How to Remove Toxins from our Foods, Products, and Bodies

Coming up on this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Behind many of these chemicals is a story of companies knowing there were problems and not complying with the duty to explain that this is toxic stuff. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark.

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Hi, this is Lauren F. One of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. Toxins in our home environment, our food and in the air all increase our risk of chronic disease. Learning about the impact of these hidden chemicals and where they are commonly found can empower us to make better choices as consumers, to limit our exposure and to create better health for ourselves and our families. In today's episode, we feature three conversations from the Doctor's Pharmacy about toxins that are found everywhere from canned tuna to our personal care products and why it's a good idea to reduce your toxic load. Dr. Hyman speaks with Ken Cook about glyphosate in our food and the work of the Environmental Working Group, with Dr. Elizabeth Boham about heavy metals like lead and mercury, and with Maggie Ward about how to test for toxins and how.

To uplevel your detoxification pathways.

Let's jump in.

This was a weed killer that came along really in force in the 90s. It was invented much earlier, but in the 90s it was matched to bioengineering technology that allowed them to develop crops that were resistant to the weed killer. So you could spray a field while the crop was standing in it. After it had been planted and it popped up, you could spray that field and kill all the weeds, but the crop would survive. That's the that's the genesis of why we have so much Roundup in our world now used on, as you say, hundreds of millions of acres. It's in air in the Midwest during the spray season. It comes down in the rain. It's everywhere. I liken it to, in a way, sort of the OxyContin, right? It was something that at the beginning had some merit, obviously, for a therapeutic treatment of severe pain. And this was not the worst weed killer molecule out there, glyphosate. There are others that are worse. What made it so bad was the greed to take it from a certain market level to a mass market level, multi-billion dollar market level, where it was used everywhere and abused. So what we face now is it's in air, it's in water, it's in all of us. then they started using it at the end of the growing season for other crops that weren't genetically engineered to resistant like wheat and oats. So they would spray wheat and oats right at the end of the season when it had grain on it. And that's probably why you got your 50th percentile, because when they did that late in the season, it was right there in the, in the final food. And when that went to the Miller, it stayed in. And when it went to the baker, it stayed in and it came out. It's in hummus. We found it there. It's in Cheerios.

Yeah. People don't realize it's the number one top product that contains glyphosate the most amount is hummus. Yeah. Crazy.

It's bizarre, right?

And people are eating it to get healthy. Right.

And so, because it was used on chickpeas at the end of the growing season to make the harvest easier and it's cheap. And so, so all of these abuses, first of all, those end of season abuses, which probably account for most of the dietary exposure, the Biden administration should just go in and say, no more post harvest or end of harvest use of glyphosate. That would immediately lower a lot of the exposure that we experience in the food supply. But it really, it's a story about mistakes we make over and over again in agriculture, where lunging for that big market, you know, growing as much corn as you can, growing as much soybean as you can, and have the pesticides and fertilizers to go with, everybody makes a lot of money as long as the system's working. But the accountability for the environment and health is close to nonexistent. So for glyphosate, what we're saying now is, look, at minimum, we should end all of this late season use that gets it in our food, and then we should dramatically reduce use in residential and home situations where it's sprayed oftentimes by groundsman. These are a lot of the cases that are the subject of the litigation now. They're spraying it out of backpack sprayers around their properties and so forth. That needs to end. We need to put very tight controls on that if not banning the compound altogether. And then for agriculture generally, I think we We need investments in systems that don't require this heavy use of Roundup. They're available and out there, but they're starved for money. Farmers, like all the rest of us, we do the things that we do. If someone told me the camera here on this computer was carcinogenic and I couldn't use it anymore, I'd be concerned. But these are tools. We can fix the tools. We can fix the tools. That's what we need to have, the leadership at the federal level to do. 'Cause the companies won't do it themselves. What we've learned from so many of these cases you mentioned is there's consideration now of a multi-billion dollar, a $12 billion settlement of thousands of cases where people have developed cancer, they've gone to court and said it was caused by glyphosate. They've won a lot of these court cases. What we really need to think through is that if going forward we can avoid some of these chemical exposures and reduce that cancer incidence. And if we can make sure that when these suits are settled, they direct Monsanto now Bayer to make some changes in how this chemical is used in the economy, we'd be much better off. But the real thing that has broken through here is when we, from the discovery in these lawsuits, we've realized that Monsanto knew a long time ago that there were problems with this chemical. they didn't tell anybody.

Yeah, yeah.

They hid the information. But that has come out now in juries. And that's really what, that's really what gets men on juries upset. It's not the toxicity, per se. Yeah, it's that they were lied to.

Right.

And, and I think that behind many of these chemicals, PFAS chemicals to Teflon chemicals, many of the pesticides we worry about, behind them is a story of, of companies knowing there were problems and not not being required to or not complying with the duty to report and explain that this is toxic stuff. They knew, but they didn't tell us.

Now, the Environmental Working Group has been really at the forefront of highlighting these chemicals, doing the research on them, bringing this to light to policymakers. And maybe you could share a little bit of the successes that you've had around getting rid of these chemicals. in our food, water, air, agriculture, because I don't think there's been any other group that has been as effective in using science and data to change policy as the environmental working group.

Oh, well, thanks. Well, and I know you're, you start with science yourself, so I really appreciate the compliment coming from you, Mark. No, we've, you know, we've gone about in a number of ways. One way is we do research and present it to federal agencies. We take it to Capitol Hill and make the case, hey, look, this chemical is posing risks that shouldn't be accepted. We need to fix our regulatory system. We need to enact stronger laws. We need to take action in regulatory agencies. And we've had considerable success on a number of chemicals, like the perfluorinated chemicals, the Teflon chemicals. We were instrumental in getting federal action on a few of those. Much more needs to be done. chlorpyrifos, our work in the 90s helped take it out of a lot of uses, particularly around the home. And there are many other examples.

That's a pesticide.

That's a pesticide. Chlorpyrifos is a bug killer, an insecticide. So pesticides are weed killers, bug killers, rodenticides that kill rats and stuff. In that mix, the insecticides and fungicides tend to be some of the most toxic. And we've worked on all of those as well as Roundup. But you know the real thing that's changed, Mark, and it's been exciting to see it. We don't know exactly where it's going to go. Because the internet allows us to engage with so many people simultaneously and get feedback from them and inform them at a pretty low cost point. We don't have to go through a front page story in the New York Times to get information to people anymore. They can come directly to us. They can come to your podcast and so forth. That has begun to build an awareness in people that companies are beginning to listen to. I mean, it's behind the growth in organic food and agriculture, certainly behind efforts to clean up personal care products, the work we've done rating cosmetics and cleaning products and so forth. What I'm excited about now is that we no longer have to just rely on the government taking action as the first step. We can start with consumers taking action to protect themselves and their families. Companies starting to listen to that. We often then find the companies come with us to Capitol Hill and say, It's time to change the playing field, add some tough new rules. Our consumers want it. The market's demanding it. Let's take action. Instead of really saying that the market is substituting for the government, it's really market forces that can be harnessed to support civil action, to support change at the regulatory level and the legislative level. We're seeing just this year we had almost two dozen chemicals banned in California from personal care products. We had the agreement of the industry to do it. They were outmoded. Some companies still use them, but not the majority. Consumers were rejecting them in the marketplace. And so we came together with the Trade Association for the cosmetics industry and work together to get those banned. That's beginning to happen more and more often. So it's kind of, it's different than the way it worked when I was coming up as a lobbyist, where you'd take science to Capitol Hill, you'd hear, you know, feedback from bipartisan people of goodwill. They'd pass a law, they'd pass regulations after the law, and industry would just die. It doesn't work that way anymore. Now it's Science comes out, consumers see it first in many cases. They start changing their behavior, companies pay attention. When they pay attention, they realize that maybe they need to go to the government because if they're doing the right thing and other companies are sneaking by and doing the bad thing, they're at an economic disadvantage for what they're trying to do the right way. So it's just shifted the dynamics in some interesting ways.

Well, if you don't think about EWG.

That behavior can matter not just for your own health, but when you add it up in the marketplace, it creates a demand for better behavior from companies, and that's translating into policy slowly.

Now, that's exactly what I want to talk about next, because EWG is not only focused on the hard work of bringing science to policymakers and getting various chemicals banned or regulated, you created an interface with the consumer, which has actually been among your most successful efforts, because You could bang your head against the wall a long time in Congress and the White House and agencies. And you realize that by going directly to the consumer and providing them with tools to understand what they were exposed to and how to avoid those chemicals, that it creates the demand, which then drives the free market businesses to change their supply, which then wants them to change the regulation. So it's this beautiful virtuous cycle. So let's talk about some of the things because I think most people don't understand. If you just go to ewg.org, there's an enormous amount of resources there that are really available and pretty much free, including the Dirty Dozen and Clean 15 list of which are the most contaminated and least contaminated fruits and vegetables. The Skin Deep resource database, which looks at skincare products, which is probably what you use to do the regulatory changes in California. What household products you should be using or not using. If you're eating animal products, which ones are the best for you and the environment? Which fish you should consume is groans, harvested or, or, or farmed sustainably that also is the least toxic. So you have all these incredible resources, that are really user friendly that are often around apps that allow people to really at the point of sale, find out if their toothpaste or their face cream or their, you know, broccoli is safe to eat or consumer put under skin. And it's really an incredible, an incredible resource that I don't think most people understand. And, and I, I was shocked to learn when I joined the board of the Environmental Working Group about how much data there is that drives these apps. There's just, you've got teams of scientists combing the research database and then putting it in a user-friendly form. No one's going to go on PubMed and read 15,000 papers, but you guys did.

We will, so you don't have to.

Right.

I know you do it, but yeah, that's right. I don't know.

Of course not. And they won't, and you synthesize that into these incredible tools. So talk about the development of these tools. What are the, what do they do? Tell us about some of these things that you've created that help people change their lives and change their health and drive the change in the marketplace and ultimately the policy.

Well, it's one of my favorite things to talk about because it was my failure of imagination that led us there. In a way, we started as a policy shop where we thought our job was to bring information to the forefront so that policymakers would take action and things would get better. this was the environmental model for a long time. And it still would be without the internet. We'd have very few tools to make the marketplace change, but the internet's changed all of that, of course. But our first endeavor was the Dirty Dozen. So here we are, we're making the case that we should get some pesticides off the market that are sketchy, right? They might be, they may cause a threat to the nervous system, they might be carcinogenic, even mildly carcinogenic. If you, you don't want to eat a lot of that if you can avoid it. they might might cause problems for the endocrine system, they might affect the immune system, all these biological effects that we saw in the open literature and even the government regulators were pointing to, but they couldn't get the job done. They couldn't get the pesticide off the market or out of the foods that we wanted it out of. So we thought, well, why don't we just show people how they can shop for themselves? We know organic will get you out of most of those whacK-A-Mole problems with the chemical toxin of the day just buy organic. But what about conventional where maybe the levels are low and we found government data, we still use it every year where because of the type of pesticide they use and when they use it on the product, the human exposure at the consumer end is low. That became the dirty dozen, the ones you want to buy organic and the clean 15 where you could buy conventional and you'd still avoid pesticide exposure. We just did this because I kept getting asked, what can I do while the government's making up its mind for decades? For decades, right? Some of these chemicals have been in regulatory jeopardy, you know, since I was in my 30s, which was a while ago. And so we started, let's put this list out. And it exploded. People loved it. It was on refrigerators. People would come up to me and say, you,'re the dirty dozen guys, aren't you? you know, and although we weren't guys doing it mostly, it was women on the staff who were doing it. It was amazing. And then, you know, we saw as the media environment got tougher to break through on, well, now we've got the internet. We can go directly to people. So this brilliant scientist, Jane Houlihan, said, well, why don't we look at the chemicals and personal care products? Because she read a study that was published by the CDC that showed that phthalates, this plasticizing agent, was used in nail polish and other cosmetic products and it was showing up at worrisome levels in the blood of women of childbearing age. And the CDC scientists, it might be personal care products and we're thinking, what? Is that an environmental issue? Personal care products? Well, maybe it is. If it's ending up in us, why not? She starts building this huge database that became Skin Deep. We thought we were going to use it to change policy. the first use was by shoppers. Shoppers, people who said, how do I avoid this stuff in my fingernail polish? And what's all the rest of it in my shampoo and my skincare and my lipstick and my eyeliner and my mascara? On and on. So it just sort of rolled out from there. And I joke, I mean, it really was not a master plan. It was being led by the interest that people showed us where they were starting from. People online just shopping, and we get 1,000 people an hour coming to the Skin Deep website, and we probably get 4,000 people every day downloading the Dirty Dozen because people want to help themselves. And it's not really just about EWG. I think it's how environmentalism has changed, Mark, and it's not just in food and personal care and cleaning products. It's even in energy. We've seen a shift so that the possibilities in front of us now are as exciting and plausible as we had long hoped they would be. Solar panels are now real. 10 years ago when we were debating the last big climate bill, no one hardly mentioned it on the floor of the House or Senate. Batteries were something you put in a flashlight instead of how you could store energy on site even at huge power plants. Here's the change. What we're fighting for now is as important as what we've been fighting against.

Yeah, it's true.

Right? You're fighting for good health. We know how to, if we can do it, we can fix healthcare. We're fighting for healthier food. We have models out there that show us what's healthier. Energy, automobiles, we're electrifying the fleet, we're getting rid of fossil fuels. All of that exciting momentum is happening now in part because environmentalists push back against the bad stuff for a long time, but also because that same push unharnessed, released this tremendous creative energy that can reinvent our economy. Reinvent medicine as you're doing. I mean, for goodness sake, if we had 10% of our doctors operating in your mode. No, I'm going to say five. Right? Population health we begin noticing, right, you know, at that level. So, and when patients come to see you, I'm not one of your patients, I probably should be, but when patients come to see you, I know what you tell them is the positive things they can be doing to take charge of their own health. What they're fighting for is as important as the diseases they're fighting against. You're giving them something to grab onto. You're giving them a sense of empowerment and control. And those small steps that they build their habits around, One success, small though it may be after another, is what's, I think, the future of the modern environmental movement now. It's from Rachel Carson's day. We, yes, we have to fight against the bad chemicals like she did, and we will not stop doing that ever at EWG. But we can also tell you that there are plausible alternatives out there now.

The only thing that I learned about toxicology in medicine and medical school was acute poisoning. We didn't even learn about chronic low-level toxicity. Now, there was some awareness that lead was a problem and that lead in kids caused behavioral issues, developmental issues, impaired cognition and all kinds of stuff. But we really didn't learn much how to treat it. We didn't learn how to evaluate it. We didn't learn how to test it. And yet, in my experience, and I'm curious to hear your experience, It's one of the most important and unappreciated factors in solving the puzzle of chronic disease for so many people with autoimmune disease, with depression, with dementia, with ADD, with autism, with digestive issues, with so many things. And it manifests in so many different ways and people just are not aware of it. And doctors don't even think about it. They might check your mercury, level or they might check your lead level in your blood, but that's not really that helpful most of the time.

Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, we did learn about lead and high levels of lead and lead toxicity like you mentioned, but one of the things we really didn't focus on in conventional medical school training was the concept of toxic load, right? And all of these toxins we're getting exposed to and that sometimes small levels of multiple different toxins are really what pushes the body over the edge. So we know that a lot of lead is bad and a lot of mercury is bad, but what we also know is a little bit of a lot of different toxins can be really detrimental for some people. And can make that level of lead that isn't crazy off the charts, but be really damaging to their health. And like you said, we see it connected to all sorts of different neurological diseases, Developmental diseases, you know, for kids, it's, you know, they're just doing so much growing and development, and if there's a toxin that their body has to deal with, it really impacts that growth and development. So we see it associated with autism and kids with ADHD and kids with other developmental disorders, even hypertension. We know there's a connection with lead and other heavy metals and hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and the immune system, which I think is so fascinating. Heavy metals and other toxins have been associated with causing depression of your immune system, so getting more frequent infections, and also, like you mentioned, autoimmune disease. So we know that heavy metals can be associated with triggering one of those things we think about when somebody's got autoimmune disease and we're wondering what's going.

On, what is triggering this. It may be some toxin. Yeah, I remember this guy when I was a resident. when I was at Kenyan Ranch years ago, he had ulcerative colitis. And he was wasting away and I tried all my functional medicine tricks and the elimination diet and the gut repair and the 5R program and this and that and it just wasn't working. And I'm like, God, okay, I'm gonna go back to the basics. You know, what are the five things that cause all disease? What am I missing? What have I not tested for? Well, heavy metals, you know, they can be immunotoxic. Turn out as mercury levels were off the chart. We chelated him, got the mercury out of his body, and his colitis went away, gained weight, and was fine.

This is absolutely what you have taught me, right, over the years of working with you is like when somebody's not getting better, you've got, okay, what am I missing? And so often it's toxins, and a lot of times it's heavy metals, right, where somebody's not getting better. And I remember when you told me.

You looked in my mouth after- having.

Cancer at the age of 30 and you looked at my mouth and you're like, you have to do something about those amalgams. And I dragged my toes for a little while, but it was really helpful for my health.

It wants to go to the dentist, right? Right, right. I mean, now the FDA has finally come out and said dental fillings are not safe for pregnant women and children. Which begs the question is, why are they safe for the rest of us?

Right.

Absolutely.

And in many countries, they're banned. In Europe, they're banned. And in Canada, they're recognized as not safe. And so I think, you know, we are in this sea of toxins, like you said, and it's the total load. So one cookie may not be bad for you and give you diabetes, but if you eat 30 or 40, you're gonna get diabetes. And the same thing with these toxins. And it's not just one toxin, like you said. And these low-level toxins that were exposed to the plastic, the flame retardants, the pesticides, the, you know, BPA, phthalates. parabens, all this stuff that we're constantly exposed to does put a wear and tear on our detox system. But the one thing that I found is that these heavy metals are not necessarily low level toxins. They can actually be extremely high given a patient's exposure and what's going on. So for me, and I don't know what it's like for you, but for me, you know, we, we see a lot of chronically ill patients here at the Ultra Wellness Center. And for me, it's like checking someone's blood pressure. I, it's just, everybody gets a heavy metal test. I mean, unless there was one patient recently, I'm like, well, I just saw.

Her and I'm like, did not order.

A heavy metal test on her. Although I probably should have, because she had no fillings and she was a vegetarian her whole life and she never ate fish. So I'm like, oh, she's not gonna have any mercury. But then I was like, wait, she was in the military. Maybe I should have checked because she could have lead. Yeah. And she didn't do a lot of blast or gun stuff, but she probably was shooting guns and, and I've had you know, patients. One guy was a king who used to shoot guns all the time, and he had really high lead levels, and.

He had diabetes and all these other issues. Yes, I had, I had a hunter as well who had high levels of lead and mercury. I mean, I'm assuming the lead came from, from the guns, from the shooting.

Yeah, absolutely. The, the fumes from the, the shooting of the bullets, for sure. So, you know, I, I remember I had a, a young student once who wanted to do a research project with us and I asked her to work with lab that we use to check heavy metals because we've done like 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 heavy metal tests over 20 years. And I had them pull, you know, all my patients, I had them analyze the results. And we found that 40% of those patients who showed up with some chronic illness who we tested had significantly elevated heavy metal levels. I believe it.

I believe it.

That may not be the general population. We're talking about people who come in who stuff wrong. Who are sick. But this is called selection bias. But still, if you're going to the doctor and you've got a problem that no one can figure out, it's got to be right at the top of the list. Gluten, metals, gut, it's like these are the functional medicine things that tend to.

Get ignored with traditional medicine. Yeah, so we should talk a little bit about how we check, right? You were just mentioning that. I mean, we can check heavy metals in the blood, which is good to check for, especially for acute toxicity or acute exposure, but the blood turns over every three months, every 90 days, so when you're checking for heavy metals in the blood, you're really mostly looking at recent exposure to heavy metals. We can check heavy metals, there's a great test we look at a lot, we'll talk a little bit more about it that looks at the comparison of blood, hair, and urine, and it looks at not only mercury levels in each of those three components, how is the body mobilizing it, and also tells us a little bit more about the comparison of inorganic and methyl mercury, we'll talk more about that. We also can do a provoked heavy metal challenge test where we give a chelator and collect urine for six hours, and that tells us about stores of heavy metals in the body. So if you're wondering if somebody got exposed two years ago or five years ago, because the body will hold on to heavy metals, we know that lead gets stored in the bones, and so you get a sense of what exposure somebody's had in the past with doing that Provoked Heavy Metal Challenge Test.

It's really important what you're saying because most traditional doctors will check your blood level. Yes. Now, if you haven't eaten fish in three months, your level is probably going to be zero for mercury. And if you don't have any acute on-iron exposure to lead, it might be very low. But, it may be something that you've accumulated over your lifetime that gets stored in your organs, your bones, your muscles, your tissues, and it's not going to come out unless you provoke the body to pull it out. Now, traditional medicine doesn't actually do this test, and they don't even know about this test, and they often are highly skeptical and questioning of this test because, well, what's the normal reference range? You hear all these criticisms. The normal reference range for mercury is zero. The normal reference range, For our lead is zero. These are not biologically necessary compounds that we should have in our blood at all, ever.

Less is more there, right?

And we used to do these lead levels on kids. 40 was considered normal. Then it was 20. Then it was 10. And now we're knowing that even down to levels of one, that there's significant impairment in neurologic and cognitive development. In heart disease. And this study blew me away, Liz. There was a study looking at heart disease and lead. And they found that any blood, this is just blood lead levels, any blood lead levels greater than two, which is about 39% of the population, were highly correlated with heart attacks, strokes and death. Far more than cholesterol. Which is amazing. And yet how many cardiologists are checking lead levels?

Yeah, and we think that's because of the process of oxidative stress and inflammation that the heavy metals can cause, and maybe because they're damaging the endothelium and impacting blood pressure. It is really an interesting correlation. And so it is something we really wanna look at. The other thing we sometimes look at is antibodies against heavy metals. So if somebody's had exposure to heavy metals or toxins in their lifetime. And you're wondering, could this be triggering an autoimmune disease in their body? We can also look at antibodies against those toxins and heavy metals. And so there's a bunch of different ways we can assess what somebody's toxic load is. We also look at oxidative stress markers. We look at genetic factors, some different SNPs or variations in your genes. may impact how well you can mobilize and detoxify from heavy metals. So there's a lot of things we look at when we're trying to assess somebody's toxic burden.

It's true, and I've noticed, and these are things that are not well described or written about, but I'm sure you've seen the same thing. You see patients who have heavy metals, and their bodies are trying to get rid of it. So you see all these depleted levels of things. You see depleted levels of amino acids. You see low selenium, low zinc. You see low glutathione levels. all these phenomena that are consequences of this constant burden on the system and the body is trying to handle it. And, you know, when we start to talk about these things, then we're gonna talk about lead and mercury. We've been sort of focused on lead, but, you know, if you have any chronic illness, whether it's depression, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, I mean, diabetes is highly correlated with arsenic levels, and pesticides and chemicals, you know, whether it's neurodevelopmental issues, neurocognitive issues like Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, whether it's autoimmune diseases, whether it's chronic digestive issues, whether it's chronic fatigue, these all need to be triggers for you to think about heavy metals. And your doctor is just not going to do that unless they're a functional medicine doctor.

That's true.

And we do something different, which is this provocative test, which is an invasive test. It's sort of like taking a glucose tolerance test, right? When you drink two Coca-Cola equivalents and then you check your blood sugar, well, drinking two Coca-Cola is not a great idea, but it's helpful to diagnose how your body responds. So, like a cardiac stress test, you provoke someone on a treadmill and see if their heart is working or not. And we have to provoke the body to pull these metals out with a chelator, which binds to these metals and you excrete it in your urine, you collect urine for six hours. And you can follow it over time and see people's levels improve and you see that correlate with clinical improvement. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And we're gonna get into it, but the way I got into functional medicine was because I had mercury poisoning and I've told the story a little bit, but we'll get into it when we talk about mercury. But let's sort of get into a little bit about lead. So what makes you think that someone has lead poisoning. And how big of an issue is this in America today?

There's always been lead around in our environment. There's a lot less now than there used to be. You know, I mean, some people feel that the fall of the Roman Empire was because of lead poisoning and that that caused such disorders in the emperors that they were all crazy. They were all crazy, right?

Lead pipes. It was the plumbing and the advance of technology. And sanitation essentially, they kill them.

Yeah, it's so interesting. And so we do have less exposure to lead now than we used to, but we still are getting exposed. It was in 1978 that we finally said in the United States, no more lead in paints. So for a lot of people, they have a house that was built before 1978. Depending on the situation and the, you know, they still might be getting their children, and they might still be getting exposed to some lead through the dust from the paint, lead pipes, as you mentioned, you know, there's still some lead in solder, especially in the older pipes. And then in gasoline, it was in the 1991, where we finally took all the lead out of gasoline. So we have less exposure to lead than we used to, but we still see some issues with lead toxicity.

Where is it coming from now?

Well, so, you know, in the, in older homes, so homes that are built before 1978 or who, or newer homes but still have some older pipes in them.

Yeah.

So it can still be in the water. That's why we always recommend people run their, you know, water.

Flint, Michigan, when they, they started messing around with the pipes and the water. Yeah. These kids got lead poisoning. And Cleveland, you know, the kids there have higher lead levels than in Flint, and because of all the old paint and all the old houses, I mean, it's prevalent. We also have the coal burning and cement plants, which use coal and release tremendous amounts of lead and mercury into the environment.

Absolutely, so lead can be in soil, you know, depending on what was happening around that home that your house was built in, it might be deposited in the soil. And we do find situations where kids are playing, I mean, we want them playing in the dirt and in the soil, but that can be a source, especially if their, you know, their toys or their hands are then going in their mouth. And of course, if they're, you know, kids are always putting stuff in their mouth, so that's where a lot of times they will pick up some of that dust from old paint, you know, at the house.

I remember this one kid who had severe ADD, behavioral issues, and he lived actually near Albany, and they had this.

Big cement plant there.

Yes. And it was right next to the school. And every day, the cars in the parking lot would be just covered with dust. And it was basically lead and mercury dust. And this kid had really high levels of lead and mercury from being in a school that was next to a cement plant. So we don't think of that.

No, and hobbies. We were talking about shooting guns and the bullets and stuff, but also stained glass. And there still is unfortunately, lead in some ceramics, and depending on where pottery and ceramics are coming from, you know, there still can be some levels.

And also wine glasses.

Yes.

And water glasses that are made of crystal. I remember once walked into this store to buy wine glasses, and they were $5 glasses, and they were $50 glasses. And I'm like, why are these Rydal crystal $50? He said, well, they have lead in them, and it makes the wine taste better.

A little sweeter, right?

Oh my goodness, yeah, lead tastes sweet. So it's a serious problem.

It is, it is. And you know, if a mom has had exposure to lead, you know, we do know it can cross the placenta, so that can be a source for children as well. So many times when we're evaluating a child who has developmental delays, you know, we're also thinking about the mom and what's what was her exposure like? What are her levels like? Because that is obviously impacting the child.

Absolutely. And I think the prevalence and the issues of this really got exposed by Dr. Phil Landrigan and others, Needleman in the 70s, where they took dental samples of kids' teeth that fell out, baby teeth, they analyzed the teeth and they looked at the lead levels and they found that there was an incredible correlation with the lead levels in the teeth and these neurodevelopmental issues with kids, whether it was dyslexia, ADD, violence, behavioral issues, academic performance, juvenile delinquency, all increase with higher levels of lead.

Absolutely. As your blood level goes up, your IQ goes down. I mean, you know, that correlation is is significant.

So it's and pediatricians do check for it, right?

You know, it's interesting. I think there's some state to state requirements, you know, like in terms of some states it's required to check at age two, but then I think in other states it's only the quote high risk population that we're checking at age two. So there may be some variations in state to state requirement. But when in my training in New York, we were checking everybody at age two.

But what did the doctors do? They're like, oh, Don't eat lead paint and don't, I mean, they didn't treat them.

Unless it was crazy high, right? Like these mild elevations where we were really watching. I mean, that's how you were trained in conventional medicine. Just if it was a mild elevation to watch and look to make sure there was not a continued source of lead exposure.

But the beauty of functional medicine is that we actually can treat it and help the body eliminate the metal.

And as you were mentioning earlier, these mild levels of exposure can have significant impact on a growing developing child. So we also always focus about high fiber. We know fiber will bind to lead and will help eliminate it. So we're always talking to moms about giving their children lots of fiber, lots of vegetables. We talk about making sure their iron levels are sufficient because if iron levels are low in a child, then the lead has an easier time getting absorbed into the body and getting into the brain. We know we wanna make sure all mineral levels are sufficient. And as you were mentioning earlier, we always focus on nutrition, right? Because you need to have enough amino acids and protein to detoxify, you need to have enough phytonutrients to detoxify, enough of those good minerals helps prevent that lead from being as detrimental for that growing developing child.

I mean, people don't realize that your body has a built-in detox system. It's designed to help your body get rid of crap. Yep. And there are very specific ways to optimize that system. And we've had a podcast on this, but it's something that we really focus on in functional medicine, which is foods that upregulate your detox pathways. All the things we're mentioning, the right amino acids, the right mineral rich foods, things with lots of glucosinolates and things that build glutathione in the body, fiber to help bind the metals and get them out. So we have a real strategy. And then there's a lot of nutrients and supplements that we use to also help upregulate these pathways in addition to getting rid of the source. You got to get rid of the source. Absolutely. And then sometimes we even use medication to help chelate or bind the metals to get them out. And these are FDA approved medications that are used for lead treatment in kids.

But they don't usually use it. Unless the levels are really, really high.

In the blood, right? Right. So if a level of one is bad, why wouldn't you treat that, right? If you wait until the level is 40 or 50, It's like it doesn't make any sense.

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, you know, with Parkinson's, you know, 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 like, oh, is this something we're probably thinking some toxins are involved here? So that's probably the most common thing, but, you know, autoimmune conditions, I mean, for so many people, it's toxicity is the one of the main puzzle pieces that we're thinking about. Yeah, for sure. Right? I mean, it's food allergies, it's toxins, it's, 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, the toxicity you're talking about that is more recognized in conventional medicine, we look more at body burden, right? These things are building up and maybe not very high in someone's blood sample when you check, but it's being stored. fat tissue in organs and things like that. So now we have more testing to look at different metabolites in the urine and things like that that would indicate that there's toxins in there.

And it's true, 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- Joe Pizzorno. 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, 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. There's at low levels, these can be immunotoxins and they're, they're often called autogens. Right. as opposed to obesity genes. 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 like 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, you know, are you getting exposed? Do you have an exterminator come in? Do you, you know, 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, right? That really can key you in. I'm like, okay, this is somewhere we have to look at. So, you know, just kind of being a detective, right? And having the time to spend with someone. I mean, just even here, you know, the doctors spend so much time with the patients going through everything, but when I meet with them for their food, you know, it's usually the first time they're telling what they're eating. And I'm like, you know, so you're eating tuna how often?

Right, right. Twice a week? We should probably check your story. 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. You know, just remind me of this patient I had. 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 and in her garage or, 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 pesticides. Right? Right.

A lot of them out there.

Yeah, farmers have some of the highest rates of Parkinson's disease. 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 have chronic fatigue syndrome, 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 in 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 that 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 that are 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 there are 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, you know, some more food or supplements that are more directed towards their genetics, which is really the way, you know, 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- yeah, look in the shadows, 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.

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 methyl mercury and inorganic mercury. So methyl mercury is typically the form that we're getting exposed to from environmental stuff like fish and food and, you know, if there's coal burning areas, then inorganic mercury, if your amalgams, your silver fillings are maybe still off gassing, that's.

You'Re going to see the inorganic mercury be high. So what you're saying basically is that, if you have what 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.

And 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, 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, a methyl mercury 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. Right, right. 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, right? 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 gonna go, 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 all 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 dentist and people 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.

Yeah, through autoimmune disease.

Yeah, so when someone's got an immunity 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 is 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 five dollar 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're, they're, They're made with lead and they help the wine taste better with the lead. And I'm like, okay then. Pay for the toxins. 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 easier 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. Thanks for listening today.

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