How To Optimize Your Body’s Detoxification System

Once foods are sprayed, the natural compounds that you make, these phytochemicals that work as antioxidants and are really important for our detox pathways, are not nearly as prevalent because they don't make as many of those phytonutrients when plants are sprayed with these chemicals.

Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and that's F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. and if you suspect you may be experiencing illness from the load of toxins in our environment, and you're not getting answers, you better listen to this podcast because it's with none other than my nutrition director here at the Ultra Wellness Center, Maggie Ward, who's worked for a lot, 12 years now. Yeah, something must be going on there. She's an incredible nutritionist. More than that, she's got a master's degree in nutrition from best University. She's focusing on Whole Foods Nutrition has been really the anchor for our nutrition program here at the Ultra Wellness Center in Lenox, Massachusetts for well over a decade. She's worked before in New York. She's worked in Brooklyn and Manhattan and doing HIV work and working with children's and adults and cooking classes. She's also counseled and worked with so many families using this functional medicine approach to really get to the issues around Buddhist medicine. And here at the Ultra Wellness Center, I think we were the first place in the country, maybe in the world, where you could not get a doctor's appointment without also getting a nutrition appointment because if food is medicine, how can I practice medicine without a nutritionist? This is basically my view. And today we're going to be talking about detoxification and toxicity and the burden of toxins in our world. Now, it doesn't relate to a specific condition because toxins can cause a whole range of problems. And we're going to get into the details of it. But first, I want to welcome you to the Doctor's Pharmacy, Megan.

Thank you. I'm happy to be here and I'm excited about this topic. It's a really important one and we see, you know, really impacting so many of the people we see here.

It's really true. I mean, the two things that are just kind of blank spots in medical education are food is medicine, believe it or not, and the whole issue of toxins in health.

Yeah.

So when I was in medical school, we learned about acute toxicity. You, you know, took a drug overdose, if you got an acute exposure to a pesticide or heavy metals. But we learned nothing about chronic low grade toxicity from the 80,000 plus chemicals that have been brought into our environment since the turn of the last century, including pesticides, plastics, phthalates, BPA, flame retardants, you know, herbicides, glyphosate, I mean, you name it, we are just inundated with chemicals. And I remember when I was researching a book many, many years ago, I found this study that looked at fat biopsies. So people got liposuction.

Liposuctions are stored.

Yeah, or they've got liposuction or they had a breast reconstruction or mastectomy. They would send the tissue to go be analyzed. And they found that every single person in the study was a toxic waste dump.

Yeah.

And they had things like DDT, which isn't even out there anymore in the marketplace. Right. And PCBs and heavy metals and. dioxin and all these PCBs, I mean, just nasty stuff that is stored in all of us. And there was a study on babies, and this was really shocking, part of the Environmental Working Group where I'm on the board. And they found that in the newborn studies, essentially they took umbilical cord blood before the baby even took the first breath. And in the baby's umbilical cord blood, there were 287 known toxins, 211 of which I think are neurotoxic, including mercury, lead, arsenic, pesticides, flame retardants, PCBs, DDT, dioxin, you name it, were in the baby's blood before they took their first breath. And in medicine, we never really learn how do you diagnose someone who's got a toxic overload? How do you know if it's contributing to their health issues?

There's not a way to test for it, right?

There are ways, we just never learned it in medicine, right? You can do a fat biopsy. There are ways, yeah. And we do that at the Ultra Wellness Center. We look for toxins, we look for your body's detoxification system. So we're gonna get into all that today. And I really, a lot of it is focused on food, which is why we're having you on here, which is food is a big regulator of our detox system.

Absolutely.

It's also a way we can overload our detox system if we don't eat smart. And in fact, the environmental toxic issue is how I got into functional medicine.

I know.

So years ago, gosh, probably 20, say 26 years ago, I lived in China and I got mercury poisoning from living in China. Plus I had mercury fillings, plus I ate a lot of fish. So the combination of the pollution and all the rest of it caused me to have mercury toxicity and I just had no idea. And I went to doctor after doctor. I had neurologic symptoms. I had muscle damage. I had autoimmune issues. I had chronic diarrhea and irritable bowel. I had severe brain fog and fatigue and memory issues. I couldn't sleep. I mean, it was just a mess. Yeah. And I went to doctor after doctor, to doctor, Harvard, Columbia, here, there, everywhere, and got no answers other than take this pill, take this drug, suppress the symptoms.

Yeah. You're depressed.

Whatever. Which you probably are, because you're.

I was.

But it was. It was. Depression was caused by the Mercury.

Right.

And I finally saw this naturopath, and he's like, you should check for heavy metals. And I did, and I was shocked. And I had. I've probably done 10, 20,000 mercury tests over my lifetime with patients, probably more, and mine was in the top 10 that I've seen of all patients. Wow. And I learned how they really detoxify. So we're gonna get into it today, but first of all, tell us about how prevalent these toxins are. What are some of the things that we should be thinking about and how And how do these toxins impact our health? What are the kinds of conditions that are common that we see related to toxicity that we often mistake as something else?

Right. I mean, and like we were saying before, it can be anything, right? You can get toxicity and have any type of condition. I think what is probably most common are neurological, you know, and that is a spectrum too, where you can see kind of brain fog. I think that's a very common, you know, description of what a lot of folks feel. But it can go all the way up into things like Parkinson's, which with Parkinson's in conventional medicine, we don't know really how to address that. So when we're seeing neurological things, that's one of the things that a good health history kind of tunes us into of like, oh, is this something we're probably thinking some toxins are involved here? So that's probably the most common thing, but autoimmune conditions, I mean, for so many people, toxicity is one of the main puzzle pieces that we're thinking about.

Yeah, for sure.

I mean, it's food allergies, it's toxins, you know, infections. Those are kind of the big ones. Yeah. And metals always have been a big one. You know, I know you've been checking for mercury and lead forever, but now we have more testing looking at different types of pesticides, different types of solvents, plastics, and like you said, they're out there and unfortunately more and more prevalent. And I think too, you know, the toxicity you're talking about that kind of is more recognized in conventional medicine we kind of look more at body burden, right? Like these things are building up and maybe not very high in someone's blood sample when you check, but it's being stored in fat tissue and in organs and things like that. So now we have more testing and look at different metabolites in the urine and things like that that would indicate that there's toxins in there.

And it's true, you know, it affects a lot of different things. And, you know, my friend Joe Pizzorno wrote a book, I think it's called the Toxin Solution, maybe.

Yeah.

Maybe that's not true.

-Yes, you know this.

-Sorry, Joe. -Anyway, it's a great book, but he really went into the scientific literature. This is not some, oh, you're toxic and you need to detox and it's some fad little diet thing. No, no, no. This is really deep science about the role of environmental toxins in human health across everything from obesity and diabetes, which is a huge cause of that, we call these obesogens, right, to autoimmune disease you mentioned. At low levels, these can be immunotoxins and they're often called auto-gens as opposed to obesogens. They cause autoimmune disease and they cause neurologic issues, whether it's autism or Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or various kinds of neuropathy. It can cause gut issues because it affects your ability to digest your food. It can cause hormonal issues, cancer, sex hormone issues. Environmental toxins are well recognized to be interfering with a lot of our cancers and being a contributor to cancers. And unlike you said, infertility. So across a spectrum of diseases, whatever you show up in the doctor's office with, the likelihood the toxins are on the checklist to think about is pretty high. Right, right.

And we do that, right, in our packet that we have everyone- At the ultra wellness center. At the ultra wellness center. We have a very detailed toxin history, right? Right, like what, are you getting exposed? Do you have an exterminator come in? Do you get your clothes dry cleaned? How often are you eating fish? What type of fish are you eating? And just from a good health history, that really can key you in. I'm like, okay, this is somewhere we have to look at. So just kind of being a detective and having the time to spend with someone. I mean, just even here, the doctors spend so much time with the patients going through everything, but when I meet with them for their food, it's usually the first time they're telling what they're eating. And I'm like, so you're eating tuna how often? Right, right. Twice a so much.

I remember this guy was really poor once, and he. All he did was eat tuna every day. And after, like, many years, he was just mercury toxic and was chronically ill. Yeah. You know, just remind me of this patient I had. She. She lived in the Bronx when she was a little kid, and her family was very poor. And she had cockroaches crawling all over her when she was a kid and mice and this and that. And she just was so obsessed with getting rid of all that, so she moved to the suburbs in Long Island. and she decided to have an exterminator come and spray in and out of her house every single month. And she had a huge barrel of Atrazine, which is now banned, which is a toxin in her garage. Yeah, she had so much nasty stuff in there. And she had really bad Parkinson's at 50 years old. And I've seen this over and over when I hear people's stories. Farming is a dangerous profession, not because of farm machinery, because of the exposure to glyphosate, right?

Glyphosate and all the pesticides.

And we know, yeah, farmers have them the highest rates of Parkinson's disease. Right. So it can make you overweight, it can make you have diabetes, it can cause heart disease, it can cause cancer, it can cause autoimmunity, it can cause neurologic issues, it can cause cognitive impairment, it can cause depression, chronic fatigue. I mean, you name it, I had chronic fatigue syndrome, right, among other things. And so that was really sort of a wake up call for me to really understand and study our bodies the detoxification system. But traditional medicine, what's really done about this?

Right. And, well, that's the tricky thing too. You're talking about affecting the gut and gaining weight. I mean, your ability to detoxify starts going down. So you have this toxic burden and it's increasing and then people's guts are leaky and they're not eliminating as they should and that toxic burden becomes that much more of an issue. So it's really a lot of it is obviously avoiding exposure where you can, which is tricky in this day and age, but also really ramping up the body's ability to detoxify. And again, nutrition is a huge part of that.

Yeah, and it's so interesting in traditional medicine because it's just off the radar. You know, like it's food, I mean, food doctors understand the food, you know, if you eat too much sugar, you get diabetes, and you know, if you don't eat fiber, you get constipated. I mean, there's some understanding. There's like zero when it comes to the role of environmental toxins. It is a focus for diagnosis. or treatment. And in functional medicine, we really focus on this extensively and we do it through, like you said, a very detailed history and through various kinds of testing. So we test a lot of things, both the load of toxins, we test our ability to detoxify, and we also look at genetics. So can you talk about some of the diagnostics that we use? Yeah. They're different here at the Ultra Wellness Center and functional medicine.

Right. Genetics is a really important one. I mean, it's never gonna really give us a definitive diagnosis, but when people have, and we get kind of get into it a little bit more with some of the food, certain genetic variations that compromise their ability to make something like glutathione, right? Glutathione is our most like potent detox molecule. And there's some of us, we make it, but some of us don't make it very well given our genetics. So there's, that's something called GSTM1. There's these certain SNPs and they're several in the detox category, several in the oxidative stress category, several in methylation, and they're all connected to detoxification.

Basically you're talking about are like slight variations in our genes that affect our ability to detox. Right.

And I think those, we see those people, right? We're seeing the folks that are at a higher risk because of their genetics and not being able to detoxify. So even if we don't know their toxic load, if I see some of these genetic variations, I'm proactive and I put some more food or supplements that are more directed towards their genetics, which is really the way functional medicine, I think, is going. So the genetic testing is really important. We do a lot of different heavy metal testing, urine toxic metal testing, which is the provoked urine test. That's what really looks at the body burden. So there's a chelating agent which basically binds onto heavy metals and will pull them out of the body. Because if you just try to look at metals in the urine, unless you just had a really high exposure, right, you're not going to see it in the urine. so this kind of pulls out what might be stored for someone. So it's looking at mercury and lead and arsenic and thallium. Mercury and lead are probably the ones we see most often.

And checking your blood, is that okay or?

You can check your blood. Well, against this case study, I mean, we do come, we have folks that come back high in mercury and lead or arsenic. So you can check blood levels, but, you know, blood's turning over, what, every three months or so. So if you have ongoing exposure or you happen to catch it right when someone was getting a more acute exposure, you'll see it. but many times it's not there, right?

So, you have a normal blood test, but actually be storing all these metals in your tissues, your organs, your liver, your brain, your kidneys. And the doctors will say, well, we checked your blood, it was fine. And sort of like the joke where the guy has dropped his keys on the street, he's looking under this lamppost and his friend comes by and says, what are you doing? He says, I'm looking for my keys. He says, where'd you drop them? He says, well, I dropped them down the street. He says, why are you looking over here?

Because the light's better.

Well, that is not the right- Dr. Yeah, look in the shadows, right?

Dr. Right.

So what happens in traditional medicine, we look at the blood test because that's what we do, but it's actually not.

Necessarily the most accurate view of what's going on. Dr. Right, including with nutritional testing, right? You're not going to see a lot in the blood. So the functional testing we do with a lot of nutrients is very different. So, you know, that's a good example of heavy metals. We do now what's known as a tri-mercury test, which I think is excellent. It's looking at recent exposure, but it's, so they're doing a blood test, but they break it down between methylmercury and inorganic mercury. So methylmercury is typically the form that we're getting exposed to from environmental stuff like fish and food and, you know, if there's old burning areas, then inorganic mercury, if your amalgams, your silver fillings are maybe still off gassing, that's, you're.

Gonna see the inorganic mercury be high. So what you're saying basically is that if you have what we call silver fillings, which are really mercury fillings, they're not silver, they're over 50% mercury. Over the course of your life, you're chewing, you're chewing gum, you're grinding your teeth maybe, and they off-gas. And we know this is true and we can measure the mercury from your fillings. And when you see someone who has.

No fillings, they don't have any of this inorganic mercury. People have a mouthful of fillings, it's high. And they get 'em out and the inorganic mercury goes away. And they get better off. Yeah, absolutely. So that's been really, this test has been really helpful for our practice over the last few years of, you know, trying to determine how much mercury that person is now getting exposed from their amalgams. And then they look at how well you're excreting it. So what are the levels in the urine and the hair? Might correct me, but I think inorganic is usually coming out through the urine, methylmercury comes out through the hair. So if you have some current exposure and you're also not seeing it get excreted, you can assume that person probably has a fairly high body burden We do this constantly. A lot of it is just more nutritional supplements and food really support that person to detoxify, obviously get them to stop eating fish or if they need to get their amalgams out, get those out, but the mercury goes down and their clearance goes up. That's been a really great test for mercury. It's very good. The whole thing about the fillings, I.

Just want to sort of jump back on that because you go to your dentist and go, oh, it's perfectly safe. It's fine. There's no studies on it. and they don't even consider it an issue. But the interesting fact is that most dentists don't use the mercury fillings anymore. They use the white fillings, even though they say it's fine. The other thing I often say to the patients that I have is, well, ask your doctor, why is it okay to put the mercury in your mouth? But when they remove the filling, they can't throw in the garbage. It has to be regulated by the FDA's toxic waste. So it's okay in your mouth, but it's not okay to throw in the garbage. And then what's really interesting is the FDA just came out with a statement September 24th, which basically said that certain groups should not have fillings and that they're at higher risk from the off gassing and the vapor for mercury fillings, including pregnant women, women who are wanting to get pregnant, nursing women and, and their infants, children before six years old, people who have neurologic issues like we talked about, mercury related ones like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's or MS, people with kidney issues, and people who have allergy to mercury. That is fascinating to me because this is a review to 20 years of data. Right. Finally, the FDA. And the FDA is not a progressive group. For them to say this, you know it's got to be bad. It's pretty bad. Now it's freaky for people because they're going, wow, do I have to get my fillings out? Do I have to run to the dentist? Just a word of caution. You do not want to go get your fillings out unless you do it with a dentist who follows specific guidelines that are designed to create a safe removal of the amalgam. So you need a special dental dam so you don't swallow them. You need high-speed suction, you need breathing oxygen. The dentist should be wearing a mask. There's a whole these precautions that need to be taken, and they're usually done by biological dentists. And there's a website called i-a-o-m-t.org, which is the dentist toxicology group that is trained to do this properly. You can find a dentist in your area, but I I think that, you know, if you have any chronic issues, if you have high levels, you can do the tri test, which we do here at the Ultra Wellness Center. But it's really important to make sure that you are doing it properly. And I would never, if you're getting new fillings, never get silver fillings. So this is shocking to me that.

The FDA is finally, you know, in September, shocking and sad, right?

Like, it's taken this long. But, well, yeah, because it's so, it's so politically heated because all of a sudden you've got millions and millions of.

People with these silver fillings in, and you're gonna have a run on dentists and people are gonna freak out. And it's not a cheap procedure to take these out either, right? So It's not easy for everyone, even if you can find a dentist. But yeah, I mean, and to your point about, I've had several patients over the years say, I've had these in for 40 years and we test them and they're still off-gassing. So, you know, it's definitely a big issue for a lot of folks. So that probably is the most test, we do look at solvents and pesticides. The testing's been a little bit harder for some of that. some of the labs we can't get like we did before, you know, with COVID I think there's just been some issues, but we do use great plains quite a bit for looking at different metabolites, again, pesticides and solvents. One of the labs that we use through Cyrex, who's typically our food sensitivity testing company, they check for antibodies or immune reactions to toxins. So you don't necessarily have really high levels of these toxins, but small amounts can provoke the immune system for some people.

Oh, autoimmune disease.

Yeah, so when someone's got autoimmunity and we're suspecting toxins, you know, if they're coming back reactive to a lot of different, again, they're looking at like benzene, which is a solvent, formaldehyde, different parabens and metals, when they're showing reactive, we know, okay, we've got to work with this person to help them detoxify to calm down their immune system because that's definitely something that's driving their inflammation.

So that's been a really helpful test. I mean, it's a little harder than, for example, like, if your blood sugar is high and you're eating donuts and bagels and having soda every day, you kind of know that's why it's happening. But if you have a chronic illness, you don't 100 know if it's the mercury or the pesticides or the chemicals. And so you kind of have to design a way of living that is a low toxin lifestyle. And I think, you know, I would like to go through a few cases of how we sort of would approach these patients, but. We really focus on one, identifying the source, you know, two, identifying the patient's own burden of toxins, the patient's ability to detoxify. And then we focus on how to upregulate the body's own detox systems and remove the toxins. And I remember one case of a woman who had all these issues and she really, really had lead levels. And I'm like, where's the lead coming from? She's a very wealthy lady and I was like, where it's coming from? And it was just hard to figure out. Finally I started asking questions. Well, you know, what kind of glasses do you have and what kind of plates do you have? And, you know, because I remember walking once to buy wine glasses in our local kitchen shop and there was the $5 wine glasses and there were the $50 wine glasses. And the Rydal crystal wine glasses were $50. I'm like, why are these so expensive for one glass? He's, oh, because they, they're, they're made with lead. and they helped the wine taste better with the lead. And I'm like, okay then. Pay for the toxic. Yeah, so she had all these crystal pitchers and crystal glasses that were full of lead. She had all these plates that were designer plates from Italy and France that had these glaze that was lead glaze. We got rid of all that stuff and she stopped using it and her.

Lead levels came way down. Yeah, yeah. So, and that's the thing though, right? It takes asking someone questions and doing a little detective work to figure out, So once you get an exposure, it is, you know, you know there's a high level, where is it coming from? Which again, you can't always determine, but many times you can. And again, I think the food quality, we'll talk over that with the case studies, but obviously you want to avoid foods that are sprayed and everything, but like Joe Pizzorno talks a lot about this, is that once foods are sprayed, the natural compounds that you make, these phytochemicals that work as antioxidants and are really important for our detox pathways are not nearly as prevalent because they don't make as many of those phytonutrients when plants are sprayed with these chemicals. So when you buy organic, local, you know, sustainable food, you're minimizing the toxins coming in, but you're also now getting more medicine.

You're getting a double benefit. So you're getting more of the chemicals that help you heal and detoxify and less of the toxins. And the reason the wild organic foods have more of these protective chemicals is.

They have to work harder to survive.

They've got to protect themselves. They're not given all kinds of like chemicals like pesticides and herbicides that make it easy for them to survive.

Right, exactly. So the chemicals they make to protect themselves from environmental insults like pests, you know, are good for us. So we kind of want them to be, you know, being exposed to stuff because then the food quality is so much better. And, and that's, I think, the, the conundrum we're in is that there's more toxins and our food is not protecting us like it used to be able to, you know, or we got to really search out and. It's a whole another area we can talk about.

Hey, everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into the Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you have to do is go to DrHyman.com/picks to sign up. That's DrHyman.com/picks, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health. and get healthier and better and live younger longer. Now back to this week's episode. So tell us about this patient you had who had neuropathy and headaches and rain fog and irritable bowel.

Right. I picked him because, you know, neurological case, which again we see a lot of, but he's 63 year old man. He had the idiopathic small fiber neuropathy. Brain fog was a big thing and headaches.

How did the neuropathy affect him?

Just, he had a lot of pain.

Fingers, feet.

Yeah, small fiber, exactly. Yeah, your fingers, your hands, your toes. And for years, like 10 years, and he was someone that, he did a lot of conventional medicine, but he had explored a lot already by the time he came to see us and had seen a nutritionist, had done acupuncture quite a bit. So that's usually the folks we get, right? Are people that are kind of out of what they can do. So that was going on. He also had a lot of irritable bowel symptoms. That was for over 20 years. he had been doing what we call low FODMAP diet, which is taking out certain sugars and fibers that can cause bloating, but it's usually because there's significant dysbiosis and imbalances going on in the gut. So he felt better from that, but my concern with him being on that diet was he was so limited in what he was eating. So he's about 15 pounds underweight, definitely looked malnourished. So that was my concern with him being on that diet. So when we Did a history with him. This is actually a patient we had together. He had seven different fillings, silver fillings in his mouth. He ate a lot of fish, tuna being the biggest one, a big sushi eater, several times a week. It fascinates me that so many people don't know that tuna is a food you should be eating.

I mean, the government tells us that pregnant women and kids shouldn't eat tuna. Why is it okay for the rest of us?

Right, exactly. So, that was definitely a bit of a red flag. And he did a lot of travel with his work, international travel, including going to China. So, you know, that was something- It's like me. Yeah, that was on our radar because of all those red flags. So, we initially supported his digestion because he had a lot of reflux. He was taking medication for that. So, different herbs like deglycized licorice and glutamine, which is a protein that helps support the gut and gave him some digestive enzymes because, right, we always start in the gut, even if there's a toxin issue. you need to support the gut. And then I did support him further with the FODMAP diet because he was feeling better, but I really was focusing on getting more protein in him, more good fats, just getting in good calories with what he felt he could digest. So when his results first came back, his urine toxic metals, which is that provoked urine test, his mercury was at 31. Anything over three is elevated. We can see levels a lot higher than 30.

Mine was 187.

I remember you told me that, which is incredible.

People 350, 400, a few, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. So 31, you think on the spectrum, what we see, not bad, but you don't need much mercury to cause problems.

Right.

So that was there.

It's the most toxic chemical known to humans other than plutonium.

Yeah, right. I know. And we put it in our mouth. So we did the tri-mercury test for him, which is looking at the two different forms of mercury, methyl and inorganic, both of them super, super high. above the 95th percentile. So, you know, remember he's a big fish eater, so his methylmercury came back high. And then the inorganic was, was most likely from the amalgams. So his blood mercury. So you were just asking about that conventional blood work. You did have him check that through conventional blood work. And he was 24. The upper end of the range. I want to say is 15, right?

Yeah, but you don't want to be even up at a 15. My question is, oh, when the doctors go, oh, his mercury level was normal. I'm like, is there a normal level of mercury for a human being? What's the ideal level of mercury for a human being?

It's zero.

Right, it should be undetectable. And there is a normal level of blood sugar. It should be 70 to 90. That's fine. If it's zero, you're dead. But mercury, it should be zero. There is no safe level of mercury.

And we know that even at very low levels, these toxins can be problematic. So that's a good point, right? Because when we do run it through conventional labs, we do often see it around three, four, five. But yeah, should there be any in there? And for that person, maybe that has a bigger impact than someone that to maybe detoxify it a little better. Absolutely. So that was quite high in the conventional testing. And his stool, obviously we did checked his gut with everything going on. He had high yeast levels. His nutrition profile was showing that he was very low in amino acids, which again, protein is really always where I start and focus with people because it's a very important part of the detox pathways.

Yeah, this is very common. I mean, I see in my patients often who have mercury toxicity, very low amino acids. And the reason is they're not because they're not eating protein. but because they're using up so many of these amino acids in the second phase of detoxification in liver that require these amino acids.

Right, right. So it's like, again, it's multiple things. Like he's not digesting well, right? He's on, he was actually on a peptide. He was on something that lowers acid, which is affecting how you digest and absorb these amino acids. He wasn't eating enough anyway. That was definitely part of it. And then, so the absorption, his gut was compromised, and then his need for these amino acids are higher with all the toxins he has. so, you know, this is why his nutritional status was so important. And we did Cyrex testing, the food sensitivity testing for him. He was off a lot of foods again with his diet, but he wasn't very strict with gluten and dairy, which are the two things I told him to be more strict with. And both of those came back elevated for him. So at the follow-up you treated him for his yeast. You know, you're working on his gut, which is a really important place to start. And we did something. You did the detox cube and dmsa. so the detox cube is something that Quicksilver Scientific has put together that goes along with the tri-mercury test. It has glutathione, liposomal glutathione, which is really probably the most important detox molecule out there. We do make it, but again, our ability sometimes is compromised or our need for it is higher. And the liposome, glutathione is interesting because it's a tri-peptide, which means there's three amino acids. And if you take it just in its normal form, you're going to break it down and you're not going to absorb it. so what they do is they put it in almost like this fat molecule. That's kind of how I think of it, so that it keeps it intact so it can get absorbed. So we that the detox Cube has the liposomal glutathione. It has liposomal vitamin C. Good way to get a lot of vitamin C into the body, which really important to have that antioxidant to support detox. The R lipoic acid is in there, which is another important component, and then it has a binder. so, you know, as you're, you're ramping up these detox Pathways of the liver and, and whatnot, that's getting spit out into the digestive tract. And you want to bind that up and eliminate it. So the Binding aspect is there. It's a form of silica, I believe. Yeah. And then there's, and then there's a supplement to go along with it, like has B vitamins, again, these polyphenols and herbs. Detox herbs all support the liver and the detox Pathways. so we have really good success with that. But you also did in combination with the DMSA, which is what they use for chelating.

It's FDA approved for chelating lead. But we also chelates other metals too.

Yep, yep. What we found, so that's where we started. I worked on expanding it.

So we get rid of the source, right? We get them off the tuna.

Right. Which we did from the beginning.

So you gotta remove the source.

Right, right.

And then you start to help the body detox But also use food as medicine because this is a big thing for us to understand is that food actually has all these phytochemicals, these plant compounds that have all these properties including up regulating our body's own innate capacity to detoxify these chemicals. So tell us about how you use food as medicine in detoxification.

Right, and this was a tricky thing with him because again, he really felt like he couldn't eat a lot. I mean, he was eating rice cakes and things like that that he felt he could digest easily, but I'm like, there's no to nutrition in there. So we have to get so I started getting him to eat some more green vegetables and just cook them really well and make vegetable broths and, you know, just find ways to make these compounds, the food more digestible so he can get these compounds. We even did some green powders and things like that to assist him until he could eat a little bit more food. So he had kind of dug himself into a bit of a hole. So getting him nourished was really important. the thing is, too, he didn't initially do well with the detox protocol, I think because his gut was in bad shape. So you had him hold the dmsa, and we just slowly built him up on the detox cube. So, you know, getting the gut sorted out is so important first. It is for sure. And that had a lot to do with his nutrition. So once he started expanding his diet, he was getting more protein, he was getting more good fats. We were getting vegetables, which he didn't.

Really like, but, you know, he was. He got. So for people listening, it's like, okay, I want to rev up my detox system. in my liver, in my body. How do I, how do I do that with food? What are the, what are the top foods that you should be eating every day that are revving up your detox? Because, look, whether you have a disease or not, whether or not you've been diagnosed with high body burden of this or that or the other thing, you can guarantee that all of us are living in a toxic world and are exposed to a myriad of toxins every single day through the air, water, food, all the compounds are in contact, whether it's credit card receipts or BPA, whatever were plastic bottles. containers, we're all exposed. So in that context, we should all really be focused on how to upregulate our detox system.

Absolutely.

So at the Ultra Wellness Center, we really focus on food as medicine. What are those top foods that everybody should include every day to help their liver and body detoxify? Right.

Good, important point. The cruciferous vegetables probably are number one. There's so many compounds in there that we've identified. They are, there's quite a few, you know, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, arugula is in that family.

Collard, it's kohlrabi.

Yeah, a lot of really just the dark greens. And what they do, I mean, they have a lot of compounds, but the liver has two phases of detoxification and you really want to support both phases to have good detox. And the compounds like the sulforaphane, which is probably most rich in broccoli sprouts, support both those pathways. So, sulfation is a really important pathway that you want to support.

Yeah, because that builds up glutathione.

Right, it does. And it well, it upregulates two enzymes, right, that the glutathione will then bind onto toxins so they become water soluble. So, that's the tricky thing. Like, if you don't have good phase two detoxification in the liver and you get more toxins in the liver that can't be excreted, so you need the second phase and glutathione is a really important part of that and these vegetables They're bringing the sulfur that supports that, but they're kind of activating the glutathione. So it makes these toxins water soluble. So you can pee them out, you can poop them out. So that's really important. So that's really top of the list.

The other- yeah, not every day. Like I focus on, where am I going to get? Every day I have arugula or I have kale or I have broccoli or I have cabbage or collards or Brussels sprouts. Cauliflower. Cauliflower. I make sure that I eat these things every day because they are the basis of, and I have that gene that makes it hard for me to detoxify. for glutathione. Yeah, I'm really focused on what are.

The other foods you want to eat? I like the allium foods, which is like the garlic family. Garlic, leeks, chives, onions, scallions. Again, sometimes digestion-wise, if that's compromised, there are certain ones that can be a little bit more difficult initially, but there's a lot in that family. And when you cook them, it makes them more digestible. So those are really, really important. Spices and herbs, I think we overlook them a lot, and they are some of the richest sources of antioxidants. And antioxidants, they protect you from oxidative stress, which we're all under, you know, just breathing in oxygen creates that. But oxidation is part of that phase one detox and you want to counteract that oxidative stress. So antioxidants are really important too. So whenever you're getting color, you know, and cinnamon and ginger and turmeric, you know, they're really rich in antioxidants, but.

They'Re also, you know, working as detox molecules. Yeah. I mean, so, so, yeah, so spices.

And herbs, sometimes they're antioxidants, but they also have detox properties like rosemary. It's a combination. and turmeric.

And turmeric. Yeah. Right, right.

So pomegranate is another one. We, you know, we're always trying to push pomegranate and berries. Anytime you're getting, like, dark pigmented. Yes. Skins is always a good thing. So you want that color. I mean, we teach our kids, you.

Know, eat the rainbow.

It's so important. And green tea. Green tea. And a lot of the teas, like Aruba's tea and Burdock tea, dandelion tea. I have a lot of my patients, you Not only are you bringing in these herbs, you're staying hydrated. So the food is really important, supporting the liver, moving the bowels, and then sweating. So good hydration, we get people into saunas, we get them getting massages.

We call it the triple P. Poop, pee, and perspire.

Yes, exactly. That's a good way to put it.

And I think you're right, I just want to loop back on some of the compounds because green tea also is so powerful. And in Japan, They eat a lot of mercury fish, but they also- They.

Have their green tea.

Have a lot of green tea and it may mitigate some of those effects. And, it's a great chelator, an upregulator.

Of glutathione, these catechins that are in green tea. Yeah, so green tea is excellent. I do encourage people to get their.

Teas and get their fluids in that way too. Also, like lemon peel. Lemon peel, right? And, I often will grate lemon peel.

From organic lemons and put it in my salad or- Right. And the thing is, all these things add a lot of flavor, right? When people say they don't like to eat these foods, I'm like, you know, they really enhance the culinary aspect of all this too. So they're tasty, which, you know, I think is really important too. So yeah, the spices, the herbs, the fiber is really important because that's the thing too. And with this gentleman that was tricky because he was on this lower fiber diet because of the yeast and the, what we call dysbiosis he was dealing with. But eventually we had to really work to get some fiber up in his diet because that, you know, when those toxins are coming out, you got to bind them up and you have to eliminate them through, through the stool. So, so the fiber piece is really important. That soluble fiber, which is like the pectins inside a fruit, you know, ground up black seeds and chia seeds, you know, are really, really good too.

Artichokes are great also.

Artichokes are, yep, they're kind of a super, a super food. So I think, yeah, artichokes, pomegranate, it's also fiber, prebiotic too, the artichoke. Right, exactly. and so that's the thing, it's a process. So we get the, you know, I, he, we had a really build up slowly. So we got the gut sorted out, got him just more nourished, got some weight on him, got his protein up, and then we could branch into really doing a lot more of this stuff. And that's where the glutathione and things.

Really made a huge difference for him. And the protein you mentioned is so important because often if you're vegan or if you're not absorbing or your digestion's not great, you can't build up the amino acids you need to detoxify. So you need all these pathways to work and they all require enzymes. Right. Enzymes are catalysts that convert one molecule to and they're dependent on all sorts of helpers, including all these compounds we talked about in food. These are facilitators of enzyme reactions. There's also a lot of nutrients that are needed.

Right, so like the B vitamins, right? When you say cofactors are helpers, you know, a lot of the B vitamins are supporting these enzymes. A lot of them provide methylation support and methylation happens all over the body, but it's a really important detox pathway too. So when you're taking methylfolate and methyl B12, and some people, again, have difficulty kind of the B vitamins they get in through their food. They're not fully methylating them or what I say activating them. So this is where a really good B complex can be really helpful. That has methylcobalamin, which is B12 and methylfolate, because they will ramp up those methylation pathways. That's one of the key pathways in.

The liver is requiring those B vitamins. You also need other nutrients like magnesium.

Magnesium is important. Absolutely. Right. They're supporting all those ends.

Selenium, right?

So selenium I kind of put in there, it's considered an antioxidant because it helps to activate glutathione. The best food source, if people don't know, is Brazil nuts, but it's pretty well known now. They say two to three Brazil nuts, right, gives you kind of your recommended amount of selenium. So selenium is really key and a lot of the detox products that we carry will have some selenium in there for that reason. so, and this is why the nuts and seeds I like so much. They're great quality fats, which are essential. We need to eat them, but they provide a lot of the zinc and the selenium and these minerals like magnesium that we need to support detox.

Right. Zinc and selenium and, you know, all kinds of nuts and beans for magnesium. Right. So you, you do need a whole array of compounds. And then, you know, if you kind of Google, you know, like phase one, phase two detoxification. look at the kinds of nutrients that are involved and the amino acids that are involved and the foods that regulated. I mean, it's fascinating.

It is.

When you look at this and so in functional medicine, we become experts in detoxification. Right.

And it really all comes down to food. I do think, you know, the supplementation really helps, but, you know, there are things in food I'm sure we don't know about and, you know, they work synergistically. So all these, these nutrients are found in our food. And again, the quality makes such a big difference because, again, if you're getting them, organic, they've not been sprayed, they have more of these, these phytonutrients that work as antioxidants.

So what happened with this guy?

We, we treated him, we detoxed him.

Yeah, so we did a detox.

We operated the detox system.

Right.

He, he was doing a lot better. Again, it took, it was a long road for him to be able to tolerate the detox because again, I think his gut and his nutritional status were so compromised. So we had to build him up for a while before he could really handle moving out the toxins.

Right.

You don't want to be moving out toxins if you're not eliminating well and your gut is leaking. so we really focused on that and then worked him up on, you know, like the detox cube and such. But at five years out, when we looked at some of his labs, his urine toxic metals, which had been 31, is now down to 15. So going definitely in the right direction.

Right.

Yeah. The. The methyl mercury from the fish was down in the 75th percentile, partly because he won't give up some fish, but he has really cut back inorganic was normal. he had good clearance of both, you know, so when they looked in the urine, the hair, he was now clearing them well. And his conventional blood work was at seven, which, again, that's not a good thing, but it was definitely, you know, from 24.

But he got better. He gained weight, his headaches got better.

His neuropathy was improved. Right. Right. So he's at least 50 better, he says, with the neuropathy and the headaches. Those are, I think, always his, his top things. But his energy is good. He's got great weight. He, he's like, you know, thanks for making me eat more food. and his digestion is a lot better, like 75% better. And he said, if he goes off, he now knows it's gluten, dairy, alcohol. Those are his three triggers. And he's like, if I start going off and just have a little bit, I get setback.

Dr. No, it's a good feedback loop.

Yeah, right. Exactly. He's got good cues from his body.

And, we also use other things with these people. We're going to talk about the next case, some of the approaches, but I mean, we, we used supplements that help boost the detox pathways, right? One of the, the main ones we like to use is something called N-Acetyl Cysteine, glutathione orally, lipoic acid. We use milk thistle, selenium. We use artichoke extracts and broccoli extracts. And, and we really focus on this very intensively to push these pathways, right, vitamins, like you mentioned. And I think one of the things we we also focus on is how do we facilitate also other things, not just the pooping and peeing, but how do we get people sweating? So saunas can be very effective. In fact, they're one of the most effective ways to help upregulate the detox system and get rid of these toxins because they're fat soluble and they're hard to get rid of. They store in the fat a lot of them. Right. So you need to sweat in order to get rid of them. And people who exercise have lower toxin levels. People who sweat have lower toxin levels.

Right.

I'm trying to sweat every day.

Yeah, I think we all need to do that. And what we see a lot of folks, right, that tell us they have a hard time sweating and that's always a key that, you know, they're probably not great detoxifiers. So getting into saunas, you know, Epsom salt baths are great, right? You get the magnesium sulfate coming in through the skin, which is helpful, but people can get a little sweat up that way. Massage, yoga, you know, some of that will obviously help circulation, but it helps the lymphatic system too, which is how you move toxins out as well. so we really take a big lifestyle approach. And Mercury, right, you can chelate that out to a certain extent, but solvents and plastics, how do you, you know, you, sweating them is a great way to get them out. So it's a really important piece to talk about.

We didn't really talk about it much, but we really also focus heavily on how to reduce exposures, not just from the one toxin we might know like Mercury, but the whole range of Right. And they're everywhere. And I'm on the board of the Environmental Working Group and we have all sorts of guides on how to reduce your exposure to science.

Right.

So how to reduce your exposure from fruits and vegetables, what are the lowest pesticide fruits and vegetables?

Right.

The dirty dozen and the clean 15. How do you reduce your exposure from household cleaning products? Right. From personal care products, whether it's makeup or shampoo, or sunblock, whatever we're using. What about animal products? How do you eat animal products that have low toxin levels? So fish, how do you eat the lowest mercury fish? So we go through all these sources of exposures and we give people guides on how to reduce their overall toxic burden and upregulate all the pathways.

Right, right.

That keeps you healthy for the long term.

Exactly. And, you know, and it's a team approach, right? Because it takes a lot of time and a lot of education around this and resources to support people. So we have, you know, low mercury seafood lists and, you know, here's a clean list of cosmetics that don't have some of these compounds in it that you want to be avoiding. You know, Environmental Working Group, we give everyone their website and, you know, we have the little dirty dozen cards of, you know, people can carry with them to avoid these highly sprayed produce. And actually that was a lot of what we focused on with this second case. This was a 52 year old woman who had a history of breast cancer. back in 2017. So she came to us more to prevent recurrence because she was, you know, she had already had surgery, chemo, radiation. She was on tamoxifen to help keep her estrogen levels low, which, you know, to prevent the recurrence of her estrogen sensitive cancer. But when we spoke with her, I mean, obviously cancer we were talking about, right? That's a huge thing we see with toxicity since so many things are carcinogenic. She, when we did a health review for her health history, she had three to four silver fillings. Her diet was good, but it was low fat and she was pescatarian, so she didn't eat much animal protein, which is okay. You know, it depends on what's going on for that person. And she also had digestive issues. She had quite a bit of reflux. She had taken out gluten and dairy because of her digestion not being great. Or she was low dairy, but she had taken out gluten because she knew it made her digestion peel better, but she still had some reflux when she came to see us. So initially when she saw the physician here, she got DIM, diindolylmethane, which is one of the compounds that you get from indole-3-carbinol, which is from cruciferous vegetables. Broccoli, basically. Right, your broccoli. So this is one of the compounds that we know is so important. Basically, it helps to metabolize estrogen to the forms that are less less toxic. So she was given some DIM and we gave her my community, which is from a company called Host Defense, which is a bunch of different medicinal mushrooms, which are very good for the immune system for folks that have, you know, something like cancer. And she had had some methylation support. I think she was on a B complex and things. So we continued her on that. I had, I really focused again on protein. That's where I tend to start with people, especially more vegetarian based. so we talked about clean fish. She had been eating tuna, so we talked about, you know, avoiding all the predatory fish. Swordfish is there, bluefish, you don't want to eat fish that are eating other fish. So I went more to like salmon and some of the white fish. And I think she was doing some seafood too. She did have some eggs. We, I got her on a good, like just protein supplement.

And eggs also have sulfur.

They have a lot of sulfur. So I, you know, my only concern with eggs is they're up there on the likelihood of being a food sensitivity. But from a nutritional standpoint, they're an incredible food. And the yolk has choline and all these fat-soluble vitamins that are so important too. So I definitely kept in eggs for her for that reason. And I told her to kind of do as little dairy as you possibly can and to stop coffee because of her reflux. And we really, that first meeting besides protein and talking about quinoa and beans and being a good pescatarian, was just trying to, how do you increase these detox foods? So, I mean, I really, you know, up to 15 cups of vegetables sometimes for people is what I'm pushing for folks that can digest them. And the leafy greens, especially when you're cooking them and stuff, it's, it's the easy way to do it. We did some green powders, too, that she could add to her smoothies. So when her first Labs came back, the doctor, I checked her for some of these other compounds, and she had.

Elevations in two types of phthalates and two parabens.

The phthalates are found in Plastics. They're in everything, right? I think they're like the biggest. group of toxins that are out there. So they're in, there's, you know, you break them down to a lot of different things, but two of the phthalates were high. Yeah. So cosmetics, detergents, plastics, some of the pesticides, perfumes. I mean, whenever you see the word perfume on something, right, you know, there's a phthalate in there. And I can't believe people use these and they're in everything. And the parabens, they're mostly, and actually, Environmental Working Group has a nice layout of, you know, different products that don't have parabens, but they're in body care for the most part. Yeah. So when they came back, that was, you know, between myself and the doctor, a lot of what we talked to her about of, again, removing the exposure.

So because these are also known as xenoestrogens.

Exactly. These are xenoestrogens. So given her breast cancer, you know, definitely there's a connection there.

I mean, you don't know if that particular paraben or Valley is causing her cancer.

Right.

But, but the Assumption of functional medicine is you get rid of all the bad stuff. Right.

You optimize the good stuff.

You give your chance body a chance.

To do a better job at fighting. You don't want that stuff in there when you're trying to prevent stuff. So when she followed up with me, she had stopped her coffee and her reflux was gone. I'm sad that people have to take out coffee, but sometimes that makes a difference. She was feeling a lot better with her energy, and she was pretty good when she came to see us again, really just being more proactive. But when she started adding more protein and good fat, she's like, you know, I just feel like I got better energy. I can think better. you know, and that's your blood sugar was doing a lot better. And she wasn't coming to us to lose weight, but she said her pants were fitting better. And I always use that as a barometer, like, right, if you're losing inches in that midsection, you're losing the right type of weight, which, you know, if you're carrying extra fat, fat stores toxins.

So you want to try to clear that out for that reason. This is just such a great case and sort of highlights the way in which we do things differently at the Ultra Wellness Center, how we think differently in functional medicine and address problems by really taking a broad view of what is the cause of the imbalance in the body. And for many people, it's toxic load and it can affect everything, right? It can affect your gut and immune system and weight and brain and everything. But I think we use a very systematic approach of diagnosing your genetic risks of detox problems, your body load of metals and pesticides and toxins. We look at also how to upregulate all these Pathways, like we talked about with food and lifestyle, exercise. swetting, drinking lots of fluids, making sure you have fiber, pooping, very important. And then how do you reduce your load? Like the environmental working group, if you go to ewg.org and look at these guides and start to clean up your house, make your home a safe zone.

Right, right. Like what are your cleaning products and things? I mean, because you can use vinegar and some basic stuff to clean really well. And, and, and that stuff is not regulated. I mean, our food isn't as regulated, you know, as it should be around toxins. Our body care and, you know, what we're being exposed to there isn't.

You've been building materials, you know, like at Cleveland Clinic, we built our Center for Functional Medicine and I was insistent that we make sure we do it through, you know, the environmentally safe compounds. So there's no off gassing from furniture, no formaldehyde, the carpets on off gas. The lighting is better for you. The water's filtered, the air is filtered. So we really made an effort to.

Create a healing environment. And I think that leads to much, much better health overall. Absolutely. Absolutely. so, so, yeah, she did. I mean, she also had some mercury and things like that, but. And based off her genetics, she had the GST1 deletion, so she needed some glutathione support, which, when she saw the doctor at her follow up, they gave her liposomal glutathione along with n-acetyl cysteine, which helps the glutathione work and make more glutathione. We gave her a product called oncoplex, which is very rich source of sulfuraphane, which, again, very important for that detox pathway. and the doctor was like, okay, you got to get into sauna. She had a sauna, but she wasn't using very often. She's like, sweat, sweat, sweat.

You know, get these things out. Yeah, sweating is very powerful. Yeah. So, so for those of you out there listening who suffered from weird symptoms, who have various chronic illnesses, who aren't sure what's going on, you're looking at your toxic load, looking at your toxin history, regulating your detox system is so important. And you can do a lot of that on your own through the things we talked about. out. But sometimes you need to really see somebody. And that's really what we're here for at the Ultra Wellness Center in Lenox, Massachusetts. We have an incredible team of providers, nutritionists, and we work with people from all over the world now over Zoom through remote consults. And we're happy to help you. And I certainly became an expert in detoxification when I was sick myself. I'd learned way too much about this topic. But it's amazing how effective it's been in treating so many of my patients. everything from obesity to diabetes, to autoimmune disease, to neurologic issues, to dementia, to autism. I mean, you just name it. It's such a powerful depression, allergies. And I think, you know, what you shared, Maggie, was just so important. It's giving hope where often people have no hope.

Yeah, especially in the world we live in now, right? It's unfortunately looking bleak with the way the environment's going. So this is just something we all, like you said, even if you're not sick, you need to be thinking, how.

Do you support your body and detoxifying?

Absolutely.

Live clean and green. That's what I say. Good food. Well, thank you so much for joining us on the Doctor's Pharmacy, a special episode of the House Call. We've been listening to Maggie Ward, our Nutrition Director here at the Ultra Wellness Center, and we've been having a great discussion about toxins, toxic load, and how to detoxify. And if you think you might have an issue or you've been helped by detoxification, please share your comments with us. We'd love to learn more about what you're experiencing. If you love this podcast, please share.

With your friends and family on social media, subscribe wherever you get your podcast, and we'll see you next time.

Time on the doctor's pharmacy.