The Rain Barrel Effect Explained: Life-Changing Detox Tips with Dr. Steven Cabral

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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 Fame, and I 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.

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177,000 different man made chemicals. Yep, that's how many things are in our environment and I think in Europe. And you'll hear it in my interview with Dr. Stephen Cabral coming up in a moment. There's something like 800 of these chemicals in the U.S. maybe it's 8,000. Anyway, we have a whole lot more and a whole lot more health problems. So could there be a correlation? That's what we'll be talking about today. These hidden toxins, what they are, where they are, what you can do about them, how they're impacting your hormones, how they're impacting your weight and how you can get started today, getting them gone. As one of my nutrition mentors said, said early on she's like better out than in and boy is that true about toxins. So I am going to bring on Dr. Stephen Cabral. Before I do, let me tell you a little bit about him. I've known him, I think, gosh, what a decade now. He's a board certified naturopathic doctor and the founder of Equilife and the Integrative Health Practitioner Institute. He's doing really cool stuff with a speed specific grouping of functional medicine tests that really help you get to the underlying condition. Tests you wouldn't normally get at a physician's office and tests that you can run yourself, which is even more cool. The other cool thing that is happening.

Here is he is giving us his.

Rain Barrel Effect book. It's a number one international bestseller. And you are going to get it for free. This is really the manual for how to evaluate your body. What could be missing? You know, how toxic are you, what to do about it? And you will be able to get that free@jjvirgin.com Cabral C A B R A L. And I'm going to be right back. What we're going to be talking about today, he's literally worked with, I think now, 25,000 plus patients, helping them figure out why they've got thyroid issues, autoimmune digestion, weight gain, all sorts of different things. But more importantly, he's helping them recover from these things. So we're going to be digging into that, how you can evaluate yourself for your own imbalances, what you might have too much of or not enough of, and you can heal, too. All right, I'll be right back with Dr. Stephen Cabral. Stay with me. Hey, jj, Virgin here. Okay, real talk.

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Dr. Steven Cabral, welcome to well Beyond 40.

It's great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

Well, I'm super excited to dig into this topic because we really haven't addressed toxins well on this podcast. And I got very interested in them years ago when I was looking at weight loss resistance and I was like, why is no one talking about this? So it seems that you have really gone deep into toxins with your I'm going to hold your book up, your rain barrel effect book. So I think this would be a great place to start with this obvious question of what is the rain barrel effect?

Yes. Well, the rain barrel effect was something that I heard about, learned about in passing when I was around 19 years old. So I got very sick at 17 years old. Later diagnosed with Addison's disease, inability to produce cortisol. So terrible for allergies if you can't produce cortisol. Terrible for waking up in the morning, trying to have energy, walk up a flight of stairs. We all know the bad effects of cortisol, but it's also really bad if you don't produce any. And so then I was also diagnosed with autoimmune issues like rheumatoid arthritis and type 2 diabetes as well. So I had a really difficult couple years with conventional medicine and I started to see more natural health based doctors around 19 years old. This was the mid-90s, so it wasn't as popular back then.

And you were, where were you at the time? Were you in Boston? No. You're in Boston now?

Well, I lived right outside of Boston, so I lived in Medford, Massachusetts. And so I saw all of the best doctors in Boston, meaning like Harvard grads, mit, bu, Tufts, you name it. But what they did was they always looked at your blood work. And although blood work's amazing, so I recommend people run their blood work, it's not going to show you typically a lot of underlying root cause diseases such as gut health, if you have yeast overgrowth, sibo, et cetera. And that's what I was missing. Now a couple years later when I found out about functional medicine and doctors just at the infancy of this, many of whom, you know, like a Dr. Hyman or Dr. Bland, they were doing this. And so I was lucky enough to be referred to one in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And they started talking about, in terms of allergies, the rain barrel effect, meaning I always had allergies, but they weren't bad until about April every year in Boston. And at that point I could barely open my eyes. My eyes felt like glass. They were scratched, they were all itchy and red. And what I realized was that, well, that's when the pollen was at its worst. So that's when it started to fill up that rain barrel. And when it overflowed, it had all of these symptoms. Well, that's basically most of us. The reason I got really sick when I was 17, I found out is because I already had taken over 3,000 capsules of amoxicillin by the time I was 17.

Holy smokes.

Yes. And so, I mean, that was given to that by a dermatologist. Now a well meaning dermatologist, but he was old school school. And when you had acne, you were given amoxicillin. So I took amoxicillin twice a day since I was 14. And then growing up, we always had Z packs and erythromycin in the house. And so the common cold, we'd get a Z pack. And that destroyed my gut function. I had Candida overgrowth, I had Sibo, I had H. Pylori. The only thing they didn't find was parasites. So I basically had everything wrong with my gut. Leaky gut, intestine permeability. And all of that led to then a lot more stress on the body. And so when I talk about the rain barrel effect, I say there's no disease that happens overnight. It seems like that's what happens. But it builds up gradually over time. And as you build it up, whether it's emfs or whether it's chemical sensitivities or heavy metals, eventually at some point, your capacity to deal with that has been met, and that's when the rain barrel overflows and you get the diagnosis with the disease. The nice thing is you can also empty the rain barrel. And that's what I was able to do. And now that I'm in my mid-40s, I feel better than ever, have no diagnosed diseases, and yet I have the same genetics which I always like to share with people. Those haven't changed.

Yes.

Well, let's talk about what could go in the rain barrel, because I would imagine, and one of the challenges is as that rain barrel is filling up, there's subtle things going on. But so many of these things we're taught to think are normal. Right?

100%. And they're typically, they just show up as minor symptoms in the beginning. So it's like, oh, a little less energy upon waking up, a little more irritability, lower mood, start to gain a little bit of weight or inflammatory water weight and joint pain. All of these things are just subtle reminders from the body that something's a little bit off. And so when I wrote that book, there's 77,000 confirmed toxins in the United States, only about 8,000 in Europe. Now it's not like 8,000 isn't a huge number because they're all man made chemicals that the body was never meant to deal with. But the US had almost what, 10 times the amount of Europe. And there's also far more poor health in the United States. At the time of the writing of that book, we were ranked as Most people know, 37th or pretty much last in the industrialized world. Yet we spend more on healthcare than any other nation. So that was my wake up call that this information needed to get out there. And the other one is that most of these toxins we're talking about are invisible to the naked eye. So pesticides, herbicides, phthalates, benzene, fluoride, chlorine, you can't see them. And so we never think about them. And it's why it's been kind of laughed off by conventional medicine for many, many years. Even though the literature is there. Well, they can't do it anymore. Over the last few years, we now continue to hear about things like pfas, the forever chemicals. These are things that will never break down in the environment. They end up in our soil, they end up in our drinking water, and they're causing gut based dysfunction and immune dysregulation.

Yeah. With the scary thing being they're never going to break down. And then you have situations like some of the states where they have fluoride added to the water.

Without a doubt. And the fluoride. So you can make an argument if you want. I wouldn't make the argument, but you could make an argument that it can be beneficial for your teeth. Okay, so even if that's true, it doesn't mean that we need to swallow fluoridated water into our intestines, which then disrupts our microbiome and it begins to lower our thyroid as well. So now we have imbalanced gut, which can lead to imbalanced immune system or intestinal permeability, which increases inflammation. And fluoride, which is part of that haloid Group displaces iodine that we need for our thyroids. So there's not a whole lot of benefit to consuming fluoride. And I would argue very heavily that it has no place in terms of our food or water based system.

Well, let's talk about, because you talk in the book about 10 different, I guess, different types of toxins. I think what are some of the most common ones? Because I would, I would guess step one here is like let's avoid as many of these as possible. Which I know it's not possible to totally avoid them, but that's right. If we know some of the ones sneaking in, maybe we can stop it.

Well, that's the thing I always say is we can't live in fear every day walking outside of our house or even in our house. So it's just we do the best that we can and that's really good enough. It really is. But we do have to be aware. And so what are the things that we're most exposed to? We start there. So we start with clean water, clean air, and clean food. So those are my first three that I'm always starting with with every private wellness client. And what does that look like? Okay, well, clean water is getting your favorite water filter. There's so many water filters out there. The ones that it's pretty much a fail safe is reverse osmosis. Now it does strip your water of a lot of those minerals. That would be ideal. You can remineralize back. You can use a little vortex spinner. You can do whatever you like. You can make your own hydrogen water. All of these things are fantastic. But you don't want the chlorine, you don't want the fluoride. And the other thing is, you won't really know this because when you work at a water department, they test about 400 different chemicals in your water. Okay, well there could be thousands of chemicals in that water, some of which which we know. And again, you can never. You don't have to take my word for it. There's citations on all these things. They're right on pubmed, we have pharmaceuticals in the water supply and that's because people dump their pharmaceuticals down the toilet. That unfortunately toilet water is recycled and it ends up then in our drinking water because those aren't necessarily being filtered out. So whenever someone says, oh your city water is clean, I would take that with a grain of salt. It's clean based on the 400 chemicals that they look for, but not necessarily the thousands of others. So clean water is the best first place to start.

Great. Now you said there were 77,000, so looking for 400 creates a problem. And I think the other important thing there, I remember, I'm trying to think of which lecture I was sitting in on this, and they're like, your skin's a sieve, is that we often think of it as what we're drinking, but I think we forget about what we're bathing in. Right? We're getting it.

Yes. So I have a 9 and 11 year old daughter now. They still take baths every once in a while. When they were little we had a bath filter and I think that's extremely important. My wife takes baths. I'm not a big bath guy. But you want a bath filter because you are literally soaking in then that chlorine or as you other said, or as you said, other chemicals that can be there. So that's important. And shower is probably as important, if not more important because when, if we're not filtering our shower water, let's just focus on chlorine alone. Hot water becomes steam. That steam is then breathed in through our nasal passages, which then gets a free ride to our bloodstream through our lungs. So now we're consuming chlorine as a vapor, which is far more dangerous before it's even processed in the gut or in the liver. So shower filter, bath filter, water filter, absolute best place to start.

Okay. Then we move on to air.

Yes, the biggest thing. So I use, I have air filters in my house. I've used Allen in the past. I use air doctor now there's just, there's a bunch of great companies, there's IQAir. I don't necessarily play favorites, but I like it to have a carbon filter. I like it to have a HEPA filter. You can use an ionizer in there. But why this is important is if I take the cap off my air filter and we try to keep a pretty clean home, it is filthy. And so if I didn't have an air filter, I'm breathing that in. It's all the particulate in the air. And so why this is important as well is when I started to look at the research, I thought that the majority, we could talk about heavy metals. The majority of aluminum we got was really through pots and pans and aluminum foil, et cetera, which it can be, no doubt about it. Aluminum is also pervasive in the environment and it gets trapped, or I should say trapped. It gets latched onto dust particles and those dust particles are then breathed in by us as well. And so one of the best ways to knock down heavy metals as well, believe it or not, is with an air filter. So I consider that to be essential if you can only afford one air filter for your home. What we do is starting out, put it in your bedroom about an hour or two before bed, run it on high. It's just going to clean all the air multiple times within that hour. Then during the day, bring it out to your living room and just kind of rotate it around. It's a great, great way to use the air filter.

And then what about food? Food's a hard one. Challenging, right?

Food is a hard one for sure. So there's two parts to this. One is you have to trust the company that you're using, right? It's the. That's because it is about trust. At the end of the day, know the companies that you're purchasing from. Something says organic, we hope that it's organic, right? We don't know the organo, we don't know the natural pesticides that they may be using. We don't know how the food was processed, how it was cleaned. But the goal is to try to purchase the majority of your foods organic and still use a produce cleaner, which can be a done for you at home. So we use the Clean 15 and Dirty Dozen. Clean 15 is put out by the Environmental Working Group each year, ewg. And they're going to share with you which foods, the Dirty Dozen, that if you can't get organic, you shouldn't eat. And I know that seems harsh, but you really don't want to eat them. So things like non organic strawberries, non organic spinach, these things are heavily sprayed. You can't wash the pesticide spray off or the herbicide sprays off. And so you really don't want to be consuming them. They'll damage your gut, microbiome, they damage your immune system, they damage your mood. Because of how neurotransmitters and other factors using the inflammation system are used for neurotransmitters in the brain. So big, big deal there. And then the other one's the clean 15. Now, should you purchase those conventional, you can. It's still better to purchase organic. And the reason is there's usually going to be more micronutrients in those foods as well because the soil is typically a little bit more rich, a little bit more dense than conventionally farmed foods which have very little minerals in the soil left.

It's so much easier now than it used to be too. Remember, there was like a little you either went to the health food store and you had like rotting organic vegetables in the health food store or you went to the store and there was like this little area. And now, I mean, gosh, they have organic at Walmart and Target and all the places. You don't just have to go to Whole Foods. So it's way easier now to do all of this. I'm always amazed, Stephen, when we go out of the country how much better we feel like food wise and we eat clean here. And I keep thinking, you know, even with the best attempts, it's still challenging. Of course we're also traveling in the country all the time, so that doesn't help. What about. And I just have to ask this, and it always strikes fear in every woman's heart because I know, you know, from what I've read, women are more at risk for toxicity than men are. Largely because of all of our beauty products that we use.

Yeah, the statistics, well the statistics first of all are all over the map, depending on what you're actually looking at. But we'll put it this, the lowest that I've seen is a minimum of 13 toxic ingredients for the average woman all the way up to over 80 before they even leave the home. And so it's a tremendous amount of chemical toxins. And why don't I take a step back? So these toxins are essentially man made, lab created chemicals that we put in our skin or on our foods. We consume them in some way and as you said before, putting them on your skin is consuming just works subdermally and it gets infused into the bloodstream. Well, the issue is, is that all of these have been pseudo studied to be generally regarded as safe. Right. That G RAs that we typically see. The problem is they're never studied in conjunction with each other. They're not studied over decades. And therein lies the problem. That's the filling up of that rain barrel effect. And it seems to also affect women to a greater degree. And it's because of the consistent use and it's almost non stop like let's just say you wash off for the average woman makeup or whatever it might be at night, well you're just putting something else on then again to go to bed. And so it's always absorbing, always consuming these things. Suntan lotion is a perfect example. So women are told, and men as well. But I don't know, I mean we have, our practice is about 75% women. So we do see a lot of women in our practice is okay, I want to put on suntan lotion because I want to protect my skin from photo aging, photosensitivity from the sun. Okay, totally understand that. The problem is most of these suntan lotions have a dozen different chemicals in them. They're not just a nanoparticle, zinc oxide, these are or non nanoparticles, zinc oxide. These are dangerous chemicals that we're putting on our skin that's creating a barrier and some of it being absorbed to not get a sunburn. And so we're trying to protect ourselves against sun cancer as well. Yet we're putting these cancer causing chemicals on the body. It's a tough situation.

It's ironic, isn't it? Defined irony.

And the thing is, the dermatologists recommending these, they could see right in the literature that this can cause cancer, benzenes and all these other things that can be added. But the problem is conventional medicine doesn't necessarily have another solution for it. And so it's almost like the, well, let's try to do less harm.

So I think of a couple things here that I'd love to explore because I got interested in toxins in the context of weight loss resistance. And then I was looking at the other things that could cause weight loss resistance, like you know, thyroid issues, insulin issues, you know, sex hormone issues. But then you could look at the toxins and go, well, those are causing the like. Everything is so connected. What are you alluded to? Some of them. But what are some of the challenges that happen when your rain barrel gets starts to get full?

Well, it's almost like the theory on aging, the triage theory of aging. And it's that our body, when we're younger, basically through our 20s, is so focused on keeping the body strong and vital and robust to carry on human life that it's not taking care of a lot of the non essentials in the background. So our body's aging in the background and finally that rain barrel begins to fill, or however you want to look at it, the cup begins to tip and then it's difficult to get it back because we get one virus or we get lyme disease, or we get whatever it might be and we just see ourselves start to age so much faster after that. And that is because our body is no longer able to keep up that triage. Yes, it's continuing to rejuvenate, it's continuing to heal. But if you're not getting sleep, you're constantly inflamed. And the biggest thing I say is energy in, energy out. Let's look at it this way. You or you're a young professional, you're a student, or you've got young kids, you're not getting a lot of sleep, you're trying to exercise, now you're doing cold plunges, you're just always doing everything all the time. And so you're always putting out energy and energy is not coming back in. So although the body's working still to rejuvenate, it's in a more of a catabolic breakdown state than anabolic. Our job is to get more into the parasympathetic nervous system, the healing rather than the fight or flight, the go, go, go. And when you are dealing with these chemicals and toxins in your body, you're pushed more towards the go, go, go. And that's because your immune system is always on. Our immune system is meant to be quietly lurking in the background looking for pathogens that it can easily squelch and destroy. Like my daughters were sick last week. I didn't get sick. Was I exposed to whatever they had? Absolutely. But it's either my body had seen it before, it used those B cells or it used those immune cells to immediately create antigens to, or antibodies to the antigen, or it was just strong enough, robust enough to be able to fight that off. But when you are dealing with heavy metals and you're dealing with all these other chemical based toxicities, your immune system is over exaggerated. You end up with autoimmune issues, you end up with Hashimoto's, you end up with or just low thyroid. Right hypothyroidism. So those are things we see in our practice all the time. And there's always an underlying root cause and toxicity is one of those root causes.

So what are some of the other root causes that you see beyond toxicity?

The biggest one, and we can kind of, we can label toxins however we'd like. So I would label Candida overgrowth, sibo, which is small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, H. Pylorian parasites. I would label that as a toxin. Those are overgrowth. So how I look at natural health and healing, we believe that everyone can heal. We see that there's, when we look in our practice and even with the anti aging and longevity. There's five main reasons that humans die before really 90 to 100 years old. Cardiovascular, blood pressure, stroke, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer's, and there is. Which one did I leave out? Oh, cancer. Yes. Because that is the one that we truly don't know how to fix 100% of the time. We can reverse Alzheimer's before it's terminal, right before there are literally holes in the brain. We can reverse that. We can reverse cardiovascular. We can reverse type 2 diabetes. We can reverse high blood pressure, terminal cancer. Again, I'm not going to be so egotistical to say that we can reverse that 100% of the time. I wish that we could. It's one that we're working on. There's immunologics, There's a lot of other stuff being done. We're not there yet, but all the others can be fixed. So humans only living at 74 to 77 years old doesn't even make any sense. It's because they're allowing these things not to be found and worked on ahead of time. But all of those things don't just appear. They come from these underlying toxicities, which are gut issues that lead to intestinal permeability, so that the good foods you're eating still inflame your body. The proteins still seep out, they still turn on the immune system, leading to autoimmune issues. Or one thing besides heavy metals, which I know I want to give some, that lead to autoimmune issues, like thyroid, which is one of the biggest ones in our practice. But stress, I consider stress to be a toxin on the body. And that is because, as I was saying, there's two ways that we get unwell. We have too little of something. Those are deficiencies. Those are our vitamins, our minerals, our omegas, our neurotransmitters, et cetera. Or we have too much of something, and I just label that a toxin. So too much of the candida, the parasites, the H. Pylori, the sibo, or too many of the mercury, aluminum, cadmium, et cetera, too much stress, too many EMFs, too much of all of those things that weaken our immune response or weakening our body's ability to triage to stay young.

So someone coming in, because I know you look at this differently, and even just what you just said tells me you're looking at this differently. A lot of these things you're not going to see through traditional lab tests. The symptoms are subtle till all of a sudden something goes totally wrong. What are you doing to be able to discover what someone has too much of or not enough of.

So as I was saying before, because I don't want to discount conventional medicine and discount conventional blood work, it does diagnose disease. If you have white blood cells above a 10 or below a 4, there's something wrong with your body, right? So we need to figure out what's going on there. And so I'm not overlooking that, but it will never tell you what the underlying root cause is. And so I went from doctor to doctor, specialist to specialist in Boston because all they ran was conventional blood work. It wasn't until I went to more integrative health practitioners that they started to look at my gut, health, food sensitivities, mineral levels, vitamin levels, looking at my heavy metals, other toxins, that they were able to say, okay, these are off. Are they diagnosing the disease? No. But any one of these could lead to all the diseases you have. And since a disease can't be cured, like there's no cure for it, it's just a name of a collection of symptoms. But all the symptoms can be fixed by fixing whatever that thorn is in your proverbial elephant's foot. So we need to pull that out. That's our job. So my job as a practitioner is to say we're going to run something called the big five labs, or at the very least the starter kit, which is going to look at vitamin levels, mineral levels, that includes methylated B vitamins that you're actually using, glutathione levels, et cetera. Then we're looking at heavy metals and we're looking at gut function. We have to start with those four. Then after that we're looking at omega 6 to omega 3 inflammatory levels. Because I'll tell you, even the people with the best diets, they're still not getting a proper ratio of omega 6s to omega 3s.

This should just be, you know, the omega 6 to 3 is such an easy, inexpensive test like this should just be like you look at and go, vitamin D, omega 3. Why are these not just run?

I completely agree with you. And it's funny, but as of five years ago, conventional medicine stopped running the 25 hydroxy vitamin D. On most lab tests, you have to go just do a great doctor. I know. And the reason is this, though the reason is actually fairly straightforward, is that there's no prescription for it. They do have prescription vitamin D. I won't disagree with you on that, but it's just not something that a doctor typically does. And it was costly to run, so they eliminated it. I know, that's pretty wild. So. But the nice thing is all of these can be run without a doctor's prescription. They can be done in the privacy of your own home. Your health information is never shared with your insurance, your pcp, unless you want to share it. And it's kept private. And so what you do with that is what you want. Because some of these things can reveal some deep underlying health imbalances and you want to be able to fix those. So the other two labs are your hormones testing, which is your estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, dhea, your cortisol throughout the day. Because you do want to see your basically 24 hour diurnal cortisol, your thyroid, not tsh. I know you've chatted about this many, many times, but your free T4, free T3, your TPO antibodies, then looking at vitamin D because it does affect your hormones and then hemoglobin A1C and insulin. So that's a big test, but that's none of. It's a blood draw. It's all saliva and then a finger prick just like you take your blood sugar. And the last one is the food sensitivity testing, which looks at an IGG food sensitivity test for 190. I like to put a little caveat there. Healthy foods that you could be eating that may be creating inflammation in your body.

You can do a fasting, insulin, salivary.

No, that's actually a blood spot.

Okay. I was like going, what?

I know, I know. Wow. You bring up a good point. Because the reason why there's different labs is because you can't test everything with only one fluid or one sample. So hair is really good at catching what's been excreted because it's a protein, it's basically tissue, but it's not. People say, oh, I can diagnose parasites from looking at your hair test. No, you can't. Like there's absolutely no data on that. I mean, you can say that and I'm not trying to like argue with people, but we have to use science as well because if not, then we're playing into the hand of conventional medicine. That's saying there's no factual reality behind this. When NASA, the FBI, I mean, hair tissue mineral analysis testing has been done for over 40 years. So we just want to be realistic and not make claims that aren't true. We want to use actual.

Yeah, it was interesting. Hair mineral analysis was one of the first things I started to use in my work, gosh, like 30 years ago. Are you using, what are you using to look for heavy metals? Which test Are you doing hair mineral analysis or are you doing provoked urine? What are you doing?

We run tens of thousands of the minerals and metals test hair tests every year. It is the simplest, one, easy entry level. Why many practitioners begin with it. You can Use it for ages 3 years old, really and up. I find it to be the. It's like that entry level lab that everybody should be using, shows your stress levels through your electrolyte excretion, calcium and magnesium, zinc to copper. A lot of people supplementing with zinc when they should be supplementing with zinc and copper. Because even though zinc's amazing anabolic mineral helps repair, it pushes down copper levels if you're not getting enough copper. And then it also looks at heavy metals. And it's phenomenal looking at heavy metals, which is why they use it with women during pregnancy, because it's non invasive and they can actually look for metals when they're running lab testings.

So here's a question around the heavy metal piece of it, if someone's not good at getting them out, if they've got them stored, right. Would the hair mineral analysis show that or would they need to do some kind of a chelating agent to help them start to excrete them, or will hair show that? That's always been one I've been unsure about.

Well, so there's two parts to it. Your hair grows at about a quarter of an inch to a half an inch per month. So what we like to do is we don't have people pull the hair out. They just take a snip underneath the back of the head. For anybody who's unfamiliar with it, typically in five or so spots. So you're just taking small steps and you're using about. For me, I'm very short here, so I'd have to take a bunch or a little higher. But what we want is about an inch to an inch, a half of here. That shows us the last three months and how this works. It's not magic. They literally burn the hair. Then they look at the ash, the minerals in the ash. It's the same exact way we find out that a lemon is high in potassium. It's because they burn the lemon, they actually look at the minerals. So it's not anything that we haven't used before with biochemistry and nutrition, nutritional biochemistry. So it works in two ways. You will still show high if you're getting current exposure to heavy metals. Let's say, though the metals were in the past and they are locked away in adipose tissue, brain tissue, etc. What you're saying is not untrue if it was in the past. What we typically do at that point is we never treat just the lab. If an individual has all of the symptoms of high heavy metal toxicity, we will still Use a natural based protocol along with sauna, typically infrared sauna, in order to be able to gently over time excrete that. Now the body will never release more typically than it's able to handle. Which is why we don't typically have Herxheimer reactions in natural health, but they do in conventional medicine when using antibiotics all the time. Because it's an unnatural destruction. It's just a greater destruction all at once than the liver or kidneys could possibly handle. So the nice thing is if we do things a little slower, typically over 12 to 16 weeks rather than very quickly, then there's just this natural dumping of toxins as the body's able to.

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And I would assume then since you brought it up and I'm a big sauna fan, we are a two sauna family now. We're not just one, we had to get two. So we have our sunlight and sauna infrared sauna, which we do a couple times at night and then we have a quick heating one that we do so we can jump in in the morning, get it up fast and then jump into the cold plunge. I do not enjoy that one as much however we do it. So I'd assume if you're doing sauna regularly, then if you have had exposure and you're still excreting, it would then show in your hair because you're doing sauna and getting rid of things.

Well, yes, and we almost always still see it. Now, would it be to the level as to what's stored? No, but there's still enough that we're able to see it because it might be releasing a little bit over time. It's not uncommon. I'll tell you one of the largest ones that we do see and I try to share this with practitioners because there might not be a recent exposure. If I help a client lose 30 to 50 pounds in six months, all of the whatever was stored in that adipose tissue is released then back into the bloodstream. So that's typically why I'm using a functional medicine, detox, or I'm using at least nutrients to ramp up phase two. Most people get enough phase one nutrients, but phase two nutrients, the sulfur based amino acids to process it faster. Because there can be a Herxheimer reaction from someone losing a lot of weight all at once. And now because the fat is just a perfect storage place, it's tucked away from the rest of the body. So now when it's released, now all of a sudden you see this huge spike on your hair tissue mineral analysis the next time you run it from mercury. Okay, well did you lose 20, 30 pounds? Okay, that can explain that. And so there's nuances that we always want to keep in mind.

I'm so glad you brought that part out because I feel like that is a kind of forgotten part of fat loss is that when you're losing fat you're freeing up toxins. And you talked about phase one, phase two, I'd love you to walk through that because I don't think most people are familiar with that, but that's always been one of my like, you know, make sure that you're detoxifying. Well, if you're going to focus on losing body fat, especially a lot of body fat, because likely you've stored some stuff in there. So can you kind of enlighten us on that?

Yes. So underneath the right side of your rib cage, one of the largest organs you have called your liver dark red. For all the blood that flows through it typically said that all the blood in your body flows through that liver about every six minutes or so. And what it's doing is getting its first pass at all of the toxins. And it can also be just used up hormone. It's not necessarily things that are necessarily bad, but it needs to be eliminated through the body. And what it does, it goes through a two part process. And the two part process is taking usually what would be considered a fat soluble toxin. And it's breaking that down using a lot of the methylated B vitamins, methylfolate, methylcobalamin. So B9, B12, it's using vitamin B6, it's using selenium, it's using glutamine, glutathione, a bunch of nutrients to break it down to, to what's called an intermediate metabolite. Now the intermediate metabolite is actually a problem. It's a free radical, it's oxidative, it ages the body, creates inflammation. Now if you have enough sulfur based amino acids, which is what the American diet is Short on, that's onions and garlic and broccoli and asparagus and bok choy and cauliflower, all your cruciferous ones. That will give you a lot of the sulfur based amino acids you need to create ultimately glutathione, that comes from N acetylcysteine, taurine, et cetera. So you can take those, of course, as nutritional supplements and it allows you then to move through those processes much faster. Now it's a water soluble, harmless metabolite that can be excreted through your stool because your liver is connected to your digestive system as well your intestines, to just move that right out through the bile. It could be excreted through your kidneys and through your bladder as urine. Or it can be sweat out from your body, partially huffing out through exercise, but not as much. So that's essentially how our body detoxifies. It does that all day long. The rib on detoxification is that you don't need anything. Your body's always detoxifying. To which I would say, yes, it is or you would be dead. But the problem is, whatever it doesn't detoxify, it stores in your brain or in your fat. So, sure, we can look at it however you want. I'd rather get as much of this out of my body as humanly possible.

Yeah, and to be clear, like our detoxification systems were built in a time where we didn't have these 77,000 chemicals. So, you know, we have a detoxification system that I think never thought all these forever chemicals were going to be a part of the picture. So we have that issue too.

Absolutely. There was an amazing study that just came out, just recently released over a couple months ago. So microplastics, we haven't even touched on.

Microplastics, but, oh, let's touch on them then.

Microplastics and nanoplastics. Again, these things are invisible. They are smaller than a human hair. Most people don't know that the tea bags they use are made from plastic microplastics, not cloth, not paper, nothing like that. And so what happens is when they're added to hot water, it begins to dissolve those microplastics then go into your water and you consume it. Now that's just one way. There's all the plastics that we're using, plastic pipes, there's plastic straws, all of these different items. But here's what they found they were doing. And I don't even know why they ran the study, but they were looking at the plaque inside of people's arteries when they were doing a bypass surgery. And they examined it and they found to be called polyethylene, which is a plastic, and polyvinyl chloride. And they found that 58% of the people they examined with this high level of plaque had twice the likelihood of a heart attack or stroke than those without the microplastics in their body. At the lower level, which was, I mean, that's a huge, staggering number. And it puts us at much greater risk from once again consuming these microplastics. Not just because plastic is foreign, so it creates an inflammation response in your body, which can create the plaque buildup in the first place. But also these microplastics under a microscope have jagged edges. And the jagged edges actually hurt the arteries. And when there's scarring there, or actually not a scarring, when there is an inflammation caused from that jagged edge, your body can put plaque, add cholesterol, and it can begin to harden the arteries. And since that is the number one killer, I think we need to be aware, of course of that as well.

Is there a way to get rid of these microplastics once they they're there.

That I haven't seen in terms of detoxification beyond our normal detox processes. But I have seen that infrared sauna will help with microplastics. It'd be interesting to see what it does with the heat. That is something I have not seen yet. But it also helps with mold and it helps with heavy metals. So infrared sauna really is one of those things that is in my top 10 list of health modalities that everyone should try to access four to five times a week.

Yeah, I was just going to ask you for some of those key takeaway recommendations before we do that. Just explain the difference between infrared and just a regular heat sauna.

And they're both great. That's why someone's listening right now, like, I don't have infrared. I have a regular, you know, finished sauna. It's still, it's still fantastic. So what's happening is with. And I have both, I have a barrel sauna in Maine and then I have an infrared sauna in my home. And so we go to Maine quite often. I get to use that. That's outdoors. I love it. It's an old school one. And what that does is it heats the temperature, the ambient, the air inside the sauna itself. And because I set it to 200 degrees, now it's not 200 when I'm actually in there. It is, but I would have to put my head at the top of the sauna when I'm seated, it's somewhere between like 160 and 180 degrees. And so I stay in there for a longer, well, 20 minutes or so to 30 minutes. And it's hot and I'm sweating. And by sweating itself, it helps me push out toxins. But also there's something called heat shock proteins that our body creates in response to basically being cooked inside of a sauna. And the heat shock proteins kill off weak mitochondria, help to rebuild stronger mitochondria, but they also help with what's called DNA refolding. And so as our DNA gets damaged as we get older, it helps to actually refold it properly. And it removes a lot of these things called zombie cells or senescent cells that create oxidative stress and inflammation in the body. So sauna's amazing. The heat is amazing. Now infrared, it actually penetrates the body. You're not just baking, but the heat itself is not typically as hot. You're not setting an infrared sauna to 200. I think I have one of the hottest infrared saunas, and it only goes to 170. Now when I'm in there, maybe it's like 140, 150. But what it enables me to do is stay in longer, because you want to stay in longer for an infrared than regular finish. And it will penetrate based on if it's near, mid or far infrared. Sometimes it's full spectrum. So you get all of them anywhere between 1 millimeters and 5 millimeters past the skin. And this does a better job at pushing heavy metals, mold, and other toxins out of the body.

Yeah. Again, we have both too, which I was like when we were getting this. I go, really? We've become those people. Now we have our recovery room with our two saunas. But it's great in the morning because we'll jump into that one that's, I guess, what you would call the barrel sauna. It's the little seated one. Zip it up. I go before my husband because literally he switches sweat so much in there. I'm like, ew, I'm not going in. And then we go into the cold plunge right afterwards.

Anyway, I was just gonna say it's important to state that I didn't start off, and probably you didn't either, as having all of these things. No, I started off with one air filter. Now we have like five in our home because I've been using them for 15 years. So it's basically just accumulating them and you start to just accumulate more and you can make these investments over time. So you start with whatever the most important thing is and you just kind of keep working down the line. It's like pots and pans. We don't want to be aluminum using aluminum pans. And so you're like, well, all my pans are aluminum. All right, well what's the one that you cook with the most? Let's go with that one first. We changed that one out to be a stainless steel, a copper glass, whatever it is that you like, that's a non toxic one. And we just start working down the line. That's the best takeaway for people, right?

Yes. This was not an overnight purchase. This has been a, a building of routines and literally like, you know, we'll be like, what do we want for Christmas this year? What's for our birthday?

Right.

This is the type of thing that we get. So you mentioned you have your top 10. I'd love a couple more takeaways that people can walk out with. I know they're gonna get your book and you're giving your rain barrel effect book away for free. So we will put that@jjvirgin.com Cabral that's C A B R A L. But give us a couple more things that someone could walk out with and start doing right away to impact their health.

So a couple things. If you have kids, I would buy an EMF meter and the one that I use, the Trifield, but there's a bunch of great ones out there. And what you want is to look for higher EMFs in your home. You might say, I don't really believe in this whole EMFs, et cetera, et cetera. There's a lot of good research around that and unfortunately the effects it has on the DNA in the body, especially with children. So I'm fortunate to also read up and study these things. Before I had kids, they're 9, 11 years old now. But when I had them, I would take my EMF meter and I went around the house and we lived in a small condo. It was easy to kind of go room to room. I found out there was two main things that I was doing unknowingly as I set up my child's nursery with my wife. One, the baby monitor. Baby monitor is one of the highest EMF producing objects in your entire house. It's outlandish. Yes. Higher than. It's a. It's basically as high as I can't Say a microwave, but pretty close. It's, it's unbelievable the EMS that it transmits so that you just move it six feet away and it's, you're. Then it's going to be fine. The other thing is putting a crib or a bed, your own bed as well, with your head facing an electrical outlet or right against electrical outlet. That dirty electricity is right there next to your head. And most of us are sleeping with electrical outlet right behind our head. So that's one thing to fix. If you can't move your bed then you can just get some Faraday tape. You can get something to be able to block that or kill the power to that outlet because you're not using it anyways. So EMF meter is great to use. It's one of those things you go around your house once and then you fix the things that are too high in EMFs that you shouldn't be exposed to all day and then you're good. It was a great investment and that's basically it. So that's one that I'd recommend that a lot of people aren't thinking about. Another one would be we talked about the air filters. We talked about the Clean 15 Dirty Dozen. We talked about the sauna. There's so many saunas out there though you don't need to go with the most extravagant ones that you know, you and I have like the sunlightens and those types, those are amazing. But you can get a lot of the, the zip up ones we use.

One by, that's the one we have, we have a, we have a zip up one along with our sunlighten and those are fantastic.

So it's a great again a great first place to start. The sauna blankets. I'm not against them but they can have higher EMFs so I just want to be more cautious. They're directly touching your body. Typically the zip up ones they have EMFs but it's only in the battery pack in the very back. So unless you're literally touching it, you're typically okay there. Another one I think is, that's going to become more and more popular is red light. It's amazing for the skin, the hair. Skin and nails. Clinically proven to produce more collagen, clinically proven to regrow some here on the top of the head. Great for women with thinning hair, great for men as well. So that's a big one. I also like it for mitochondrial health. The thing that people I think are using red light incorrectly is they're not close enough to it. You really need to have it almost touching your body. So you have to be very close to red light to get the direct effects from it. And I'm talking within six inches.

I'm so glad to hear that because I literally, I have the big joovv panels.

Yes.

And I just walk, I just, I'm right up on it. Like I just get right on it.

So yep, it's important one or you're just not going to be getting the effects that you want. And if you're going to spend the time and you're going to spend the money, we want you to max out those specific benefits. The at home lab testing we touched on find your underlying root causes, don't guess for what nutrients your body needs, I would say is one.

Well.

I don't want to get too in the weeds, like that's the thing because I don't want to overwhelm.

Well, they'll get your book. I mean that's the good news is your book is pretty comprehensive.

That's why it's. And it's sequential. So it's basically like, here's what you may be building up, but don't live in fear, here's how we begin to empty it. And because there's all sorts of things, it's like the insulation you put in your home. And like back even 10 years ago there was VOCs and paints which are gases basically that are given off and they're given off for years. But now it's been outlawed essentially most paints are low VOC or no voc. So we're getting better in general, but only because, you know, people like yourself, myself, we're making a bigger deal about it where people are beginning to demand better for their health and for their families. And that's why I love this industry. And we'll be doing it again for the next 30, 40 years as well.

Yes, we will because we're going to age powerfully. So we're just going to keep at it. But I think that's the other important thing is, you know, you'll read this and just do one thing at a time. Like do one thing, then you do the next thing again. Just like you said, we didn't start out with two saunas, Red light Nicole plunge and a gym. Like I started out with a TRX suspension trainer and an exciser and built from there.

So we just, we all use dumbbells before kettlebells. Right. Like it's like you just start where you're at and you start to add to that home gym and your repertoire. Next thing you know, you're putting the PMF mat on your couch while you're, you know, relaxing, reading a book and you're healthily biohacking your life. And that's a great thing. It's also things to look forward to. That's why I don't even don't get everything at once because you can just say, like yourself. It's like, all right, what are we going to add on in six months from now or 12 months from now to upgrade our health? And so I think it's a fun way to look at it and when.

You look at the most important things, and I think this is important because I always say major in the majors before you major in the minors. And a lot of what you talked about just optimizing your vitamins and minerals, getting your food dialed, moving, sleep, those stress like some of the most important things and the biggest needle movers are the ones that cost the least amount of money and they have the biggest impact. And then you can do the fun stuff.

Totally agree.

Cool. Well, I will put this book again@jjvirgin.com Cabral that is C A B R A L. Your free book, the Rain Barrel Effect. This is a loaded book like lots of great information, so it can be a resource manual for years to come. And I super appreciate you coming on today, Stephen.

Thanks so much for having me. Appreciate it.

Be sure to join me next time.

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