In this video Dr. Andersen (Dr. A) addresses the common question of whether clean eating is worthwhile, acknowledging that a perfectly toxin‑free lifestyle is impossible but arguing that incremental improvements can meaningfully reduce health risks. He frames clean eating around two pillars: (1) minimizing exposure to environmental toxins and (2) optimizing macro‑ and micronutrient intake. Dr. A outlines concrete, low‑cost strategies for each pillar: improving air quality (e.g., bedroom filtration), using water filtration (whole‑house, reverse osmosis, or simple pitcher filters), selecting organic produce based on the Environmental Working Group’s Dirty Dozen and Clean 15 lists, and scrutinizing supplements and other substances for contaminants. He emphasizes a rational, incremental approach—focus on the biggest toxin sources first, use reputable resources, and tailor choices to personal health goals such as blood‑sugar control. The video concludes with a call to action for viewers to adopt small, sustainable changes rather than striving for perfection.
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If you try and do this and be perfect, yeah, it's probably pointless because you can never be perfect. There is no way in the world that you can have a totally non-toxic life or diet or anything else. But as some wise person once told me, that doesn't mean that you have to add to it. Hey, it's Dr. A. Why should I even try to clean up my diet? So this comes from a question, a super common question. It says, my doctor said clean eating is not only a waste of time, but also just too hard to do. Well, this is something that we hear a lot, and there's a lot of complexity to it. I want to break this down in this video. But first, I'm Dr. Andersen. I'm Dr. A, and I answer your questions. I've been a physician, educator, researcher, writer, etc., on medicine for 3 decades. And so I use that background to help with some of these questions that get sent in. With regard to the why, Obviously, there are some basic things that I think are important in regard to why would you want to clean up your diet, what do you want to target, etc. One of the things is that there are kind of 2 prongs to this. One is toxins, and so clean eating can have to do with toxins and less toxins, because toxins equal illness. But the other thing is that there— and we've had videos on this before, macro versus micronutrients. So macronutrients, what you see on your plate, breaks down in your digestion to micronutrients to help you fuel your body and run all the processes in your body. And macro and micronutrition can either improve or decrease your overall health. So those are the 2 big reasons. To the point of whoever's doctor it is that said this, that it's, you know, kind of pointless to try and work on it. If you try and do this and be perfect, Yeah, it's probably pointless because you can never be perfect. There is no way in the world that you can have a totally non-toxic life or diet or anything else. But as some wise person once told me, that doesn't mean that you have to add to it. Yes, we all are exposed to toxins. Yes, there's a whole bunch of things that go on that are toxic. We have foods that can be better and worse choices. Beyond that, We do have to take some onus to clean up our diet. So in this one, we're not going to, you know, you can do days and days and days on this particular topic, but you got some big targets here. So one of them is going to be the air that you breathe. That's not really part of your diet, but we'll throw it in because we're talking about that. The fluids that you take in, water, et cetera, the food that you eat, and then whatever other substances there are in your world that you're taking in. When it comes to all of these things, You want to think about what are the best ways to reduce the overall burden that your body has. Now, with respect to air, and again, it's not your diet, but air is a big vector for toxins. Believe it or not, even just having air moving is a way to reduce the amount of toxins that you have available to you. So fans can be actually quite good. Air filtration. Now there's a lot of different kinds of air filters. This is not a video about air filters, but there's a lot of really good ones. If you tend to be allergic, if you tend to have maybe a high smog area, if you tend to have other things, you know, in your area, you might wanna look into what the best type of filter is. And what I always tell patients is if you're going to, uh, pick and choose one area to pay for an air filtration system, make it the bedroom because you're there breathing recirculated air in all night long. And so if you have trouble with, you Allergies or toxicity or whatever, at least you're covering this one, you know, 8-hour period or so that you're in there. With respect to fluids, we have to think about water a lot because we cook with water. Of course, we also hopefully drink water, and water is one of the things that can carry a lot of toxicity in with it. So what we have to think about with respect to water and toxicity is it brings toxins to our food because we water our food or the animals drink the water, and if it's toxic, that goes in there and it gets bioconcentrated. But also, if you are drinking or cooking in water that has toxins in it, you're going to bioconcentrate that in your body, either directly or indirectly. We want to— again, this is not about water filtration, but there's all sorts of water filtration ways to go in the world. And you should at least be trying to do something. Some people have whole house systems. Some people do reverse osmosis, which is probably the cleanest water you can get. Some people do You know, the sort of jug or decanter filters, et cetera. Anything is better than nothing. But again, like an air filter, look into it and see what it is that you're trying to filter out. The other thing is to look, and you can look online, like the Environmental Working Group, ewg.org, and the other drinks that you may have may be indirectly toxic, such as, you know, like a juice that has some metals in it, or maybe a, you know, an— Non-organic sort of something that has some solvents or whatever in it, uh, or directly toxic, you know, such as say alcohol and other types of things that you might drink. So you need to think about the fluids that are going in your body. The other thing is considering foods. Now we did a video called Organic, Is It Worth It? You can go back and look at that for a whole lot more ideas. I talk about the Environmental Working Group, EWG. There's a lot of other sites you can look and see. Yeah. Okay, if I have to allocate dollars towards organic food, which foods should I do that to? You know, if money is not an option, or not an option, money is no object, which is very rare for people, just get everything organic. But DWG has the Dirty Dozen foods and then the Clean 15. And you can kind of look at, okay, just at least don't get these most toxic foods in their non-organic And again, see that other video, you know, Is Organic Worth It? Then the other thing is substances that you might— now, by substances, I might mean substances that might be illegal, but really what I mean are supplements, dietary additions, drugs, you know, things you're prescribed, whatever, to include things such as, you know, cannabinoids. A lot of people use CBD or other cannabinoids. Like other supplements, if you don't know the source of your cannabinoids, you can be getting a lot of toxicity from the cannabinoids that you're using. So you might want to take a look into that. Take a look at who makes your supplements. What are their quality control? They should have certificates of analyses that you can look at that say they actually check for things like PCBs and other things in it. But just generally, we, you know, we often, you know, kind of like we forget about drinking water, but You know, we might drink filtered water, but not cook with filtered water. We often forget that the supplements or the pills we're taking may have things in them that might add to our toxic burden. So when we look at these big areas of the air we breathe, the fluids that we take in, the food that we eat, and then the substances that we might use, even in a good way, like a nutritional supplement, what you want to think about really is you want to look for the cleanest sources you can have. You want to understand that there is no clean world to live in anymore. It is a polluted, toxic world. And so your goal is not to make it perfect and zero toxin, but it is to reduce your exposure as much as possible. You may not be able to reduce your exposure in the air, uh, very much, but reducing it a little bit is helpful. You may be able to reduce your exposure by not only drinking filtered water, but also cooking with filtered water, for example. You may be able to reduce your exposure by looking at eating the, you know, make sure you get the dirty dozen plus a couple on the Environmental Working Group that are, you know, the most toxin-laden foods. Make sure you get those organic. Make sure if you're eating animal flesh proteins, things like that, that you look at where it comes from and how it's propagated and that it's the least amount of bioconcentrated toxin if you do eat animals and all of the other things. The point really is to be Rational and reasonable about it. Realize, yes, we live in a very, very toxic world. Yes, what we eat, drink, and breathe is full of toxins. And on the other hand, no, we can't be perfect and take it all away. But somewhere in the middle, we can do a little bit every day to try and reduce the overall burden that we're taking in. And every little bit that you do to reduce the burden of, you know, cleaning up your diet, et cetera, will improve. Your exposure to a lot of negative things. Now, the other side that we talked about, kind of this two-pronged thing, was macro and micronutrients and all of that. Well, that really gets to— let's say we have clean food coming in. Maybe you and your physician have talked about how you tend to have high blood sugar, borderline type 2 diabetes, whatever the other problem is. That's when you're looking at your macronutrients and your micronutrients saying, well, I do need to limit maybe the number of amount of carbohydrates I take in, or I need to be careful about what kind of carbohydrates, et cetera. It's all very, very important as you go along. So remembering the idea that toxins and then the type of food you're eating, you can enhance and improve them. You can't make it perfect, but the more that you do to improve it, the better your life can be. And so use reputable online resources. As I said, there's a lot of university-based Resources for toxins in foods. The Environmental Working Group, ewg.org, is a good place to start. You can branch out from there. If you are going to look into air filtration or water filtration, do a little background research on what's common in your area, and also do a little background research in the type of technology that you're going to use. And, you know, if, if what you can afford is the type of, you know, pitcher or carafe type filter, Even though they're not perfect, it's better than doing nothing. So again, do what you can implement a little bit every day, and overall you will improve your probability of success, health, and having an actual as clean as possible diet. I'm Dr. A. Please like, share, subscribe, hit the notification bell. All that's very, very important. Want to thank all of the new subscribers. Thank all of the former subscribers. Really appreciate all of the effort that you guys. Have put into watching and making the channel go. So I'll see you on the next one.
