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Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show.

We are all inundated with these microplastics and these environmental toxins. But there is good news. You can detoxify from these things. You can actually get rid of them from your body. You have to do a little work, but you can. BPA has a rapid clearance rate, so it doesn't really last that long in the body. Only about five or six hours. It means about takes five or six.

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What exactly are microplastics? Well, microplastics are tiny little plastic particles less than five millimeters in size. Now, they can be as small as a grain of sand or even smaller, invisible to the naked eye. Microplastics can be broken down even further into minuscule sized plastic particles called nanoparticles. Now, nanoplastics are less than 100 nanometers in size, and for reference, a nanometer is a billionth of a meter. So, not very big and are much, much more difficult to detect versus microplastics. So why are these so bad? They're pervasive in our environment. They're ubiquitous and have become a significant environmental concern due to their widespread pervasiveness in the water, in our soil and our air. And it can take anywhere between 20 and 500 years for plastic waste to decompose. Even then, it never really fully disappears. It just gets smaller and smaller and smaller. Examples of how microplastics show up in our environment are everywhere. Now, because of their small size, plastics infiltrate ecosystems from the bottom of the ocean to the tops of glaciers. I mean, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a microplastic island the size of Texas. It spans from the west coast of North America to Japan. 70% of that debris sinks to the bottom of the ocean. 14 million tons of microplastics exist on the ocean floor. And microplastics have been identified in the core of ice caps in Iceland, where I just came back from. Pretty frightening because it's very remote. Microplastics are easily ingested by wildlife, and then they bioaccumulate up the food chain, which then, of negative impacts wildlife and human health because we're at the top of the food chain. So what impacts do microplastics have on human health? Well, in the CDC's national report on human exposure to environmental chemicals, scientists analyzed urine samples from 2517 individuals, a six and above for BPA, and they found almost every participant contained BPA. That's bisphenol A. Now, exposure from the time we're in utero is also going on. It's not just what we get when we're alive outside the womb. It's inside the womb. A recent study published in Toxicological Sciences analyze 62 placenta samples and microplastics were present in all of them with polyethylene, what plastic bags and water bottles and food containers are actually made of. These account for most of the nano and microplastics. Also, these microplastics affect our immune system. They drive inflammation. Now, when they're inhaled or ingested in our food, they often will cause what we call dysbiosis or imbalances in the gut flora. They'll cause oxidative stress and inflammation, which just drives further inflammation. And chronic systemic inflammation is associated with every known chronic disease. In fact, the new study in mice found that microplastics plastics have been shown to penetrate the gut barrier, causing a leaky gut, which then creates more issues, right? We get more inflammation and the food particles and bacterial particles then migrate into the bloodstream and the inflammation from there affects every organ, such as our liver, kidneys, brain, and they also affect our metabolic health, causing insulin resistance and worse. So this just screws up your whole liver gut axis and increases the risk of pre-diabetes and diabetes and insulin resistance. So they affect every aspect of our biology. They also describe hormones. These are also called endocrine and many plastics contain chemical additives like phthalates or bisphenol A or BPA and brominated flame retardants, which are just a few of the main ones. So let's look at BPA. BPA is structurally similar to estrogen and actually mimics estrogen in the body, which is why it's known as a Xeno or foreign estrogen. It binds to the estrogen receptors and then it alters hormone signaling, which is not a good thing. BPA causes epigenetic changes, so it literally changes the way your genes are expressed by something called DNA methylation. And then that causes all kinds of other issues, reproductive issues, cancer, metabolic issues, weight gain. It also affects reproductive system function. So when you have exposure to these microplastics and chemicals, it impacts your ability to reproduce. And BPA, for example, impacts the female reproductive system and fertility by affects the maturation of eggs in the beginning of your menstrual cycle. And BPA is also associated with PCOS or polycystic ovarian syndrome and endometriosis, which by the way is an autoimmune disease. BPA doesn't just affect women, it also affects men and it screws up spermatogenesis, meaning the making of new sperm. It's also associated with lower testosterone levels. and reduce sperm count, reduce sperm motility and increase sperm DNA damage, not what you want to have if you're having a baby. We call these changes epigenetic changes. They're imprinting on your epigenome, which then has transgenerational effects. So what happens to, let's say, the grandparent can happen to the grandchild because of the insult that happened to the grandparent. This affects the fertility of progeny of many future generations, which is very scary. And we're seeing all kinds of weird stuff in animals, even in humans, general abnormalities, influence on brain sex development and BPA BPA also has bad effects for men, right? They're anti-androgen. Androgens are male hormones. They're responsible for the maintenance of male sex traits, like, you know, hair on the body and muscle mass and all the things we like men. But BPA affects the brain sex development in fetuses and alters gene expression. So it literally changes the reproductive system of the developing fetus, which is really terrifying to me. And we're also seeing a lot of linkages to these environmental chemicals and plastics with obesity. they're called obesogens, carcinogens, but obesogens. And human studies have shown a positive correlation between urinary levels of BPA and your BMI or your weight. According to the NHANES data, this is the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey data, which is tens of thousands of Americans over decades and decades. Those are the highest levels of BPA exposure were more likely to be obese. Now, why? Could it be just because the people who were studied, who had a high BPA also didn't pay much attention to their health for other reasons? That's called the unhealthy user bias. Or maybe, you know, it's because they're eating more processed foods and eating, drinking more plastic stuff. Maybe there's a reason there, but the mechanism is that it has estrogenic activity and it promotes fat cell division and accumulation. So basically BPA causes insulin resistance. It causes more fat cell accumulation. It inhibits the release of an important hormone called adiponectin, which is an anti-inflammatory insulin sensitizing hormone. And it actually also helps regulate blood sugar and burning of fat. And it's secreted by fat cells, but when you have high levels of these toxins, you don't get adiponectin and you don't get all the benefits. BPA is also linked to abnormal cholesterol and dysbiosis, which is imbalance in the gut flora and endotoxins. Oxidative stress, meaning toxins getting in body from the gut that are caused by damaged gut lining. They're also linked to oxidative stress, to insulin resistance, high levels of fasting insulin, and also inhibits fat breakdown and leads to weight gain. So these are really nasty and they're everywhere and it's allowed in our food supply. What else does BPA do? Well, I mean, you probably don't want any of this in your system. And it's, by the way, everywhere. You really have to pay attention to cans and packaging and credit card receipts and ATM receipts. All these have BPA in them, so you just want to, you don't want to touch them. I never get the receipts. Also, BPA causes cancer. It binds to estrogen receptors, the ones we call alpha and beta, and it activates the same signaling pathways in these estrogen sensitive tissues that you would from estrogen. And that leads to breast cancer, ovarian cancer, uterus, can even affect prostate health. This increases all kinds of bad things like cell proliferation, cancer cell formation, cancerous tumors. And depending on the genetics and your environment and level of exposure, your risk is going to be higher. Now, there are other mechanisms that that BPA can cause a damage with, and those include what we call cytotoxicity, which just means it's a poison. So it's just directly poisons the cell. It creates oxidative stress and it damages our DNA, which has tumor effects. So there's just many, many pathways that this is bad for you. What else? If there wasn't something else, well, there's another thing, right? Heart disease. The long-term adult exposure to BPA is associated with all sorts of things like heart disease, hypertension, atherosclerosis, plaque development, heart attacks, as we saw that the data is just pretty scary about this. And the research shows, for example, a 10-year study in the UK done by Meltzer and others found that higher BP exposure correlates with an increased incidence of coronary heart disease, more heart attacks. Another observational study, and this is observational, but it was pretty scary actually in the New England Journal of Medicine, and it looked at the presence of micro and nanoplastics in the plaque of 304 asymptomatic people who underwent carotid endarterectomy, that's cleaning out the blockages and then the arteries in the neck, and that can help prevent strokes. And they looked at the microplastics in that plaque and they tried to track it how it correlated with heart attack, strokes and death from all causes about 34 months later. And what was really frightening was that polyethylene, one of these microplastics, was detected in the carotid artery plaque of 58.4% of patients. And PVC from PVC pipes, polyvinyl chloride from vinyl flooring, credit cards, medical devices, furniture was detected in 12% of patients. Now when they looked through a special kind of microscope called an electron microscope. Looks at very small, small things. It showed visible jagged edged micro and nanoplastic particles in the plaque, significantly increasing the risk for primary endpoint events, meaning heart attacks and strokes, by 453%, meaning if you had higher amounts of micro and nanoplastics in your carotid artery, you had a much, much higher risk of having a major cardiac event or a stroke than those who didn't have those microplastics in their arteries. Now, other studies have shown that people with high blood pressure and low heart rate variability tend to have higher total urinary BPA. So that's concerning. So it can cause high blood pressure and higher variability is a very important measure of your overall cardiovascular fitness. So what are the top sources of microplastic exposure? You want to know now that it's causing all these bad things? Well, ultra processed food and packaging. Just don't eat crap. You're going to feel like crap. It's not good for you. There's no reason to eat it. It's not actually food. You should never, never put that past your lips. And I've done many podcasts. You can go back and listen to them on what ultra processed foods are and what they do, but it's, it's pretty frightening. So where are you going to find also these microplastics? Well, cans, BPA lined cans, coffee cups, Lids, we drink in all these coffees. I mean, bring your own cup. Right. Bring your own can. Salt. Even salt has it. Table salt, which is, you know, ultra processed food also has a lot. But sometimes that has microplastics. Tea bags. They know tea bags are fine. Coffee filters, but they're not. Polypropylene is a type of plastic that's used to seal tea bags and it's kept, keeps them kind of together in hot water, but not good because that plastic can leach in your tea. A single plastic tea bag at the Brewing temperature this year can release, get this, 11.6 billion microplastics and 3.1 billion nanoplastics. That's scary. This is from Environmental Science and Technology Journal. Correct. Coffee machines, those plastic tubing and the plastic little things that they do. I mean, I don't think we should be using that. Plastic water bottles, soda bottles, any beverage container, which is BPA-lined, plastic containers, cups, bags, shrink wrap, tupperware, often cutting boards. You have to be really careful. just try to use natural products. Personal care products also another big source of these microplastics. Face wash has these micro beads, exfoliants, phthalates and lotions, creams, toothpaste. Use Skin Deep, which is a database from the Environmental Working Group that gives you a guide on what to eat, use and eat on your body and what to clean your house with that doesn't have all these crappy things in them. And watch out for your makeup. As I said, skincare products are full of these microplastics. What about your clothes? Well, clothes also are an issue. Polyester and synthetic fibers also are a big issue because when you wash them, those microplastics drain into our water supply. And a friend of mine a appliance company. He's a CEO of in, in Europe called archilec and has developed a micro plastic filter and he's open sourced it to all manufacturers of appliances. I don't know if they're using them, but they should. Now, what about kids? Well, toys, plastic toys, especially those made from polyethylene, which can lead to direct exposure to these chemicals when they're chewed or sucked on by kids. Kids stick everything in their mouth. So all these plastic toys for babies and kids are terrible. Also, there's a bunch of other places I mentioned, receipts, you Credit card receipts, ATM receipts, gas station receipts, medical equipment like II tubing, IV bags, disposable gloves, and all that gets to us over time. They enter the body through food and water, through inhalation, through skin exposure. That's kind of bad news, a little depressing, right? We are all inundated with these microplastics and these environmental toxins. But there is good news. You can detoxify from these things. You can actually get rid of them from your body. You have to do a little work, but you can. BPA has a rapid clearance rate. so it doesn't really last that long in the body, only about five or six hours. It means about takes five or six hours for your body to kind of metabolize and get rid of half of the BPA in your body. The bad news, we're exposed all the time, so it's hard for the body to get to net zero. And we're gonna actually measure this in function health panel soon. We're gonna measure BPA levels, so you can even test them. You go to functionhealth.com/mark. We're not quite up there yet with that test, but we'll get there soon. We'll also look at PFAS for every chemicals. So we'll be able to start testing these things and you can see your exposures. So the first step is really reduce your exposure. How do you do that? Air filters and water filters. Water filters are great. You can use Aqua Tru, a LinkedIn show notes. Also just a reverse osmosis filter. Other types are fine. Swap out plastic food containers with glass ones. Don't eat ultra processed foods, right? You're going to reduce your exposure to microplastics and phthalates and PFAS from processing and packaging. Swap out your plastic cups for glass cups. Use rock salt like Redmond's Real Salt. That's my favorite. Never heat food or drinks in plastic ever. in the microwave or anywhere else. Stay away from the instant meals that you cook in plastic, like a cup of noodles, soup, rice. Just don't do that. Avoid drinking from plastic water bottles, which is hard to do, but we should definitely be doing that. Both to not pollute the planet with plastic, but also to not pollute ourselves. A new study found that a liter of water from plastic water bottles contained, and this is scary, 240,000 detectable plastic fragments. I'm gonna say that again. A liter of water from a plastic water bottle contains 240,000 detectable plastic fragments. And that's about 10 to 100 times more than previous estimates. And about 90% of these fragments were nanoplastics, not microplastics. Also, you can use a steel water bottle, a stainless steel water bottle. I would encourage you to do that. I have one. Avoid commercial to-go coffee cups, like from a coffee shop. They're usually lined with BPA. Ask to fill a stainless steel travel mug or transfer the hot contents to a safe container, especially right after you get it, because I don't want to leave it in there. Avoid cans, especially a Acidic food and drinks like soda, tomatoes, leach out unless it's a BPA free can. There's companies that do make those. BPA concentrations up to 40 times higher in canned food from sterilization, pasteurization. Don't try to have canned foods unless you know they're BPA free cans. Don't take the receipt. You know, you can these. Most of these have a BPA coating. You can email it or, or text it or something, but don't, don't, don't touch it. Don't use plastic tea bags. I use tea bags that are organic, unbleached, 100 plastic free, free cotton coffee filters are fine. Don't use Keurig or plastic tubing for coffee. You can use a stainless steel French press, pour over coffee. And again, as I said, say no to receipts. Bad idea. Get an air filter. HEPA filter is great. I like Air Doctor. I'll put a link in the show notes. Watch out for also something called BPS because as soon as they find a chemical's bad and we go, oh, BPA is bad, they come up with something else, which may not be better, right? And BPS is used as a replacement for BPA, but it can actually be more toxic. That's how you reduce your exposure. That's the first step, is get rid of the source. How do you actually detoxify your body from the microplastics? Well, your body has a built-in detoxification system, so you have to support those pathways. And it works better than any crash diet or juice cleanse. So you have to support it by eating the right food. Foods actually have components in them that help your body detoxify. So what are they? Well, antioxidants in general help scavenge free radicals. They protect against DNA damage, oxidative stress. Vitamin C is great because it's a great antioxidant and you can get that from citrus fruit, oranges, kiwis, veggies, vitamin E, another great antioxidant from wheat germ oil, nuts, some veggies, vitamin A, which is grass-fed beef liver, chicken liver, grass-fed meats often have vitamin A. Animal food is the main source. Plant foods don't have actually preformed vitamin A. Melatonin, which you can get even in your diet actually from meat, fish, eggs, pistachios, lots of antioxidants you can take in terms of herbs, quercetin, curcumin, quercus in onions, garlic and apples, carotenoids are like, you know, they sound like where they're from, like carrots and yellow vegetables, flavonoids like berries, ellagic acid and pomegranate, EGCG, which is in green tea, astaxanthin from algae and salmon, krill, curcumin, milk this. So all these are great to use to help your body detoxify. These herbs have been well studied and they have been shown to actually upregulate many of your body's own built-in detox pathways. One of the, so powerhouses here, and I have these almost every day, are what we call cruciferous veggies. Now these are things like broccoli, collards, kale, brussels sprouts and so forth, bok choy. But a lot of other things are great too, like dandelion leaves, rosemary and so forth. So all these can really help your body to upregulate these detox pathways. Your body also has a lot of its own antioxidant enzymes. So you can upregulate those enzymes by having the right cofactors like copper and zinc for something called SOD, catalase, another important antioxidant enzyme your body makes. It needs iron and manganese. Glutathione, really, really important. It needs selenium and cysteine and a number of other amino acids. A grass-fed whey is a great way to boost glutathione, which is high in cysteine. I use regeneratively raised goat whey like Mt. Capra. Sulfur-rich foods also great for boosting detox pathways. So what are those? All the broccoli family, right? The broccoli, cauliflower, kale, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, watercress. Protein also, amino acids are critical for upregulating your detox pathways. so you want to make sure you have at least a gram per pound of ideal body weight. And you have to really need that, otherwise if you're detoxing and you don't have the amino acids to support your liver detox pathways, you're gonna be in trouble. Also, you need to have the right B vitamins, particularly the B vitamins B6, B12, and folate to support methylation. Really important. And you can get those from grass-fed meat, from pasture-raised eggs, poultry, certain enzymes are really important. Hydration also really important. You know, the solution to pollution is dilution. That's what we learned medical school. Make sure you drink half your weight in ounces of water per day. Use a water filter, as I mentioned, reverse osmosis. Make sure you hydrate to get rid of the toxins. So you want to have plenty of urine, clear urine. If it's yellow, you probably not have enough water. Fiber, really important. It's like a sponge that binds the toxins and prevents you from reabsorbing them. So try to eat 25 to 30 grams, even up to 50 a day. You can actually take fiber supplements like soluble or insoluble fibers. And insoluble fibers, for example, are non-digestible ones. pass through the GI tract. They add bulk to the school, but but you want soluble fiber, fruits and veggies, which has kind of like a gel like substance in the intestines and really helps all areas of health. That reduces inflammation and feeds your good gut bugs, it aids your blood sugar control, also binds to the cholesterol and bile acids helps excretion. And many of these microplastics are fat soluble, so they're bound to cholesterol. For example, we saw in the study on heart disease that the microplastics were detected in the plaque of arteries.

Right.

Remember that? So you want to eat more fiber. fiber, especially the soluble fiber that helps BPA exit the bile through your poop. Now, there are different types and sources of soluble fiber. One of the best types is beta glucans, which are found in oats, but you want glyphosate, gluten-free, whole steel cut oats, pectins, which are in apples, oranges, pears, and nuts. Certain mucilages, which are like kind of, if you put in water, you'll gum it up pretty quick, but that's great, like flax seeds, chia seeds, psyllium seeds, inulin, chicory root. These are all prebiotic foods. Draw some artichokes, onions, garlic, asparagus, and sweat. Also, you don't want to hear about sweating. Sweating is really important. It's how your body gets rid of a lot of toxins. So in 2012, there was a study of human excretion of BPA in blood, urine, and sweat, and they found that BPA concentrations were higher in sweat than in urine. And out of 20 participants, 16 had detectable BPA concentrations in the sweat, but only two had detectable levels in their blood. So basically, they're fat soluble. So when you sweat, you actually have one of the main mechanisms to get rid of these environmental toxins. That's why I love saunas. The results of the study suggest that sweat testing can be a cool tool for checking BPA monitoring and inducing sweating is a clinically useful tool to facilitate the release of BPA through the skin. It's not routine for doctors to test BPA, but it can be tested in urine or blood, even in sweat, as I mentioned. Function Health is going to be offering that test. Go to functionhealth.com/mark to learn more. But yeah, I really want to sweat, right? I really want to sweat. foot to get it out. Certain supplements can be very helpful. CoQ10 has been studied by researchers at Harvard and it shows that it reduces free radicals caused by BPA in worms, which is, I guess, good. Chlorella also can help support detoxification. Probiotics also helpful. They bind to BPA, phthalates, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, so it's like lactobacillus, bifidobacterium, saccharomyces, boulardii, all help your gut health, help improve liver function, prevent all kinds of stuff from going wrong in your body that have great effects on your endocrine system. Also, you can take other supplements like N-Acetyl Cysteine. I take that every day to boost glutathione. I also take lipoic acid, which is an antioxidant. It helps boost glutathione. And you can take some fiber supplements.

Like psyllium or just take flax seeds.

Or even chia seeds every day.

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Go to bioptimizers.com/hyman and use code HYMAN10. Your body will thank you. In the case of toxins, how do.

Toxins actually interact with our biology?

Cause such problems?

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

That's right.

Is it good glutathione, your mitochondria die and you die sooner and have more disease.

Yeah.

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

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

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

Yeah.

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

Unless I live to 200, then I'll get rid of them.

There you go, right. Yeah, you have to live past 100 to get rid of them. Okay. So then, so what's happening is the byload is going up, but now as the byload going up, we've cumulatively damaged our DNA. So our ability to respond to them and adapt to them has now become limited. and now all of a sudden all the disease correlations start showing up.

So total load, damage to enzymes and damage DNA, but there's more effects, right? There's the immunotoxicity, which is leading to all the inflammatory and autoimmune diseases, right? And mitochondrial injury, which leads to poisoning of our energy metabolism. So there's damage to our gut lining that happens because of toxins that damage our enzymes in our gut that make our gut not be able to work. Every level of our biology, there are endocrine disruptors, they disrupt our hormonal functions. So, every level of our biology, these compounds are interfering with them. And, you know, I think, you know the story, but, you know, the reason I got into functional medicine was I was living in China and long story short, I got poisoned with mercury from the pollution there, cleaning out my air filter. Plus, I'd eaten tuna fish for decades when I was a kid and I had lots of fillings and I had a level on a challenge test of 187, which is, for those you don't know, so, like, if I see someone over 20, I get worried. I rarely see anybody over 100. I don't remember last time was 100. I've had a couple of people who had higher levels than me. One was a dementia patient. And. But, you know, I. I literally had every system in my body break down. My gut broke down, my cognitive brain broke down, my amnesia broke down, my felt allergies, everything broke down. And. And I developed chronic cleave syndrome, and. And no one could fix me. Went to doctor for doctor for years until. well, actually, I went to the conference where I first met you in Hawaii, and an IFM conference, like, in 97, I think. And I was on a plane with a guy who's a naturopath, and I was telling him, I just learned about functional medicine. I was going to my first conference, and I learned about this.

This natural.

I was thunder. Well, gee, maybe you should check your heavy metals. I'm like, what? Really? So I did a hair analysis. I had a high levels, and then I did a challenge test, and that was the beginning of my exploration. of functional medicine. So I learned it the hard way. I learned it the hard way. And, and I, you know, I find this as well in my patients. So many patients are, you know, come in with these diagnoses. And underlying it is, is this toxic load. So let's talk about the kind of big categories of toxins. You mentioned a lot of immune system. Yeah.

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

And so I looked at- Forever chemicals. Where were they from? Where did they get them from?

Worst place, fast food.

Fast food.

Popcorn, fast food, or the worst by far.

Microwave popcorn. Microwave popcorn.

Okay, because if you said regular popcorn, I don't know. Regular popcorn's fine. Microwave popcorn problematic.

We get it.

When I was looking at this, I was looking at, I thought, look at COVID and PFAS. and looked at people who had either no cold or mild case compared to people had a severe version of cold. The ones got severe version had 50 to 100% higher levels of T-factors in their body compared to those who did not get bad cold. Wow. So just, just a simple thing like that. Enough damage to the immune system, couldn't.

Get rid of the COVID virus fast enough. Now you got problems.

Yeah.

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

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

Those scents, like sunblock or makeup.

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

BPA and phthalates.

Because it's just so much research. I'm not saying there aren't other problematic chemicals, but these three binding cells cost so much.

There's only 144, 000 other chemicals.

Well, there's 12, 000 of these forever chemicals.

Just one category is 12, 000 chemicals. I think that's the thing that, you know, some of this is daunting for people because, like, were living in the sea of these chemicals. The newborn study that the Environmental Working Group did showed there were 287 chemicals in the umbilical cord of a brand new baby before it even took its first breath. And 217 of those chemicals were neurotoxins, everything from flame retardants, pesticides, dioxin, PCBs, DDT, things that were banned, had been banned before long before decades before these kids were born. They were in their mothers and they're in the environment and there's in these babies.

So when you're born pre-polluted now we're going to the next, next set of toxins and that is the herbicides and the pesticides.

Industrial chemicals.

Yeah. Industrial chemicals for agriculture. So let's look at just one category, organophosphate pesticides. Okay. If you measure the body load of pregnant women and measure the level of down phosphate pesticides and you look at the IQ of children born to women with the top level of glyphosate pesticides compared to women with the lowest level of glyphosate pesticides and you are not statistically all the differences in weight and ethnicity, things of this nature. Just look at glyphosate pesticide levels, highest levels, top 10% of women, seven point drop in the IQ of the children and they never get it back. So in neuro, the body is being saturated with neurotoxins. So, it isn't any surprise the brain does not develop properly when exposed to neurotoxins. Yeah. So, I said before that I'm focused on PFAS, bisphenols, and phthalates. You gotta focus on the pesticides, particularly organophosphate pesticides, are probably the worst of all them. But then you've got chlorinated pesticides are.

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

Yes. So there's actually some really good news here because there are some very simple things we can do that have huge impact on our toxicity. So first thing we want to do is how toxic are we? So I recommend that everybody get have their doctor measure a laboratory test called GGT-P. So GGT-P is a liver enzyme that in the past was measured to determine if person had hepatitis. Because a person has inflammation in the liver, they start leaking liver enzymes into their blood and you measure those enzymes of the blood and say, ah, hepatitis. They stopped using GGT for hepatitis because other tests were found to be more reliable because GGT was reacting to other things. So it turns out within the called normal range, 10 to 50, depending upon the lab, GGT goes up in proportion to toxic load. And as you detoxify, GGT goes down. So I mentioned that corporate wellness program.

Did.

So I measured my GTT then and it was 27. And I thought that was okay. I saw the research saying, once you hit 30, you have an eightfold increased risk of diabetes. Well, it's not concerning to go from 29, no risk to 30 more risk. So I thought, well, 27 is too high. So I started getting more and more careful. Started getting more careful, went down a couple years later, down to 24. Then I measured a few years late, a few years ago, it went down to 17. I just 32 months ago, I was down to 16.

Yeah.

So between a GGT between 15 and 20 means you've done a good job of getting rid of enough toxins that the body doesn't have to increase GGT. Why is the body increase GGT? Because it recycles glutathione, because glutathione protects us from toxins. Okay, you're down to 15 to 20. You probably done a good job getting rid of the toxins. Now, if you're below 15, it may not mean you have low toxic load, you may need to have a genetic inability to increase glutathione to protect you from environmental toxins. So people I've seen with the biggest problems with environmental toxins have low GTTs. I call them the yellow canaries. They can't protect themselves. So right there, you have to monitor. Now what's the next easiest thing to do?

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

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

Filter your water?

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

Yeah, very important. It's kind of keep your home environment clean.

Keep your home environment that's what you.

Spend most of your time in.

Materials.

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

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

So we need an N95 filter.

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

I hold my breath. It's great. I hold my breath for the entire.

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

How do environmental toxins affect our health? Well, they do it through a lot of different mechanisms, but they're basically poisons and they cause inflammation, they cause oxidative stress, they cause DNA damage, they cause disruption in our mitochondria, they damage our our stem cells, I mean, the whole flood of environmental toxins, there's over 80,000 of them now that have been introduced to the industrial sort of world since the early 1900s that we've never been exposed to before and we somehow have to figure out how to deal with them. Well, thank God we have a system to do it, but it's still overwhelmed. So environmental toxins, as I said, drive cancer. They are hugely impactful, for example, in blood sugar and insulin sensitivity. Most people don't realize that diabetes and prediabetes and even obesity can be driven by environmental toxins. something called bisphenol A, which is a compound that's found in lining a lot of cans, plastic bottles, on paper, receipts from credit cards or gas stations. When you touch that, it goes to your skin and bisphenol A is a huge driver of insulin resistance and prediabetes, independent of what you're eating. It affects cholesterol metabolism, it drives inflammation, oxidative stress, mitochondrial injury, screws up our thyroid function, affects our appetite, leptin signaling. I mean, pretty much everything gets Haywire when we're exposed to too many environmental toxins. Now, the downside of living in the modern world is that we're all pre-polluted when we're born. There's 287 known environmental toxins found in the umbilical cord blood of a newborn. I mean, they take out the blood of the umbilical cord, send it to a lab, and the average amount of toxins is 287, many of which have been banned for decades like DDT or PCBs or dioxin. And 217 of those are neurotoxic, meaning they're directly damaging to the brain. There's pesticides, phthalates, bisphenol A, which I just mentioned, flame retardants, heavy metals like mercury, lead, arsenic, and they have huge effects across the spectrum of human health. So, what are the ones that we should really be paying attention to? two that we really want to avoid and get rid of. The first I just mentioned earlier is bisphenol A or BPA. It's found in plastic water bottles and canned foods. It's a synthetic compound that mimics estrogen in the body. We call these xenobiotics or xenoestrogens. They're hugely impactful in regulating hormonal health and risk increasing risk of cancer. It's been linked BPA to breast cancer, to infertility, reproductive issues, obesity, heart disease, and it's not that hard to get rid of it in your life. Basically, don't touch credit card receipts, don't touch gas station receipts that come out of the machine, don't eat from plastic bottles unless they're BPA free or from canned foods unless they're BPA free. So make sure you look at that. You can use stainless steel, glass, boiling packaging, look for BPA canned fruits. The next compound is phthalates. Phthalates are also plasticizers and they're found in food containers, children's toys. It's banned in Europe. There's a legislation in Europe called REACH. It gets rid of most of these chemicals that are allowed in America. And when there's ever an attempt to limit by law or a bill to reduce our exposures, the food industry and chemical industry comes in hard with tons of lobbying dollars, millions and millions and millions, tens of millions of dollars to defeat defeat bills. There was one on this final a that got defeated. And unfortunately, it was trying to be banned, but it didn't pass because it was so much Lobby against it. But it's found in children's toys. It's found in, like, the plastic little rubber duckies in the bathtub. So they stick it in their mouth.

Bad idea.

Also, makeup has a lot of phthalates in it. So get rid of all your unhealthy makeups. And we're going to talk about how to do that. But there's a beautiful website called ewg.org, the environmental working group. They have a skin deep database. You can put in your product, what you like to use or other products that can find that have no contaminants and see the level of toxins and what they are and find alternatives. So they also are really bad for you because phthalates cause hormonal chaos. They're linked to breast different cancers to birth defects to thyroid problems. So make sure you check it out. And the basic rule is if you wouldn't eat it, you probably shouldn't put it in or on your body, right? So for skincare products, everything goes through the skin. When we go to the emergency room, the heart attack, what's the first thing we do? As a doctor, we slap on a toothpaste tube cream full of nitroglycerin because it goes right through the skin and it's the fastest acting, but then taking it by mouth or before we can get an IV and we just slap that on. And so it goes to the skin, hormone patches, testosterone gels. We know the fentanyl patch. I mean, there's all kinds of drugs that are delivered through the skin. So when you're putting it on your again, it's actually getting inside your body.

So you want to make sure that.

If you wouldn't eat it, you shouldn't put it on your body. Like coconut oil, where you can eat that and you can put on your body.

So that's a win.

But there's a lot of products out there that are safe that you can use. Another one that's concerning is glycol ethers. They're in-household cleaning products, cosmetics, paints. They damage fertility, they lead to birth defects, they worsen allergies, asthma. And these are really bad because they're pretty much in all of our household cleaning products. And Environmental Working Group, EWG, also has a whole guide on household cleaning products so you can use the least contaminated products or ones that have no toxins in them that work well. So make sure you check that out. And there are so many other toxins like heavy metals, mercury, lead, arsenic, mercury is from fish, from our fillings, from coal burning plants, pollution, lead is often found in crystal wine glasses or glazed plates. I see many, many patients have those and they get sick from that. It can be in the ground, it can be from coal burning, filling our cement plant or a coal plant that basically goes up in the atmosphere, comes down in the soil, your kids are playing with it, it'll be dragged in the house, the baby's on the floor. So lead exposure is real. There's houses that still have leaded paint, all the leaded gasoline that was used for years, all that went in the air and goes down in the soil. It can be in vegetables. If you're growing in an urban environment, for example, you're growing greens, you think you're eating kale and being healthy, it could be full lead. Now, arsenic also is a big problem and it's found in rice, many places because in the ground. It can be in pressure treated lumber that you have on your deck and getting your feet. It can go actually in, in chicken feed to prevent the, the feed from going moldy, which is great for the feed and the mold, but it's not good for you. And it gets in the chicken, you eat it. So it's pretty, it's pretty important for us to make sure that we get rid of those. So I think the, the key is We need to avoid toxins. And so the question is, what are the top strategies to reduce our toxic burden? Well, we can basically remove the toxins, but we also have to upregulate our detox system. So first thing is avoid plastics wherever you can. Try stainless steel like containers, I have those, or glass containers for storing food in your fridge, stealing so water bottles, glass containers are great for leftovers. Don't buy water in plastic water bottles. Get a water filter. I like reverse osmosis and you can actually get a water bottle, bring it with you. Make sure you detox your home. Get simple cleaning products, a laundry detergent, cleaning products for windows, for counters, for dishwashers, stuff, everything. And there's a great source, Thrive Market. It's an online grocery store basically. You can get all the best cleaners from Seventh Generation and other eco-friendly, non-toxic food companies. and now of course check out EWG's guide on household cleaning products, on skincare products, they're great. So I think make sure that you just are diligent about getting toxins out of your home. Second is mercury is a big one and often we don't pay attention to what we're eating and people eat tuna fish, swordfish, sushi. Sadly all the oceans have been polluted and no matter where you get your fish from it's pretty much pre-polluted. as microplastics, mercury, and other toxins, PCBs, farm fish can be just as bad. So, there are a few kind of ways to get around it. One is to eat very small fish, sardines, mackerel, herring, anchovies. Small salmon can be okay, but still that can have mercury. Also, there's a great regenerative aquaculture company called SeaTopia.Fish, and they actually provide beautiful, delicious, clean fish that you can get frozen sent to your home. It's amazing fish, actually. Also reduce your exposure to the problems that are from all the chemicals in your environment by having an air filter in your house that reduces their airborne pollution. Indoor air pollution is a real thing, whether it's mold or whether it's other things like contaminants off gassing from furniture or rugs. I mean, you want to obviously try to have a clean home and not full of products, but I mean, by a tempurpedic bed and it smells awful.

It's off gassing.

Those are called VOCs, volatile organic compounds. You really want to avoid those in your house. And then you want to start to learn about how to actually upgrade and increase your body's own detoxification system.

And the best way to do that.

Is by using a couple of strategies that are really important. One is maximize your intake of phytochemicals. Plant-based compounds, these nutrients in plants work on up regulating different pathways in the body including a lot of detox pathways. There's amazing cornucopia of phytochemicals that work on boosting glutathione and boosting our detox pathways and increasing our ability to get rid of stuff. So the biggest category is the cruciferous vegetables, broccoli, collards, cabbage, kale, Brussels sprouts. They really up regulate glutathione in the body and help to maximize the main detoxifier. Also there are amazing things like garlic and onions that also contain sulfur that are great for detoxification. Also things like rosemary, curcumin, ginger, and the skin of a lemon, like if you grate lemon into a salad or something, the skin of a lemon has limonene. These all help upregulate our detox pathways. We also need the right nutrients, right? We need methylation support, B12, folate, B6, we need magnesium, selenium, zinc, and many other minerals and vitamins to actually help upregulate our detox pathways. We need amino acids and form protein to help with some of the amino acid pathways. So there's lots of ways we now understand the body's own built-in detox system and we have to support it. The next thing you can do is sweat. So your body gets rid of toxins through both exercise, increasing the lymphatic flow and circulation through exercise, increased circulation, and also so saunas. So sauna is an amazing way to boost your detox system and, and help body remove a lot of environmental toxins which are fat soluble and you can actually measure them on the sweat. You also want to take the right.

Supplements, as I mentioned.

So you want to take additional support about good multi, methyLating supports zinc, vitamin C, glutathione boosting stuff and acetyl cysteine, lipoic acid, milk thistle.

A lot of other herbs can be.

Used to help the boost the body's detox pathways. So I highly recommend getting on a regular support system for that. I do because we're all exposed. Sometimes if you have a real big issue, you might need to see a doctor and get treated like I did for mercury poisoning. I needed chelation. I needed to actually use a medication to help remove the metals from my body. If it's lead, you can use EDTA. It's mercury, you can use the MSA. And they're, they're extremely effective. They need to be used properly. safely with a doctor's supervision. There's a lot of steps to properly.

Getting rid of mercury, but you need a good functional medicine doctor. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I am Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness Center at ultrawellnesscenter.com and request to become a patient. It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained, licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public. So I'd like to express gratitude to sponsors that made today's podcast possible. Thanks so much again for listening. Don't forget, there's a way to listen completely ad-free. With Hymen Plus on Apple Podcasts, you can enjoy every episode without any breaks. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap Try Free to start your seven-day free trial.