Dr. Mark Hyman explains how environmental toxins like mercury and BPA can contribute to weight gain and what you can do to reduce exposure. He covers detoxification basics and practical steps to support your body's natural detox processes.
Hi, this is Dr. Mark Hyman and welcome to my weekly house call. Your chance to ask me your questions and this week's question comes from a Facebook reader who writes, Dr. Hyman, I've been reading a lot about the role of environmental toxins in our health and what's the best way to get rid of these toxins and are things like household cleaners and skincare products really that harmful? Well, to understand how harmful environmental toxins can be, we need to understand the process of detoxification. You see, many doctors look down on the whole idea of detoxification, but just ask them how bad things can get if your kidneys or your liver stop working or if you get constipated for weeks. Detoxification is a natural process that occurs all the time in the body. Unfortunately, in our modern world, we are burdened with a huge amount of environmental toxins in our diet, in our environment. These toxins include plastics, pesticides, phthalates, bisphenol A or BPA, flame retardants, mercury, lead, arsenic, or any one of the 80,000 chemicals introduced into our world since the Industrial Revolution. And these have been shown to interfere with metabolism and they cause weight gain even in the absence of extra calories. This is a real breakthrough. These environmental toxins are called obesogens. In fact, the average newborn baby has 287 chemicals in their umbilical cord blood. Now, animal studies have found that toxic chemicals can cause weight gain independent of any change in calorie intake or any change in exercise. Now, there are many mechanisms by which toxins affect weight gain. They change your metabolism, they change your hormones and even your brain function. For example, environmental toxins cause insulin resistance or prediabetes. They affect your mitochondria, which are the little factories in your cells that help you burn energy. They also increase inflammation, which causes weight gain. They can even affect your thyroid function. And when we found people lose weight, a lot of weight, they actually release environmental toxins that are stored in their fat tissue, and this shuts down their thyroid. So you have to detox as you're losing weight. Now toxins can be found in your cosmetics, they can be found in your food, in your household cleaners, in our Tupperware, they can wreak havoc on your health. One of my patients was a trainer. She was a fitness expert, she ate a really healthy diet and she was 40 pounds overweight and she just could not lose the weight despite doing everything perfectly. And when we tested her, we found she had very high levels of mercury. and so we detoxed her. We got her mercury levels down, we cut out the mercury in her diet, we gave her things to help boost her detox system, we chelated the metals out of her system, and she got her mercury down and she lost 40 pounds without changing her diet or exercise. So cutting your exposure to environmental toxins is really possible, and we can also help your body eliminate these stored toxins. The good news is there's a lot you can do to reduce your exposure to environmental toxins, and help your body get rid of the ones you already have stored in you. Here are some really simple tips. The first is eat organic when you can. And I want you to follow the Environmental Working Group's guide. You go to ewg.org, and they have a list of the dirty dozen and the clean 15. The dirty dozen are the most contaminated fruits and vegetables with pesticides. You never wanna eat those unless they're organic. And the clean 15, which identifies the 15 most common fruits and vegetables that even if they're not organic, don't really have a lot of pesticides. Also, I want you to stop eating mercury. That's key. You have to avoid big fish with lots of mercury, like tuna, swordfish, halibut, Chilean sea bass. There's a wonderful guide from the NRDC, you go to nrdc.org, and it has a guide for picking fish with the lowest levels of mercury. Also, I want you to eat clean, organic animal products. Choose grass-fed products or Animals raised on pastures, without hormones or antibiotics. They may cost a little more, but you can eat smaller amounts of higher quality food. Also, filter your water. You want to use a carbon or reverse osmosis filter to get rid of all the hidden contaminants in your water. Also, you can support your body's own detox system. How do you do that? Well, you drink about 8 glasses of water a day. You also want to eat lots of fiber so you poop every day. Now, if you're not pooping every day, you got to go every day. take more magnesium, have more fiber, whatever you got to do, go to the bathroom. Also, I want you to get sweaty. Sweating helps your body excrete toxins. You can use exercise or saunas. In fact, infrared or regular saunas are a powerful way to help your body excrete pesticides and other common organic pollutants, even heavy metals. In fact, I knew a dentist who was severely depressed and fatigued, and he told me that he had very high levels of mercury from all his work with amalgams. so he told me he did an hour a day of a sauna and he got his mercury levels down, he relieved his fatigue and his depression. Also I want you to increase detox foods. These are special foods that help your body get rid of these toxins. What are they? They're called cruciferous vegetables. Things like broccoli, kale, bok choy. You want to eat at least one or two cups of these a day. And lots of other things like garlic and ginger and onions and turmeric. These also help your body detox. and you also can take supplements that support detox. Certain minerals like selenium increases glutathione, zinc helps your body get rid of metals, vitamin C and B complex vitamins help your body process toxins, and special compounds that help boost glutathione, which is the body's super detoxifier. And there are certain supplements to do that, including N-acetyl cysteine, lipoic acid, milk thistle, and these are powerful boosters of detox. so you can cut your exposure to toxins and you can boost your body's own natural detox systems. Living clean and green is a powerful way to improve your health and prevent disease. So now I'd love to hear from you. How have you minimized your exposure to environmental toxins? How have you felt toxins may have affected you? I want you to share your experience below and on my Facebook page. And if you like this video, I want you to share it with your friends and family on Facebook and Twitter and be sure to submit your questions to DrHyman.com so that maybe next week I'll make a house call to you.
