Heavy Metals, Chemicals and Mycotoxins: A Root Cause of Intractable Gut Health Issues

Welcome to The Perfect Stool: Understanding and Healing the Gut Microbiome. This is your host, Lindsey Parsons, and today I'm going to be talking with Wendy Trubo, MD, MBA, who is a functional medicine gynecologist with a thriving practice called Five Journeys, and she's passionate about helping women optimize their health and lives. Through her struggles with mold and metal toxicity, celiac disease, and other health issues, Dr. Trubo has developed a deep sense of compassion and expertise for what her patients are facing. She's the co-author of Dirty Girl: Ditch the Toxins, Look Great, and Feel Freaking Amazing. But before our conversation, if you're a regular listener and you wanna find a way to support the podcast, which I really appreciate, there are a few ways and links to all of them are in the show notes, which are also on my website, HighDesertHealthCoaching.com. So first, if you're in the US and you get supplements regularly and want vetted high-quality ones, you can find them on my Fullscript or Wellivate dispensaries. Or if you're on budget and you just want low-cost supplements, I'm an affiliate of eVitamins and Bulk Supplements as well. And then if you live in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK, or the US of course, anything you buy through my Amazon link or Amazon links on my recommended supplements page will support the show. And finally, you can also become a supporter on Patreon, and I really appreciate people who can support me that way. And if you haven't yet followed or subscribed to the show, be sure to do so. If you wanna get transcripts of the podcast, pop over to my website, HighDesertHealthCoaching.com, and sign up for my newsletter. You'll also get my free e-booklet, Finding Your Root Cause Through Stool and Organic Acids Testing when you sign up. And if you haven't yet done my quiz on which stool test would help you get to your root cause, you can find a link in the show notes and take that. And now I have one piece of listener email that I wanted to share with you. It says, love your podcast. I got into MB, I assume that means microbiome, via FT, I assume that means fecal transplant. So your latest one was great. You were discussing bifido in the most recent podcast. I thought you might be interested in my results with soluble fibers. I raised my total bifido from 0.02% to 8.5% with only soluble fibers. The most striking results were with HMO, and that means human milk oligosaccharides. I know you interviewed Beau from Layer Origin. I wrote a quick review on their website and Beau asked me to make a video. Full disclosure, I paid for my HMO before I did my third stool test, but they gave me two bottles after I submitted the video, all at their suggestion, not my request. All testing was done by Thrive and Ombre with results uploaded to BiomeSite. And as he says, if you've used BiomeSite, you will recognize their charts in the video. He's working on a second video with other Bifto results. I'm also in the process of testing HMO with my wife and daughter. Thanks and best to you in your coaching podcasting. Rich Maurer. So I wanted to include that as well. Now on to the show. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Trobeau.

Thank you so much. Feel free to call me Wendy during the talk. Oh, okay. Sure.

Okay. So thank you for coming on, Wendy.

Great to be here.

So I understand that you started your career focusing on gut health. So I'm wondering what got you into gut health and then what moved you towards a focus on toxins?

I think at the end of this conversation, you're gonna think that I'm completely self-focused, but as a celiac who was undiagnosed for many years, my gut was a hot mess. And so I really naturally gravitated toward that because I wanted to fix my own struggles and then I saw the impact of of how, how much of a difference it made for my patients. And then simultaneously, I fell into the toxins hole because I was full of them and had a sort of second health crisis in my late 40s. So that really then served as the jumping board, springboard for developing all my toxins expertise because again, I was struggling really badly and had to learn about it so I could fix myself so I could take care of people.

Interesting. Now, when you say you were— your gut was a hot mess from celiac, so that other people who might have celiac could potentially hear their symptoms called out and go, oh, maybe that's what I'm going through. What, what might that look like?

Sure. And I think I would broaden it to not just celiac because you can have gut dysfunction and not have the autoimmune component of it. So if you think about a gluten allergy doesn't just develop overnight for most people, it's, it's slow and steady and goes from no reaction to a little reaction, which could be some gas or bloating after eating, or then you maybe get constipated, or maybe you have some diarrhea, or maybe then you get an irritable bowel. So it's this whole progression of symptoms. I kind of had all of the above. I had stinky gas, bloating, constipation some days, and then some days, same day, constipation and diarrhea, or maybe back and forth between them in any given day. And then the celiac part The part where I had the autoimmune issue was where it started to impact outside of my gut. So I had— because of the celiac, it causes this degradation of the lining of the gut so you don't absorb your minerals and nutrients properly. So I had mineral nutrient deficiencies and that was ranging from iron to magnesium to B12 and folate. Often celiacs have osteoporosis because they don't absorb the calcium and the vitamin D. So I kinda had all of the above without the osteoporosis. Mm-hmm. And then head-to-toe issues. So brain fog. I'm not an anxious person, but I had anxiety and difficulty synthesizing information. So executive function was impaired. I had thyroid disorder. I had heart palpitations, asthma, all the gut stuff, fertility challenges, bad periods, heavy periods, the wasting. I was wasting, like I was about 10 pounds lighter than I am now.

So a lack of nutrients will kind of destroy your body all over.

Yes. Yes. I had to tell I was a mess. Okay.

And I imagine with all that, you must have, with lack of B12 and iron, you must have had some fatigue.

Oh yeah. I didn't mention that.

I didn't hear that one.

Sorry. I got out of bed because I was a primary breadwinner and otherwise I would've been quite happy to stay all day in my bed curled up.

Yeah. Well, I have to say, I, I had one client who came just for one appointment and he had not been diagnosed with celiac until he was in his 60s. Oh. So you can imagine the fatigue that builds up over that many years of, of, you know, poor absorption of your nutrients.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay. So tell me what the connection is between toxins and gut health.

Sure. It's so great. It's creepy, but it's awesome. So there's a million levels at which this occurs. So toxins themselves irritate the gut. Just flat out, they irritate the gut. If you do quote-unquote everything right and you just can't get a handle on your gut, it's often because there's this underlying thing called the toxin, which I'm referring to heavy metals, mycotoxins, which are the mold, the— when mold gets in you, it puts out these toxins called mycotoxins or other like gasoline fumes, nail polish, phthalates, BPA, all that stuff that in the other category. So that flat out irritates the gut, A. B, if you're someone who has toxins, it's creating this enormous pull on the body to detox. And in order to detox, you need to have your adrenals, your liver, and your gut in good shape because your liver is responsible for in some way converting the toxins into a water-soluble form that you most often poop out. But if you have dysfunctional poop, so say you're constipated and the poop is just sitting there in your gut and not moving properly.

Yeah.

You'll start to overly act. You have, you have these enzymes called beta-glucuronidase and their job It's throughout the body, but in the gut, what they're doing is taking the, the toxins that your body has already packaged up nicely with a binder, and they're separating it from the binder. Now remember, I told you it's water-soluble to go be pooped out. The minute you separate it from that binder, it becomes fat-soluble. It can't stay in the gut. It gets recycled into your body. It's super toxic. Your body freaks when it sees it. You put it in your fat. So if you have any dysfunctional processes in the gut, And by the way, any gut dysbiosis can have inappropriate secretion, uh, for beta-glucuronidase for some of these nasty bacteria. So it's like circling the drain, right? You know, you have these toxins, it irritates the gut, the gut gets thrown off, and then it doesn't properly function, and then you can't get rid of your toxins. So you just keep going around in circles.

So the beta-glucuronidase, when elevated, is an indication of some improper processes And the toxins are becoming recirculated.

Yep. And by the way, Lindsey, it's not just toxins that you think of like bleach. It's toxins like hormones can be toxins.

Right, right. Of course. And a potential cause of breast cancer is elevated recycling of estrogen. Yes, I know. I have, I have a client in this very situation.

Oh no, no, I'm sorry to hear that.

Post-breast cancer situation, elevated beta-glucuronidase, but we're bringing it down.

We're gonna fix that, right? Like that.

Okay. So are there specific gut conditions that have their root in toxins? Like, does it tend to, to be more one condition than another, or could it be any of the IBDs, IBSs, etc.?

Yeah, it can really be any of them because it's just how your body is responding to that particular stressor. You know, I get this question a lot. Why, why is this my symptom and not that? Or why am I having any symptoms? And I'm like, well, that's just how your body's processing it. So you really can run the gamut from Just bloating, just gassiness, poor digi— you could have poor digestion of stools, or IBD, IBS. I mean, it, it runs the gamut. You can, you can kind of develop anything from, from exposure to toxins.

Mm-hmm. Oh, speaking of which, I'm wondering, do, do regular doctors test beta-glucuronidase or is this only within functional medicine?

No, ma'am. That is a functional medicine test.

Okay. And I was just curious, it was the kind of thing that, that you could get an easy follow-up at the doctor's, but obviously not. Nope. Nope. And so do toxins have an impact on your hormones?

Yeah, so it's— again, it's like circling the drain. So some of these xenoestrogens that we get from plastics, they mimic the estrogen in your body, and they look kind of like estrogen, enough that your body goes down the let's process you like estrogen pathway. And so it all ties together. So if you have these toxins, they look like your estrogens, then you're not processing your estrogens properly. You can also, it looks like, go down the harmful processing of estrogens pathway with these xenoestrogens when they wind up in your gut and they confuse the body. So that's one part to it. But then if your hormones are not properly processing, that can make it more difficult to deal with your toxins. And because a lot of it winds up in the gut, it throws the gut off. It really is this big circle of dysfunction.

So when you have the xenoestrogens in your diet, does that then increase your estrogen, decrease your estrogen? How does that work? Is there?

Yeah. So if you imagine, imagine that there's 100 people in a room and the door is a foot and a half wide. So basically one person can go through that door at any one time. And say now there's a fire in the room and everyone's trying to get out of that door, but still that door's only a foot and a half wide. You have essentially people building up in the room trying to get out. That's like your hormones. So your body can deal only with what it can deal with. But when you start to pile on, make, you know, so there's, there's xenoestrogens in the room, there's estrogen in the room, there's testosterone. There's progesterone. They're all piling on, and essentially you've flooded your body's ability to take care of it. So one can increase the other and vice versa. So they're tied in together.

Okay. And then what are your sources of xenoestrogens typically? I mean, you mentioned the plastics, but like, like how far do you have to go in trying to eliminate that? What's, what's a reasonable, a reasonable way to, to work on that particular problem?

Yeah. I mean, so this, it's not just limited to xenoestrogens. I think The question is, how can we systematically decrease our exposure to things that really increase the risk of making us quite sick?

Right.

That's kind of right. So when you take it from this big picture, look, you go, okay, really easy, low-hanging fruit for a lot of people is how do you level up on your food? Start with food. It's foundational. You do it every day, multiple times a day. So aim for food that's minimally processed, organic, if possible, local. And in season, that, that's sort of the basis. And then with that goes your drink. So don't drink anything from a plastic bottle because that's a source of the xenoestrogens. Don't drink alcohol because alcohol is straight up a toxin. And so that makes it harder for your liver to deal with the other stuff it's being presented with because it's busy dealing with a more important toxin, essentially. You know, alcohol will directly kill you if you don't deal with it. So your body knows we have to deal with this and get rid of it. So that's the easiest way. And then all of us through our lives have exposure to hundreds of chemicals throughout the day. So what I say to people is pick the thing you're running out of. I don't care what that is, whatever you're running out of, be that house cleaner, weed killer, makeup, deodorant, hair products, it doesn't matter. That's an ideal moment to go to either Think Dirty or ewg.org and look to see what's a better option here. What's something where I can get 3 steps better or 10 steps better depending on how bad it is, right? Maybe it's really bad and you want to go a lot, or maybe it's not so bad and you go, you know what, this isn't a priority right now.

Yeah.

So, but to systematically do that throughout your life as you start to run out of things.

Okay. And so, well, we'll get back to, to the toxins and getting rid of them in a, in a minute, but I wanted to ask first, like, what is the best and most economical way to test for the various toxins?

Sure. So I'm not clear that I can say it's necessarily economical straight up. The testing is a little bit pricey. So we use urine testing. You can test in the blood, but for metals, that's only indicating if you had an acute exposure. You know, like the kids in Flint, Michigan, they have acute exposure, their lead levels are elevated, but for the rest of us, we're not getting acute exposures. So blood's not that accurate. For that reason. We use urine and the metals testing is not that expensive to test for. It's, well, the system we use, it's $69 for the test. You do 2 of them because you always do a baseline and then you do a provoked test and the provoking agents cost like, I don't know, $35. So it's not that expensive.

And what do you provoke with?

We provoke with DMSA. Okay. And that's pretty cheap to test because there's so many prongs to treating metals. The treatment's more expensive, but the testing's cheap. And then We usually do a urine test also for the mycotoxins, the other environmental toxins, and the pesticides and glyphosate. You can break those up or you can do them all together. So if you do them all together, it's $500, just under $600, $560 basically, which is not cheap. You can break them up, so it's like $300, $200, and $100. You can do them piecemeal, but you are going to need to see a functional medicine provider because your conventional doctor doesn't have these tools in the office, right? It's like going to the mechanic and asking for a haircut, right? It's just the wrong, wrong access.

So the $69 test, is that, is that urine for metals?

Yeah, that's urine for metals. It's a cheap test.

Okay, what about hair testing?

I'm not a huge fan of hair testing personally because hair testing's showing what your body's basically voluntarily getting rid of, and this is for metals, not, uh, for mycotoxins. You're not going to see it there. For metals, it's, it's really only looking at what are you kind of voluntarily excreting. It's not looking at what's stored because 95% of your lead in particular is stored in your bones. You're not gonna see that in your hair. You know, it's, it's like a fraction of what, of what's really present.

I know most of my listeners are struggling with gut health issues or else you wouldn't be listening to a podcast that is this inside baseball on gut health. So I just wanted to let you know that in addition to being a podcaster, I work one-on-one with clients around gut health issues, like IBS, IBD, SIBO, SIFO, or invasive candidiasis, constipation, diarrhea, soft stool, food sensitivities, and other health issues like autoimmune diseases, skin issues, chronic fatigue, and fibromyalgia. I help clients locate the least expensive lab tests that they can order themselves online to determine the root cause of their issues, then educate them on protocols used by practitioners to address those issues. The first step in seeing if health coaching might be right for you is setting up a free 30-minute breakthrough session with me. And you can tell me what you've been going through, and I'll let you know if it sounds like something I think I can help with based on what you've already tried. So you can find a link to set up a free session in the show notes. But it would be in the urine?

Yes. Well, when you provoke it, right?

Okay. So you take the DMSA, that prompts your body to start releasing toxins, and then you see? Yep.

Okay.

Got it. How, how far apart or how long will you treat with DMSA before you do a provoke test? We—

it's the same day. What we do is we say to people, we need a baseline. Get up and pee. That's the test. That's the first $69 test. And then as soon as you've emptied your bladder, you're starting with a clean slate. So take your DMSA and we, we collect for 6 hours. For 6 hours, collect that information, and then at the end of 6 hours, empty your bladder. So you complete the test at 6 hours and that's what we're comparing against. You know, we treat people if they have high levels. We treat over 8, which is just the reference range for that lab. Say someone comes in and, for example, they have no hair. Anywhere on their body. We're gonna have a lot strick— we're, I'm sure we're gonna see high levels, but say we didn't, say their detox is so shut down you don't see it, we're gonna treat them anyway and keep monitoring them.

Okay. So no hair would be a sign of toxins?

Yes.

Okay. And so how much DMSA will you give them then?

It depends on how big you are and how old you are. So I don't treat kids, so I won't speak to the dosing for that. For our adults, as long as they're a normal weight, we're gonna give them 1,500 milligrams, and we have that compounded by a pharmacy.

Okay. So you mentioned that there's the metals, then the toxins, and then there's also all the pesticides, right? Yep. Are these, are these Great Plains tests?

Yes, this is who we use.

Yeah. Okay. And then other, is that a whole separate one?

Well, it's on the same Great Plains test, but that's all the, the stuff that we're exposed to throughout our life. So the MTBE, which is the gasoline fumes, the styrene plastics, asparagine, the burnt foods, tobacco smoke, all of the chemicals in all of these things, makeup, nail polish, hair products. All of these things are captured in this test, and so it's looking at all of them. And really, I typically look for a level of 75 percentile or above, at or around the 75th percentile. I'm like, hey, we gotta treat this.

Got it. Yeah. Okay. And what kind of gut conditions might prompt you to think that there could be a toxin issue?

So we do a ton of toxins work in our practice because we get a lot of people who say, okay, I eat right, I've done a stool test, I've fixed my dysbiosis, I fixed my SIBO, I don't eat gluten, do everything right, and I'm still not right. You know, I have this irritable bowel or bloating, gas, diarrhea, any of the above, right? So if you do everything right and you're still having symptoms, that deserves a toxins look, because what else is it? Unless you're so super stressed that your body can't process, it's a toxins issue.

And so talking about getting down to the level of specific toxins, like, okay, what are the most common sources, say, of lead?

This is great. So lead, the most common sources are pipes, living in a house built before 1978 because almost all of them had lead in the paint. And now everyone says to me, "Dr. T, I'm not licking the walls." I'm like, "Dude, I know. I know you're not licking the walls. However, as that house settles down, you're getting exposed to all of the lead dust and you absorb it in your skin, you breathe it, and you touch it, you eat it. So you're absorbing it in various ways." And the most likely causes are living in homes built before 1978 or lead pipes. However, there's like lots more causes. And one of the other really subtle ones is being born to someone who had lead in their system who also nursed you because being— it will cross the placenta and it does come out in breast milk. My poor kids, right? I got 4 kids. I nursed them all. And I was like, nursing is a detox event for the mother.

Yeah.

And a tox-up event for the kids.

That's a perfect example of this. I have a friend who got really sick at a workplace she was at. I'm not sure what ultimately contributed to it, but during her pregnancy felt healthy, and then her son ended up with all these food sensitivities and allergies. And then as soon as he was out, you know, then she was really sick again. Yeah. I just think she was just transferring all those toxins to the baby that whole time.

We're so generous to our children.

Yeah, exactly. Okay. How about aluminum? What are sources of aluminum?

Aluminum is usually just aluminum foil and that's actually one I look at less. I usually focus on lead, mercury, cadmium, thallium, and arsenic.

Oh, okay.

Those are the 5, the big 5.

Okay.

Mercury, it's so funny, Lindsey Parsons. So mercury is fish and fillings. The fillings are the mercury amalgam silver fillings and even having one in you is enough to create problems for some people and then the heavy mercury fish. So what's horrifying is that as wildfires occur, say in California, they release all of the stored mercury in the forests, and that mercury gets into the water system, which gets converted to methylmercury, which the fish eat, hangs out in their bodies. They can't excrete it any better than we can, and then we eat the fish. So one serving of, of a heavy metal fish such as mahi-mahi, tuna, swordfish, tilefish, Chilean sea bass, one serving theoretically it has enough for like a month's supply of mercury. But if you're someone like me who's not the best detoxer, I say to my patients, you should not be eating that, period. It's not— it's not like, oh, once a week. It's like, no, we're not going to eat that.

I think I literally had just Chilean sea bass last night. I never thought of that as one that had—

I know, right? All the super yummy fish are high in mercury. I think—

I think that was what I had last night.

Oh, can I tell you a story?

Yeah.

So we have a patient in our practice who has had no hair when she came to our practice, and she was just told by, you know, of course people see 20 doctors if you have no hair, you keep going to doctors. So she came to us and she'd seen 10 doctors and all of them had said to her, oh, you just have autoimmune alopecia, nothing to do, sorry. So she came to us and my— she saw my husband first. I stole her from him.

He—

she saw my husband and he looked at her and he said, you have heavy metals. And she had really high levels of lead. So this was about just under 2 years ago, just as the pandemic was starting, she, she came in to us. She has been successively working on her hair, and last year her hair started to grow back. And I saw her 2 weeks ago in my practice, and she said to me, I feel like I've plateaued. Now, by the way, what I will say is she has about 2 inches of hair growth all over her hair, and she now has to go back to waxing and shaving and plucking because she's grown hair in all the places women try to get rid of it. But I was like, "It's a mixed bag, buddy. No hair on your head, but you didn't have to wax, but now it's the reverse." So, she's growing hair on her head, but she said, "I feel like I plateaued." And I said, "So, what's going on? Let's drill into it." Well, she was down at a remote job and as a treat, 1 to 2 times a week, she was eating sushi. And I said, "Okay. Well, what kind of sushi are you eating? What are you having? Are you having salmon? What are you having?" She said, "Oh, I'm having tuna." I was like, Oh no, like we just got all this metal out of you. You can't do that. You don't have good detox. So I said to her, that's it. Like, I hope you enjoyed your last meal because no more of that. It's too much.

Yeah. And so do you think you can get away with the, the Safe Catch tuna though, that's in cans?

Yeah. As long as they're testing for mercury, there's a number of brands that will test for mercury in canned tuna. So yeah, that's reasonable.

I think the Vital Choice and Safe Catch are two that I know. Okay. So yeah, no, I had my last mercury fillings removed and I was glad I went to the dentist I went to, although it cost me a pretty penny. I had it replaced with gold. So I've now got two gold fillings and I feel very like I'm gonna get my bling in the mouth.

Given the price of gold, you're kind of like, you're like a kidnapping risk.

I know, seriously, they were each like $1,000. But I mean, you know, given the number of years I have left to live and, you know, the composites are not supposed to last that long. Right. I had to make my choice. But so if somebody is getting their mercury fillings removed, I know you should go see the biological dentist and all that, but say you can't afford that, you can't do that, what could you ask your regular dentist to do to just keep you safer? Or what can you do yourself?

Let's look at things you can do yourself because I can't really speak for whether your dentist is gonna say yes or no, but I can make some recommendations. So things you can do yourself: 1, don't eat any high mercury fish, period.

Yeah.

Okay, particularly as you're approaching this. 2, On the days preceding the metal, the mercury, I would take activated charcoal, especially the day of. Yeah. Take, you know, a couple of tabs of activated charcoal in the morning, and then when you get home, take a couple of tabs of activated charcoal. And ideally fast so that you're not— you're not bothering your body with it has to digest food. You're just focusing on binding the metals because charcoal will bind to your food too, so don't take it with your food. So take the charcoal, eat lightly, increase glutathione for a couple of days before and a couple— and at least a couple of weeks afterwards.

By taking glutathione?

Correct. Yeah.

Right. Like liposomal? Yeah.

It's the best— liposomal. The best one is by Quicksilver, which is a liposomal form. But you can take— we have another one, it's called Safe Cell Glutathione. It's a liposomal in a gel, which is easier for people who don't wanna refrigerate it or can't remember to take it.

Yeah. That's, that's a Tesseract product, isn't it? Yep, yep, yep.

So that's a great product. And then you can also do things like— I mean, simple things like cilantro and parsley. Yeah, help. And chlorella. All these things are super helpful. So I would say load up on those for the days preceding and the days after and the day of, so that you give your body every opportunity to bind those metals. And by the way, don't drink any alcohol because your liver can't deal with metals and alcohol.

Yeah.

It's too much. Do all those things and then if you can find a functional medicine doctor who will give you metal binding IVs, a couple of weeks afterwards you can get some IVs to bind up those metals so that you're not just letting them float around and go back into your— into your bones and your fat. So that's for you to do. Okay. And manage your stress because if you're stressed, you're not gonna detox anyway. A lot of layers, right?

Yeah.

That's just for you. Then what you say to your doctor is, "Hey, can you give me oxygen while you're doing this?" Because oxygen can help. I'm not sure of the mechanism. It either binds to the metals or it prevents you from absorbing metals, but oxygen helps.

A.

B, can you put a dam on the tooth you're working on so that nothing falls down my throat? You know how they work and those little chips and you swallow them? You want them to not fall down your throat. So say, "Could you put a dam around the tooth that you're working on?" Most dentists, if they're not comfortable with this, are going to be like, no thank you. And by the way, you can find another dentist.

Yeah. No, my dentist, he was not like trained as a biological dentist, but it's a very simple piece of plastic that you just surround the tooth with and it covers the rest of the mouth. And he put that on. He had like a vacuum cleaner under my mouth sucking the air. I mean, very low tech, but like it did the job.

Yeah, low tech. And make sure they irrigate a lot, give you oxygen. And keep it from— keep you from swallowing it. So it's not rocket science, right? I just can't vouch for whether they're going to say yes to doing that.

Right.

And then the other part to that is if you have a mouthful of fillings, do not get them all done in a week period. You're going to be really sick.

Yeah. Yeah. So how many at once reasonably?

Not more than 2.

Yeah.

Unless they're tiny, you could do 3.

Okay.

But I was really reluctant to get my mercury fillings out because I said to her, my biologic dentist, I said, they've been here for over 40 years. What difference are they making, really? And she said to me, a lot. It's 50% mercury by weight. A, it never stops off-gassing. B, C, just so you know, when we take that out of you, we can't throw it in the trash. It's considered toxic hazard. We can't— we have to put it in special trash. It's so toxic. She said, so that's in you. And I was like, oh, okay, persuaded. Let's get it out.

Yeah.

So So I got them taken out, but I was pretty resistant. But you don't wanna do more than 2 and you wanna give yourself 2 weeks between every 2 at least so that— and if you have a reaction, don't go back to get more done if you're still reacting. Right? Don't pile it on.

Keep taking the activated charcoal or—

Yes.

Yeah.

And glutathione. It's really weird. Metals deplete your glutathione.

Okay.

And you need glutathione to get rid of your metals. So another case in which you're circling the drain. If you have metals constantly depleting your glutathione.

Okay.

And now that I see that, I just realized I didn't take it this morning before I left the house.

How aggravating. And in this case, would, would NAC also do the job as a replacement for the glutathione?

Yeah. So NAC and alpha-lipoic acid are precursors for glutathione. So they help your body make the glutathione. So you can give your body these things and they can help get you where you need to be for the substances your body needs to get rid of the metals.

Okay. So we talked about mercury. Okay. How about arsenic?

Yeah, rice. You know, no good deed goes unpunished. So you eat brown rice because you're like, "Oh, I gotta get the fiber," except the hull seems to have more arsenic in it. So white rice has— organic jasmine white rice has less. It's unfortunate, but you have to pick your battles. If you're someone who's really dealing with blood sugar issues and cardiovascular things, and when you eat rice, you're going to want to do the brown rice, but be aware that you, you want to monitor your arsenic. And then otherwise, I would go for white rice and go for smaller portions so that you don't have a spike in your blood sugar, but then you don't get the arsenic.

My parents, I had them both do an ion profile, and both of them came up with high levels of arsenic. They barely ever eat rice.

I'll have to look up other sources. I mean, it's not the only source, but rice is like the far and away the biggest source.

I mean, it can come from, from other grains, I think, too.

You know, I don't know the answer to that. I always think about glyphosate from other grains. Yeah.

Yeah.

So I'll have to look at that. I'm not sure.

Okay. Fair enough. How about cadmium?

Cadmium is West Coast oysters, tobacco, and I think there's a couple more that I'm totally blanking on, but really the big ones are West Coast oysters and tobacco smoke.

Okay. So don't get your oysters from the West Coast.

No, ma'am.

Get them from somewhere else or— Avoid them altogether.

Correct. Yeah.

Get them from somewhere else. Okay. And how about chromium?

Thallium. Thallium is the next one I focus on. And that's— this is back to the no good deed goes unpunished. So you, you're doing a good job. You're eating organic. A lot of it comes from California and you're happy because it's in the United States. You're buying, you're buying American. However, California soil is contaminated with thallium. The organic vegetables happen to be particularly high. So if you're someone who eats a lot of green leafy vegetables from California, you're at risk for getting high levels of thallium. Thallium is, uh, can cause hair loss in high doses and maybe even constant doses, but it's sort of, I always say to people, let's work on improving your detox because I would vote that it's better for you to eat organic, we'll deal with the thallium rather than eat non-organic and then we have all these pesticides which have even other consequences.

Right.

You have to pick your poison here, right?

Right. Well, if you get your vegetables locally and you don't live in California, then you're good. You're good, right? Because that's the local part.

Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. Or grow them yourself.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay.

Let's talk about mycotoxins too.

Oh yeah. Let's talk about mycotoxins.

There's a lot of layers to this. Water-damaged buildings are probably the biggest source for people of mycotoxin exposure. And then food is another source. The foods that are the biggest ones. And by the way, I had a patient whose car was moldy kind of randomly. When, when I diagnosed her, she said, my car is moldy. I was like, really? She goes, yeah. And she got— and she had her car tested when she had her house tested, and yeah, it was moldy, so she sold it. So anyway, foods that can increase your mycotoxin burden— coffee is a big culprit, and grains are a culprit because, you know, they sit in these big sills and silos and they, they're wet. And so one way that they dry them out is with glyphosate. And glyphosate was originally developed as an antibiotic and then was converted into agricultural use. And back in 2014, I don't have stats beyond 2014, couldn't find them, but in 2014 there were over 250 million pounds used in the United States, which is just ridiculous.

This is banned in Europe, isn't it?

You know, I don't know the answer to that actually.

I'm gonna Google that while Keep, keep talking and I'll Google it while you're doing it.

So it's a probable carcinogen according to the World Health Organization. And so I wouldn't, it wouldn't surprise me if it was banned in the EU, 'cause they actually do a lot better job at preventing harmful things. So only about 500 different items have been specifically tested for whether they're toxic. And then there's another 150,000 things that haven't been tested specifically. So now we rely on just, studies. So it's pretty horrifying because they don't have to prove that it's not harmful, they have to prove that it's not directly harmful in large doses. It's a little bit of a nuance. So, but the combined cumulative effect of lots of toxins in small amounts can be just as bad as one major exposure. So back to the, the mycotoxins, a lot of them are ochratoxin, which come from grains that are wet.

Okay.

Did you find it?

I did actually find the answer, yes. So it's currently approved for use in the European Union until December 15th, 2022, but Austria already banned it in July 2019, and Germany is going to start phasing it out by 2023. That's what I got in my quick search.

Love it.

Yeah.

I mean, it's pretty nasty. It disrupts the mi— back to gut health, it disrupts the microbiome, back to because it was developed as an antibiotic, it disrupts the microbiome, and it's, it is, uh, directly, I mean, the, the World Health Organization is classified as a probable carcinogen because there's a number of cancers that are associated with it, most of which are lymphocytic, like non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Lymphoma, things like that. It's again, like, it's just sort of horrifying. So I want the listeners to think, okay, I have control over this, right? Because you can take control of the narrative and sometimes you have to get that horrified in order to make a change. But when you think about when you're eating the grains, even organic grains are sometimes contaminated with glyphosate because of the drift that occurs. It's sprayed on these massive farms and then the wind carries it to adjacent farms, which happen to be organic. And there you go, your organic greens are now contaminated, as are like all of the garbanzo beans in the United States are contaminated.

Oh no.

With, with glyphosate. I know.

Even the organic one?

Yep. But eat the hummus. Eat the hummus. It's better than not eating it, right? It's like good for you. This is where you balance it.

Okay, so I know there's people out there who are just like, well, I don't eat organic and I'm okay. Correct this line of thinking.

Yeah, I think you have to look at that moment in time. So a lot of disease is from the cumulative effect of abuse, and I don't mean— meaning over the course of years you get exposed to different things. I didn't have celiac when I was 15, but I had certainly gluten sensitivity. I just didn't know it. But 20 years later, I had celiac. So it's really about at what point do you want to intervene in the disease process. So there are certainly people, I call them strong like bull. Nothing impacts them, right? They can like take a beating and they don't— nothing fazes them. They can eat anything, stay up all night, drink all night, and the next day they're chipper. I'm not like them, but there are some people like that.

Cool.

If you're a bull, cool. And it's going to take a lot to bring you to your knees. The rest of us are generally not strong like bull. We're more like a mouse. And so we can be brought to our knees a little bit faster than the bulls. And basically, everyone's eventually going to break down with things because when you look into, okay, are you in optimal health, you can start to see the dysfunction at a cellular level before you see it at an organ level. So you'll see, you'll, you know, when I was 15, I had iron deficiency and B12 deficiency that didn't respond to supplementation. By the time I was 35, I had wasting, right? So it was a 20-year process. I'm sure I had celiac earlier than 35. I just wasn't tested.

Yeah.

Nobody knew. So when you talk to these people who say, "I have nothing wrong," well, I'm not so sure about that. We just have— maybe you just don't know about what you have wrong.

Yeah.

Have you tested? And the other part of it is humans are very quick to explain things away, right? So when I hit the skids with all my toxins exposure stuff, I was like, "Well, 48, perimenopause is terrible." Hate it. This is the worst, right? Except it wasn't perimenopause. It was a toxins exposure. But in the absence of knowledge, you might assume or chalk it up to something else. Oh, that's how my family is. Everyone in my family has insulin resistance or diabetes, or everyone in my family can't lose that 10 pounds, or everyone in my family goes bald, whatever that is, right? We're very quick to say that's just how my genes are, as opposed to, oh, something's— something's turning on those genes.

So you piqued my curiosity by mentioning perimenopause.

That's our next book.

So tell me what made you think that, or what symptoms you think were associated with toxins that went away after you detoxed. Right.

So I was losing hair at a very rapid clip, and you can lose your hair in perimenopause. I gained almost 10 pounds, and that— you can have weight shifts in perimenopause. And I got a rash, which wasn't really perimenopause, but I was like, I don't know what else it is. So All right. I'm having a terrible, terrible perimenopause.

Okay.

So, yeah, it was— it was the weight and the hair loss.

And what toxins were you particularly high in and where were they coming from in your life?

Yeah, well, sit down, okay? Because it's a long list. So I had lead. I was born in 1970, so I grew up in homes that were built with lead paint. We did construction on homes that had lead paint. We had lead pipes when I was a child, you know, so, okay, those exposures. I had mercury from both fish and fillings. I had 4 strains of mycotoxins. I had 7 or 8 different environmental things such as nail polish toxins, gasoline fumes, plastic styrenes. I had a whole bunch of those in me. And that was really the impetus for writing the book because I got all these tests and I mean, Lindsey, for the last 16 years I've eaten gluten-free. I don't eat gluten substitutes, so I'm eating like not processed food, no sugar. I don't drink alcohol. Like, I'm really boring on paper and I don't do anything fun. I exercise, I get enough sleep, blah, blah, blah.

I'm sure you do something fun.

Well, but like, I'm not fun. People aren't like, oh, let's go to her house and have like an ice cream sundae. Nope, I'm not that person. So there's nothing fun in my diet, basically. And yet I had all these toxins. And so we— that was the impetus for the book. When I got all this data, I said to my husband, I am such a dirty girl. And then I went, oh, that's the book we need to write, because don't do what I did, right? Let's, let's provide a roadmap so you can avert getting to where I got to, where I was— could not lose weight, hair was falling out. Brain fog, fatigue, rash on my face, like all these problems. It's preventable.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So— Oh, go ahead.

And something else I forgot to tell you, because this is about poop, right? I used to be the canary in the coal mine for gluten. So if we went out to eat and it had any, any, any trace of gluten, I was sick. The worst exposure I got, I was sick for 3 months. Wow. And it was awful with brain fog, emotional problems, like, you know, anxiety and really being sensitive. You know, you look at me funny, I start crying. And then gut stuff, like super sensitive diarrhea all the time, no matter what. And it was awful. And what was really amazing was when I started to treat the mycotoxins in particular, I only noticed this in retrospect because you only notice when you don't have a problem when you have a problem, I guess. So I used to have 6 to 12 weeks of problems with a gluten exposure, and then I noticed it was like 4 weeks, and then I noticed it was 10 days, and then I noticed it was 24 hours, and then I noticed it was just overnight. Being someone who couldn't eat at a restaurant at all, converting that to someone who can now, you know, I, I'm not indiscriminate, but going to restaurants that are careful, I can eat out. And that has transformed my life because my gut is no longer this raging torrent of reaction. It's a lot quieter.

Wow.

Just an unexpected benefit. But that goes back to that. These are all very irritating to the gut. And when you start to pull them off, the gut can relax.

Right. So basically your detox systems can handle the gluten because it's not all preoccupied with everything else.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Mycotoxins. If somebody, they have no obvious exposure to them in their life, so they, they've never lived in a moldy house that they know of. They're not having extreme reactions. They're not losing hair. They're not, you know, that kind of stuff. Is it worth, still worth testing?

Yes and no. So this depends on what your philosophy is. So if your philosophy is I feel fine, I'm gonna wait for a problem to develop and then I'll deal with it, then no, you should not test, right? Because, because there's no problem that you're treating. If, if you take a step back and you're someone who says, I really want to have optimal health, I understand that these mycotoxins are associated with degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, dementia, Parkinson's, cancers, I understand that these are a risk factor and I want to pull off any risk factors that I have or I'm having symptoms, then yes, I would test. Okay. But it depends on your philosophy. It's very upsetting for people when their philosophy is, I'm gonna wait till it gets worse, and you try to make them change. They're not ready.

Yeah.

Because there's, there's not a problem that they can react to.

Okay. So in terms of treating each of these and detoxing, is it specific for each toxin how you detox, or is it more general?

It's both. So then, so there's basically 3 buckets. So So the metals fall into one treatment category and that includes improving the liver's ability to remove the toxins, binding to them specifically, and then replacing the minerals and nutrients that you pull out when you bind the toxins.

Mm-hmm.

So that's, that's the metals. The mycotoxins are specific binders based on what strain you have. So that's really targeted therapy.

Oh, okay.

And then, right, it's based on, you know, you have to test 'cause actually there, there is a fiber Propylamine and fiber will bind to all the mycotoxins, but basically you do wanna know what you're treating to know when you're done even.

Mm-hmm.

And then the environmental toxins and pesticides almost universally trickle down into responding to a smaller group of things that include glutathione, NAC, sauna, B12, niacin, and things that improve phase 2. So it's a lot smaller, but again, you wanna know like, what are you treating?

Okay.

But it would never harm you if you, took glutathione, NAC, B12, cilantro, parsley, and did a sauna every day. That would not harm you.

Right. And can you just explain phase 2 detoxification a little bit?

Yes, it's horrifying. I remember when I learned it in context of hormones. Your liver is responsible for doing the majority of work to get rid of anything that your body doesn't need or is harming it. So that largely falls into toxins and hormones, although alcohol too, or medications. I guess I could keep going on. So your liver responsible for doing lots of work.

Work.

In phase 1, you take this substance and you convert it into what's called a toxic intermediary. So it's a middle ground substance that's even more toxic than what it started out as. Don't ask me why. It doesn't make any sense to me, but that's what your body does. And then in phase 2, there are 6 different detox pathways you can go down. You can, you can bind it to a methyl group. You can put it on a glucuronic group. You can put it on a sulfur group. There's lots of things you do to it, but you basically bind it, make it water-soluble, and poop or pee it out. Phase 1 is generally pretty fast, especially for women. Phase 2 is generally slower. So your body, it's really good at making these toxic intermediates, and then it's like, oh crap, wait, now what do I do with it? So it puts it in your storage units, which is your bones and your fat. And it hangs out of there— out there until phase 2 is ready to actually pull it out and deal with it and excrete it. And this is why when your gut has overactive beta-glucuronidase and you're, you're recycling these toxic hormones, this is why it's so harmful. Because not only do you now need to deal with what you were already dealing with, but now you've just piled on more and your body can't deal with the volume.

Is it better then to support phase 2 detoxification before doing anything with Phase 1?

You wanna do them together.

Okay.

And, and there's, there's a lot of overlap actually.

And Phase 1 supports are things like?

Uh, minerals, nutrients, curcumin, ginger. It's funny, I'm less versed in Phase 1 'cause I'm like, ah, everyone's fine with Phase 1, right?

Oh, okay. So generally people have that under wraps. It's the Phase 2 they need help with?

Yeah, they're generally better. And if they need help, I'm like, go to my nutritionist. She'll take care of you.

Okay. Got it.

But then Phase 2, it's actually very hard for vegans to do effective Phase 2 because a lot of support for Phase 2 comes from flesh— meat, chicken, pulled, other poultry, fish, eggs, dairy. So it's harder for vegans. It's not impossible, but it's harder. Interesting.

So they might be more inclined to have a buildup of toxins.

Yeah, counterintuitively, because they eat much healthier, but right. Yes.

Great. Well, so tell me about, tell me about your book.

It's a fun read. Reading our book is like talking to me. So it's, it's pretty much like a conversation. Well, conversational and it's all about how are the ways that we're getting exposed to various toxins and what are the things that we can do to control the narrative. Before you ever get to a functional medicine provider, there's so many things that you can do to take control of your health. How you eat, how you live, how you drink, how you stress, how you exercise, the supplements you're taking, all of these play a role and you, you really can alter it. There's a lot of things people can do on their own and so we go through that in the book and we talk about, well, what would make you even think that maybe you have toxins? Toxins because some people don't even have the, I guess, awareness that, "Oh, this is a toxins issue." Yeah.

So the, so the things that should make them suspicious that it's toxins we've talked about like hair falling out, weight gain. Yeah. Any other sort of big red flags?

Unremitting fatigue, really bad, really, really pronounced issues with any hormone stuff, you know, really bad periods.

Mm-hmm.

Fertility challenges. Any kind of cardiovascular disease or metabolic disease. So high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, prediabetes, all those indicate toxins. Bad cholesterol profile, those indicate toxins. Interesting.

And even if you have a genetic predisposition to having high cholesterol?

Yep, because your genetics are only one facet of the conversation. And so your genetics aren't your aren't your determinant for life. They just make you more likely. But when you pile on the toxins, there are— it makes it 10 times harder to deal with, right?

So tell me, I understand you have a free gift for my listeners.

I do. I mean, after listening to this podcast, you may be saying to yourself, okay, I really need to clean up all the products around me, at least so I can stop being exposed. Because this was my passion play, and had all these problems, we spent hours looking for products, and then we were like, well, we'll put it together in a guide so that people don't have to do as many hours of research as we did, because we did like— I don't even know, I stopped counting actually. So it's a— it's the Non-Toxic Guide to Healthy Living. It's meant to really go with the book, but you can also use it alone, and that's on our website at 5journeys.com/promo. P-R-O-M-O.

Okay, great. I will link to that in the show notes. And you all the other places that you're— your different social media and such. Yep.

And we also have a podcast. It's the Five Journeys Podcast, so people can also find us there.

Wonderful.

Because there's probably a lot of overlap between us, and people who like you will probably like me and lots of other people. So we do that too. It's somewhat fledgling, but yeah. And then, yeah, Instagram, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn is all Wendy Trubo, MD.

Great. Well, this was really informative and interesting, and I think will be useful to a lot of people who've kind of gotten to the stage stuck place after trying to fix the gut stuff and are not getting anywhere.

Well, yeah, definitely. It's definitely helpful for people.

Yeah, awesome. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with us.

My pleasure, Lindsey. Thanks for having me here.

That was an amazing conversation and super useful information. So if you'd like to connect with me online, you can follow my High Desert Health Facebook page, join my Gut Healing Facebook group, or join my newsletter list at highdeserthealthcoaching.com, as well as as Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. Links for those are in the show notes. Thanks for joining me today, and here's wishing you all the perfect stool.