Why Chronic Disease Is Exploding!

If we were food, we wouldn't be safe to eat.

We have a progress narrative that things are getting better and better because of tech and capitalism. And there are certainly areas where that's true. It's just not the whole story. Daniel Schmachtenberger is a social philosopher, health consistent strategist, studying how collapsing institutions and.

Exponential tech are reshaping our health.

Some of the effects of tech and capitalism create environmental pollution, cheaper healthcare or cheaper food that has side effects and externalities that affect our bodies. And so we figured out organophosphates, napalm. Awesome. We can kill a lot of people and defoliate the whole jungle of Vietnam with this. Oh, guess what? We can also make an herbicide inspection rate on all of our food, as you see in your clinic every day. It's all changeable, and it's changeable acutely for each person with behaviors they can take, and it's changeable at scale for everybody with behaviors we can take to do systemic changes.

All right, Daniel, I'm so excited to have you on the show. This is a long time in coming. We had many conversations which I've tried to keep up with and understand how you think, because I don't imagine many people have heard of you, know about you, or know who you are. But your background and your thinking is so remarkable in its depth and its clarity and its ability to bridge many different disciplines and come up with an overarching understanding of what's wrong in our society and where our existential threats are and how we can fix them. It's going to be straight. We're in a really shitty situation where we have more and more health care, quote, sick care, and more and more illness, and it's exploding at such a rate that we can't even keep up with it. Just in my 40 years of being a doctor, I've seen just the acceleration of chronic diseases and both in the amount of suffering, the severity, the scope of them, the increase in new diseases, it's just, it's remarkable. But the last, you know, 100 years, we've seen this sort of inversion of, of, of the life expectancy curve. It's kind of got. Starting to dip down and we're starting to see a drop in life expectancy. And I think it has to do with the kind of rise of what you have termed anthropogenic disease.

First, thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here. I followed your work for a very long time before we got to know each other through Institute of Functional Medicine and things like that. Obviously, over the 40 years you've been in practice, that was already after the better living through chemistry boom started and modern industrial agriculture started. So it would be even a more extreme picture if we went back further. You've obviously studied the history on going back further. A lot of people think, oh, well, the rise in diseases is just a result of we're diagnosing more or something like that, as opposed to. No, there are ways, like we have a progress narrative that things are getting better and better because of tech and capitalism and democracy and whatever. And there are certainly areas where that's true. It's just not the whole story. Right. There are areas where some of the effects of tech and capitalism create environmental pollution or cheaper health care or cheaper food that has side effects and externalities that affect the environment but help affect our bodies.

So, so let's talk about that. I mean, let's dive into what, you know, we're sort of set the stage for the fact that, you know, we're having increasing rates of these chronic diseases, increasing rates of mental health crisis, increasing rates of neurodevelopmental issues, decreasing life expectancy. I mean, it's a grim, It's a grim situation. And we're spending more and more, getting less and less. So the question then is, you know, what is this context in which the disease occurring, why is this happening, and what anthropogenic reasons for this chronic disease epidemic?

So you were, as you were going through the list, you mentioned vitamin D, you mentioned mercury. That's obviously deficiency toxicity. You mentioned some pathogens, you mentioned stress. So you have a model of like, what the underlying categories are. And a lot of them are things like, everybody knows what acute deficiency is. What acute toxicity. You just got a bag of chemicals poured on you. You have acute poisoning, you're vomiting, you have to go in for toxicology. But there is something that is called toxicity. That is not just a hippie nonsense idea. It's a real thing. It is not acute poisoning that is chronic, that is subclinical or subacute. Same with infections. You have acute infection, you're producing symptomology versus kind of subclinical infections, which is in Lyme disease or in, you know, viruses that cause cancers or whatever it is. So the treatment of everyone's going to be personalized, not based on a disease diagnosis, but based on their actual medical history, their symptomology, their, their labs and what's uniquely going on for them. But it's going to be personalized within a Framework that is kind of not that hard.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, the laws of nature are pretty simple. Pierre Laplace said they're, they're the laws of biology. When I think we're describing them and I think we're getting toward approximation of what that looks like. And they're just, you know, functional. Medicine is just a heuristic. It's not the end all and be all. It's just a framework that we're continually evolving to understand the complexity of human biology, which is infinitely unknowable. But even though it's so complex, you know, a rocket ship is complicated.

Right.

It's, it's. But it's knowable. It's a known, known.

Well, there's a blueprint that specifies it completely.

Yeah.

And DNA is actually not a blueprint.

Right.

It's a generator function which can make a new protein. It's never made exposed to a new thing. Yeah, right. And it evolved rather than was designed, which is why it's self repairing. Right. The, the rocket ship doesn't self repair, it doesn't self evolve.

Yeah.

And so biology is, is not mechanics. Right. It's like it's a different unique thing that to have a system that self organizes wasn't created by from the outside that has an immune system. Right. Like it'd be dope if our computer had an immune system, but it doesn't.

Or our car.

Right. Things itself, antivirus, self evolve. And so we're like, okay, what's happening in a system that is building itself, evolving itself, repairing itself, is obviously different in type than a system that doesn't repair itself, that doesn't evolve itself. So we have to make sure we're using the right epistemology, right. The right kind of scientific framework. So you were talking about laws of biology and we're talking about anthropogenic stuff, which is like stuff in the current world that is different than the evolutionary environment. Even though our genes aren't different. Yeah, right. Like modifying the environment in a way that we are not actually genetically fit.

To that mismatch is really why we're sick.

So let's talk about that a little bit because I think the first thing is a lot of people are still suffering from the propaganda of Hobbes and Hobbes's descendants. Right. Man in the state of nature's life is brutish, short, nasty and mean. Right. And as you already mentioned, the average life expectancy was 30 and their life was shit the entire time until they were 30. And you know, that's nature, right? That's just nature. That's human biology. That's nature. And our civilizing ourselves with technology is creating longer lives and everything's getting better and better. And this is like awesome propaganda. If you're colonialist and you want to.

Kill all the natives, we're helping them by killing them because they wanted to suffer so much.

I mean, Churchill has a famous quote that says, I'm going to paraphrase it, actually have a whole list of quotes about Manifest Destiny of kings. I mean, Manifest destiny in the US And Divine right of kings. And like just stuff that when we look back we say, wow, that was the most dreadful propaganda nonsense, but we still do the same kind of thing. But Churchill said something like, you know, I don't hold for one second that our treatment of the red man is a bad thing in any way. Because evolution selects for higher life forms and a higher species replacing the lower species is good, right? And you're like, that's a big deal. So north and South America, the Americas, before Columbus, etc, right? Before colonization was roughly, depending on who you look at, 140 million people. And within a short period of colonization, both from infections and war and the driving them out of viable habitats, the population was decimated by 90%. And if you look at that and you compare it to whatever, 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, right? And you're like 190% of 140 million, which is so many different civilizations that had different languages and songs and art and pharmacologies and just gone. And similarly, so many ecosystems, so many species. Like we don't have the giant sloth, we don't have the mammoth. Those were largely, though many of those were early human extinction from over hunting, from destroying habitats. And of course it makes sense that like if the winner writes history, of course they're the good guy, right? The winner's not going to say we were the bad guys, but we were better at weapons than them. We destroyed them because they were peaceful and lovely. No, we're going to say they were. They were brutish and terrible and we brought democracy and Christianity and whatever. You know, you can say Christianity, you can say Islam, you can say whatever. The thing is that is justifying Wyatt won. So there's something where it's like the, the dominant narrative of a power system has to justify the power system. And so it's going to be apologism for the power system. We saw that through the, through the Dark ages, through the. And so history is hard, right, because we got to Read this stuff that's written by the winners.

Yeah.

And you're like, in general, more peaceful cultures got slaughtered by more warring cultures. It's not like everybody that Genghis Khan slaughtered was a less good civilization. No, they were less good at war. But how many people that knew how to live in more peace got slaughtered in the process because they didn't build maximally lethal militaries? And yet we are the descendants of who made it through history, which war and weapons and killing, growing massive populations, not keeping populations in stable relationship with their environment. Good at technology that can be used in competition and war. So it's a really interesting selection criteria. So then we tell the story, oh, they only live for 30 years and life was terrible. And but you were just saying like, hey, no, actually some of the planes they Indians were living to 100. A lot of them were living to 100. This is such an important story because I think one of the things that I want to get across in this conversation is there's still this general idea that is a part of the progress narrative, that is a part of just propaganda. Say that is the diseases come from nature. Man in a state of nature's life is brutish, short, nasty, at mean.

Right?

And the progress comes from science and the application of science, the technology brought to the world via the market, blah, blah, blah. And, and now look at how long we live. And you know, vaccines solved all these issues and whatever. It's not that there's no truth to it, but it is cherry picking the stats pretty heavily.

90% of measles was gone when they've introduced the vaccine because of better sanitation and health.

This is pretty important part of the story. And so if you rewind a little bit to say Dark Ages Europe, this is not an indigenous culture. And then if the indigenous cultures you're studying post science, which is very recently are post trail of tears after you've already slaughtered most of them, move them to an area where they don't understand the plants or animals and that we're like crap areas. And then they're drinking and whatever. You're like, this is not a study of indigenous people. So there's a lot of indigenous scholars. They're like, come on, this is ridiculous. Like, no, we had a lot of people that were 100 years old. There's a lot of diseases we just didn't have. So this idea that like that diseases just come from nature, our genome is a bummer, right? Like nature's a bummer. Tech is going to solve it as Opposed to like actually technological agriculture has really made a lot of people sick. Technological mining and et cetera that has caused ubiquitous pollution made a lot of people sick. So when we say anthropogenic disease, we're not just talking about iatrogenic, right? Anthropogenic meaning diseases we have that are a result of our own action as a species. So if you take mining, for instance, right. There's. There's 2 billion tons of municipal waste produced every year. Waste that, you know, like comes from our house. It's a lot. Two billion tons. Like mind blowing when you think about it. But there's about 190 billion tons of mining waste produced every year. That's a lot because you mine stuff. But that rock isn't. It's not all the thing you want, right? You want a particular metal. All the stuff you don't want is waste is tailings. That stuff is almost all super toxic. And it gets put in some big dam that eventually breaks and all goes in the water. This is comprehensively undoing what took the biosphere a billion years to do that made life possible in the first place. This is. You had actually mentioned something. I want to. It's a tangent, but I want to double down on is.

Maybe there's aliens. Who knows. We're not going to get into that part right now. But when we look out at the universe, we see a lot of planets that are not habitable and we don't see a lot of places that look habitable. This place is pretty awesome.

Any.

Right. Carl Sagan's pale blue dot is as relevant today as it was back then.

Yeah.

So this like the fact that it's habitable to life is a big deal. We should want to protect it more than anything. Anything.

Not move to Mars.

Obviously. If you deal with radiation and other issues, 0.4g is a pretty tricky issue to deal with. Right. As you see the people who go into zero G and they do a lot of resistance training and everything to try to deal with it. Bone density goes down, neural density goes down, neural density drops pretty massively. So, you know, like obviously we evolve it to this planet. We have a planet that supports life. It's rare as can be, right. It's everything we care about depends on that. And it took a long like the other planets didn't do that, at least in the time period that we can see. That's very special. It took whatever a billion ish years for geological hydrological processes to make a space where abiogenesis could start to happen. Right where Life could start to emerge. And that was trapping all the super toxic stuff in which life couldn't emerge in rocks in the lithosphere and making a certain temperature range and, you know, whatever that life could emerge in. And then it took like a billion years of just single cell creatures to make a biosphere in which multicellular creatures could emerge. And on and on and, and then you look at the biosphere, a complex biosphere, and you're like, it's pretty much six atoms. Right. Like there's 92. Table. Yeah. Oxygen first. Right. Like 65% of our body by weight is oxygen. Because water, oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus, calcium make up 96% of our weight.

Yeah.

And you add the few electrolytes in there and it's 99% of our weight. And then you have trace minerals. And the trace minerals are important, they're a tiny bit. But roughly every animal, plant, whatever, has the same distribution, distribution of trace minerals, the same building blocks, the same type of molecular bonds. This is a humongous deal to understand me and you. And a dog and a mouse and a scorpion and a tree and a fungus are made of the same stuff. Same atom, same molecular bonds, which is why any of them can die. Go on the soil, turn into soil, turn into new stuff. A tree can fall, body can fall, an animal can defecate. Rattlesnake poison. Right. Like super duper poisonous stuff. Still, the nature of the bonds, it dies, breaks down, doesn't stay as an enduring toxin.

Unlike plutonium, which stays around forever.

Yes. Or pfas or whatever. Right. Styrofoam. Because those are either atoms that were not part of the biosphere that we got through mining, or molecules that we made up in a chem lab that nothing in nature knows how to break down.

Right.

Like your bond. So just to get a sense of like, part of what allows evolution to work is that we're all made of the same stuff. Hmm. And we need the same physics. Right. Obviously, the North Pole to the equator are different temperatures. So polar bears don't do very well in the savannah, and cheetahs wouldn't do very well in the Arctic. But the temperature difference from the North Pole to the equator is almost nothing compared to everywhere else in outer space. Right.

Well, some things are very hot, some things are very cold. But like, everything here operates with the same pressure, the same physics, the same ionizing radiation, the same chemicals, the same temperature ranges. That's a big deal to get. And the same chemicals and the same molecular bonds. A huge deal. And it's part of why co evolution works, why there can be mutual symbiosis, is we are literally recyclable into each other.

Yeah.

Now if you think about from that perspective, how rare life in the universe is, how rare the biosphere is, how it's all based on basically these same six atoms, same molecular bonds and a little bit of trace minerals. You think, then you start to think about how mind blowingly stupid mining is.

Taking other weird things out of the earth that should be buried in there and things that we should be protected from because they don't do well with our biology.

Things that are omnitoxic to all life forms, right? Like mercury is bad for all life forms, cadmium is bad for all life forms, lead is bad for all life forms, etc. So fortunately for us, the earth has a lot of those. But they're all bound in rock in the lithosphere under the biosphere, not part of the biosphere. We don't have to deal with them. So what do we do? We say those are useful for industrial purposes. So let's actually destroy the biosphere on top to make a mine. Let's pull this rock up, let's pull that super toxic thing out through smelting and metallurgy and whatever. And if we just kept it all in a perfect metal and recycled it'd be one thing. But we burn the coal and put the mercury and lead in the air, we put the lead in the gasoline, you know, and aerosolized it. We. And then the also the rest of the part that is toxic tailings also goes out. So you're like, we have one planet that we know is habitable. It's habitable because of specific chemistry. And we are as fast as possible making omnitoxic shit that chemistry can't deal with.

And that's a big part of what's making us sick. And it's something that medicine sort of ignored, which is this chronic low level burden of toxins that we're all exposed to and we're all basically accessible. If we were food, we wouldn't be safe to eat. You know, the average newborn has 287toxins in their local cord blood.

Wait, wait.

Before they take their first breath, we.

See the same thing in the mother's breast milk, right? And in our blood. Like just people need to have this sink in mother breast milk, mother's blood, baby umbilical cord, 2 to 300 petrochemical and industrial toxins.

It's crazy.

I mean, to even call it Low level is ridiculous.

I've thought of a business of creating a breast milk filter. I don't know how you do that, but.

Well, the lymphatic system is a filter, but it can only fill. Like in our evolutionary environment, we were not exposed to organophosphates. So what evolutionary process can deal with organophosphates? And so we figured out organophosphates. Napalm. Awesome. We can kill a lot of people and defoliate the whole jungle of Vietnam with this. Oh, guess what? We can also make an herbicide and spray it on all of our food.

Yeah.

To think about this thing that we invented as a chemical weapon to destroy nature at scale.

Napalm, which is dioxin.

Same molecular class. We figure out, oh, we can kill weeds in agricultural settings, but we're going to spray it on all the food, and humans are going to eat trace amounts of all of it. And the pesticides, like the thing that blows my mind about pesticides, you're like, okay, nuclear modeling, nuclear war happens, nuclear winter, almost everything dies. The only things that make it are bugs with exoskeletons. We want to make something poisonous enough to kill bugs that can make it through a nuclear winter, and we spray it all over our food and then eat it. And just because we're bigger, we. It's. It's not a lethal amount, but it's a lot.

But it bioaccumulates and it's additive. And over time, it's sort of like, that's what I see so many. So many of the times that we see in many of the diseases of aging, chronic diseases we're talking about, including autoimmune diseases, are all the result of this total load phenomenon. It's not just one thing. It's a total load of everything. And you keep adding and adding and adding.

So when you say low level, it's important to say so we're talking about lead poisoning, right? There's like, you have acute lead poisoning, you have Mad Hatter syndrome, okay? That happens because you're working in a lead mine or some industrial source. Right. But how much was there in an evolutionary environment? None. So what amount is good for you? None.

Right. So that's why I laugh when I see the reference range on the lab of like, the level of mercury that's considered normal is 10 to 10. I'm like, well, there's no biological requirement for mercury. It's zero. Is the normal level.

Yes. Yet that would mess up so much industry that the industry is going to lobby the EPA to make a number that doesn't mess up the industry too much. And the cost, the externalized cost is your children's health and your grandparents health and your health and the cancers that everybody's going to get.

Yeah, I see this, I mean I, I saw this kid, my practice years ago, his mother was just so, such a good attentive, observant mother. And she, she saw this kid who went from a normal little kid to being extremely difficult, extremely aggressive, violent, learning difficulties, dysgraphia, dyslexia, just a whole bunch of things, neurodevelopmental things. And you know, she, she said, we live north of Albany in this town where there's a cement plant across the street from the school. This is, this is why the history is so important. How many doctors ask their patients if they live near a cement plant or a coal plant or not? Nobody asked that. Right. But it's part of the history that we find really essential. And she said every day after school the, the cars would be coated like in Austin here when it's pollen season, like your car just coated with pollen. Their cars every day were coated with dust from the cement plant. And that duck quote, dust was a toxic soup of chemicals. And when I actually did a chelation challenge test, which again is something we don't do in traditional medicine, but we look at your blood levels and that can tell you if there's an acute exposure. And often there, there are levels that are significant. You see kids, for example, with high lead from environmental exposure, but it's, it often is stored in the tissues. And so we give a drug called dmsa, which is a FDA approved drug for chelation. That's a Greek word that means to claw, to bind some things, that binds the metals and then we collect the urine. And we saw this kid was just, everything was just lit up, you know, arsenic.

I just want to specify that one of the things, one of the things you said is you had to use a different testing method. Yeah, right. Because of course if there's something that's circulating in the blood, it's going to cross the blood brain barrier that's going to go into the kidneys and hurt the nephrons. It's so dangerous to keep in the blood. The body will excrete it as fast it can. If it can't excrete it fast enough, it wants to get it out of the blood.

Yeah.

It's stored into its issues. So you do a blood level, Blood level is the wrong thing to do. Right. If you're not looking at tissue levels, which is what. But tissue biopsies are not a non invasive thing to do. But this is just important to be like people could say, oh, this is nonsense. I've ran the labs and nobody has heavy metal. Well, are you running the right labs? Very important topic. And again, there's some theory under it, right?

And one of the, one of the, you know, one of the gold standard tests for lead, for example, is looking at, in bone levels through various specialized types of imaging that are used in research. And that's what you should be looking at. It's sort of like the joke I always tell that, you know, that's guy drops his keys on the street and he's looking for him in his, on this light post and his friend's like, what are you doing? He's I'm looking for my keys. He says, where'd you drop him? He's like, drop him down the street. Why are you looking here? He said, the light spit are here. And that's what we do in medicine. We tend to do testing that we have available, but not the right testing. And, and I even remember an article in the New England Journal of Medicine or a JAMA was one of those, was talking about like mercury. And, and they said when we check the blood, because that's the easiest thing to do. I'm like, well that's not where you want to check, you know, to see what's really going on. And, and so this kid, these kids who were living at the same a plant were severely affected by these and by treating them and getting rid of the metals and decreasing their toxic burden, they were able to actually recover and do well.

So everybody or most people know the story of leaded gasoline, tetraphyl lead being added to gasoline. Most people don't know the story. Well, there's actually a exceptional video on this made by Veritasium, a YouTube channel online that describes the, you know, tetraethyl lead story. It was an additive for gasoline in the early phases of internal combustion engines that stopped engine knocking, as in not even absolutely crucial heaps of other chemistries that could stop engine knocking, as obviously we know because we don't have lead anymore. The early studies that were done on tetraethyl lead, on toxicity, the people did get sick, including the researcher, and the results were hidden. So it wasn't that we couldn't have possibly known. It was, we actually knew hit it and brought it out anyways because of the economic interest. And then to think about like, what, what adding lead to gasoline means which is your aerosolizing it. Right. You're not just putting it in the water or the soil. You're literally atomizing one of the most toxic chemicals that exists and putting it into the air at scale. Right. So of course, even though it was already known toxic, that was hidden. And then the companies that were producing the tetrafyl lead fought really hard to keep it there and not ban it. And it only finally got banned after the preponderance of how much harm it was causing got proven decades later. The effects, when you look back in just America are estimated at a billion points of IQ loss for Americans.

Yeah.

And that's staggering. I just would like people make Americans dumber. Yeah. A billion points of IQ loss for a population that was less than 300 million people.

Yeah.

Is a lot of IQ loss. And then there were also studies on increased violence and aggravation.

Yeah.

That showed that populations that were heavily exposed had something like 4x the impulse.

Control disorders, impulse control, school performance, cognitive.

Deficits, not to mention the bone issues, the osteoporosis, the cancer, everything else. But if we just look at even the psychocognitive elements. Because one of the like again, one of the bullshit stories that is real politic is like, it goes back to the Hobbesian stories like humans are kind of dumb and nasty. That's why we need rule. Right. Humans are kind of dumb and nasty. Well, empirically we made humans dumber and nastier with just the aerosolizing lead. And you're like, who would the humans be?

Yeah.

If we weren't. If we hadn't done that. So then you say, okay, well that's an old story. Because we got rid of lead. Well, no, those effects are enduring. And it doesn't go away.

It's in the soil still.

It's still in most of the pipes.

It's in the pipes, Right, right.

It's like we still see it in.

Water, the whole thing that happened in Flint, Michigan.

But Albany's worse than Flint, Michigan.

Yeah.

Even though we supposedly banned lead and gasoline, it's still used in prop planes. It's still used in certain military and farm equipment and other kinds of things. So we're still using it. It's supposedly banned around the world, but it's still used because not enforced in the third world pretty heavily. But then the lead that comes from mining, specifically mining affluent. There's a study I saw in 2019 that showed children under five lost 780 million IQ points just in 2019. Just from lead.

Well, it's interesting. It's not just. It affects your cognitive function, it affects everything. You know, there. There was a really pioneering study that I. I saw in American Journal of Cardiology where they found that anybody with a lead level of over two, and by the way, the lead levels that they thought were harmful were 40 and over. Yeah. Then it was 20, then it was 10, now it's 10.

But that was not based on proving that they weren't. That was based on lobbying from the company, from the industries that produced the lead that wanted to not have that much restriction.

But still the lead levels of, quote, normal is 1 to 0 to 10.

Right.

And in this American Journal Cardiology study, they found that.

Excuse me, I was saying the arguing for it being higher was the lobbying side. The proving the toxicity brought it lower. But it's still, as you're mentioning, 1 to 10.

Yeah. Still 1 to 10. So it's still pretty bad. And what they found, it was in terms of kids cognitive function, it was a continuum from 0 to 10, still causing a problem. It wasn't like you had no effect. So that. That's been well proven. But what was. Was really interesting was the American Journal of Cardiology found that that if your level was over 2, 2 out of 10, which is 39% of the population of adults and kids, it was a bigger risk factor for stroke and heart attack than having abnormal cholesterol.

Yeah.

Which nobody talks about. So you go to the cardiologist, they're not checking your lead levels. And one of the.

And even if they did, that's only one fifth of the allowable level.

Right. And what's really interesting is that there was this whole movement in the 70s and 80s for chelation therapy, which was thought to be quackery. And the NIH did a $30 million trial called the tack trial, where they use EDTA IV chelation. EDT specifically removes lead, and they found that it was very. Actually effective in preventing heart disease and heart attacks. And yet it's not part of standard medicine.

Lead increasing heart disease more. Use it more than cholesterol markers. Yeah. And how much do people hear about the safe, quote, unquote, safe levels of lead compared to cholesterol when it comes to heart disease? From the cardiologist. Right. Nobody, but. And again, we're not just saying within the safe range, we're saying not even close to the top of the range. Yeah. Right. Someone would look at it and they'd be like, oh, I'm near the bottom of the range.

I'm too.

I'M like yeah except the range you're like in evolutionary levels it's not even the right scale because what we're calling one to ten is actually like one to a million in terms of what should be the right part per billion scale.

I mean there were moments in human history where there were volcanoes and there was exposures but not much. Right? Not much. Yeah.

In terms of like the famous topic people like to talk about right now of what caused the fall of the Roman Empire, there's a whole lead pipes hypothesis. Well lead was added to sugar to make a particular kind of sweetness and lead was actually added as a food additive and to alcohol plus the lead pipes plus the lead.

Actually I did love the story. I have a few patients who you know are well wealthy and you know they, they get fine crystal where they, they have wine out of leaded crystal. I remember buying wine glasses once.