Environmental Toxins: How To Eliminate The Silent Killers | Dr. Joseph Pizzorno

A third area now that's a huge problem with the toxins is they damage our DNA. So when you look at the research on the correlation between the by the love of a particular toxin and a particular disease we're looking at, if you do it according to age, you don't see very many correlations until about the age of 50.

Welcome, Joe, to the Dr. Sarno's podcast. You know, Joe, we've known each other for the better part of three decades. Wow, that's fine. We've worked together at the Institute for Functional Medicine on the board for decades now on the founding board. And, you know, you've been someone I've learned so much from and relied on to actually learn functional medicine. And, your textbook of natural medicine was my go-to guide for learning about this as I kind of evolved in becoming a functional medicine doctor. And I also, you know, you know, encyclopedic for natural medicine was sort of a consumer version of that textbook that helps so many people navigate the world of natural medicine. For those who don't know Joe, you know, you've heard the introduction, but you know, he's an icon in the field of natural medicine, integrative and functional medicine. He's basically, I would say, infused the DNA of what functional medicine is with naturopathic principles, which was sort of an early version, I would say, of what functional medicine was. And he started Bastyr University. He's, you know, he's been just such an inspiration for me and I think without him, I don't think this field would be where it is today. And many of you haven't heard of him because he's not out there as much in the public eye, but he's done so much hard work, so much deep research, so much deep science about the things that are really plaguing us. And, you know, what really has been impressive with you, for me, for the last few years of your work, has been the focus on environmental toxins. And it's something that we talk about a lot in the space we're in. It's certainly not something we learned about at all in medical school other than acute poisoning. And it wasn't really considered part of our toolkit to look at toxin exposure, the role of toxins in our health, the way of diagnosing toxic load, the way of treating toxicity, the whole idea of detoxification was considered quackery. But it's actually central to everything we do. And I think this is not a new topic. I mean, Rachel Carson 60 years ago, more, I think more than 60 years ago, wrote her book Silent Spring and she sounded a warning that we used to these man-made chemicals, we now call them forever chemicals, are destroying the biosphere, are destroying ourselves. And, you know, in 2024, we really haven't listened to her. We have actually poisoned ourselves in ways that I don't think she even could have imagined. And I think we see sort of exponential growth of chemicals. And I think the European Chemicals Agency that said there's more than 144,000 man-made chemicals in existence. The Department of Health in the US estimates that 2,000 new chemicals are being released every year and they're not really tested. The WHO estimates 12 million people die every year from diseases caused by air, water, soil pollution, chemical exposures, climate change and ultraviolet radiation, all of which result from human activity. I mean, it's just staggering to me when you think about that because the global burden of disease studies said that there were 11 million people dying from bad food. So 12 million people are dying from toxins. That's maybe the biggest killer, right?

Yes.

And it's something we don't really talk about.

So.

How did you come to understand that toxins were so central? to human health and disease? And how did you sort of understand that we need to look at the toxic load of every single patient we see with a chronic illness?

So let me actually quote one of our teachers, Dr. Sid Baker. Yeah. He was a medical doctor who I consider one of the most brilliant physicians in medicine. And he said at one of our IFM conferences, and by the way, a lot of the intellectual foundation of functional medicine came from Dr. Sid Baker. Yeah, we owe him a lot. He said something when I had a lecture that I thought was just perfect. He said, you know, all medicine is really quite simple. Get into each person what they uniquely need and get out of each person what they uniquely do not need.

And get rid of the bad stuff, put in the good stuff.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So I said, you know, I've been in medicine for over half a century. Yeah, I've been doing this for a long time. And so as I look back and see, well, what really helped people? And for the majority of my practice up until about 15 years ago, I mainly did nutritional medicine, and I helped a lot of people.

Yeah.

But as I started doing environmental medicine, I was realizing I was helping way more people because the body has tremendous ability to heal. We just give it a chance. but what we've done is we've placed our bodies with metals and chemicals so that the body can't function properly.

Yeah.

Even if there's aquamonic nutrients there, so being blocked by poisons in the environment, it's not gonna get better.

Yeah.

We now suffer the highest burden of chronic disease in every age group ever in human history.

Why?

Every age group.

Every age.

That's what's staggering. Ever.

Yeah.

In the past, conventional medicine said, well, yeah, people are getting sicker, but because they're getting older. that's true. It's like an old answer is now.

In such young age groups that we never saw before.

Never, never before. So, and then, about 15 years ago, one of the wealthiest men in Canada sent his personal Learjet down to Seattle to pick me up and fly me to Calgary, Alberta. And he said, I want to improve the health of my oil field workers. And I said, well, I'm happy to do that. But, you know, I'm a true believer in natural medicine. I'm also very objective, very scientific, aren't I? So I want to measure people's by load of toxins, measure nutritional status, and measure physiological function, see what's going on, how much can I spend? He looked at me and said, blank check. If you can convince me this test is going to help improve my employees, I will pay for it. So 15 years ago, I did the equivalent of that time, $1,500 of lab tests, on 4,500 oil field workers.

Wow, that's a lot. Testing.

So I tested nutrition and I'll tell you nutrition. The 4,500 people, 4,450 of them had at least one nutritional deficiency. Only 50 of them did not have at least one. But right there we have something to do.

90 plus percent.

99%. So then I looked at how about environmental toxins? Wait a minute, I was seeing a lot of toxins. So as they started interviewing with people, well, they were happy to get the nutrients. When we got the toxins out of the bodies, all of a sudden, dramatic improvements. Matter of fact, some are so dramatic, actually, I actually wrote a case this year on one of them that's so significant. So then I started looking into the research. I started realizing, studying things like and that most people don't realize, including doctors, one out of three people in North America have arsenic levels in their body high enough to cause disease. One out of three. How's that correlate to? One out of four cancers is due to arsenic. One out of five cardiac deaths is due to arsenic. Diabetes, about 15%. Strokes, about 15%. So just one toxin that's so prevalent, it's causing all this disease. What if instead of spending all this money on medical intervention after disease has started, Wolfi simply started decreasing people's body load of arsenic. Think of what happened if all those heart attacks and all that cancer didn't happen because they weren't full of arsenic.

Yeah.

So I started looking at toxin after toxin, lead. Do people realize that today, one out of three fatal heart attacks is due to lead? Yeah.

That was a shocking, you know, years ago I read it was in the American Journal of Cardiology. I think it was this paper that looked at lead levels and correlated them with cardiovascular disease and endpoints. And it was shocking because the normal reference range for lead, it used to be like 40, then it was 20, and then now it's 10. and levels over two were correlated with a higher risk for stroke, heart attacks, and death than cholesterol abnormalities. And 39% of the population have LDL levels over two, which is just shocking. And it's not something you check when you go to your cardiologist.

So I wrote an editorial and I'm in the Journal of Integrated Medicine, the Clinician's Journal, it's in PubMed. I wrote an editorial that we should be changing the standard screening. Instead of screening for cholesterol, why don't we screen for lead and arsenic? Because we'll have way better impact on people's health dealing with those than dealing with cholesterol.

So let's kind of back up a little bit and talk about the toxins that are the most prevalent we should be concerned about. But I want to talk about like, what do toxins do in the body that cause disease? And how does it cross the spectrum from everything from mood disorders, to autoimmune disease, to dementia, to cardiovascular disease, to obesity, to autism. I mean, the list goes on and on. So at every level of illness from the birth to death, toxins seem to play a role. And it's not that the cause of everybody who has diabetes or Alzheimer's or autism, but in functional medicine, we think about the root causes and how one cause can create many diseases and one disease can have many causes. So just because you know the name of disease, you don't know what's wrong with you, right? You have to know what the cause is. But in the case of toxins, how do toxins actually interact with our biology to cause such problems?

Yeah, that's actually a really good question. I kind of break it into three categories. Category one is while we pay attention to individual toxins and know a lot about the disease, caused by individual toxins, number one priority is total by load of toxins. How much arsenic do you have? How much lead do you have? How much bisphenols do you have? How much styrene do you have? Etc. Because what happens is all the toxins cause oxidative stress and deplete glutathione from the body. Glutathione is the most important antioxidant in our body, but more importantly, it's a key way we protect our mitochondria. And the longest living people with the least disease have the highest levels of glutathione.

That's right.

Is it glutathione? Your mitochondria die and you die sooner and have more disease.

Yeah.

Okay.

So we got decreased total load. Then we look at, okay, so now what do the toxins do individually? So they can range from, this is where classically the main problem with toxins is they displace nutrients from the body. So for example, any enzyme that depends upon calcium in the body, they have high levels of lead, it displaces the calcium from the enzyme so they don't work properly. So they basically poison enzymes. Why is that important? Bodies are enzyme machines. What bodies are enzyme machines? Enzymes are not working, my machine's not working, and we get sick. That's number one.

Direct poisoning of the enzymes by the toxins. Let's just sort of emphasize that for a minute. Enzymes are such a huge part of our biology that one third of our DNA codes for enzymes. One third of our entire genome is coding for enzymes that catalyze metabolic reactions in the body. And all those have to be functioning for us to be healthy. It's like the metabolic machinery that it has to run everything. And toxins bind to those enzymes in a way that blocks their function, leading to faulty biology, which leads to disease.

Yes, exactly. Very well said, Mark. Exactly. That's what happens. And going on with what you said about DNA, in the second area, a third area now, that's a huge problem with the toxins is they damage our DNA. So when you look at the research on the correlation between the by level of a particular toxin and a particular disease we're looking at, if you do it according to age, you don't see very many correlations until about the age of 50. because up until about the age of 50, our body is pretty able to adapt to the damage from the toxin and work around it. But when we hit about age 50, there's two big things that happen. Number one is our body load of persistent toxins has now become much, much higher. So these are toxins that take so long to get out of our body, we can't get rid of them.

Yeah.

So PCBs, for example, if you go to a restaurant and eat farmed fish, some of the PCBs and the farm fish have a half-life ranging from 10 to 20 years. It takes four half-lives to get rid of the toxin. So you go eat that farm fish and some of those toxins will be in your body for the rest of your life. So what happens?

Let's say I live to 200, then I'll get rid of it. There you go.

Right.

Yeah.

You have to live past 100 to get rid of them. Okay, so then. So what's happening is the vinyl is going up. But now as the body load going up, we've cumulatively damaged our DNA. So our ability to respond to them and adapt to them has now become limited. And now all of a sudden, all the disease correlations start showing up.

So total load, damage to enzymes and damage DNA. But there's more effects, right? There's the immunotoxicity, which is leading to all the inflammatory and autoimmune diseases, right? And mitochondrial injury, which leads to poisoning of our energy metabolism. So there's damage to our gut lining that happens because of toxins that damage our enzymes in our gut to make.

Our gut not be able to work.

Every level of our biology, there are endocrine disruptors. They disrupt our hormonal function. So every level of our biology, these compounds are interfering with them. And, you know, I, I think, you know, the story about, you know, the reason I got into functional medicine was I was living in China, and long story short, I got poisoned with mercury from the pollution there, cleaning on my air filter. Plus, I'd eaten tuna fish for decades when I was a kid, and I had lots of fillings. And I had a level on a challenge test of 187, which is. For those who don't know, like, if I see someone over 20, I get worried. I rarely see anybody over 100. I don't remember last time was 100. I've had a couple of people who had higher levels than me. One was a dementia patient, and. But, you know, I. I literally had every system in my body break down. My gut broke down, my cognitive brain broke down, my immune system broke down, my allergies, everything broke down. And I developed chronic fatigue syndrome and no one could fix me. Went to doctor after doctor for years until actually I went to the conference where I first met you in Hawaii and an IFM conference like in 97 I think. And I was on a plane with a guy who was a naturopath and I was telling him, I just learned about functional medicine. I was going to my first conference and I learned about this this natural product, well gee, maybe you should check your heavy metals. I'm like, what?

Really?

So I did a hair analysis, I had a high levels, and then I did a challenge test, and that was the beginning of my exploration of functional medicine. So I learned it the hard way. I learned it the hard way, and I find this as well in my patients. So many patients are coming with these diagnoses and underlying it is this toxic load. So let's talk about the kind of big categories of toxins. You mentioned a lot of heavy metals.

Heavy metals, yeah. immune system. Okay. So the immune system is very, very successful to environmental toxins. So I looked, so I just gave, you know, I just gave a lecture on PFAS is the perfluorinated compounds.

And so I looked at forever chemicals. Yeah, the forever chemicals.

Where were they from? Where did they get them from? Worst place, fast food. Fast food.

Popcorn, fast food or the worst by far. Microwave popcorn.

Microwave popcorn.

Okay.

Because if you said regular popcorn, I don't know, regular popcorn's fine. Microwave popcorn, popcorn.

We get.

Well, I was looking at this. I was looking at Co, I thought, look at COVID and PFAS and look at people who had either no cold or mild taste compared to people had a severe version of Co, of Co, the ones got severe version at 50 to 100 higher levels for PFAS in their body compared to those who did not get bad cold.

Wow.

So just, just a simple thing like that. Enough damage to immune system, couldn't get.

Rid of the COVID virus fast enough. Now you got problems.

Yeah.

Immunotoxicity is a real deal. You know, I had a patient who would bring me up like Crohn's disease and done everything and turned out she had really, really high blood levels. You'd be toxic from lead and she got better. I've seen this over and over in my career. You know, some of the chemicals other than metals, which we can test for, for blood tests, and we do that at Function Health where people can get their own blood tests. But also we do it through, you know, traditional sort of challenge testing, which is where you take a and it binds the metals and you can see what's going on. And, and it's the test that's really not done in traditional medicine. It's a test that I do, anybody who's got a chronic illness, because I have to rule it out. And often I'm surprised. I had a guy, for example, who had long covan, you just mentioned, and I was kind of shocked. Like, he had, his Mercury was like 93 on his challenges, really high. His blood level was 18. And he was struggling with long covan and gut issues. And I'm like, well, this is what's going on, right? Exactly. And so I think it's, it's, it's anywhere, every start looking, you start seeing it. And I think there's a whole swath of other compounds that are, I would call them in a petrochemical sphere that are, that are synthesized compounds that are problematic. So what are the top compounds that are, are concerning to you that we're exposed to on a regular basis and, and where, where are they found and how do we avoid them?

Yeah. Again, another excellent question. So when we look at the toxins, the easy way to think about them is metals versus chemicals. So we're looking at metals, arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium. The four big ones, substantial portion of population have elevated levels that cause a lot of disease. When we look at the chemicals, we have perfluorinates, the PFAS, the forever chemicals. We've got the bisphenols. So people think, oh, BPA is bad. Let me get plastic that's BPA-free. Well, guess what? They put other bisphenols in. They're just as bad. Phthalates, a lot of the healthy beauty aids have phthalates in them.

So, like sunblock or makeup?

Yeah, sunblock, makeup, things like this. A lot of phthalates. But why is that problematic? Phthalates bind to insulin receptor sites and give people diabetes. Okay, so, There are so many chemicals. I've been kind of systematically working my way through, but so far in terms of chemicals, these are the three I'm paying the most attention to. BPA.

BPA and phthalates.

Because it's just so much research. I'm not saying there aren't other problematic chemicals, but these three by themselves cause so much disease.

Only 144,000 other chemicals.

Well, there's 12,000 of these forever chemicals. Just one category is 12,000 chemicals.

I think that's the thing that, you know, some of this is daunting for people, because like we're living in the sea of these chemicals. Yes. the newborn study that the Environmental Working Group did showed there were 287 chemicals in the umbilical cord of a brand new baby before it even took its first breath. And 217 of those chemicals were neurotoxins, everything from flame retardants, pesticides, dioxin, PCBs, DDT, things that were banned, had been banned before, long before, decades before these kids were born. They're in their mothers, they're in the.

Environment, and they're in these babies. So when you're born pre-polluted, Now we're going to the next set of toxins, and that is the herbicides and the pesticides. Industrial chemicals for agriculture. So let's look at just one category, organophosphate pesticides. Okay? If you measure the body load of pregnant women and measure the level of organophosphate pesticides, and you compare look at the IQ of children born to women with the top level of organophosphate pesticides, compared to when with the lowest level of glyphosate pesticides and you are not statistically all the differences in weight and ethnicity, things of this nature. Just look at glyphosate pesticide levels, highest levels, top 10% of women, seven point drop in the IQ of the children and they never get it back. So in utero, the body is being saturated with neurotoxins. So it isn't any surprise the brain does not develop properly. when exposed to neurotoxins. Yeah. So I said before that I'm focused on PFAS, bisphenols and phthalates. You gotta focus on the pesticides, particularly organophosphate pesticides are probably the worst of all of them. But you've got chlorinated pesticides are problematic in many other categories.

Yeah, it's true. I mean, I think I read a study that was based on farm workers, children, migrant farm workers, children. and they estimated that in the offspring of that cohort, there were 41 million lost IQ points in most children. And, you know, I think they're everywhere, right? We're sort of living in a sea of them. We can't really completely avoid them. I'm on the board of the environmental working group, and there's wonderful guys there on how to find products that are low or don't have these compounds. Skin deep is their skin care database. They have what household products that you can buy for cleaning that are not going to pollute your environment. There's ways you can choose food based on lower pesticide counts, 30 dozen like Clean 15. And there's guys that what animal protein and fish you should eat and how to reduce your exposures. So there's a lot of ways to reduce your exposures. But part of the problem is we really can't avoid them entirely. We're all like polluted. And I guess they were more people polluted. from your perspective as a practitioner, you can see this and you can see the data. And it's kind of terrifying if toxins are causing all the diseases, what the heck can we do about it? Because other than trying to reduce your exposures and stop eating fish and don't eat paint chips and filter your water and have an air filter in your house and don't use these skincare products and stuff, we're still not going to be completely able to avoid them. So how do we actually start to think about this from a practical point of view of treating people with environmental toxicity and how do we diagnose them properly? Yes.

So there's actually some really good news here because there are some very simple things we can do that have huge impact on our toxicity. So first thing we want to do is how toxic are we? So I recommend that everybody get have their doctor measure a laboratory test called GGT-P. So GGT-P is a liver enzyme that in the past was measured to determine the person's hepatitis. Because a person has inflammation in the liver, they start leaking liver enzymes into their blood, and you measure the enzyme in the blood and say, ah, hepatitis. They stopped using GGT-P for hepatitis because other tests were found to be more reliable because GGT was reacting to other things. so it turns out within the quote, normal range, 10 to 50, depending upon the lab, ggt goes up in proportion to toxic load. And as you detoxify, ggt goes down. So I mentioned that corporate wellness program I did. So I mentioned my ggt then, and it was 27. And I thought that was okay. And so I saw the research saying once it's 30, you have an eightfold increased risk of diabetes. Yeah. Well, it's not going to go from 29 no risk to 30 more risk. I thought, well, 27 is too high. So I started getting more and more careful. Started getting more careful, went down a couple years later, down to 24. Then I measured a few years late, a few years ago, it went down to 17. I just measured it two months ago, I was down to 16. So between a GTT between 15 and 20 means you've done a good job of getting rid of enough toxins that the body doesn't have to increase GTT. why is the body increase GTT? Because it recycles glutathione because glutathione protects us from toxins. Okay, you're down to 15 to 20, you probably done a good job to get rid of the toxins. Now if you're below 15, it may not mean you have low toxic load, it may mean you have a genetic inability to increase glutathione to protect you from viral toxins. So people I've seen with the biggest problems with viral toxins have low GTTs. I call them yellow canaries. They can't protect themselves. So right there, you have to monitor. Now, what's the next easiest thing to do?

I don't understand about that test. That test is a really inexpensive common test. It's not part typically of your annual physical. It's not part of your typical hepatic liver function test. You have to ask for it specifically. It's called GVT. and I think it's something that I've been measuring on every single patient for decades. That can be high with alcohol, like liver disease, it can be high with fatty liver from diabetes, from a lot of other things. But it's a, it's a very important biomarker. And as part of function health, which was the company I co-founded, it's part of the standard panel you get for, you know, under 500 bucks for 110 biomarkers.

But it's really important because of that. Smart.

Yep.

Like, right on. Very, very useful test. so that way you can monitor what's going on. So as my teacher, Dr. Bastyr, would say, don't kid yourself. You know, you can figure living healthfully, but you might have this little thing you do here and all this food you really love, you can't buy it organic, but I'm going to eat that anyway. You can find how many of your little exceptions, how bad are they adding up? Okay, the second thing to do is report the buys on natural detox systems. We have spent millions of years evolving these things and we sabotage them. How do we sabotage them? A lot of the toxins are excreted from the liver into the gut where we then expect them to go out through the stools. But we evolve that system when we're consuming 100 to 150 grams of fiber a day. Now we consume 15 to 20 grams of fiber a day. yeah, 89 lower, which means that instead of going out through the schools, it just reabsorbs through enteropack recirculation. So number one, eat more fiber. Eat more fiber and you'll buy, get rid of things more, more effectively. Number two, only organic or grown foods. And number three, from your kitchen, remove all the Plastics, remove all the non-stick things, only use glass and ceramics. It's the only safe things I'm aware of.

Yeah.

Filter your water?

Yes.

Okay, so what we do is we have a carbon block filter right in the main coming to our house. So all the water, whether they're drinking it, whether they're taking a shower, is clean and our air conditioning and the heating system in the house, we use what's called a Lennox filter and it's rated at MERV-16. That's M-A-R-V dash 16. and that will get rid of 99.9 of the toxins in the air in your house.

Yeah.

Very effective.

Yeah.

Very important. It's kind of keep your home environment clean.

Your home environment. That's where we spend most of our time.

Non-toxic materials. But I, I think, you know, one of the things I was going to bring up is this whole idea of detoxification. And, you know, it was, it was really from a perspective of a traditional doctor and training I had, it was quackery. Like, you know, our bodies detox, whatever, but like there's no reason to think about improving detoxification. And yet, when we deeply look at the science of the biology of detoxification, which includes your breath, your skin, your hair, your stool, your liver, your kidneys, it's a whole system. And it requires the right building blocks to actually function. It requires the right materials and the pathways have to work. And it's a really well worked out model. And yet we learn nothing about how to fix it, except when you're in the ER, and I was an ER doctor for many years, someone comes in with a Tylenol overdose. We give them this drug called Nucynta, which smells horrible, smells like rotten eggs. You make them drink it, which is like punishment for taking the Tylenol all overdosed. and then you have a bunch of charcoal. And essentially what this compound does is boost glutathione, it's N-acetyl cysteine, which is essentially a supplement, right? And I was shocked when I learned that later, but it literally will rescue the liver from failure after a big insult like a child overdose, which works quite independently with glutathione. So, we kind of use it in traditional medicine, we just don't realize what we're doing. But, I think what I'd love to talk about is sort of break down how do we optimize each of the types of detoxification systems we have because it's really about building in to your life the automatic ways to upregulate the biology of detoxification in your system. And, I do that every single day now because I just build it into my life because I know I'm not a great detoxifier. I've checked my glutathione snips and I have methylation snips. genetics that makes me more likely to accumulate toxins. So, I have to upregulate those pathways. What's your approach to sort of giving people guidance all the way from diet to lifestyle to supplements that actually help their biology do the things it's supposed to do?

Yeah, very well said. So, number one and number two and number three are avoidance, avoidance, avoidance. Don't let this stuff into your body. And everyday choices we make. So for example, do you pump your own gasoline? The answer is probably yes. Do you smell the gasoline? When you smell that gasoline, that's benzene going into your body. So you're smelling something that doesn't smell right, get away from it.

So we need an N95 filter.

Yeah, right. N95 filter on your nose. So anyway, avoidance avoidance avoidance.

I hold my breath. It's great. I hold my breath for the entire time the gas tank is filling your tank.

Yes, it's challenging to do. So I think I'll say some specific things to do, but it's every time you have a choice, look at what's a less toxic environment, less the lower environmental toxin load choices that you can make. So stand up when, when you're pumping your gasoline. When you're having to go out to eat in a restaurant, well, talk to the people at the restaurant. And if there's one of your favorite restaurants, I've got a little far field here. Cook as much of your own food as you can. I just read a study on the way over here where it showed that for every meal a person eats out, they didn't differentiate between fast food, and regular restaurants, fast foods are worse. Every time a person eats a meal out versus cooking the food at home, they increase their blood levels of the free radical chemicals by 1%. 1% per meal. Okay, so choosing where you eat your food is a way to start. Make sure that food is organically grown. If you are gonna go out, if you have a failed place to go out, meet with the owner, meet with the cooks and say, can you cook for prepared food in ways that are less toxic? If you are going to eat, if you are going to buy food that is from a grocery that has been prepared, coming to you in plastic or coming to you in lined paper containers, immediately put it into glass. So you might say, well, it's been sitting there since it was made and sitting there in the grocery store. So my lecture today showed, It's time dependent. Even though it's been going up as long as it's been in the grocery store, if you're leaving that container, it's still going to keep going up. So at least you can stop it there. So put everything into glass containers. I said before, increase your consumption of fiber. But it's also simple things like do you take a multivitamin in mineral? The majority of the population is deficient in multiple nutrients. I mean, U.S. population, 99% of people are deficient in one or more nutrients.

Yeah.

Half are deficient in five or more. So just right there, what are those nutrients needed for? Detox systems. So use a good multivitamin. Neural does not have to be super high dosages, but it has to be a little bit of everything. Mark, I could keep talking and talking.

Yeah, I want to just kind of cut in there because I think, you know, as you're talking, I'm seeing literally, like, all the biological pathways in my head and which nutrient does which thing. For example, like, you're mentioning a multivitamin, but you break that down. You're like, well, what does zinc do? Well, zinc actually increases an enzyme inside the cell called metallothionein. It's designed to get rid of heavy metals from the cell. Or you take selenium, which you can get from food too, but you know, that upregulates glutathione peroxidase, which is an enzyme that helps recycle and make more glutathione. We need, for example, B vitamins, folate, B12, B6, because it's important and we call methylation. which is a critical pathway that is involved in detoxification, but also actually is needed for recycling glutathione. So, I think about all the basic building blocks of things that we need. And so, I'm always thinking with food. Like, what are the top foods that I can eat upregulating these pathways? So, I'm always food first. So, one of the biggest categories is the whole broccoli family or cruciferous vegetables.

So, first off, before we get to there, because I may have a different opinion, And you on something.

Oh, okay.

Let me go back to case history. So right where we were just talking about. So I have a patient, by the way, I don't see patients, okay? But I have family and friends who come to me for help. So it's really good because I continue to apply my body of knowledge.

You did see patients for years and years.

Oh, I've seen plenty of patients. Corporate wellness, I've seen tens of thousands of patients in corporate wellness. Here's a guy who came to see me. Now listen to this. Personal history of prostate disease and heart disease and diabetes. Now, remember, I don't know if you heard me talk about arsenic. One-third of prostate cancer is due to arsenic. About 15% of heart disease is due to arsenic. About 50% of diabetes is due to arsenic. So he comes to see me and says, I want you to improve my health. Okay, well, here's my measures. So first day I did, I measured his heavy metals, arsenic. His arsenic was 83. Remember I told you 10 micrograms per liter, the threshold.

Is this in the blood or in the urine challenge test?

No, not a challenge test. His baseline coming from where? Aha, good question. Okay, now going further, I did a blood test on him. His homocysteine was 19. and then macrocytic anemia. Now what's going on? Yeah, macrocytic anemia means you can't produce enough blood cells. Now the basic is two kinds of anemia. Microcytic anemia, which is due to deficiency of iron. You see that in women a lot, menstruating women a lot. And macrocytic anemia is due to deficiency of typically folic acid or B12. Now when a person has high homocysteine levels, what are they deficient in? Homocysteine and B12.

I mean B12 or folate or B12.

I'm saying yeah, B12, folate or B6, B2 sometimes, but yet mainly folate and B12. How does the body get rid of arsenic? Through methylation. How do we know if a person's having trouble with methylation? They have high homocysteine levels.

Yeah.

They already have high exposure to arsenic.

Blood tests that you can get that most doctors don't check that you should get, but again, it's on the why.

Did his primary care doctor not notice his homocysteine and his macrocytic anemia, his primary care MD? Anyway, here we have high arsenic exposure and inability to detoxify it because it can't produce methyl groups. And guess what? Prostate cancer, heart disease, diabetes, right there.

So what was the cause of his high arsenic?

I just diagnosed this last week. So now, we have to find where's the arsenic coming from. So it turns out I'm from Washington State. There are a lot of high arsenic areas in Washington State, particularly what are called the San Juan Islands, a group of islands off the west coast of Washington State. He lives on one of those islands.

Was it in the water naturally? Is it coming from the water naturally?

So I bet you his well high arctic levels and nobody's tested it.

And that's why you need to filter your, well, the water, it's in the ground water, but it can come from eating chicken because they put it on the feed to prevent mold on the feed for chickens. It can come from wine that's grown in certain wineries where they use pressure treated lumber. If you have a deck, pressure treated lumber. Nice. So it's out there in our environment.

And I think people don't realize how prevalent it is. Again, one out of three people in the United States and in Canada have arsenic levels high enough to induce disease.

Yeah.

This is not rare.

So then what would you do with this person? Like talk about treatment. So how do you begin to start?

So remember arsenic half-life is only two to four days. Now his, because of his methylation problem, is probably four to six days, maybe eight days.

But doesn't it get stored in the tissues though? No, not particularly. Not arsenic.

But lead does. Lead does. Really bad.

Arsenic's not good.

And mercury does. Lead, mercury, cadmium. huge storage in tissues. Arsenic not so much. Yeah. And think about it, as we evolved as a species, we often encountered arsenic. So those of us who survived, we're gonna get rid of arsenic.

So we're gonna, we're really gonna get rid of arsenic. We didn't get too much lead in, we didn't get office, so we didn't. Yeah, this is a volcanic eruption. We didn't get much mercury lead. No, no.

Unless you were Andrew, Andrew Jackson and.

You were taking calomel, which is a remedy. Right. For, for everything in the 1800s.

George Washington.

You were doing duels and getting lead shot. I remember they tested Andrew Jackson's hair. They found the $20 bill and they found he was full of mercury and.

Full of lead, which is like so crazy. Yes. That's huge problem. So what I'm gonna do for him, we're testing his water. I'll bet you his water supply is full of arsenic. And that led to all of his disease. One thing. So actually not one thing, the one exposure plus the susceptibility, because of nutrient deficiencies.

Let's get back to the counter treatment approach and what we treat people with in terms of food. How do you upregulate the major detoxification pathways using food?

Yeah. So as you mentioned, cabbage family foods are a great way to increase phase two detoxification in the liver. But notice folks, this is genetically determined. So some people like me, I don't upregulate my detox when I consume cabbage family food.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Cabbage family food are actually toxic for me. So why don't we have all these-.

Wait, they're poisonous if you can- so.

Why do we have all these detox enzymes? Because there's constituents in food that the plants produce to protect them from predation from insects. So we developed enzymes when we come in contact with that food, those of us who are able to upregulate our enzymes, okay, can now eat that food safely. But people like me, they talk about cabbage family foods being great for you. For me, I can't detoxify those cabbage compounds. So cabbage foods may not be good for me, but for the vast majority of the population, they're good for us.

Oh yeah. So, and I think the data is really interesting. I remember seeing a study in China where they looked at urine, metabolites of the Brassica family vegetables like broccoli, collards, cabbage and all that. And they found that those were the highest levels of the metabolites, meaning people who were eating a lot of these vegetables had very low rates of cancer compared to the general population.

Hugely beneficial. So what happens is, which we think about the hormones we produce, estrogen for women, testosterone for men. So you think about what they do in our bodies and they're great. I like being a man. I'm sure women like being women. But you think about what the hormone is doing. Well, once it's done its job, then what happens to it? The body's got to detoxify it. And it can do it through two pathways, many pathways, but there's two major pathways. And particularly estrogen, one pathway promotes cancer, one pathway prevents cancer. Now, how do you determine which pathway goes? Eat cabbage family foods, prevents cancer. If you smoke and eat charbroiled foods, It outbreeds the enzymes that produce cancer, cancer versions of estrogen. So our choices in the foods and what we do to the foods has huge impact on what we upregulate. So one reason why women who eat cabbage family foods have less breast cancer, because they're upregulating the right enzymes.

Yeah, it's so prevalent. I just remember I once worked with a lab because I've done, you know, tens of thousands of heavy metal challenge tests and and I went with the lab that I did the test with. I said, could you actually calculate all these patients that I've sent you labs and what percent had elevated levels and give me the ranges and the distribution of the abnormalities? And I gathered the data. It was shocking to me. And of course, people who come to see us at the Ultra Wellness Center, where we specialize in functional medicine, tend to be sicker. So it's a sick, we call it selection bias in medicine, but 40% have very significantly elevated levels of heavy metals. And this was from a wide spectrum of diseases. That was like just one condition. So it's out there. So, you know, we use foods like the Brassica family. We can use garlic and onions to help boost glucosinolate. We can use a lot of the polyphenol compounds and like that are rosemary and, you know, curcumin and other compounds. So we can really just increase our polyphenol content. We need to make sure we have the right nutrients.

Right.

So.

I personally know that for me, I'm not great at glutathione production. So I take N-Acetyl Cysteine every day, I take my chlorella, I take selenium and zinc. I make sure I actually are, I'm really boosting those pathways up because I know I struggle and it has kept me feeling good by doing that over many years. And I find with my patients, I do the same thing. So it's really a very systematic process of mobilizing a toxin, reducing the exposures, making sure you're increasing circulation. So I make sure they're exercising, your saunas and sweating. That is a great way to release toxins. I think also I recommend a basic, you know, multivitamin and the right things to boost glutathione and the right co-factors for all the pathways, methylation support.

It's amazing how a lot of people do. Yes. So I, I'd like to add a little bit to that. Our bodies have tremendous ability to heal. We just give them a chance. And a lot of people say, well, I'm going to, I want to now detoxify. I think the stupidest thing for a person to do is to start detoxifying before their body is ready. Yeah. Okay. So I wrote a book called the toxin solution.

Yeah, everybody should get that book. It's really good.

Oh, thank you, Mark. Okay. So for the first two weeks, I teach people how to avoid toxins. Now, I'll tell you now, if you carefully avoid non-persistent toxins within two weeks, they'll be gone. Arsenic will be gone, phthalates will be gone, bisphenols will be gone, and you'll immediately feel better within two weeks. Okay, then I say now that you're stopping, expose yourself to toxins, let's open up what you call the, what the nature paths call the organs of elimination. Let's get your gut working properly and detoxify. Let's get your liver functioning better. It's a detox life. Let's get your kidneys functioning better so they can detoxify. Now once your organs elimination are working properly, two weeks each, enough time to do it, now let's do, let's now start doing the sauna. Now let's start releasing the toxins, because now your body can get rid of it. But don't release toxins until your body.

Can get rid of them. You make yourself sicker. I think that's really an important point, Joe. I think it's really the order in which you do things. And I think you're right. I didn't know about this concept of naturopathic medicine, but that's basically what I do. basically fix everything else in time. Detoxification is the last thing I do in deep. Make sure all their enzymes are working. Make sure all their metabolic pathways are working. Make sure their guts work to make sure they're, they're actually optimized in terms of their amino acid levels and their mineral levels so they can handle the detoxification process. Because all those things can be challenged when you, when you do the detoxification. So it's such a, it's such an important concept. And I, I think it's, you know, you can actually make people a lot sicker if you do it. Transiently. Yeah, and I think it's challenging and you have to go slow with some people too. We talked a little about saunas. I want to back up on that because saunas are hot these days and breathing for longevity and biohacking and so forth. Can you talk about the data on saunas and particularly around detoxification and the release of environmental chemicals and how to use them for that?

So I'll get home late Saturday night and on Sunday I'm taking a sauna. Okay, so if you're really interested in looking at the research on saunas, I recommend you look at the work of Stephen Jenkinson. So Stephen's an MD in Edmonton, Alberta. We've done a lot of incredibly good research. Just guys, if you ever get a chance to listen to him lecture, do that. It's fascinating. I had a chance to meet with him personally all about 10 years ago. We went to a vegan organic restaurant in Edmonton, Alberta. We sat down to eat. and next time I looked up, it was two hours later.

Yeah.

So much fun to talk with. So what Stephen does is he takes people, puts them in the sauna, takes their sweat, looks at what's in the sweat, looks at what's in the blood, measures what's in the urine, and compares them. He finds toxins in the sweat that are not in the blood or in the urine. These things are so bad and the body has so much trouble getting rid of them, it just sequesters them, just.

Try to keep them out circulating as.

Much as possible, limit the damage. He's using these positive chemicals. stuffed in the fat, stuffed in the bone, et cetera. So when sweating, it's a different pathway for detoxification. And it turns out the body is able to get rid of a lot of toxins through sweating. It has trouble getting rid of in other ways. I've often think to myself, we evolved on the equator where it was hot, and we sweated a lot. And I think we had this detoxification mechanism through the sweat that now when we move to northern climates, we will go for six months out of the year without sweating, and we basically undermine whatever sweating, whatever detox mechanisms.

Does it work if you just sweat from exercise?

Does that count? Yep. That's the first question I asked, Stephen. So, when he presented the data at a conference, so 15 years ago, I was, you know, I made first person to raise his hand, and I said, well, how about other things like sweating? He says, it doesn't matter. As long as you're sweating, you're getting rid of toxins. It doesn't matter how you sweat.

What you're saying basically is that the fat soluble toxins from petrochemicals and plastics and BPA and BPA and all the things we talked about don't get released.

Not very easily.

And so you can get them out of your blood, but they may still have effects even if they're stored in your fat tissue.

Yes, yes.

And that it's tough to get rid of them and very few ways to actually get rid of them, but saunas may be a way to do it.

Yeah, so I have a little slight variation I do on sauna. So just basically you want to sweat for at least 20 minutes vigorously. You want to make sure you drink a plenty of fluids. My one little tweak is I recommend you put some alkalizing minerals in your sauna, in your juicer. Electrolytes. Electrolytes, yeah. So some magnesium and potassium. You can use carbonate. I prefer citrate. And what that does is it slightly alkalizes the body. Makes it easier for the cells to get rid of the toxins. Yeah. And makes it easier for them to urinate afterwards.

Makes it easier for the kidneys to get rid of the toxins as well. Now, one of the things I heard is sort of a hack, and I don't know if it's any data on this, but a number of my patients have been juicing cilantro rather than taking chelators and have had their metals levels drop significantly.

Interesting. Is there any data about this? So I looked at the research on cilantro, on chlorophyll and things like that. there's surprisingly little actual hard human research.

Yeah.

So I think they should be useful. I wish I could find some stuff. I mean, I found studies here and there, but, you know, I'll start from Russia with, you know, 20 people. It's hard to be confident in that data.

Yeah. Yeah.

So, so the, the other piece around this is sort of metal detoxification, which is a, it's kind of a, a sort of a rabbit hole that I, I think is. Important to go down because honestly, as a doctor, I learned nothing about this. Still today, three decades after I had mercury poisoning and talking about it forever, it's still not on the radar of traditional medicine. The testing that we use is pretty much dismissed, which essentially is taking a chelator, a bioligand that binds to metals, I think T later means it's from a Greek word that means claw. And we use it to then detect how much urine, how much the metals spill out in the urine and track that over time as a way of tracking therapy and treatment. And I've done tens of thousands of these tests, and it's just amazing what we find and how we treat people. For example, I found that there was a whole bunch of A special forces guys were treating at Cleveland Clinic who had chronic fatigue syndrome and all these vague symptoms. And, you know, the Army and the sort of the military was so little dismissive of them. They're like, look, these guys are not whiners. These are Navy SEALs. These are Green Berets. These are Army Rangers. These are not guys who are kind of, you know, weak or just kind of complainers. And something's going on. And so I started asking questions. And what do you do? Well, I'm a blast instructor. I mean, what does that mean? well, I blow stuff up inside and teach other guys how to blow stuff up. Like, oh, you're blowing stuff up. That's like lead and mercury, all this stuff in the blast materials. And I checked them and their levels were off the chart. And so we started to sort of treat these people. And there was one of them that was reported in the New York Times who has seen one of the top experts in lead in the country, I think, at Mount Sinai or Albert Einstein, one of those hospitals. and they use a bone absorbed geometry to measure the lead in the body. And he saw the patient before, and then after I treated him with chelation, with DMSA. And he was shocked because he said he'd never seen levels go down ever.

Fantastic.

This is like the top lead expert in the world, and they don't even know how to treat it.

So.

I don't know why there's so much resistance to actually looking at this. it's, it's a, it's something that should be pretty valuable as well. It's something easy to validate. You can just, you know, measure it and track it. It's like an easy thing to do. But I, I think, you know, the whole process of heavy metal treatment is a thing. And I think you mentioned arsenic, you know, avoiding is great, but, but lead and mercury and these other, these don't come out on their own. And, and as functional medicine practitioners, it's one of the things we really are trained in, trained how to do. And I think it's For me, it's been one of those, not just for me personally, but as a treating physician with dementia, with autism, with autoimmune diseases, with colitis, with chronic fatigue syndrome, these diseases really have no treatment, often get better when we do this. Can you talk about what is the safest way to do this? How do people think about learning about it and being guided to do it right?

I want to follow up on what you just said. So again, I probably I deal with I treat half a dozen patients a year. Okay. I'm not in primary care and I spend most of my time looking at research, but research doesn't count unless you use it in real people. And over the years, my approach to patients has changed dramatically. I pretty much don't care what disease they come with. Of course, pay attention to it. Every patient, I test a body load of toxins, I test nutritional status, I do a genetic analysis to see where the weaknesses are, I deal with those things. And what about the gut? well, of course. Okay. But actually, I don't test the gut because I know what to do anyway.

Okay.

So anyway, so I just. I find if you get the toxins low down, nutrition up, improve the gut, so many diseases start going away. So I just. I just. We need to change how we deal with people. So going back to what you're talking about, Metals, huge portion of population hides metals. So, for example, my wife. on my advice and the patients that I have, I haven't taken 250 milligrams of NAC every third night.

N-Acetyl Cysteine, it helps to find 250 milligrams.

Not a lot. So remember, I developed in corporate wellness where I'd treat a person, I wouldn't see them again for six months. Well, you can't use high dosages. So 250 milligrams every third night, along with 10 extra grams of fiber, I use PGX. because I have commercial relationship with them. And I just have them do that regularly kind of forever because it chelates out a lead, it chelates out the mercury, and it helps get rid of the arsenic a little bit, not great. And now having said that, you have to also give them a little bit of molybdenum, maybe 100 micrograms, because the enzymes that metabolize sulfur compounds depend upon molybdenum. I personally cannot take dmsa every third night because I cannot detoxify sulfur compounds adequately. Sulfur makes me sick. Okay, so just what I'm going to tell you, anybody you do this protocol on, they start complaining about GERD, about allergies, about gastritis or colitis. Check them for sulfur toxicity.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I think, I think, you know, I've developed very robust protocol using a whole host of compounds and food that upregulate detoxification, lots of fibers, you said, saunas, also the right supplements for methylation, for N-acetyl cysteine, the right minerals we talked about. But also use, I also use high fiber combiners. But I think DMSA is a very powerful chelator. It's FDA approved for lead chelation in children, and it's not really used in medicine. very much at all, even in kids. But I find it one of the most effective ways to gently remove these heavy metals and help with these chronic inflammatory or toxic conditions.

Yes. I have a huge amount of data. That protocol I just described, in a year and a half, it'll drop mercury and lead over 50% without any adverse events.

Amazing. Amy, before we close, I want to dive into a topic that I think is a sort of a broader a broader view of the sort of framework of toxins. So, I think we can all accept that we're living in a sea of petrochemical toxins, heavy metal toxins, that we need to pay attention to, that we need to understand how our biology works to operate with our detox systems. And, I've written a lot about this. Your book is amazing, the toxin solution. You've shared a lot about this. But, it's this whole field of EMFs, right? Electromagnetic frequencies. Yes. You know, Wi-Fi, 5G, cell service. Yes. Now, I just came back from Ecuador and Patagonia where I was completely away from all of that. And I noticed that my heart rate variability doubled, that my deep sleep changed, and that I felt better and I slept better. And of course, I was on vacation, but I'm on vacation in other places and I don't have those results. So I think there's a lot of controversy about this. It's very political, obviously, because our whole life depends on cell service and Wi-Fi and everybody uses it all the time. What is the strength of the data that EMFs are an issue? If it is an issue, what do we do about it?

Mark, extremely good question. I have to be honest, I have not studied the research. I can't give a good response. What I can tell you is I've seen patients who are EMF sensitive. Well, how common that is, I don't know. So I'm sorry, I don't have a good answer.

Okay, fair enough. I thought you, I mean, I think he's written literally the encyclopedia and textbook of everything. I thought he might know, but I.

Just haven't gone to it yet.

I do think it's an increasing issue. I actually was living in New York for a while and I had this EMF detector. And if you're in an apartment building in New York, there's so many Wi-Fi's. And so it was like, said five, high alert, get out immediately. And then I bought this Faraday cage. Essentially, it's like a net that goes over your bed. I would go in there, we couldn't make a cell call, we couldn't get Wi-Fi, and it was just basically zero. And it just makes me wonder about what this is doing to us because we are electromagnetic beings. Absolutely.

You know, energetic beings. By the way, this is too early to talk about, but I'm in conversation with a doctor who has been experimenting with metal detoxification. He finds if it lies on one of these high magnetic field things, his heavy metal excretion increases dramatically. That tells me these fields are doing something in the body.

Yeah, interesting. Okay, one last question. This is a bit controversial, but I'm going to jump in anyway. It has to do with the increasing rates of infertility. It has to do with increasing rates of particularly in track, well, in animals, but, you know, sort of hermaphroditism and sort of ambiguous sexual genitalia in animals. Theo Colburn wrote a book about this called Our Stolen Future, which really impacted me and talks about this. It was like a Silent Spring kind of book. and, and also, I've been reading about different birth rates in, in humans, men and women now that this sort of becoming discordant from what we used to see, which is a fairly even birth rate now. I think, I think there's more males or more females. I can't forget.

Probably females.

Females.

Yeah.

And we're also seeing it, you know, this increasing rate of gender confusion and gender identity issues and transgender you know, sort of awareness that I'm wondering, it was so much now, and I'm not saying it's a bad thing if people want to change their gender. I'm just wondering if there's any role of these environmental chemicals and their endocrine disruption in affecting the brain and affecting hormonal development and affecting fertility. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yes.

So I have a 90-minute lecture just on environmental toxins and infertility. there's no question it plays a huge role. And I talked before about bisphenol A being removed. So let's talk about bisphenol A. If you look at the bisphenol A levels in a man's semen, and you then look at their sperm count, it goes from normal sperm to low sperm to abnormal sperm to no sperm. In the men with the top 10% of the men with the top 10% of bisphenol A and their male fluids, you might say, they have no sperm whatsoever. Wow. Now that's bisphenol A. And guess what we just replaced bisphenol A with? Bisphenol S. Bisphenol S nearsyc tail is about five times as bad as bisphenol A for male fertility. So we have to talk after toxins. There's no question these toxins are destroying our fertility, which means they're also damaging the development of the fetuses that do manage to get through the infertility problem. So gender dysphoria, it's gotta be environmental toxins have to be playing a role. It's so very clear.

Yeah, it's concerning.

And the animal research is very clear on that.

Yeah, clearly is a big issue. But I think, you know, the perspective that you brought over the last decades of teaching us all about Environmental toxins, your work is so important. I think everybody needs to check out Joe's book, the Toxic Solution to Environmental Illness and Other Books. Check out the textbook of natural medicine.

The Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine, so many. If you're a doctor, I have a.

Textbook called Clinical Environmental Medicine and a lot of this research is in there.

Yeah, so Joe, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Thank you for your work in this field. Thank you for being my teacher for so many years. Mark, thank you. I mean, look at what you're doing to educate people. you know, I have my books and such, but they're just for doctors, man. Like, you're. You're educating the whole.

I just stole everything you ever wrote and. And redid it in my own way.

Thanks, my friend.

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