Break Free From Toxins with Dr. Tom O'Bryan

Hey, it's J.J. here. You know I've been talking about environmental toxins forever and laundry detergent is a sneaky one. A lot of them contain harsh chemicals like dyes, preservatives, and even UV brighteners. Those brighteners don't actually clean anything. They just coat fabric so your eyes think things look whiter or brighter. That's more chemicals I don't want on my family's sheets or skin. And if you've got sensitive skin or allergies around the house, this can be a big problem. That's what got my attention about Earth Breeze. It looks like a dryer sheet, but it's actually laundry detergent. You toss one in the washer and that's it. No pouring, no mess, and no heavy plastic jug. Their packaging is lightweight cardboard, which helps reduce plastic waste. And if you choose the fragrance free option, it's gentle, hypoallergenic, non irritating and non sensitizing. I really like how simple it is and how fresh and clean everything comes out without those unnecessary chemicals. Right now you can try Earth Breeze for up to 40% off with free gifts@earthbreeze.com virgin that's earthbreeze.com virgin for up to 40% off plus free gifts on your first order. Hey JJ here. Every year around this time, I get the urge to make my home feel a little extra special. A space that feels just like the holidays. And Wayfair is my go to for that. Think cozy textures, twinkly decor, warm lighting, and all those little touches that make you want to curl up with a good book and a blanket. You'll usually find my book stacked on a great little end table I got from Wayfair, proof that function and style can coexist. Now, whether you're adding last minute hosting essentials, picking out gifts for loved ones, or refreshing your decor for the season, Wayfair makes it easy with beautiful finds, great prices and fast delivery. And when the holidays wind down, Wayfair has everything you need to tuck it all neatly away. Smart storage solutions for every room from the kitchen to the closet. Plus, with free shipping for any order over $35, that's fast delivery and a total peace of mind. It's the perfect mix of joy and order, bringing the holiday spirit in, then storing it all with ease. It's if you're ready to make your home feel as good as it looks, get organized, refreshed and ready for the holidays. For way less, head to Wayfair.com right now to shop all things home Wayfair Every style, every home that's W a Y F a I r dot com.

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I'm JJ Virgin, PhD dropout, sorry mom turned four time New York Times bestselling author. Yes, I'm a certified Nutrition Specialist, Fitness hall of Famer and I speak speak at health conferences and trainings around the globe. But I'm driven by my insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep asking questions, digging for answers and sharing the information I uncover with as many people as I can. And that's why I created the well Beyond 40 podcast to synthesize and simplify the science of health into actionable strategies to help you thrive. In each episode we'll talk about what's working in the world of wellness, from personalized nutrition and healing your metabolism to healthy aging and prescriptive fitness. Join me on the journey to better health so you can love how you look and feel right now and have the energy to play full out at 100. So one of the things I always think about is, you know, when people say they feel fine, I go fine. All right, what does fine mean? And do we really know what feeling really great feels like? Now today on the podcast I've got a repeat guest because he's so fabulous, Dr. Tom O'. Brien. And he is going to be talking about toxins and low grade inflammation and the fact that most people think they feel fine, but it's because they don't know what feeling great really feels like. And that quite often this low grade inflammation, you're just not eating aware of it and you're not aware of what these toxins are doing until they show up as something like cancer or autoimmune disease. So he is going to be connecting the dots between those, talking about all the different places we get exposure from, how toxins create this low grade inflammation and also more importantly how you can know how you can test for it. And I remember when you wanted to do a real big tox screen and it was thousands of dollars and now it's something that you can do relatively inexpensively from your house. And also, you know, once you know that you have these toxins which unless you've been actively detoxifying for a while, likely do what you can do about it, which I would say is something we need to be doing every single day, starting now. So I'm going to put my resources for some of my favorite saunas. I actually have two saunas. And I think in looking at some of these other countries and that are happiest and healthiest countries, one of the things I noticed they all have in common is they sauna. So we are going to be talking saunas, we're going to be talking toxins, we're talking about ways to detoxify, we're going to talk cold plunges and how to do that. And all with Dr. Tom O', Brien, who's really deep diving now. You probably know him from my shows before talking about gluten or talking about autoimmune disease. And we will kind of talk about the connection of toxins, of course, and inflammation and autoimmune disease. But we're really going to be diving into toxins and why this is an issue for everybody. We're also going to be talking about his new docu series, the Inflammation Equation, that you will have free access to as well. And I'm going to put all of this cool stuff@jjvirgin.com inflammation equation. And I will be right back with Dr. Tom O'. Brien. So stay with me. Hey, JJ, virgin here. Okay, real talk. So often the holidays sneak up on me, travel, gifts, hosting, you know, all the things. And suddenly it's like, wait, who spent what and where? And I know I'm not the only one who's looked at a bill in January and thought, wow, that escalated quickly. If you want to keep your finances under control this holiday season, you need to be using Monarch. It's rated the Wall Street Journal's best budgeting app of 2025. Monarch is the all in one personal finance tool that brings your entire financial life together in one clean interface. On your laptop or on your phone, Monarch lets you link everything and gives you real time visibility so you're not shocked later. Right now, I've been checking the holiday spending category so I don't accidentally start the new year with that dreaded debt hangover. And honestly, just seeing everything laid out is already helping me stay more aware. This season, Monarch does the heavy lifting. It links your accounts in minutes, gives you smart categorization and super clear visuals. Yes, that end of year reset could be a real goal. This time. Don't let financial opportunity slip through the cracks. Use the code virginonarch.com in your browser for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year@monarch.com with the code Virgin saving on your education should be a right, not a competition. At University of Phoenix, you'll get the best scholarship or savings you qualify for. Simple as that. Explore scholarship options at University of Phoenix. Dr. Tom O', Brien, welcome back for the gazillionth time to the podcast.

Thank you so much. It's always a pleasure.

I can't get enough of you.

Nor I you. So it's a win. Win.

Well, what's super awesome is every time I talk to you, I learned something new, which means everybody gets to learn something new. And now we are going to be digging into toxins because you have a new docu series out the inflammation equation. Very exciting. So, you know, we've talked in the past about autoimmunity, we've talked about gluten. Why did you decide to go digging deep into toxins?

That's a bottom line question. Why are we doing this? And it's because our doctors, as great as our holistic doctors and our functional medicine doctors, are applying recommendations to help people feel better and function better. They're not addressing the basics. And the basics are that the center for Disease control tells us 14 of the 15 top causes of death in the world today are chronic inflammatory diseases. That it's always inflammation. We aren't guiding our patients in identifying where is this inflammation coming from. We are guiding our patients in identifying where are your symptoms coming from. What is it about Hashimoto's for you? You know, here's a little pearl. Sean Feld, the godfather of autoimmunity, published a paper in March of 2022 identifying that 87% of Hashimoto's patients get better on a gluten free diet. Non celiac Hashimoto's patients, that's the most common autoimmune disease. So that's a trigger. And so you eliminate gluten. In this example, your thyroid starts functioning better. You think you're healthy. No, you're not. You still have all the toxic crap that's accumulated in your body over the last 40 years, causing more inflammation that just hasn't killed up enough cells to have tissue dysfunction, which then gives you tissue disease. And so then now you have symptoms of something else that you know, instead of just chasing the symptom that is right in front of us right now, which is important to deal with, let's go back and address where it all comes from. So that you're a little more assured of higher quality of life in your senior years.

I'm not middle age anymore. And I was having trouble even embracing the middle age thing. And now I'm like, wait a minute, I'm not technically considered to be middle aged. I know, but you know what, Tom? If we, as long as we move the needle in our lifespan along with our health span, then we still are middle aged.

That's right.

So then when we look at inflammation, are you saying that the root of inflammation is all this toxicity?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is.

Now, what would you say to someone like you, you mentioned gluten, and I always go, is it gluten or the glyphosate? And it's like both. But, you know, for someone that kind of goes, all right, you know, I've been eating organic, I've been using clean skin care products mostly, so I must not have that much toxic exposure, what would you say to them?

A dear friend of mine who has been teaching functional medicine for many years, world renowned, was just diagnosed with stage four aggressive breast cancer. She eats organic, she lives a healthy life, a really vibrant life. So. And you know, in. In my series the Inflammation Equation, I interviewed Patrick Hanaway, the co founder of the Functional Medicine Institute at Cleveland Clinic, and many accolades to him. So one of the questions I asked him, I said, patrick, you've been a pioneer in educating physicians on functional medicine for many, many years. You eat well, you've got a very healthy relationship, a healthy family life, you're really careful about what you put in your body. What did you miss? Because Patrick was diagnosed with stage four throat cancer.

Right.

What did you miss? And he just looked at me and said, no one's ever asked that before. And then he went into the emotional or the spiritual side of what happens when we think that we are stronger than life's demands on us, that we allow ourselves to be so stressed and be so productive in all that we do. And so it really comes down to, bottom line, you need to test, am I inflamed right now? When I interviewed David Furman, who is at the Buck Institute of Aging and he's got the contract with NASA, he and his team. Now, David Furman was a senior graduate student on the outside of there, taking care of all logistics for them. So his entire career has been on healthy aging and lifespan. NASA doesn't tell you this, but the astronauts were going loopy in space, that astronauts were not at the top of their game, their brains weren't working properly, and they found out it was the phthalates in the air.

Oh my goodness.

Everything in there is plastic. So, you know, I'm looking in my, around my office and my glasses are plastic. The stand for the lights that are shining on my face right now is plastic. If your bedroom nightstand is press board, not solid wood, it's soaked in formaldehyde. It out gases into the air for years. Well, I don't smell anything. Well, of course not. It's my. It's minute amounts that you can't identify, but they accumulate in your body. You know, I asked Jill Carnahan how often do you get a negative back on a total toxpert? And she, she was like never, never. Right and never that. We all have high levels of toxins in our body that are activating our immune system right now to fight this stuff. So we've got this low grade chronic inflammation that David Furman has identified. It is the bottom line mechanism in every degenerative disease is this undiagnosed low grade level inflammation that we don't feel right now. We feel fine, but it's under the surface killing off tissue. Killing off tissue. Let me give you an example of the accumulative nature of this stuff. This is Chicago 2016. 326 pregnant women in the 8th month of pregnancy they took urine analysis and they measured five phthalates, chemicals used to mold plastic. There are many more, but they met including bpa. They measured BPA and four others. They put the results into quartiles. The lowest amount, the next, the third and the highest amount. They followed the offspring of those pregnancies for seven years. When the children turned seven years old, they did Wechsler IQ tests. On the official IQ test, every child whose mother was in the highest category of phthalates and urine in pregnancy compared to the children in the lowest category. Whose mothers were in the lowest category of phthalates? Every child in the highest category, their IQ was seven points lower. Every single one of them.

Do you remember Robert Cran sharing that picture that he showed with the kids, the drawings of kids that had been subjected to toxins and kids who hadn't.

Yes.

It was incredible. And then I started to think about like if a woman who would know this knows to really detoxify before getting pregnant, they're going to offload those toxins into that first child, right into the baby.

Here come the studies of the higher level of phalates, the more inhibition of brain cell growth. So these babies whose moms were in the highest category, they don't have a chance in hell of ever excelling in school. They just don't have a chance because their brain never developed properly.

You know, it's interesting, way back when I was asked to write a course, do a talk about prenatal nutrition. And as I started to dig into it, I realized it wasn't prenatal nutrition, it was preconception. And then I got into this whole rabbit hole. I'm like, this little like hour talk became, you know, 900 slides later, I'm like, oh my God. And this was 20 years ago. And I'm like, where? Why is this information not out? So someone listening now because this is the well Beyond 40 podcast and you know, someone listening now. I always say your body is. Is a chemistry lab and a history book. And you know, so we've been accumulating things over the years. First of all, how would someone know. When you talked about low grade inflammation, you talked about this total toxic burden and then you said they got a test.

Yeah.

How would someone know how toxic they are, what kind of toxic burden they have? And then you know what it is doing to them in terms of inflammation.

There are many different tests out there. The one that we are using now that we find so helpful and it's extremely accurate. It's called the total tox burden by Vibrant Wellness. And they look at volatile organic compounds, they look at mold metabolites, they look at different yeast accumulation. They could bacterial infections, viral infections, heavy metals, all in one test.

Wow.

Yeah, it's really impressive.

Can someone like, does someone have to go through a doctor to order that? Can they order it through like any lab tests? What's it cost?

Right. They, you. They have to go through a doctor that's not open to the general public. That lab does not cater to the general public. But you go to my website in order to do that.

I was just gonna say. So they can order it through you.

Yeah, yeah. The doctor dot com. Yeah, the doctor.

All of this, all this will be in the show notes. We're going to do jjbirgen.com inflammation equation. So we'll put all the resources there that they can get this. Now when you do this testing, do you have to do some kind of a provocation thing?

No, it's urine. It's urine.

Wow.

Yeah. Just simple. It's simple. But. But it's so good. It's just I'm. It's one of the prerequisites to see me or on a first visit. The recommendation is always the wheat zoomer. Cause I'm the gluten guy. But also because it's, it's the most accurate measure of intestinal permeability. The wheat Zoomer, the Neural Zoomer Plus. Cause it looks at 53 different markers of inflammation in your brain and the total tox burden and the gut zoomer. Those four tests give us enough to get started on the big picture of what's going on in your body. And the results are always shocking. People are always blown away by what they see. And this lab is the only lab in the world that I have found where the sensitivity and specificity is 97 to 100%. And they're very happy to put it right on the website. No other labs.

Someone listening, though, who's not a medical professional won't know what that means.

How accurate is the test? And we think our blood tests are accurate. Turns out that most of the blood tests that our doctors do in their office, the sensitivity and the specificity mean the accuracy is somewhere between 74 and 84%. Meaning it's wrong 2 or 3 out of 10 times. Completely wrong 2 or 3 out of 10 Times. So I, I challenge doctors all the time to do double blinds. And they look at me, you know, and I do this on stage. I say, if you want to know if what you're doing is accurate or not, do five double blinds. Pick five patients, and when you draw blood, draw a second tube of blood out of the same venipuncture, label the second tube, Joe Smith, and send it to the lab ordering the same test. Now you have to pay for that second test. You can't charge the patient and you can't charge insurance. But now when the test results come back, you're going to see are they the same or how much variation is there. And sometimes you don't know whether to talk to the patient about the normal or the one that's really bad. It's that different.

Holy smokes.

It's that different.

So, yeah. So beyond that, where, where are you seeing the inflammation component when you're doing the testing? How are you.

Oh, the inflammation, yeah. You look for elevated antibodies. That's the easiest one to use. People say, well, I look at hscrp, which is a good marker of general inflammation, but it's an, it's a way up there, meaning it's been around for a long time before your CRP gets elevated. So it's not sensitive enough to identify this low grade level of inflammation under the surface that's really killing all of us. So you, you have to look for more sensitive Tests. So anytime you have elevated antibodies to your own tissue, that means by definition they're elevated, meaning there's too many of them. And means you're killing off the thyroid or you're killing off your joint surfaces or your, your, the saran wrap around your nerves called myelin. And when enough of that occurs, you got ms, you start getting numbness and tingling and you eventually get diagnosed with Ms. So looking for elevated antibodies is a good test in the inflammation equation. You'll hear Dr. Isaac Elias talk about the most. The first marker of inflammation in the body from which it all trickles down is called Galectin 3. And that's an inexpensive test that any doctor can do because LabCorp does it, Quest does it. It's about, it's less than a hundred bucks I believe to do that test and you see if Galectin 3 is elevated, you're inflamed.

Why isn't that test being done? Why are you doing HSCRP instead of this?

This?

Like because obviously by the time HSCRP is ele, this has been a major problem. So I'm always looking at like by the time blood sugar is elevated, you've been insulin resistant for a while. What's the precursor? What's the, you know, what do you look at first?

That's right, that's where Galectin 3 comes in. It's the precursor, it's the upstream effect that trickles down into all of the follow up inflammatory cytokines. So in the innate immune system, in the automatic response system we have in our bodies, that's at the top and then it trickles down from there. So looking at that, looking at elevated antibodies is such a good measure and it's not expensive at all. You know, you can do Cyrex has array number five that looks at 24 different antibodies to your own tissue. Well, why is that important? Because Blue Cross Blue Shield published in March of 2020 that in the previous four years there was a 407% increase in, in a diagnosis of Alzheimer's in 30 to 44 year olds. This episode is brought to you by Buffalo Trace Distillery. Powerful yet smooth contained, but never tame. Proudly going their own way, but never going alone. This is the spirit inside Buffalo Trace Bourbon made at Buffalo Trace Distillery, the world's most award winning distillery. Buffalo Trace is always perfect. Perfectly untamed, distilled, aged and bottled by Buffalo Trace distillery, Franklin County, Kentucky. 90 proof, 45 alcohol by volume. Learn more at buffalotrace distillery.com Please drink responsibly.

This is an issue for everybody. That's bottom line. It's just how much of an issue is it at this point? You know, what's it, how's it affecting you? So now that we know it's an issue and we know how to test for it, just in case you need the validation or you're already at that point where you need to get very targeted. But someone listening to this, what are some of the things that it can do? I remember I had a woman, Tom, who went and got bariatric surgery behind my back. She didn't tell me. And I go, but your issue is you've got a huge toxic burden. Like your body shut down. You can. And it didn't do a thing. Like nothing happened when she went and got this bariatric surgery. And the other thing, funny enough, tonight I'm doing a masterclass for my community about when you want to drop body fat. Your first thing is to make sure your detox pathways are working well because you're about to free up toxins. If you burn fat, toxins get liberated and you better be able to get them out. So what do they do?

Well, the first thing you know, there's a new paper out, came out last year from Italy, the Mediterranean Gluten free Diet. And they, they revised the food pyramid. And what's at the very bottom, and so critically important for all of us is water, that we, most of us are dehydrated. You have to first have the system to escort the toxins out. That's really important. And you ask, what are the effects of this? I mean, how would that be affecting us if I'm toxic? Let me tell you this study. And now first I'll tell you, this is my opinion, and it is only my opinion. I think that the most sensitive tissue in the body, the very most sensitive tissue, is a fertilized egg in a woman's womb. Because it has no immune system of its own, it's completely dependent on mom. So here's a study that came from the Journal of the American Medical association from Harvard. And the editors of the Journal wrote a comment saying this is an elegant study using sophisticated biomarkers to demonstrate their point. So what did they look at? They looked at couples going to assisted fertility centers, and they ruled out all of the known risk factors. Tobacco, alcohol, exercise, no exercise foods, socioeconomic class, race. They ruled out all that out and just looked at one concept. How many servings of fruits and vegetables is the woman eating a day? And they did this in such an elegant way that the Editors complimented them on it, and it was shocking. They divided the women into fourths, the lowest, the next, the third, and the highest. Those in the highest category of servings of fruits and vegetables per day had an 18% less likelihood of successful implementation. And if they did get pregnant, it was a 26% less likelihood of a live birth.

Wait a minute. Wait.

That's correct.

People eating the most fruits and vegetables.

That's correct. More servings of fruits and vegetables a day, the worse the success rate for implantation. These people are spending tens of thousands of dollars of their own money. And if they got pregnant, they had more miscarriages and stillbirths, they lost the baby. But. But there was a subgroup in that group that they were looking at who were eating organic. And in that category, it was the exact opposite. The more fruits and vegetables you ate, the better the outcome. And for everyone out there says organic so hard, they qualified people in the organic category if they had three servings a week of organic, not three servings a day. But the more fruits and vegetables you eat, the worse the outcome because the.

More non organic fruits and vegetables.

Exactly, exactly. Insecticides, the pesticides, the fungicides, rodenticide, the antibiotics that accumulate in your body over the years. Now mom has a. Has a uterus, and the amniotic fluid is toxic soup. And that fertilized egg doesn't have an immune system yet. And so it's all dependent on mom's immune system to protect it. But wait, it's a toxic environment in there. 18% less likelihood of successful implantation and 26% less likelihood of a live birth with conventional fruits and vegetables. The highest category. Yeah, that's a game changer.

Let's jump age groups from, you know, babies, fetuses, babies, moms, to now peri and postmenopausal accumulation of toxins all these years. I mean, I think back to, you know, when we were growing up and there was no, like, there wasn't really organic even discussed. And maybe at that point we didn't need, like, I don't know. When all the really crappy farming started to hit, Was it the 50s and 60s? When did all the chemicals start to hit?

They started to hit in the 60s, and glyphosate came on the market in the mid-90s.

Okay, so, you know, someone who's, who's just accumulated a bunch of stuff and what do they do now?

Right. Well, first is to do the proper testing to identify do I have a toxic load and am I inflamed? That's what we're talking about in the inflammation equation, it's all about this in all these studies. So the first thing to do is to just recognize I need to find out what my current status is. That's most important because people feel fine until they're diagnosed with stage four cancer.

Well, I think honestly looking at a tox test and seeing all of those levels can give you the same thing without having to have that horrible diagnosis. So maybe we could just avoid that piece. So the first part, we'll put that in the show notes again. That'll be@jjvirgin.com inflammation equation is to get tested and so to see where you're at. Because depending on the toxins, you do different things.

Yeah, there's different levels of detoxing.

Right.

And it depends on what your levels are.

So it is possible to do this and I would assume two things. Number one, one of the things I always tell people about this is, you know, people will come and do. I'm gonna do a three day detox. Things that you need to put into your life. This is level one of detoxification. It is not going to go deep. Like then you're gonna need to go, all right, let's test, let's go work with a practitioner. We may need to put more things on board, but to me, level one is what you eat, how you avoid things. Right. The water, the fiber, the polyphenols and the antioxidants, the amino acids and sweating, especially heat and infrared. But what else beyond that are you recommending? And then what are some of the therapeutic things that you do? Like how did you get to zero?

You show off the Swiss Mountain Clinic. Marzi and I go to the Swiss Mountain Clinic a couple times a year, every year. They're the best in the world, the very best. And they're not the most expensive. They're extremely reasonably priced for this. But they. There's only 10 centers in all of Europe that have inuspheresis that's I n u s inner spheresis and it's a type of phoresis where you sit in a lazy boy chair and they put a needle in, it's taking blood out, it goes through a machine and comes back in the other arm. But it's so much more sophisticated than anything that's out there now. And you see this bay of toxins accumulating that's being filtered out of the blood. And in mine, the first time I did it, she says, oh my goodness. And I said, what? And she said, can you see how there's almost like these, these layers that are stacked on top of each other, almost like these waves of thicker material or something. I said yes, that's plastic.

Oh my goodness.

Really? Really? She said yes. Now, just before I went to India last week, I downloaded four studies on this that just three, four weeks ago, a paper came out. New technology using this laser type of evaluation of water. And they, they, you, they checked the three popular types of bottled water and they didn't say the names, but they said the most popular types that we could find, three liters. So a liter of three different types, the average. And they're measuring nanoparticles of plastic, not microplastics. Nanoplastics. And it was 246,000 nanoplastics in a liter of water. Now, one of the reasons that I don't have a lot of toxicities, because I drink a lot of water. So I just took this trip flying longer than I've ever flown before. I didn't drink any water. I didn't buy water in the air or because I couldn't find bottled water and I could glass bottles of water and I couldn't bring my glass bottle through security. Right.

No one paid attention to water. Then all of a sudden we had water bottles. And I think of how many bottles of plastic, you know, water bottles exactly consumed.

You start with the basics. You do JJ's 10 day course and you learn about hydration and how important it is. You develop the lifestyle habits of the foods that help your liver to function better, to break down these chemicals. You learned that there's two phases to liver detoxification and different nutrients or different foods support each phase. You just learn this stuff. You know, in my book you can fix your brain, which was number one in seven categories on Amazon.

Nice.

Under brain function. The subtitle of the book says it all and it's the secret to success. The subtitle is just one hour a week to the best memory, productivity and sleep you've ever had. Just one hour a week. And that's the only way to be successful and not be overwhelmed. Right. Will you poison your family with toxins? These minute amount of toxins. And then next week you learn that houseplants absorb 74% of the toxins in the air. And so you get house plants and you go to my website, the doctor.com plant and there's the handout from NASA on which houseplants absorb the toxins.

Wow, how cool. I will make sure you put all that in the show notes. And so what it sounds like to me, and this is kind of how I've thought this through is, and I love, you know, testing so you really understand where you're at. But even while you're waiting for the test to come, Water. Super important, but not water in plastic bottles. How about saunas or hot baths? What do you exercise like? What are you doing on the sweating front?

Yeah, there's, there's nothing as effective as infrared saunas that I've seen on a cons. You know, you do it two, three times a week. You invest in an infrared sauna if, if you can.

We have both. We have that one because we turned our old gym into a biohacking lab and we got it. We have a big sauna and that's where we watch Netflix. But then we have a, the small heat up sauna so that we can go and do heat and then jump in the cold plunge that we have right next to it. Then I go over and stand in front of the red light for my mitochondria. I was listening to something Dr. Stacy Sims shared, was that women. And it makes sense, smaller capillaries, et cetera. Because we're just trying to evoke the shiver response. Right? You're trying to trigger hormesis. So she said four minutes at 50 degrees for a woman. So that's, that is way more manageable for me than the. Because Every degree under 50, I'm like, oh my gosh, it's like, it feels like knives.

Right, well, here's, here's something for your listeners. And how do you do this? How do you do a cold plunge? So, and I started teaching this part of it when I opened my practice in 1980. It's called hot, cold, hot. You get in the shower and you let the hot water beat down on your adrenal glands or your kidneys. So lower part of your back, right back there and nice hot water. It feels great. And you focus on your breathing and take some deep breaths. And so you've really got your breathing down. Your calm focus on your breathing. And while you're focusing on your breathing, you reach around behind you and you turn it all the way to cold. Focus on your breathing. Oh my, that's cold. Focus on your breathing. And when you're ready to. And when you're going to go like this, you turn it back to hot.

Now don't you want to turn around and hit your chest? I always thought the cold you wanted to get on your chest.

Well, but at first, just to get acclimated and to teach your body to stay focused on breathing, just. And we did the adrenal glands because it was part of a hypoadrenia profile to get more blood flow into your adrenal glands. And. But you just do it for two seconds. Any. As soon as you're about to lose your breath, your calm breathing, and it.

Turns to say, lose your mind, you.

Turn it back to hot. And what happens? After about a week, it's staying on cold for 5 seconds and then maybe 10 seconds and then 15 seconds and then, and eventually you get to where you turn it on cold and it's on cold for a minute or so and you're fine. And you turn around, you know, you're getting your whole body like the chest and. But you transition, you just take your time, focus on your breathing and then the temperature will allow your body to acclimate to this startle effect. And then you're, you're ready for cold plunge. And I tell people when, when you can stay in the shower for 60 seconds on cold, you're ready for cold plunge. And when you go into cold plunge, you do it for five seconds. You just put your feet in, sit down, focus on your breathing, maybe get one breath or two breaths and get back up and out, whatever. You know, as soon as you lose your breaths, it's time to get out.

So I love that because that is something anyone can do. We all have showers, so you can do a hot, a cold. I know that when you get the cold on your chest, it's even better. So you can do hot, then flip it. So that's fantastic. And you know, you've given some really actionable things too, because I always want to make sure if we're giving all this alarming data, which there's so much of it, that there's something you can do to start to handle it. And the fact that you've been able to eliminate all your toxins, I've never heard of anyone being able to do that. That's quite something.

I'm really surprised too by that.

That's, that's very cool. So we're going to, we'll link to everything in the show notes. We'll put everything@jjvirgin.com forward slash inflammation equation. Now, I know you have a docu series and we'll have the information on that there. And you said it's, it's seven days, 10 days. How did someone digest this?

Right. It's going to be about an hour a day, give or take a few minutes, an hour a day for probably eight days right now is at seven. But there's so much information I wanted, so many wonderful points that came out from these scientists that, you know, I want to include. So it'll probably be eight days for an hour a day.

Very cool. All right, we'll have all that info to. And thank you. Thank you. You are always a wealth of information and I'm excited to do those like that. Testing. I was making notes going okay. Families getting tested.

Yeah. Total toxic burden. Yeah. For everyone. Thank you, jj.

Thank you, honey. Appreciate you. Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips and techniques you can incorporate into everyday life to ensure you look and feel great and more importantly, that you're built to last. And check me out on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and my website, jjvirgin.com and make sure to follow my podcast so you don't miss a single episode@subscribetojay.com See you next time. Hey JJ here. And just a reminder that the well Beyond 40 podcast offers health, wellness, fitness and nutritional information that's designed for educational and entertainment purposes only. You should not rely on this information as a substitute for, nor does it replace professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. If you have any concerns or questions about your health, you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare professional. Make sure that you do not disregard, avoid or delay obtaining medical or health related advice from your healthcare professional because of something you may have heard on the show or read in our show notes. The use of any information provided on this show is solely at your own risk.

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Hello listeners, this is Anne Bogle, author, blogger and creator of the podcast what Should I Read next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week I take all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read. They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change or a Frothy page turner to help them escape the stresses of work, school, everything. You'll learn something about yourself as a reader, and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read, with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for what Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and Visit our website whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more.