How Can We Protect Ourselves from Toxins in our Daily Environment? with Dr. Aly Cohen

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Today I'm so excited to have Dr. Ailey Cohen. She's the co-author of the best-selling consumer guidebook called "Non-Toxic Guide to Living Healthy in a Chemical World." As you listen, you might get a little anxious about all the toxins around us, but you know what? Knowledge is power. You're going to find some great tips in this conversation, and there's going to be resources in the links in the show notes below.

Hi, Ailey, how are you? So good to have you here.

I'm good to be here. Thank you so much.

I'm so excited to have you here. This is one of my favorite topics, toxicity in our environment and also toxicity in everything that we are consuming on a day-to-day basis. I got really crazy about this when I first had my children. When I was pregnant, this is when I, it all started for me.

So it's a big topic and it took a lot of years to not only learn the material, but then to be able to teach it, share the information in a way that didn't overwhelm people, because I was overwhelmed.

Once you start to learn about it, it's like a rabbit hole. And it's very stressful, 'cause it's almost like you can't avoid everything. So you have to pick and choose. So we'll get into that, but when I had my babies, that was the most difficult time, because they're so little and they're so vulnerable to things. Although they're also resilient, but that's when I really wanted to protect them. After that, I got a little bit slack about it. So I'm hoping you can get me back on track. Good.

No, it's— listen, it's a journey. I say this to everyone. I teach high school, college, I teach doctors. The idea is that number one, you want to get into your comfort zone of what you yourself as a teacher or a parent or a practitioner, what feels comfortable as really solid information for you. So yeah, it's a very, it's an overwhelming topic, but there's so much empowerment that can come from knowing this information as opposed to hiding and going, covering your head and saying, "Oh, it's too much to deal with," or, "Genetics will determine my disease fate." Our environment plays a key role in our health and our, not just for acutely for allergies and hay fever and food allergies, but also for long-term risk reduction. That's the ultimate goal of these messages is We have this problem. Let's figure out how we can best lower those exposures because those exposures are related to risk for developing a variety of conditions. And if you can lower those exposures, you supposedly— and what we now know— can lower those risks. I'm an autoimmune disease specialist as a rheumatologist, so I'm seeing many more cases. And this is true of the epidemiology worldwide. We have an enormous number of autoimmune cases that are increasing. We have not only that, we have young people who have autoimmune diseases, and there's many of them at younger ages. And what's most interesting, with no family history. Wow. And this is actually the topic of my next book that I'm working on now. And the idea is that we want to connect these chemicals not just to the endocrine system, which is where they've gotten the most attention, research internationally in terms of hormones like thyroid and pancreas and for insulin, hormones that have to do with growth and development of children, of fetus, and but also bone development. But we also need to think about the immune system effects, and that's where I'm tying the two together so we can think about how to avoid those inflammatory conditions. Allergies are one, but also autoimmune issues, rheumatoid, and also susceptibility to infections as well. Believe it or not, this plays a role.

So just for people who are not medical specialists, basically we're talking about environmental toxins that are in our lives day to day that can actually affect us from everything from autoimmune diseases, which are becoming even more common, up to cancer and just affecting our lives. What you said before, I would love for you to expand on that. When people say, oh, it's just my genes.

Yes.

Can we talk about that a little bit? Like when people just say, sure, that's how I'm built, or that's what my fate is and how we can prevent things that we never thought was preventable.

So, you know, whether or not any of us healthy people develop any kind of illness— say you start off as a healthy person, let's just hope that's the case— and whether or not we develop any illness, whether it's mild, like maybe a milk allergy or something that could be potentially mild, or environmental allergies like trees or pollen, versus something much more serious and concerning and having life-threatening issues like cancers of various types. Or autoimmune diseases that also run their range of mild to serious. Whether we develop disease as a human being is an intricate dance between our genetics, which we're given from our parents, right, and our ancestors, actually not just our parents but their parents and their great-grandparents, but it's a dance between our genetics, our lifestyle, and our environment. And those 3 things all help to determine whether we do develop a risk for disease or increased risk for disease or not. And we really can't control the gene component. You can't just turn on a switch or turn off a switch. But we can control the other 2 components, which is our lifestyle, which includes, do we get enough sleep? Because that's critical to our health. Do we have too much stress? That's critical to our health. Are we smoking? Are we sitting out and getting sun without sunscreen or too much exposure in that area? Do we eat food with lots of processed chemicals? Do we drink drinking water that has not been filtered? Perhaps it has contaminants. Whether we put personal care products on that we now know we can vet out for safety or toxicity. So that's your lifestyle and exposure in your environment can also be things you can't necessarily that you can't necessarily control, but you can try, which is air quality, things like certainly water as well, but medications are medications to our environment. And so those all really play into whether or not we may develop disease or not. And I think it's important to really give people the empowerment that you can control so much of your health risks. And if people think it's all on you, and this is by the way called the exposome or exposomics. And so just so people understand that word and want to dive deeper into it, it's a really well-vetted science of understanding all of the exposures that we experience as humans from basically, they say, birth till death, but really it's in utero as well. And chemicals can do that. Actually, it's been shown that these exposures can change your genes. Believe it or not, when I say you can't change your genes, I'm saying that sort of philosophically. But we do know that these chemicals, in order to initiate a cancer perspective or some other serious illness, there are potentially gene changes. And so that's why, again, it just goes back to the less exposure, the better. How do we do that? So this was the book that I did only a couple years ago, but it's still completely valid. There's nothing— it's all up-to-date information on where to find resources for how to choose food. That it's called Non-Toxic: A Guide to Living Healthy in a Chemical World, and it's published through Oxford University Press. Essentially, this book, who was— which was written with my co-author Dr. Fred Baum Saul, a remarkable renowned developmental neurobiologist who actually was very much responsible for helping to remove bisphenol A, or BPA, from baby bottles, plastic baby bottles, in 2012. Some of you remembered that in the news. So his work was so remarkable on understanding how bisphenol A, which is the poster child for endocrine-disrupting chemicals and was one of the first to be studied in this way, really is just, as I said, a poster child for thousands more that have since been discovered. Since that was originally discovered. So BPA is used in a lot of products for a lot of reasons. It's not simply just plastics. It's used to make plastic things squishy or hard, depending. Phthalates do the same type of thing, depending on how much in the process. But the idea is that we always thought, I say we meaning the world of toxicology, up until, I mean, from Paracelsus back in the 16th century, that the dose makes the poison. That the amount of exposure to anything will determine your risk of developing something like illness. Turns out from Dr. Vomsall's work and his international colleagues that we now know that exposures to certain chemicals called endocrine disruptors at very low amounts, like parts per million, parts per trillion, parts per billion, meaning one drop of water in 20 Olympic-sized swimming pools, That kind of exposure actually can literally create health and cellular changes and health risks at far lower levels than anyone bothered to look, 'cause we always looked at the higher doses. Now that there's capability of seeing how those chemical compounds can work on humans and animals at much lower levels, there's a whole world opening up as to how we unfortunately don't test properly and don't regulate these chemicals since there are now many of them out on the market and keep coming. And we don't hold manufacturers in the US to test these chemicals before they go into the products we love. We don't require safety testing.

In Europe and other countries, it seems like they do ban these products faster than they do here. I remember when I was, again, pregnant and was looking for a mattress and I found out that all the chemicals they put in to make it flame retardant would be excreted in my breast milk. So I ended up buying this crazy mattress, like a horsehair mattress, and thank God you don't have to buy that anymore 'cause there's so many more organic beds now available. And then I was buying a playset and pressure-treated wood. You can get it on your fingers. When babies are crawling over this pressure-treated wood, ingest it, you get increased bladder cancer. I had to ask specifically, for non-treated fencing and—

Yes, the treated wood is a problem. Look, when you do an organic garden and you use wood for an organic garden, you have to really make sure that wood is not treated also because that can seep into the soil. And those are— and those treatments were designed originally, they were created to what they thought was going to help the market. I don't think it was altruistic, but they thought, oh, it'll be flame retardant, it'll be water resistant, it'll be microbe resistant, so it won't rot as quickly.

People used to smoke in their bed.

Correct.

They had fires, and that's why they started putting flame retardants on mattresses.

The problem actually turned out, as per Chicago Tribune's Pulitzer Prize-winning series, is that really these chemicals were added to home furnishings, particularly couches, in the 1970s in order to give a 12-second burn time, which meant 12 seconds to get out of a home if the couch What ended up happening is foam were to catch on fire from a cigarette. Instead of changing, it was really a push by the tobacco industry. That's what the Tribune discovered is that the tobacco industry, instead of changing their formulations for cigarettes at the time to make them less flammable, they pushed adding the chemicals to the home furnishings, which became the baby's furnishings, which became home. It just went on and on. And so there became a market for these chemicals, but it was all really pushed and pressured and marketed through the tobacco industry.

Wow, that's so interesting. So let's go back to that endocrine disruption. You were talking about lawn chemicals. What else is there that people should be looking at?

So endocrine disruptors are— again, disruptors means they can change how receptors in the human body manage those hormones, either up/down regulation. They can— disruption can mean a variety of things because cells signal to each other, correct? So it's almost like a ball and a catcher. You're sending the signal, you have these catchers, but those are receptors and they go up or down and maybe you just drop the ball or not. The idea is that the way these chemicals work on a cellular level is that they have to communicate around the body for growth, for development, for brain function, brain development, which sex you, you end up becoming, male, female, can be disrupted, believe it or not. In utero, there's all these chemicals. So that's why in utero exposure is very important because of the sensitivity. Now hormones, work at such microscopic amounts to do enormously incredible things, right? They're very conserved through evolution, and it makes the body be able to do miraculous things with very little human energy. Okay, that being said, these chemicals can work the same way. They work at very infinitesimal amounts to do potentially harm to receptors, to disrupt that communication, and And that's the real issue is that when we didn't have chance to look below the hood and see how and where these chemicals were coming from, now we can test them for some of the same problems they cause at high doses versus low doses, which would mean like everyday exposure. You're getting a little bit every day over the course of a lifetime that adds up to healthy— health issues and perhaps even at younger ages now. So in terms of the numbers, We have over 95,000 chemicals on the market in use, in commercial use, in all the products, whether it's cosmetics or food chemicals.

Is that number increasing? In use. Because I saw 80,000 in your book.

Yeah, it goes up every year. It goes up every year. And so by the time that this book— my next book, it'll probably go up another 1,000 or 2,000. And the reason is they keep coming out. There's about 15 new polymers. At least that are patented every week. Old ones have grandfathered in. We now know there's over several thousand endocrine disrupting chemicals as per testing by third-party labs. Remember, these are academic institutions that are figuring this out. This is not manufacturers because they are not required to know that or care about it or reveal that. We have a whack-a-mole situation because as we're trying to get some off the market, as some people may have heard of, like bisphenol A, phenol A, oh my gosh, that's still in everything else besides what's in canned foods, for instance. Every canned food that anyone eats from in this country is lined with bisphenol A plastic, basically a component. So here is the warning sign, and we talk about this because what happens is even though BPA was taken off the market for plastic baby bottles, and there's sort of this— people know about BPA as being a problem. A lot of people will say BPS or BPFB is BPA-free, but these are other created molecules that are now mimicking the same effects of BPA. So it'll say if you have a water bottle that's plastic that you're not sure what and it says BPA-free, that doesn't necessarily mean it's BPS, BPSIP, BPF-free. So you really wanna go with glass, stainless steel, very, very important. Lead-free glass, if you can, most things don't label lead-free. But lead usually, after a certain period of time with glass, it will generally, you can, it'll wash out some of the resins of lead. Stainless steel, the issue would be like lead as well if it's mixed with that. But most, there are people that are looking into this more deeply, but really stainless steel would be a harder matrix for anything to leach out.

Okay, what about silicone? Silicone is everywhere.

Silicone is actually one of the safest plastics if it's truly silicone. The idea is that silicone, it's used in baby nipples and it's been studied to show that those are very low toxin, if no toxin. So if you have to choose a plastic, silicone would be the best choice. But there are also these glass containers that are cheap and stainless steel. And you always want to try, although it's very difficult to avoid buying products from China and overseas, you would like to find American-made because they There is a little more oversight to some degree on US-made stainless steel and ceramics. What's the blue flowers?

Um, CorningWare?

CorningWare has oversight as well.

You go on Amazon, there's like a gazillion different products and you don't know where it's coming from, and I don't trust—

99-cent stores are notorious for having cadmium, lead, and mercury, especially like, for instance, Mardi Gras beads. Mardi Gras beads, kids sucking on them and chewing on toys from 99-cent stores have no oversight when it comes to chemicals, and they've been tested to be highly loaded with chemicals. We want to really think about the quality, and I extend that to food. We want to go with USDA organic because that is one of the few, if not really only, regulatory oversight laws in terms of the criteria, which it started in, I think, 1992. So it's not— organic is a relatively new regulation. When it's USDA organic, it has to keep out a huge number of pesticides from the process of growth for that produce, from the soil to the package— not so much the packaging, but from the soil to the fertilizer to pesticide spraying. And so it is truly one of the few things we have USDA organic is far cheaper as frozen foods. I really encourage that, but it has all the nutrient value of fresh-picked because it's flash frozen. Whereas fresh organics are great as well, but they travel often a long distance, so they tend to have lower nutrient value— still having less pesticides but lower nutrient value. So I am a big fan of frozen organics as a general rule in terms of cost and accessibility. So Environmental Working Group is a wonderful resource.

I'm going to have the links on the show notes, but you do believe in that, that you can eat things not USDA, but can be fine for you.

So it has a lot to do with trade-offs. So what, so what Environmental Working Group, which is a wonderful nonprofit consumer advocacy group started by Ken Cook, and I know this group very well, actually, I worked with them to do CME programs for physicians years back. It's a group that was started by lawyers basically working to, to to get chemicals out of the system. And it's evolved into a lot more. But what they do annually, which has become very popular, is to look for their annual Dirty Dozen list and their Clean 15. And what those are, the Dirty Dozen is when they take conventional, non-organic, conventional produce samplings across the United States, and they take over 200 samples, and they test for the amount of pesticide residue on top of that fruit or vegetable versus the Clean 15, which, you know, so the top 12, the Dirty Dozen, are the worst dozen that have the highest pesticide loads on those non-organic.

And usually they're like berries and things like that.

A lot of it is, and as you can imagine, it's skins, things that have skin on them, right? So it's going to be berries, but believe it or not, I think third and fourth, it just came out, kale, spinach, really high. Leafy greens, peaches, things with skin like berries. And sure enough, and even— and sure enough, the dirty— the Clean 15 are those that you could buy. If they're not organic, they tend to have a lower amount. So not perfect, but lower amounts of pesticide residues.

And those are things with rinds, right? More?

Yeah, they tend to be. But asparagus often makes that list as well. Is it on the top of the list as clean? Not generally, but it's in that list. It helps to guide people's decision-making. It's never going to be a perfect situation. And you never want people to freak out. But you want— you're saying you're at a supermarket, it's not asparagus season, there's not a lot of variety of organic. So if you were to pick the asparagus that's conventional and you clean it really well with baking soda or vinegar, or you have a clean vegetable spray that's nontoxic, that would not be a bad choice. And so you have to just think about what is available at the time, being the cost, location, accessibility, time of the season. Then you can make those decisions. So it's just another layer of decision-making from a good tool, and it is a good tool.

But you'd always choose the non-organic berry over a processed meal, right?

Oh yeah, exactly. If you were talking about a hierarchy, McDonald's, Burger King, and all these junk foods with tons of crazy chemicals versus a washed conventional fruit, To me, there's no choice there. No doubt about it, you would choose the washed conventional fruit and just try to give it a little extra scrub or soak. That's what I teach in the book is how do you take all options on the table and make them better.

And how do you use that baking soda? Because I know about vinegar, you dilute the vinegar in water.

You could do water and baking soda as well. And you want to agitate your food. You want to make sure you're sort of getting— little scrub never hurt. But warm water. So baking soda works. Not a lot of baking soda, you don't need a lot. But either one of those would work very nicely. In fact, many cleaners, home cleaning products should really be baking soda and vinegar and lemon, sea salt. Yeah, we'll get to that.

I used to get so stringent about that and then I gave up because I was like, I need to clean the house at some point. But what about hydroponics? There's a lot of hydroponic vegetables and fruit, like gem lettuce, they come with the root. Do you think those are clean?

It's interesting. They just hit my supermarkets. And on the labeling they do say no toxins, pesticides, no chemicals. They make a point to tell you how well controlled those environments are. So I find that unique. They're also cheaper. I noticed at least a $1.50 difference between a container of the hydroponic lettuce as compared to the brand in the soil. So organic as well, but still within a dollar difference or so, $1.50. And so I think people just have to make the choices that they're comfortable with. I tried both just for fun, and I found no real difference, obviously, in taste. But loss may be a real issue. And unfortunately, I don't want to put organic farmers out of business. I think we need to be thinking globally when we make our choices as well, if we can.

Yeah, Terry, agriculture.

Yeah, we want to support the people who are doing things right, be it cosmetic makers or fashion designers that are making inroads.

There's so much dirt, there's so many dirty industries I think it's almost impossible to do it all 100% right. But the hydroponics, even those that— it drives me crazy because they're all in plastic. Everybody's in plastic containers. So do you actually get leaching into the food from the container, especially if it's not a cold? Because I think cold somehow protects leaching.

Yeah. So your question is excellent because I think we spent a lot of time talking about the foods, macros, fats, carbs, this, or USDA organic or conventional. But no one's really seeing that packaging makes a huge difference in our food. Packaging, like I said, BPA often is leaching into the food it carries. It's often worse when it comes to— or I should say increase when it comes to acidic foods. That's why it's better to buy some things in jars, you know, glass jars if possible. Yeah, like acidic products, you know, tomato sauce, tomato paste, those kind of things. And then EPA, there's wonderful studies that I talk about in the book. One of them was that they had 75 participants who they changed out just their lunch to either a Progresso, and they said the brand Progresso canned soup, versus a handmade, you know, packaging, completely clean soup. And so these 75 participants, they spent 2 weeks eating the Progresso soup at lunch only and nothing else changed in their diet technically. And then they had a 3-day washout, and then they only had the all-natural soups. And there was an 1,100% difference in bisphenol A between those who had the Progresso canned soup versus the unpackaged, clean, hand-made soup. And BPA is measured in the urine. And so this was such a remarkable study. Now, they were doing this in Japan with people who drink Coke and Diet Coke. It's a big thing in Japan. And all the studies point out that the BPA BPA does make it into the body. The good news is, here's the good news, is that BPA has a half-life of 6 to 8 hours generally for a normal healthy kidney and livers that are breaking it down. So the idea is that if you were to give up canned foods, you would have that much less exposure continuously in your body as an endocrine disruptor.

That's wild. Okay, so there's so much to go through here. Let's— how about we walk through the house and like pretend that you're walking through someone's house What would you tell them to watch out for and what are easy ways to avoid some of the daily toxins that we have in our lives?

This walk into a home, the first thing you want to do is take your shoes off.

I mean, so let's walk into the house like you're walking in the front door. You look at my grass or whatever and you tell me to watch out for, and let's do it like that.

That's fun.

Yeah, well, I don't do it as much as I would love, or ever really, but I mean, actually, you know, we try to get people to think about having an outside shoe shoe bucket because you won't want to, you know, bring in chemicals, pesticides, fertilizers, E. coli from bathrooms, you know, poop, I mean, nose, whatever it is. But it's a lot of chemicals. I mean, I live on a farm and we're getting sprayed constantly by farmers who haven't really worked with me. Some haven't. So the idea is all of these chemicals make their way not only from rain but meet the soil, uh, have air quality chemicals that can land on soil. But we have like spaces that are pretty disgusting. So the idea is that you may want to keep those shoes— you know, cultures do this so beautifully, it's not a stretch. But in the United States—

funny, because I grew up South Korean and I grew up not putting our— I mean, putting our— taking our shoes off all the time. And I never thought the day would come where everybody's doing it all the time.

Do you still do it?

I try to, but sometimes I get lazy, you know. Oh, I never wear shoes up to the bedrooms unless it's an emergency.

And where do you keep all your clothes, your shoes for getting dressed? I mean, upstairs in your clothes area and you just carry them down?

Yeah, I'm a clean minimalist, so I don't have that many shoes.

Girl, you don't want to go into my closet. Anyway, but funny thing is I think to myself like all my nice shoes are up there, all my junk shoes are downstairs because I try to do the, you know, everyday shoes are by the door. They're not outside, they're by the door, which is at least better. Then you forget, you got to go upstairs to get something and you're like, I'm not taking my shoes off.

And so yeah, but we do yell at everybody else to take it off, like my kids.

So then I can do it.

Sure.

Yeah, yeah, that's how it works. You get a pass for being the teacher. But so you walk in, I mean, before you walk in, you really do try to, you know, occupational issues, 'cause I do work with occupational issue communities, like where you think, you know, workers have lives too, they have families, and you really wanna think about what were they exposed to before they even get inside the house. If you're someone who works in the fields, if you're someone who's working in industry where the OSHA regulations which are national government regulations for exposure, are much higher than average mortals that live as consumers and in the general population. So there's an allowable higher exposure. Unfortunately, that's the case, but that's what it is. And so you want to think about having separate washer dryer in the garage, having a place to at least take off your clothes. You want to take those chemicals away from the in-home environment because that's where they'll stick around the most is in home.

Okay. So get yourself cleaned up, sort of debrief yourself before you get in the house even maybe. Like during the pandemic, my husband worked in a hospital, so he would actually do that before coming in. Yeah.

It's the same idea, but we, that was really kind of fear and stress of infection and people are freaked out now. People are lackadaisical.

But it's, they're good habits.

They're good habits.

Very good habits.

Very good habits. So you come in. What about the mail? That drives me crazy. I'm like, don't leave the mail on the kitchen counter. Cause it's like you, that mail has been everywhere.

Yeah, it's interesting. I really don't worry about the mail.

Oh, really?

I'm saying, to me, there's a lot dirtier spaces, and it's usually because the chemicals, less the hand touching of mail. That doesn't bother me as much. It's a great question. I've never explored that. Usually have a little space for the mail, so it kind of is in the same area. But the kitchen is really the source of a lot of things that people can work on, one being cleaning products. I mean, cleaning products, again, EWG is a wonderful resource for this. Look, there was a time I was making my own cleaning products. I have all of— by the way, I'm holding up my book Non-Toxic again. I have all the recipes for the most basic household cleaners.

I love it.

I have surface cleaners and oven cleaners and sink cleaners. And you become so over— garage— with the billion-dollar industry of cleaning that people don't realize that the same solution can clean everything, even against COVID, if you do the right I have that in the book as well. So the idea is that you want to be able to keep it simple. You either make your own, which is super easy, or EWG tells you which products, you know, on their toxicology ratings, are a little safer than others.

Give us one of your favorite— just give us a recipe for your favorite basic cleaning product that's in the book.

Oh, you just take— and I don't even know the percentages, but it's basically just white vinegar, lemon juice that's real, and water. Maybe even a little Castile soap. Nothing that's really out of this world or unattainable. It's all attainable everywhere. So, you know, these air fresheners, they're not fresh. They're actually the most toxic air you can have. So it's just such a marketing nightmare. You know, commercials that you see with like a house filled with dirty dishes and filth and they're like, oh, it smells like roses. Like, who are we fooling? It's just remarkable how we can be, let's cover it all up and pretend it's not there. It's not the way to go. Clean up your dishes. You didn't use natural stuff and that way you won't get into your body, on your skin, on your pet's paws, in the dust that accumulates. Because most house dust is actually a collection of chemicals from furniture, from cleaning products, not just skin cells, which is normal, but pet dander. I mean, the greatest number— and I talk about the studies in the book— the greatest class of chemicals found in homes in dust is phthalates. And phthalates as a class come from plastics. They make plastics soft and squishy. They're in nail polish to make, uh, polish not chip, or hairspray to make it not crack. So they're known for—

is that in turf also? Like athletic turf?

Turf, yep, that's in—

so I visited my daughter, I visited her dorm room, and she was having a lot of congestion, and I looked under their beds and I was like, oh my God, so they had not vacuumed. I had— I bought them a vacuum cleaner. It's much better now. But, but honestly, I didn't even think about how, like, I didn't know that that dust traps all those toxic chemicals. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, dust is one of the most toxic thing you can imagine. And if you think about children or pets, they're lowest to the ground, their toys get sticky from putting in their mouths, everything gets on children in their hands, and they're the most vulnerable of all humans because by body mass index they have, you know, most to lose with these exposures because of their developmental stages are so young. So we really want to think not just the in utero environment, we want to think of young kids and toddlers and their exposures. And then we can also think of another vulnerable period where hormones are really active is teenage years. I have two teenage boys. I battle it out with them. My one of them is— loves cologne. It's like a battle, real life battles.

And yes, yeah, and you don't want to sound overboard, right? Because, you know, right, it's everywhere. And it's almost like we're brainwashed to think what's normal is fine, but it's not.— it's normal, it's toxic.

Right, because you can't see, smell, touch, feel a lot of these chemicals as they're getting absorbed into your body. We'd all flip out if it was like dermatitis and we had contact dermatitis and we had a rash from touching something.

Which happens, right, from all these things.

Absolutely, absolutely, even from natural substances. But in other words, they're insidious. They're insidious. They can be measured, as I do with patients, Breast milk can be measured, urine can be measured, blood can be measured for various chemicals depending on how they're measured.

That's a great point.

We have opportunities to do this now with the PFAS chemicals and all the different perfluoroalkyls and nonstick chemicals that are in our waterways, we've heard on the news. And so because we can get them in our body, because they can be tested, we can also really remove them. And goal is to not let them into our body in the first place and to remove the ones naturally that actually get in.

Okay, and so we're in the kitchen, we're going to drink— talking about removing toxins, hydration, right? Hydration is key.

Yeah, and hydration, but depends on— exactly. So people always talk about how much water should I drink per day to be hydrated. Well, sure, I worry so much about how much, although in some patients you should, in certain kidney disease and that kind of— but it's the quality. It's the quality of what you eat and quality of your water, which has become such a major topic in my world, that we don't realize just by volume of how much we drink over the course of a lifetime that we should really be filtering our water. And that's based on the laws of the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1976 that's still in effect, by the way, hasn't really changed. And under that law, only 91 chemicals are looked for and removed, remediated from our water treatment plants that there's 160,000 that serve 80% of the US population. 20% is wells, which have their own issues. But we should really be thinking about just 91 chemicals out of 95,000 that are available and do get into our water. And I— and we show how it gets into water, right? We worked on that artwork to make sure people simply could see where those chemicals come from into our wastewater treatment plants that come right out the other side. We don't have a system for that.

Yeah, you know, when I was an adult and I found out where that our waste actually goes into the areas that we drink from, it was—

our toilet water becomes our drinking water. Yeah, our toilet water becomes our drinking water, and no one really understands that.

I know. So we're in the kitchen, and I've gone through so many different filters. I get paranoid about them. I've tried different, uh, Fusion filters, upside-down filters. Like, what is your recommendation? For filters. I have one under my sink also, but not all filters are the same either.

Not all filters are the same, and a lot of times they vary even by the location of what's infiltrating your water system, your water treatment plant issues, because they do vary. But let's start by saying all water is disgusting. In my opinion, not a third world country. I want to say that we have far better water than many third world countries, but that being said, it's still not good enough for human health and certainly not infants, toddlers, you know, pregnancy, immune suppressed patients, elderly. So it's not so much where, it's what type. And how strong are they, okay? So I first of all say everyone should filter. So no matter what you can afford, what you can gather, whether it's a pitcher that's a carbon block type, or it's under the sink faucet has a carbon block filter system. And you can go to distillers, that's a whole different process. There's, uh, V-Lite, there's whole house filters, there's reverse osmosis. So there's all different ways of doing it.

I tried the reverse osmosis one.

So the pros and cons for all of them, but I will say to you that at this point I'm very comfortable telling people to try to get a reverse osmosis water filter. Not the kind that necessarily sits on the countertop. I have heard all the commercials about these types. If it does not at least take literally hundreds of chemicals out, then it's not really a good enough filter, even if it's reverse osmosis. And you should know what it removes. Yeah, under the can— the under-the-sink ones tend to have more aggressive filtration because they're bigger. They've got more surface area to remove those chemicals. Don't cost as much as they used to. They're now $275 for the ones even that I recommend. And the fact of the matter is I give them as wedding gifts. I mean, at the point where they've come down so much over the last 10 years of doing this work, that I'm very comfortable saying we should be subsidizing these in Newark, in Flint, in all the areas that make the news. We should be subsidizing these In California, if there's water restrictions, it's higher quality and we need to figure out where this water is coming from that has a variety of climate change effects from flooding. You really want to be thinking about high yield, good use of filtration, filling up at home in glass and stainless steel bottles. And that's creating a system as best you can. That, that's what I say to people.

Great. And what about dishwashing pods? Like, even if they are— they say they're clean, do they have some sort of effect? Because they're not like regular soap, even the ones that I buy that are natural.

Yeah, I think that, you know, so many companies that I can't speak to that general question. I mean, use the people like EWG to vet out, you know, issues because they have the people and the manpower to do it. You know, they list ingredients. They don't have to always tell you what's in it. When they tell you what's in it, not every one of us is a toxicologist and can make out whether or not those actual ingredients are a problem for human health. Vinegar, vinegar is acetic acid. Most people seeing the word acetic acid would flip out, right? But acetic acid in vinegar is not harmful.

Yeah.

So I think we need to think about what our roles are and who are the resources.

So now we're in the kitchen. We already talked about the different kinds of foods and water. So we walk into the rest of the house. We want to try to buy wool or natural products if we can, as far as like rugs and—

Well, there's a reason, there's a reason for natural. Also, it's more naturally flame retardant.

Wool is flame retardant.

Yeah, exactly. So we want to think about materials that don't have flame retardant chemicals. And we now know how to do that with the right labeling because that information— That was all reversed in California in 2013. And so I actually, you know, and there's labels that show the old one that has flame retardants and then the new one you should look for that shows that it's free of those flame retardants.

And it's funny, California is so stringent. So stringent.

Well, they are. They're getting much more stringent. Yes.

Everything causes cancer if you're in California. You pick up any product that says it causes cancer.

Well, the Prop 65, which we explain in the book also, but You know, we have to have leaders. We have to have legislative leaders. We know Europe is better in terms of their regulatory oversight. We know that Canada is better and we know that California is better. And everything that follows suit after these areas, you know, countries and states, we should be listening to because they are doing it right.

Yeah.

I mean, I guess my big issue with that is that now everything looks like it causes cancer. So then you start to ignore things. You just ignore it because it's on every label, California labels. But anyway, going back to flame retardants.

I think moderation is what I would say. You can't live your life so stringent that you get everything out of your life. But I think it's important to— I think that Prop 65 is very helpful because I just had a chair a couple years back that had the Prop 65 label and I got rid of it. I made a better choice. And so at the very least, because the markets are so big, and there are people doing it right, it'll give you that opportunity to make those choices as opposed to shoving it down everyone's throat that this is what's available and you don't need to know what's in the material, right?

Okay, so if somebody can't replace all their furniture, then what's the best thing to do? Just vacuum and just keep it clean and open the windows. I think that's one of the biggest things that I recommend. Sometimes, as long as somebody's not outside with a gas blower, right?

Exactly. As long as the outside air is better than the inside air. You had a couch that I knew had flame retardants, and I watched it for a couple years. And the reason I watched it for a couple years is because we didn't have the money to just, you know, really toss it and get a $3,000 couch. And so we really waited. And when I finally got rid of it, I took pictures and I made a big to-do about it because I wanted people to understand why we got rid of it and what the labeling was. So when it comes to home furnishings and couches and really thinking about these things, go with materials again that are wool. Go with things, you know, get a cover that can certainly go across a couch that's maybe organic cotton. That's one more barrier. But again, what you said was correct, you know, dusting, vacuuming, getting rid of all of the particulate that comes off of our materials, and it comes off of cords, you know, so in the cords of computers, telephones, and we have everything around us, but we have to just kind of control that environment a little bit more.

Awesome.

If you're in a home though, one of the easiest ways to get rid of something that causes cancer, which is radon, radon, just open the windows, right? Get a cross breeze going.

You don't want to really— you have to do remediation if you're going to get radon testing tested, it's very serious. It can cause lung cancer. It's one of the largest cause of, you know, important cause. So if you're getting radon tested, and then that has to be remediated. Yeah.

Yes. There's not much you can do if you have no testable— like, you know, your limits are below the standard. But you should still open your windows and—

oh, sure. Yeah, absolutely. There's nothing like plants. I mean, talk about all the plants that have been tested to help remove chemicals the air.

Snake plants.

Yeah, there's a variety. But when, you know, cleaning windows daily— I do that in my office also— is really great because again, it's stagnant air, but it also may have any aeration off of new products. Even my office, I supply my cleaning staff with the right products at my own cost. So the choices you think about once you start to get good at this process.

Great. Okay, let's cover one more thing. Makeup.

Makeup. Okay, so makeup is interesting. There is no required testing for ingredients that go into makeup or cosmetics, feminine care products. And so it's a real problem. Personal care products are really just sort of game in the sense that— and I didn't know this either back in the day when I was trying to figure this all out— so there's just no oversight. And I think having the tools like EWG and other databases that do now exist actually, can vet those issues out. And we can, you know, to my son who wanted, you know, summer camp and he wanted all these products, he's 13 at the time, I said, look, you can take this Healthy Living app, you know, out of the resources again or in the book, take this app and you find the products you want. If it's a 3 or below, which should be really 2 below, but I gave him some leeway, 3 or below, then you can get it. And he did it.

Great.

You know, what I do with my high school kids, it means empowerment. I think people just— and look, I color my hair. I did this in my TED Talk. It's a journey. It's a journey for everybody to go through these changes in a way that works for them. So you don't want to feel rushed. You want to do this in a way that's actually reasonable so it sticks.

Okay, well, thank you for doing this amazing work. Such important work. Can you please tell us where to find you and where people should— I'm going to put the links below also. But let us know.

So my work in education and what I love to do, which is teaching, whether it's to the public or schools or colleagues, is The Smart Human. So it's The Smart Human. I have a podcast. I interview really interesting researchers and physicians and a lot of environmental health work. Great. And it's TikTok, it's Twitter, it's Instagram, it's Facebook. All different ways of sharing these ideas. They're not all the same. Then I encourage people to listen and to invite people, anyone, kids, middle schoolers, you know, the age groups including adults. In terms of my practice, I practice in Princeton. I see rheumatology patients, I see integrative medicine patients, all different ages, and also environmental chemical exposures. I'm doing a lot of work with that as well. So people can find me online and it's, you know, hard to find me.

Wonderful. Okay, thank you Thank you so much for being here, Ali. I really appreciate it.

It is my pleasure. Thank you so much, Juna Bobby MD, for having me. I appreciate it.

Thank you. Thank you.

That was Dr. Ali Cohen. Remember, start small. You don't have to tackle everything at once. That's the key to overcoming any challenge in life. You can find out more about her on alicoenmd.com and watch her TEDx talk, How to Protect Your Kids from Toxic Thank you so much for listening.

Forward this to a friend, a family member, anyone who needs to stress less, and soon enough you'll be surrounded by more Zen people. Your support is literally what makes this possible. Subscribe and head on over to YouTube to my Fall Asleep Easy channel. Sign up for your updates at mindbodyspace.com and get special tips into your inbox once a month. Until next time, this is Dr. Juna wishing you wellness.