. They all have the ability to kind of buck the immune system. They might be the kind of confounding variable or this kind of contributory variable in the setting of things like autoimmunity. So I think metals in general are problematic. Glyphosate is another one. I mean, glyphosate. By now everybody kind of knows about Roundup.

And I had someone come to my house today to look for some photography stuff. Yeah, I said glyphosate and they were like, what's that? What are you talking.

I'm like, that's crazy to me.

And they're a healthy person from Northern Virginia and they had no idea what I was talking about. I'm like, roundup. They're like, oh, yeah, I know what that is.

Yeah.

But if I said glyphosate.

They did.

Yeah. So still a lot of people have no idea that Roundup is in our. It's caked into our food system.

It's everywhere. And it's an antibiotic, it's a pesticide, but by its nature it's an antibiotic. And so it's killing our microbiomes when we are eating these foods that are contaminated with it. And that's just about all these conventionally grown foods.

One thing that's interesting, I forget which professor was doing my training with this and they talked about Roundup briefly. If you look at Roundup, you know, it's like 92% inert ingredients. And those inert ingredients are petroleum distillates. So their point was. Yes, Glyphosate blocks the Shikimate pathway. Yes. It got its patent for being antimicrobial. His thing was like the devil in the details. These petroleum distillates. And the answer, he said, we do not know yet when you're freely sprayed everywhere.

And even in the. If you look at. I think it's in California, where they have these biodynamic or organic vineyards. And basically, because of all the water runoff from the adjacent vineyards, there's detectable glyphosate levels in their wines. And so they can't even claim to be fully organic because of that. It's just. It's kind of crazy.

Tomatoes and oats, you have to buy products, test it for glyphosate and glyphosate free. If you don't even. It's organic, it can still have significant amounts of glyphosate in it because of this very thing you mentioned.

Yeah. What about plastics microplastics?

Let's. Let's go to plastics. I want to ask you one quick question. Have you been seeing antimony in your patients? Because I. Yeah, yeah. If you figure out where it's coming from. Because I looked at. My levels are actually low, elevated. I'm gonna be a little personal here.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah, I know. And I'm looking at. Okay, where could it be from? You know, coming out of plastics, industrial stuff. I looked back in my labs to see if I checked for it in the past, so I couldn't find anything recent.

Yeah.

So. And I have multiple patients. Have levels be elevated.

And I've had a couple, not a ton. The ones I see most are lead and mercury, obviously cadmium, especially if they have a smoking history. I'll see things like cesium and thallium. I'll see gadolinium if they've had a bunch of MRIs, and typically that'll clear over time. Arsenic. Both of my genital urinary cancer patients had high arsenic levels. And if you look in the literature, correlation. One had bladder cancer, one had prostate cancer. I'm not saying it caused it, but it's curious. Note the couple antimony patients that I've had. They were not filtering the water. They filtered the water. It got better. We also worked on some chelation, so I don't know if it was their water source or if it's coming from somewhere else, but we were not able to identify a specific source.

I'm still trying to figure my source.

So you had aluminum issues, too? Forgetting personal.

Yeah, I did have aluminum. I had mercury issues as well. My aluminum Issue actually went back my dad, to work for Reynolds Metals when I was a kid. And he would get these. We had all the free Reynolds wrap we could possibly want as a kid. So we used it to cook everything in, wrapped everything in it. He'd make the potatoes on the grill.

Yeah.

Wrap them in aluminum foil. How you know it's ready. You poke it with it. Yeah, it's ready. And you, like, poke in little. So you're eating specks of aluminum. Aluminum into the potato. And then, like, you know, fast forward 30, I don't know, years maybe. I start checking for the stuff for myself, and I'm like, why is my aluminum level, like 11, 12, 13, 14? It took me about a year and a half to get it undetectable. And my mercury, what I figured out my mercury was back to my college days. I had this health kick that I thought eating albacore tuna at night before I went to bed, when I was working out really hard was a good idea. And probably 15 years after that, I started doing this stuff and checked, and I had a measurable level of mercury of 8. The reason, I think, was that exposure, because after I chelated and got it out, it never came back.

Yeah.

So it had to be. It wasn't an ongoing exposure. I had to pass. And I was the only one I could figure out that may have accounted for tuna.

That was me. I thought I was allergic to fish until I proved that I wasn't. At least I was told I was. Tuna was the only one that could eat. So that's all I ate. I ate a ton of tuna. And I had a bunch of metal amalgams. So my mercury levels were through the roof. And when I was heavier and I started to lose all that weight, I started to feel really sick. Do you remember that? And I was like, I'm losing weight. I'm cleaning up my lifestyle. I'm feeling better. I'm supposed to be feeling better, but I'm not. What's happening? And you looked at me and you're like, I bet you it's a detox reaction. All of these chemicals, all of these metals, all these things were flushing through my system. My body wasn't ready for it at that time. So everything that was stored in tissue and the fat that I was losing was now mobilizing. And my liver and kidneys and gut were having to handle it. So my levels, actually, despite chelation, went up and then eventually peaked and plateaued and came down. Lead was also high, too. We were Both born before 1979. Lead was in gasoline, lead was in paint. I mean, it still is to some extent. So it's kind of everywhere.

Microplastics.

Yeah.

So they're interesting. I was actually interviewing on the podcast Tracy Gapman, who's a urologist down in Florida. And the first time I'd heard this, he was talking about low testosterone in men. And they actually had this one study where they did biopsies on men's testicles with low testosterone, and they had microplastics in their testicles. And so I'm like, what the. How do you. So is this. Are microplastics a thing? What even are microplastics? Should I be worried about? Is this a weird. Like, is this common?

I mean, seriously, though, why would they even go that route? Was it just because of the endocrine disrupting?

It was low testosterone, and then it was testicular failure. And so they're on. You know, what's the cause on these young, healthy people say opsidum. Right. Because we had the elevated fsa. I mean, elevated lh. Right. The brain HP axis. So it's hot. This is secondary.

So they're just looking for a reason, and this is what they stumbled on. They weren't going in thinking, oh, there's going to be.

No. They're like, why is the young. Why the young people having low t. Why is this looking like it's testicular failure? You know, secondary versus primary hypogonadism. What? The microplastics. That is.

That's crazy.

Well, the thing about it is, you know, microplastics are everywhere. You know, it's in the air. Where's plastic everywhere?

Yeah. You know, it's all the packaging. It's in the air, it's in the water. It's everything that we're using.

Yeah. Well, the thing interesting about microplastics is one thing you can address that will remove 80% of all microplastics exposure, and it's stopping drinking out plastic containers.

Yeah.

I was looking at one of my detox things I was doing recently for this personalized medicine thing I'm doing at the usf. Have a chart, new nice Venn diagram chart kind of thing, looking at sources of microplastics, and 80% of it was plastic containers. We got. Of course it's in the air. It's in, you know, all that kind of stuff. But in my mind, I'm a pragmatic fellow. If you just don't drink a plastic, you can eliminate 80% of all this.

Yeah.

So, you know, I feel like that's something simpler.

Doable.

Yeah, doable. Yeah.

Yeah.

Look, I know we both actually. No. Okay. So one thing I want to talk about. You mentioned this European thing. Tell us about the precautionary principle. Because it's the way they do things in Europe, and we don't do it here.

I'm not familiar with that.

Precautionary principle. Yeah, it's the precautionary principle. In Europe, they have this thing, prove it's safe before exposure the population to it. In America, when you say that, you know, I've heard that Roundup or glyphosate's bad for kids. They're like, show me it's harmful.

Right, right.

And so it's. You know, if these organizations are trying to keep the public safe, you know, it should be. There's a new chemical we just made. Before you expose hundreds of millions of people to this, you have to prove it's safe to us first. And that's kind of the one that they operate in Europe and here because we're very individualistic and very, you know, for better, for worse. Show me. Kind of show me. Prove to me like that what you're introducing thousands of people to is harmful. And it's like, well, I think we should do the precautionary principle before we unload new chemicals and things to the population.

Yeah.

Especially as we're learning, like, how bad petroleum distillates are. And they can be anything from solvents and skincare products to dyes. You know, a lot of the artificial dyes are just petroleum distillates that we put in food, and they look natural. So we say natural colors, natural flavors, whatever. And they're like, not flavors, but colors, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

It's just badness.

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One last thing I want to talk about in this section right here is the concept of, you know, when people talk about toxicity, classically we learned about it was the lethal dose, LD50 of lead, mercury. It's the amount of lead you get exposed to and you die in mercury. And so we thought about toxicology classically as one substance, one exposure. What's your outcome?

Yeah, acute toxicity.

Acute. A hundred percent. But we don't talk about chronic toxicity. And the thing I remember Learning is the LD1 of lead and mercury. LD1 is the dose of lead that you expose a population to that 1% die from. The amount of mercury you expose a population to that 1% die from. If you take the LD1 and LD1 of lead and mercury and put them together, what's the new lethal dose for that? A hundred percent. And so one thing we don't talk about is like, you know, yeah, it's a little bit of here, a little bit of there.

Cumulative.

But when you start adding this stuff together, what are we doing to ourselves?

Yeah, it's not linear and it's not one plus one equals two. And it winds up. And obviously it depends on the individual and what their exposure is and what their genetics are and detox pathways and snips and things that we can talk about, what their nutrition is, how their gut's working, how they're going to be able to offload some of these things, what they're already in place, toxic burden is, but it becomes a nightmare.

Yeah, I want to talk about the tipping point. I think we've said enough about this. We do have a great blog series on detox. If people want to read about it, that's on the website. But the tipping point, you get exposed to this stuff from birth. The average placenta has like 200 measurable chemicals. I'm feeling great. I'm doing all this stuff, I'm doing what I want to do. I feel no problem. And then people hit a tipping point. Why is that? People do what they want to do, drink, eat how they want to drink. And then day, they kind of wake up, autoimmune, inflamed, toxic, their hormones are off, they have pcos, they have infertility, you know, you name it. Right. What is that? Like? I was great for 20 years and now all of a sudden I'm not.

Yet I Think at that point in time, the way that I kind of describe that to patients is usually through the same conversation that I have with the biotoxin patients and the whole bucket analogy. And I think if you break down for most individuals when you're trying to explain on a basic level what's going on in their body that we can do something about, that's contributing to their symptoms, that's cumulative and chronic and environmental in nature. It's what is your infectious burden? What is your toxic load? And to me, I see those as buckets. And you have to then factor in metabolic byproducts, which are also technically toxins the body has to get rid of. And as a person gets to some point where they're starting to fill those buckets up and hit critical mass, and they're superseding their liver and kidney and guts ability, the sweat glands, the breathing, all the things that we use for detox, superseding the ability to kind of get rid of them. They're going to start to have immune dysregulation, inflammation, endocrine disruption, and start to see some of the manifestations, co stimulation that leads to autoimmunity. Now all of a sudden, B cells see self is foreign, and it's problematic. It's at that point where someone becomes symptomatic, where previously they were feeling great and they were tolerating it, they've now hit some degree of critical mass. Where it's stored in the tissues, it's stored in the solid organs, it's stored in places where the body's doing its best, but the liver can't handle it anymore. And everything's starting to kind of form a line and back up. And then you start to see these ramifications. It's the best way that I can explain it.

And sometimes they'll have like, a triggering event, like a concussion or head injury, a physical stress, like a stressor, like a divorce or even Covid. It was some of the interesting stuff with literature shown that Covid being a trigger for lyme reactivation, Epstein bar reactivation. But it's like, when you look at these patients, when I see them, they also had mold. Yeah. They also had other gut issues. It wasn't like. Yeah. You know, it was many things at play, but there's usually some trigger.

Yeah.

So there's a setup, there's a triggering event. And then what keeps them stuck there is. By the way, they weren't detoxing very well. And by the way, they already had gut issues.

Yeah.

They already had a Horrible diet, they already had poor sleep and they're like, why am I not healing? It's like, well, you know, you felt great until this thing happened. The trigger.

Yeah.

Now you're stuck there because you're stuck there because your foundational stuff is off. So let's talk about the detox pathways, because, you know, I found the most useful things with detox are old school, like naturopathic kind of stuff. So, you know, sweating, what kind of things do you get out of your body when you sweat?

A lot of things. A lot of the plastics, actually, you get a lot of the endocrine disrupting chemicals out of your body. You can get metals out with sweat. So I think sweating is underutilized and I think probably something that we should be doing at least three times a week, if not more. I think it's something that if I have a patient that tells me, oh, I went to the sauna and I sat there for 40 minutes and I didn't sweat. Your detox pathways are not open. That's not a good thing. You need to go back and go back and go back. You need to get to the point where you're sweating within minutes of being in that sauna. That actually is a story that happened to me. I mean, I went the first time I sat in the sauna, I got beet red. I didn't sweat. I came out, I was hot and mad and said, I'm never doing this again. And the lady at the desk was like, you should come back and try again. This isn't uncommon. Which led me to believe that this is pretty common. I came back and by the end I'm sweating. Now I go sit in a sauna, within five minutes, I'm saturated. But it's a different story than it was 11 years ago. So sweating's gonna get persistent organic pollutants outta your system, they're gonna get metals outta your system. You're get these things that are problematic, some of which that we call forever chemicals, we're learning are best removed through sweat. So I think that's a big deal. Do you sweat for that? That could be exercise induced. That can be yard work. That could be the sauna, whatever, I don't care. As long as you're sweating.

Yeah. And it's interesting because in modern times, like, like no one sweats anymore. Yeah, used to 70 degrees, right? It doesn't. 70 to 75 degrees. Yeah. No one works out in the gym. And all of a sudden it's like people go years without sweating. And if you don't sweat. Like, if you stop peeing for a week, you die from renal failure. You stop pooping, you know, and. But we ignore the fact that sweating is one of our body's essential ways we detox. And it's. It's also interesting, like, you know, in my. The way I kind of practice medicine, you know, I've kind of learned to, like, pay attention. It's actually interesting in. In Tibetan medicine. Yeah. The way they looked at was body, like humors, liquids, and they would actually figure out part of their diagnosis was looking at the smell of what your body gives off. Yeah. So your breath, your sweat and your pee and your stool. And part of their system was, you know, looking at what your body gives off. That's a marker of diseases in your body, which sounds kind of weird until you realize we have devices to measure that in stool now we have devices to measure that in urine. Now there's some research doing a VOC device to measure patients in the hospital. If the VOCs are high, they're more likely to succumb to their acute thing. And it's interesting. Why is that not the case with sweat? And the answer is, it probably is. We're just not.

We're not measuring it.

Yeah. One thing of note. You know, it's interesting you said you didn't sweat. I have a lot of patients similar, and that's actually a form of dysautonomia. Sweating is something your parasympathetic nervous system. You get vasodilation. You know, it's kind of interesting. So if you're not sweating, someone's listening to this right now, and they're like, oh, yeah, I'm like. Like Jinsky, I don't sweat. Yeah. It's actually a type of dysautonomia where you're not having an appropriate neural response to stimulus. And the easiest way to fix that is repeat exposure. And then you retrain your body, and all of a sudden now. Yeah, that's interesting.

I'm actually going on Friday. I'm going to do circuit cold plunge sauna, cold point sauna, cold sauna.

How do you feel after that?

Amazing. But it's cold.

Oh, my gosh.

And you get in the sauna for 15 minutes, no longer. And then you get into the cold plunge tank. And the woman that was introduced me to the chamber because the first time I'd been there, she was like, most people sit in for about 30 to 60 seconds. I kind of chuckled to myself. I got in that thing and it was so cold. It hurt. It's about 40 degrees. It was so cold it hurt. My body was tingling and I lasted about 30 seconds. Then you dry off, you get into the sauna for another 15 and you do circuit through 60 minutes. So I got four in and by the fourth cold plunge I was in for about a minute and a half. And I took that home. I felt amazing. I felt amazing the rest of that weekend. So I'm going to do another one on Friday and see if I can go to two minutes.

We'll see.

Because that's who I am.

So I don't want to, you know, other major things. Pooping. We have stuff out.

Yeah.

You know, you talk about the liver, we tend to think about the liver.

But we also pooping daily. At least once a day, right? At least once a day.

And the bacteria gut are a part of that. They help detoxify chemicals. 30% of all pharmaceuticals are actually detoxified. Bad bacteria in our gut.

Yeah.

Tell us what it.

I'm trying to think some of the liver detox.

Yeah.

So the liver is really the best way to understand it is that it's broken into phases. There's phase one and there's phase two. And maybe even the kidneys are considered phase three elimination. And so phase one, phase two, phase three, get it out. So convert it into something that you can eliminate and then eliminate it. Most toxins are hydrophilic, which is water loving, or lipophilic, which is fat loving. And therefore you want to convert it into hydrophilic, which is water loving. In order to do that, phase one has to take these fat soluble toxins and convert them into reactive intermediaries, meaning take something toxic and make it even more toxic. You then have to neutralize that or kind of calm it down with phase two and then you can eliminate it. So that's really where you get into trouble. If someone's phase two is not robust and phase three is not adequate and you push phase one, you're now making them worse because you're creating a more toxic burden. Phase one tends to be this conversion and that tends to require things like B vitamins and minerals. And that's where things like milk thistle or quercetin and flavonoids can play a role. And then phase two is roughly six different processes that can neutralize things. Phase two is going to be sulfation, methylation, which I know a lot of people talk about, glucuronidation, amino acid conjugation, glutathione conjugation and acetylation. So One of these processes, or many of them, depending on what the chemical is, to neutralize it, rendering it inert. Now water loving or water soluble. And then you pee and poop it out. So it's phase one, phase two, out the body it goes. But it gets way more complex than that. That's the basic way of explaining it.

Yeah. And it's interesting because if, you know, one of the things you're hearing a lot about now in social media and stuff is more people need more protein and more protein. And it's interesting because most of those things you mentioned require amino acids in phase two. And with my wife, you know, I've talked about this before, one of her issues was she was so toxic that when she would do this, did this fast thing that she crashed health wise. And part of her issue was the toxicity. She couldn't handle the burden of stuff that was being released because she didn't have enough amino acids.

Yeah.

And so it's really interesting how people don't, you know, just eating enough protein, the right kind of protein and clean protein, all of a sudden you're actually helping your liver detox.

And you also need specific ones to make bile, which is a big component of detox. So glycine and taurine, you need methionine for methylation, you need cysteine, you need glycine, glutamine and cysteine to make glutathione, which is your master antioxidant. Those are all amino acids that I'm saying. So, like, if you're not getting enough protein or you're not getting these amino acids, you're not making your master antioxidant, you're not doing amino acid conjugation, you're not making bile, you're not methylating appropriately, you're not doing any of these steps in an appropriate fashion, and things just get backed up and bottlenecked and then you're stuck.

Yeah. And we, we've talked a lot about gut health in the past and done serious. I don't want to rehash too much stuff, but let's talk about the kidneys a little bit.

Yeah.

As a detox organ. Because it wasn't until I started doing my training through the American counter of anti aging or general medicine, Dr. Lavalle, like big into kidney and started realizing, you know, your kidneys are a ma. I mean, it makes sense, but it's just like, you know, I drink enough water, but we don't realize all of a sudden, trace minerals, earth minerals, potassium, magnesium, like these metals, zinc Help our kidneys do detoxification. And so let's talk about the kidneys a little bit like the average American's dehydrated. The water we drink is from city municipalities, is full of junk. Yeah. And we're not getting enough minerals in our body. And all of a sudden we're inhibiting and we're chronically acidic and our kidneys detoxify better in alkaline environment. Why don't you give us a little 10,000 foot overview of like kidney detoxification and what things it gets out of your body and how we can boost it?

Yeah. I mean, kidneys in general are the unsung hero in all of this. And I think like you said, people are just like, oh, your kidney function is normal or it's not. And then if it's going the wrong way, eventually you're on dialysis, which really is not the way it should be. Right. Like, have you seen someone with abnormal kidney function that you normalize? I mean, I have like, I correct renal insufficiency all the time, at least stabilize it from getting worse and requiring dialysis. And the goal is figuring out what's behind all of it, figuring out what is contributing to that dysfunction. Is it something as basic as dehydration and you just need to get me drinking more water, or is it that they're not holding, they're drinking enough, but they're not holding that fluid in the intravascular space and that's requiring more things like minerals to hold it and create that oncotic pressure that keeps things where it belongs. So mag, potassium, zinc, these are things that are going to help hold that fluid. They're going to help alkalinize. Like you mentioned, adding things like bicarb, eating dark leafy greens and getting plenty of plants in your diet. These are things that are going to help alkalinize. And then ultimately I like things like alpha lipoic acid. I like cordyceps. I think they're great for kidney function. Kidneys are filtering liters and liters of blood per day, pulling out the bad and recirculating the good. With the goal being that you're just getting rid of waste, but they're not going to function in that capacity, at least optimal capacity if they're not getting enough fluid. If you're not getting enough fluid, you're not alkaline enough. So sometimes you can measure the urinary ph and kind of assess that and you're not getting enough of the other things that are helping to protect them.

It's an interesting aside on what you said. I clear my mercury levels up pretty easy when I figured that stuff out. But my aluminum levels and my lead levels, I didn't get them undetectable until I started alkalizing my urine. Yeah, I was using. And then all of a sudden I. Oh, yeah, I remember those lectures. Metals, you know, heavy metals. And there's good metals and bad metals. You know, iron's a good metal, lead's a bad metal. Magnesium is a good letter. Aluminum's a bad metal. Right. And so it made sense intellectually, but until I actually did it to myself and realized I've been working on this for years and I finally got the levels undetectable, and all I did was just.

How did you. How did you do your alkalization? Are you using, like, PHS strips? What targeting, and what kind of things did you add?

I started with the usual thing that I tell people to do. Get green, leafy vegetables, eat, you know, alkalizing foods, blah, blah, blah. And my urine stayed acidic. It just didn't budge. Cause I ate a fair amount of protein, you know. And so I'm like, well, how am I supposed to alkalinize myself? And I'm using a PH strip. Has a test strip five, five to eight, I believe, five days, the range. And so I start adding in potassium citrate, magnesium citrate. There's a nice little powder of those. And then realized if I added those in, all of a sudden the test strip would turn, like, bluish. So I was alkaline. Ish.

Yeah.

But some days I still wouldn't be quite enough. And so that added in a little capsule of potassium bicarb.

And there you were.

Magical. Yeah. And so for me, now, if I mix my minerals in the water, do a capsule, two potassium bicarb. I mean, my urine an hour later will be deep, like a magenta blue on the strip. So I don't even test anymore because I know for me what does it for me. But I tell patients, like, I have no idea what it's going to do for you. I know for me, diet alone was not enough.

Yeah.

And maybe for you diet alone is good enough. But sometimes I think most people need minerals added in and they probably need a little bit of bicarb on top of that. Not sodium bicarb, because, you know. But yeah, you can get potassium bicarb. Yeah.

As long as the kidney function is decent enough.

100% disclaimer. Yes. You have to have normal kidney function.

Because you can get hyperkalemic. Which is high potassium, and that could be fatal.

But how do nephrologists maintain renal function in their patients? Going towards bicarb, they use that to do potassium citrate as well, to alkalize the urine, which wasting potassium. But they'll watch it closely.

But how do you treat Hyperkalemia in the ER for 20 years? You give bicarb.

Yeah.

You give calcium to stabilize the myocardium, and then you start getting the potassium down. Right. So you don't want them to go into a fatal dysrhythmia from hyperkalemia. And so you give calcium to buy yourself some time. And then they get bicarb, and then they get insulin and dextrose, sometimes albuterol. Like, you just give the whole gamut. But fluids that they can tolerate, and you kind of push it down. But a lot of what you're doing to treat that high potassium is actually correcting kidney function indirectly or directly. Yeah. So the PH that you're targeting on these test strips is what should be above, like, 6.5, seven.

I'm shooting for, like, over seven. Over seven, yeah.

Okay.

And the way it's kind of nice because they'll start turning from, like, the orange yellow to blue, about six, eight, they start changing. So usually you get. If you get blue enough, it's over seven. And then we get the magenta. It's like closer to eight.

Yeah.

Cool. But I mean, think about how many of our patients do we, you know, you do a physical? I mean, I do. I've done the stage of my career, probably tens of thousands of physicals on patients. And how often when you get a urine dip back on the physical pH is acidic. It's almost rarely. Rarely. It'll be over 8.0. It's almost always acidic. If you see it, the pH, you said you're like, wait a second, what's going on here? Like, I first started seeing those, I was like, what's wrong here? Because I never see alkaline. Now I know.

Yeah.

What's the oddity? Should be more normal. Yeah. What's the normality? Is actually not optimal. So it's funny how your perspective changes as you. It is as you season as a physician. So. So we talk about sweat. We talked about kidneys, liver breathing. You know, that's something that Americans are known. We shallow breathe. We don't deep breathe briefly talk about that. Because breath work is important for neuroregulation. Activating the vagus nerve has a calming. It does a lot of really good things. But it's also the way, you know, if you stop breathing, we're dead in five to eight minutes.

You retain carbon dioxide, you get altered mental status, and then you succumb.

Yeah. But we also breathe all volatile organic compounds. Breathe out, you know, too much ammonia. People have dka.

Right.

You can smell it in the breath.

Fruity breath from across the room.

Yeah.

So we're acetone. If they're off breathing.

Yeah, we can. There's a lot of things that we breathe out that people don't talk about. And it's really interesting. Some of my cancer patients, I can actually smell the chemo, like you. The breath has this weird kind of smell to it. Yeah. And even some of my SIBO patients are making toxins. You'll like. You'll be like, yeah, right.

Yeah.

So it's. Breath is more than just getting out CO2. It helped. It does a lot of other stuff. And if you're chronically stressed, you're a shallow breather. You're breathing fast and shallow.

Yeah.

You know, versus deep and intentional. And that's something as simple as mindful breathing can actually improve. Actually did a podcast with Sasha Patel. We talked about an hour about breath work and how all the health benefits of breath work. And I feel like it's something that people just forget as a way to.

Detoxify 100 and it ties to what you were just talking about with kidneys and acid based disorders. I mean, what's the primary compensation for an acid based disorder? Breathing. What's the secondary compensation? Your kidneys. So if someone comes in acidic, what are they going to be? Tachypneic? They're going to be breathing fast because they're trying to blow off carbon dioxide to equilibrate their physical. Right. Secondary happening over the course of days is the renal compensation where the kidneys are dumping acid so that you can equilibrate that. So someone comes in breathing fast because they're in dka, that's a compensatory mechanism to keep that person alive. If you. Then this patient is now acutely ill and you decide that you need to intubate them and you put them on a vent and you go, oh, well, normal respiration is 12. Let me just go ahead and put the vent setting at 12. You're going to kill that patient. If they were breathing 25 times a minute, that was their body's way of saying, this is what I need right now. You put their vent setting at 25 times a minute. While you're correcting that acid Based disorder, and then you can slow it down. So breath is way more important. And I think one of the places that you see it more than anything is the emergency department.

Well, you know, everything you're talking, this is like intensive care medicine. This is functional intensive care. You know, this is when I had patients on Vince and the icu. Usually the critical care specialist is managing that aspect. But you're in the er.

Yeah, but I also did a fellowship. I did two rounds of toxicology because I thought I wanted to do a toxicology fellowship when I was er. And one of the things that we would get called for would be intentional ingestions, unfortunately. And so when you would see salicylate toxicity, aspirin overdose, that is a mixed acid based disorder. It winds up being a metabolic acidosis with a respiratory alkalosis. So that person is metabolically acidotic, meaning that their PH is really low, but their respirations are different than what you would expect for that. And you have to honor that. So you have to understand these connective pathways of kidneys and breath and the body in general to maintain that person's physiologic ph. Otherwise they're going to crump. And that's never a good thing. So it's more interwoven than you can possibly imagine. In the outpatient setting. We saw the end organ damage portion of that in the er. So breath work.

Breath work. So let's wrap this session up. So toxins are an issue. It's in our environment. Organs of detoxification, a couple takeaways. You know, Clean water. Clean food, Clean air, clean environment, clean home. Like, these are these basic things. Run this really quickly because I don't want this to last. You know, respect people's time. But, like, walk through this really briefly. What are some key steps people can do? Like two or three things in each one of those. Clean water, food, air, environment, Water, food, air.

Okay, Water. Water filters. Like anything from something that you put in the fridge to a tabletop Berkey to a filtration system under your sink to a whole house. Either way, you gotta filter your water at least. You need to empower yourself by understanding what your tap water has in it. And you just go to EWG.org and plug in your zip code and you'll get your water reports and it's eye opening. And the first thing you're gonna do is start googling best water purifiers. So water purification, 100%. That was a game changer for us. Clean air. We do a combination of Using some air cleaning plants. I like snake plants and spider plants and things of that nature. But we also use air purifiers. And air purifiers are simple bedrooms, bare minimum, because that's where you're spending eight hours a night. And then if you have the ability to do so, maybe one in the main living space. Making sure your H vac system is appropriate and serviced and has filters in place, making sure that your air that is being recirculated through your home is being cleaned appropriately. And there's ways to test for this and have a licensed person come out and set you up in that way. And then food. Food is. It just goes down to, you know, if you can't grow your own, you got to shop wisely. And so my first advice would be start dabbling with maybe growing your own. Starting a small garden, maybe a windowsill, some herbs, maybe you got a small patch of dirt, maybe you can do a raised bed and grow some vegetables that you like and see how you do. But at least you know that those are going to be clean and organic. The next step would be again utilizing EWG.org clean 15 in the dirty Dozen. They do it every year, sometimes twice a year. And if it's on the Dirty Dozen, you need organic. If it's on the clean 15, you can buy conventional. They test it for you local farmers markets, shop locally so that you're not worrying about all the preservatives that are being added, being shipped from wherever they're being shipped from. And you're also supporting these local farmers and vendors. And then environment is just going to be about everything else. Anything from food storage to your cookware, to your cosmetics that you're using to your cleaning supplies. You just want to, in a stepwise fashion, without breaking the bank, go from one of these aspects to the other and kind of change the game. And you can really do a lot in that way. I mean, we started by doing a reverse osmosis filtration system, and then we added some air purifiers to the bedrooms. We had our H vac redone. We had our crawl space redone. We have a radon remediation stack sub vapor barrier and a dehumidifier in the crawl. We have good April air high Merv filters on our H vac system and in the dehumidifier. And then we just started changing out, you know, Teflon to cast iron and stainless steel and plastic to glass and, you know, cosmetics with a bunch of chemicals to more natural options or I Make my own eczema lotion instead of buying a bunch of stuff. Like you don't have to get that crunchy. But like the reality is that you could do it.

It's not hard.

So I think that's a lot of dense information, but it shouldn't be daunting because it's easier than you think for the environment.

We do have on our website, resource from the Harvard School of Public Health, they have a healthy home guide and actually walk through every section of the house. Bedroom, bathroom, you know, just checking basic things like are your. The vents in your bathroom and your laundry room, are they actually venting outside? It's amazing how many people's houses they vent to like a crawl space.

Ours were going to the attic. Blind pockets.

Yeah.

They weren't going to the soffits. They had to be redirected.

So super basic things. Yeah. But massive issue.

Massive issue that you may not even know exists. Like we didn't even have a hood over our stove. And oh, by the way, the stove was leaking gas and my wife, every time she cooked, she would get headaches and we weren't smelling it and it wasn't detectable enough.

A little thing on this, I make my kids turn the hood on every time they cook.

Yeah.

I was reading this interesting article. I was looking at if you have a gas stove.

Yeah.

98% of the. It depends. What depends? 92 to 90% of the combusted particles, including a bunch of these petroleum things are really bad. Are removed if you have your vent fan on. Yeah. So just having a good vent on while you're cooking eliminates. Not perfect, but 92 to 98%.

So ours is always on.

Yeah, I know.

So loud. But it's always on. I'd rather not be sick.

That's true. So we'll stop there. We'll keep on talking. Next episode more about detox, maybe getting some nitty gritty, some other cool details. Otherwise, if this information is helpful, like share, subscribe and we'll talk to everybody soon.

If you've lost trust in your body or in the system that was supposed to heal you, don't give up. Dr. Aaron Hartman's book Uncurable will help you rediscover what's truly possible. Visit UncurableBook.com to get your copy and start your healing journey today.