TOXIC CHEMICALS & WHAT TO DO ABOUT THEM | Medicine & Health Podcast

Welcome to Medicine and Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. This is a show about opening the often mysterious world of how doctors think and how science works. This program exists to educate and empower you, the listener. Now here's your host, Dr. Paul. Good day and welcome. Medicine and health. I'm Dr. Paul Anderson, or Dr. Paul. So toxic chemicals and what to do about them. They've been in the news a lot the last couple of months, and I thought this would be a really nice program to do, even though it's not great news. It's, you know, we have to deal with bad news all the time, but what I want to do is talk about the problem and some of the latest data that's come out about toxic chemicals we're exposed to, etc. And then in part 2, what I want to do is talk about what do we do about it, how can you protect yourself, etc. So as we get started with our discussion about toxic chemicals and the environment and you and how they get in you and how they can get out of you, maybe, etc. Want to just go through and not rehash, you know, everything in the world of chemical toxicology or metal toxicology, etc., but go through some of the recent publications that I've seen. And I chose the ones I chose because they've been heavily represented in popular media, social media, etc. So I figured a lot of people had seen these and, and might want some comment and, and some perspective on them. So that's what we're going to do in the first half. And then second half of the program, we're going to talk about what do we do about all this, because that's really where the rubber meets the road. So first off, I'm going to have links for a lot of the things I talk about, any article or journal paper, etc., that I put up, I'll have a link for. And for those of you looking for the links in the show notes, we're right now live on Facebook, we're live on CTR Radio Network, which is my home base. And then CTR takes this program and puts it over onto all the pod burners. So if you want to listen just to the audio, you can go to any pod burner and look up Medicine and Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. And if you want to do the video version, that's over on YouTube. And I put all of the show notes on YouTube. So don't look for the show notes on any of the audio servers or on Facebook. Go over to YouTube. So then you say, well, how do I find the YouTube? And so that is DRA Online, Dr. A Online on YouTube. I have that, which is pretty searchable. Also, if you can't get there, I have a hub website, which is just dranow.com. And on there are links to all the media. So you can get a YouTube link there if all else fails and you can't find me on YouTube. By the way, really appreciate the community is growing on YouTube side. So like, share, and subscribe if you can. Uh, notifications are always great because that helps to kind of push the information out to people. And, uh, you'll— if you go into my YouTube, you'll notice there's a lot of videos, both short and long-form videos in there. So it's quite a library. Um, so in YouTube, the show notes go down in the description area. So on your phone, it'll be on the right side. There's a little down V looking thing. Click on that, it opens it up to the links. On your computer, it's on the left side, and it'll either say show more or just the word more, and you click on show more or more, and that'll take you to the show notes. So there you go. So toxic chemicals, what, what do we do about them? The upshot of this is I started collecting, uh, articles that I had seen just in the last month and a half or so that were being kind of popularized on social media, etc. And people were, um, you know, obviously posting these things because a lot of them are very, very recent and they sound really scary, which they kind of are if you're working with chemicals going into the human body or children, etc. Um, so I wanted to go through the more recent things that have been popularized in the media. And then, like I say, we'll— in part 2, we'll kind of work our way over to what do we do about all this. So the first one is from the news service at Harvard University. And again, this will be in the show notes if you want to look up this article. And so I've said this before, but I'll kind of reiterate here. If you've followed me at all, or you've looked at, you know, my show notes and stuff, I do a lot of citation of scientific research. And that will always be in there if we have that. But sometimes for some of these topics, I will do the citation for a news service like this Harvard News Service, which is not a peer-reviewed publication. It's just a report about other peer-reviewed publications. And so the reason I do that is to, um, let you read what I read, let you read what's been put on social media. And then, um, normally there will be links either that I provide or within the article if you want to go back to the source material. So they start out with this Harvard, uh, report by Karen Felscher. Says June 15th, 2022, the EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, updated, uh, health advisory warnings around 2 types of man-made compounds called forever chemicals. They're called forever chemicals because they don't break down in nature at all, so they literally are there with us forever. And they are called PFOS and PFOA, which you probably have heard of in water. And they are part of a big class of chemicals which we call PFAF— PFAS, excuse me, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. So PFAS family is a little bit easier to say. So they don't break down in the environment over time. This is a problem Because these chemicals are associated with a lot of health issues that people have. And we'll get to that in just a moment. So the other thing that was kind of shocking, which I think is partly why Harvard reported on this, is that if you go to the 2016 guidelines from the EPA, they had a particular level that they calculated, um, was okay in drinking water. This level was 70 parts per trillion. Okay, so that's not a lot. Um, but the new advisory that they just put out were over 1,000-fold less. Okay, so in 2016 we said, oh, you have up to 70 parts per trillion, and now they're saying, uh, 0.02 to 0.004 parts per trillion. So that is a fraction of the number 1 by a long shot, less than the number 1 by a long way, and the previous one was 70. Okay, so that's a pretty big change, and this has caused a lot of waves in the world of, uh, the environmental protection movement and environmental medicine and things of that nature. So what's the problem with these things outside of the fact that they don't break down, uh, in, in nature or really in your body? Okay, the problem is that there are certain types of cancers, uh, diminished immunity— these are immune suppressive chemicals, disruption of your hormone system called endocrine disruption. These are endocrine disrupting chemicals. A lot of fertility problems created by this and low birth weight in babies, among other things. So there's nothing good on this list of health effects of these forever chemicals. And so If suddenly the Environmental Protection Agency is saying, well, 2016 was, you know, just a few years ago, 6 years ago, and we had 70 parts per trillion, and now we have less than 1 part per trillion we think is safe, there's a pretty big shift in the impact of that. Now, another problem, if it wasn't bad enough to have low birth weight and certain cancers and weak, you know, immune blockade, weakened immunity, hormone blockade, fertility problems, etc. The other thing was that in children— and children bioconcentrate these toxins— so in children, when they have these toxins on the inside They actually have 50% less antibody production, so their immune system is hampered to the degree that if you give them an immune challenge, such as you get sick with something and build up immunity, or you get a vaccination, you build up immunity. If you have an immune challenge, those kids that have these forever chemicals inside of them lose 50% of their antibody production. This is a big bad problem. It's bad enough to have adults having immune suppression and all of this from these chemicals. But if you think about it, and then you got children who are trying to develop immunity. So, you know, all of us have a certain amount of native immunity that we've developed over time, either through vaccination or infection or a little both. Well, you got kids, uh, who start out with less, you know, they— when you're born, the immunity you have is mostly from your mother's immune system, and that doesn't last very long. So you have to work out your immune system to develop your own immunity. Well, now you have children who are trying to develop their immunity through getting sick and vaccinated and all this other stuff, and they cannot, uh, achieve full immune activation because of these chemicals. they're at 50% less antibody. That's a big deal. So this is not very good. And if you thought the news was, you know, pretty bad, here's some more news. It's not great. These chemicals are easily transmitted through the mother's milk to the baby, and they found that when they tested mom and baby, that the babies had up to 10 times more of these chemicals in their blood than mom did. And this is something I've talked about before when we talked about the Environmental Working Group and, um, the, uh, the Endocrine Society, which tracks endocrine disrupting chemicals and things. We've talked about these sort of global, uh, you know, toxic problems that go on. And when you have children born who then wind up being more toxic each generation, it's not a far stretch to understand that there's going to be big problems down the road. And we're going to see that with a number of these other things we're looking at. So the end of this article from Harvard, uh, says, well, There's a lot of uncertainty and confusion because we already couldn't meet the old standards, and now they're a thousandfold lower. And so how in the world are we going to meet them? Um, and they end by saying right now there's at least 100 million Americans in the United States whose drinking water has these chemicals exceeding the old limit of 70 parts per trillion. So how in the world will we get to 0.02 or 0.004 parts per trillion when we're already at 70 or above in, you know, a big portion of the U.S. population? Um, so when we get to the what to do about it part, I'm going to give some ideas, etc. But this is not a small problem. It's not like an isolated problem. You know, we've talked on this program before about cancer hotspots where there'll be a whole bunch of childhood or other cancers in one geographic location, it turns out it's because it's toxic with something, right? You look at that movie Erin Brockovich was all about this. And if you look at cancer hotspots that happen, this is a global problem, unfortunately. All right, so there's forever chemicals. Now there's another chemical that is very widely used. Commonly used chemical for, uh, food production probably in the world. And inside of the trade-named herbicide Roundup, um, is a component called glyphosate. And you've probably heard about glyphosate, something you can test and see if it's in there and all that stuff. Glyphosate has— because obviously it's a very big moneymaker all around the world, there's been a lot of scientific intrigue around glyphosate because people would come out and say, well, it's probably bad for you, and then they would sort of get, you know, they get all their funding taken away and other stuff like that. And I have worked with some of these scientists from other countries and seen firsthand what happens when you go up against, you know, a company that's got all these billions of dollars and they make a multi, multi-billion dollar product. So until about 2015 or '16, glyphosate was considered to be just fine. If you, you know, did a biochemistry PhD, you were told, no, it's, you know, it breaks down very easily. It's not a problem. It's not pathogenic at all. So there was, first off, some data that went with— from the CDC, and then we're going to look at some data from another paper that was looking at glyphosate inside of people. But the bottom line is, in the paper from the CDC— and you'll get the link down in the show notes there on YouTube— they came up in 2015, said, well, it's probably a human carcinogen, cancer-causing. And then the World Health Organization and a bunch of other groups got together and said, we don't think it's a carcinogen. Okay, this is one of those things where it kind of depends on who you believe when you read the research. But here's one of the things that you have to consider if you're looking at research. Research can only inform us of what has been studied. Okay. So let's say I do a research project and I show that glyphosate has a pathway by which it can be genotoxic, or it can be liver toxic, or it can be cancer-causing. And then let's say they come and they take all of my money away from my laboratory. and shut down, uh, my research so that never gets published, theoretically, let's say. Well, that is a common way, theoretically, where, uh, research can be sort of shifted to say what, um, you know, what the financial interests want to be said. In the case of glyphosate, there's just so much of that that has gone on because it's, it's a big money maker. It's used all over the world, and it's one of those things that there is such a financial interest in not, uh, you know, maligning it at all that it doesn't get maligned very much. So glyphosate, at the very least, is not that good for you. Now, I also put in a, uh, a paper, uh, from Dr. Samsel et al. Glyphosate Pathways to Modern Disease. They're talking about celiac, but really these pathways work in all people. The first thing is it disrupts a pathway that helps in humans, is a pathway that's shared with humans and, uh, and non, uh, non-animal plants and things like that. Um, in humans though, it disrupts a pathway which helps us to support our good digestive flora, the good bacteria and stuff in the digestive tract. Uh, it also then alters the pathogenic bacteria versus good bacteria in the digestive tract. It pulls transition elements out, so it chelates them, so it decreases the amount of nutrients you can get out of your food. Um, and it inhibits, uh, some of the Phase 1, the first part of your detox enzyme systems. So at the very least, even though it's a little unclear exactly what— how bad it is for human health, there's a lot of data that would say it's not good for you. So less glyphosate in your body as a human is better. Okay. So what do we see when we look at large numbers of people and look at how much glyphosate is inside of them? Well, a study was done with over 2,000 people over the age of 6, and this was reported by the CDC. And it's 81% of the people that were tested over the age of 6 had at the detection limit or above for glyphosate. So it's, it's 81%. That's, that's the majority of people already have it in their system. 18% were below the detection limit, and 1%, uh, they— it was, was missing data, basically. So there, there's that. So we have forever chemicals, we got glyphosate, and we know that these are already in people, and it's getting worse, the, you know, uh, with each generation. Well, then there was, uh, recently— this was like, I think, just last week, uh, so if you're looking at, uh, the popular media like social media, this would be something that you would see like in, um, Uh, you know, in your Instagram feed or YouTube or Facebook or something. And this was the one about Skittles, okay? And Skittles and titanium, a particular form of titanium that was in Skittles as a coloring agent. Now titanium is used in paint as a coloring agent, it's used in food as a coloring agent, uh, and so it's been used for a long time. This is another one of those things where we used to say from, you know, CDC would say, well, you know, or the FDA would say it's probably fine. Okay, keep using it. But there was a— in the paper I'm going to link again, it's just a news report about the science. Titanium dioxide found in Skittles and Starburst. Additive found in Skittles no longer considered safe. And that was because somebody did a lawsuit against the Mars company, M&M Mars company. And it was a class action suit filed in California and talks about gene toxicity, DNA toxicity, etc. Now, what you need to know so that we're not bashing on Skittles too much is that the Environmental Working Group found titanium dioxide in over 3,000 foods. This is not a rarely used substance. So if you're looking at artificial coloring— so remember we talked about avoid artificial colors and flavors. Well, if you're looking at artificial coloring and you're looking at, you know, why would I want to avoid that? Over 3,000 foods have just this one artificial coloring, which is at the very least toxic to your DNA. So that's not really a great thing. But it's not just Skittles. I think they did the Skittles and Starbursts because everyone knew what those were. So. Hmm. Now, the FDA admits— they admit this— that they are responsible for regulating all color additives to ensure foods containing color additives are safe to eat, contain only approved ingredients, and are accurately labeled. So FDA said, it's our job. However, when determining the regulatory status of a food ingredient, the FDA says the responsibility is with the manufacturer, in this case Mars for the Skittles, etc., to ensure the ingredients comply with regulations. Now, this is a problem that we see with the FDA, and they sort of do this, this dance around how and what they regulate, etc. So in this case, they are leaving the regulation and the policing Up to the people who make the food. And this is part of what drew this lawsuit out, was, well, this is not appropriate. And if the people who are responsible for keeping us safe from toxic ingredients in food are also the owners of the company who make the food, well, there's sort of a conflict of interest there. And also, uh, if we know that there's toxins, and they're still allowing to be put in food, you know, what's— where is the accountability there, right? And they go on to say in this article, you know, that the— a different government organization, the USDA, reviews additives that are approved for organic foods and those that are disapproved every 5 years. So it basically goes on to say, well, if the USDA can do that for food, why doesn't the FDA check up on their rules and regulations and who's complying or not? Now I'll tell you from personal experience that the FDA is very good at involving themselves in other areas that they decide that they want to police and look at, etc. And And it is their job to do that, but they don't seem to do it very evenly. The groups and the industries that provide FDA with the most money tend to have the lowest amount of direct oversight, which is interesting. So titanium dioxide is used for color pigmentation, as I said. And it's also in cosmetic paint and some medicines. So this is something that needs to really be going out of all of these products for us. But if you eat anything pretty much that has any coloring in it, it probably has some titanium dioxide, even if you don't eat Skittles or Starbursts. So something to consider as far as the Safety. In 2016, remember we had the old guidelines of 2016 that we talked about with forever chemicals? 2016, they said, ah, it doesn't look like titanium dioxide creates any health concerns at all. And what we're seeing with newer studies is that they're probably, at the very least with titanium dioxide, is a toxicity to your genetics, to your DNA. That's not a place you want to— you don't want toxicity anywhere, but your DNA is a place you really don't want toxicity. The other thing that we see, and I see this a lot with patients who are having problems with sulfur metabolism, sulfite sensitivity. So common one is you drink red wine and there's sulfites, you get a migraine or something, but there's lots of other sulfite sensitivity things going on. Turns out that titanium, when it depots in the body, disrupts a lot of enzymes. Metals do that sometimes. And so titanium specifically slows down an enzyme called sulfite oxidase, which helps you take the toxic sulfites and, and convert them to sulfates, which your body can use and eliminate through other pathways. So if I slow down sulfite oxidase with titanium or any other thing, I Build up the toxin sulfite, I get the health negative effects, and I can't eliminate it out of the body. And then, uh, in— as I said, we're going to do this in 2 halves. So in the last few minutes, we're— of the first half, um, we're still talking about toxicity. I want to just review a couple of lead studies now. As I said earlier, we're not going to talk about every last toxic chemical because that gets really, really negative and it's a big downer. You kind of get the point, right? But lead is one of those things where we have sort of a two-edged sword with lead, and it's neither— neither edge is good for us. Okay, so big picture speaking, what we used to say when we teach environmental medicine is people born in Especially the '60s and '70s, but especially the middle '60s or so, have the largest amount of lead in their body because of lead in gasoline, because they were young when they were exposed to lead in gasoline. We've taken lead out of gasoline. So we used to say as well, so it's mostly people, you know, in their '50s and '60s and '70s now, and they're the people with the biggest lead problems. Okay. But then we come around to the other side of the equation, and we realize that we now have this big upswing in lead in our drinking water. So just like the forever chemicals, now we have lead in our drinking water. And so you people who were not born in the late '50s through the middle '70s, who are the high lead group now, Anybody outside of that group who is just exposed to drinking water has a higher propensity for new lead exposure. So no one can get away. What else did they look at? Journal of the American Medical Association, JAMA Pediatrics, 2021, published 1,141,000+ Children. Okay, this is children. More than half had blood lead levels that were elevated to the point of detection, and of that group, uh, about 22,000— 21,000 and some had blood lead levels at a pathologic level. Now here's the thing about lead and certain other heavy metals. Your body probably didn't evolve to use them. There is no useful purpose for lead or mercury or whatever inside of your body. And over the years with lead, especially in children, they keep dropping the level that they feel is safe, just like the other stories I told you there. So the problem is now that we have data that shows that when you get, you know, somewhere past 1 microgram per deciliter of lead in your blood, you are starting to lose IQ points. That's not what we want for children or adults, right? Well, now we have out of over a million, you know, about a million children, we got half of them with detectable lead levels and the majority of those are already in the 1+ microgram, and then 20,000 of those out of the million actually are at 5 micrograms or above, which is already pathological. Now, aside from IQ points dropping, what else can happen with lead? Well, lead is not good for anything in your body. Higher lead levels are associated with cardiovascular disease, hypertension, coronary artery disease, etc. It's associated with a host of other problems. So I remember, you know, a few decades ago testing adults for lead who had been exposed, and then they would go— and that same adult would then go to the toxicologist at the medical school, and the toxicologist would say, well, lead is only a problem for children. Okay, well, now we have these papers coming out And, uh, I'll put them all into the, you know, into the show notes. But basically there was one, uh, that says, uh, lead exposure in the last century shrank the IQ scores of half of Americans. Um, and we've lost cumulative IQ points since 1940 because of lead exposure. And this is for adults and children. Um, and so then they go into the whole thing I just said about that. Uh, lead is a neurotoxin. It's directly toxic your brain. It literally will erode your brain cells. And, um, it doesn't matter how old you are. Okay, so this old idea that lead is only bad for children is a big misnomer. And so they go on and they talk about, um, you know, how easy it is for lead to be in the air, which is partly why, um, We took the lead out of gasoline because that was being aerosolized, and then we're breathing it all in. That's, that's why that generation has so much in them. But then it talks about once it's inhaled, it gets in your bloodstream, and then it goes to your brain very easily and every other organ. Then there was another paper in Psychology Today reviewing the data on lead. talking about lead exposure and Alzheimer's disease. So this is again not just for children anymore. So the thing that we have to be concerned with there is with all of these lead damage avenues in your brain and other organs like your heart and everything else, lead is now triggering, we believe, the onset of Alzheimer's, and it's basically making you an easier target for dementia, especially of the Alzheimer's type. That's a big problem. And so we've got a whole generation that's been told, well, if you're not a kid, lead's not a problem, don't test it, don't worry about it. And that means now we've got a whole generation with cardiovascular and neurological and memory problems and all this, uh, where the lead is actually a problem. Now, there's a couple of things. Remember I said, you know, gasoline, lead in gasoline, we took it out, so we weren't worried about it. Well, now we have a crisis of lead in drinking water. And the study— there's a study they cite in here in this Psychology Today paper, and they talk about how The authors of the study project that by 2030, 43% of the population— so almost half the population— will have blood lead levels higher than 5 micrograms per deciliter, and 23% will be over 10 micrograms. So you got the majority of all humans by 2030, which is just a few years away, people, having full-on pathological levels of lead. That's very, very bad. It's very bad news. And the, um, expansion of cardiovascular illness, neurological illness, Alzheimer's, etc., is just going to go up like crazy because of this exposure. And I will also put a link in about, you know, generally toxins and what organs they damage. But, uh, the, the last note when you open the link up is The key point, all organ systems can be target of toxic exposure. Of course. Yeah. So what we want to do now is take a look at something that's not quite so negative. So I could go on for hours and hours and hours with all the different chemicals, all the different exposures, and how the science is taking us to this new place where we used to say, oh, it's probably not that bad for us. Now it's like, oh, holy shit, what have we done? We've polluted the world, and now we polluted all the humans, and we got babies with 10 times more forever chemicals inside of them than, you know, their mom has, and all this bad stuff. So the first thing that you want to think about is there's no way not to be exposed. There's no place on earth, literally, that you can go and not be exposed. There's all Almost no commercially produced food or probably drink that doesn't have these things in it. Okay, so that's sort of a bummer, but the goal that we have with environmental medicine is to limit your exposure. And then at the very least promote the processes your body uses to try and get rid of these things. Now, the global processes your body uses to try and get rid of these things is called depuration. And depuration has meanings in different areas, but in humans and in environmental toxicology, depuration is any means that the body can employ through its own natural purposes to help remove toxins from it. Okay. The next step after depuration is then detoxification, which is specifically To usually put something into the body to have a system remove the toxin from the body. So a detoxification strategy would be something like, say, a chelator that goes in and grabs onto a metal and takes it out of your body. A depuration strategy would be fulfilling the needs of all your detoxification pathways so that they can run as fast and as quickly as possible. Okay. So generally speaking, things that help you depurate, things that help you move this junk out of your body, would be things that are normal to your body to, you know, move stuff out. So sweating— one of the things that's really important when we're trying to stay as, you know, kind of cleaned out as possible is to move your body to the point where you have some sweating. Also, and people think of sweating, so they think, well, you know, it's— I have to do a sauna or something like that. Turns out that any way that you sweat is, is useful for detoxification, depuration. But sweating can be enhanced, of course, through, you know, athletic activity. It also can be enhanced through heat. And a lot of people now have these portable saunas and other things like that, and that can be very useful. Yeah. Okay. But what I would always tell patients is if you don't have access to sauna at your gym or at your house or whatever, a lot of people don't. If you do your normal movement or exercise and you know that you need to get some sweat going, if you just add another layer to whatever you wear, you will sweat more. And so you can sweat that way. I've also had people say, well, you know, I Just, you know, broke my ankle and I can't do a whole lot. You know, what could I do? Well, there's actually research that would show that— and we didn't used to think this was true, I guess— but there's research that would show that if you immerse yourself in hot water, like a hot bath, you can sweat out up to a pint of fluid. into your bath. Keep that in mind. So heat through water, heat through steam, heat through sauna, heat through moving your body— any kind of heat you can get is very, very important. Another way out of the body, of course, is through the kidneys, and the kidneys generally work better the more hydrated you are, and that means that you have to drink more water. And if you're detoxifying and depurating and you don't drink more water, um, the toxins can actually get stuck and recycle within you. I've seen that on testing with people, so be careful with that. You always want to have enough water going through so you pee the stuff out. The other thing then is, what's another way out of your body? That would be through the GI tract, so fiber is helpful. One of the ways your body tries to get through— rid of a lot of chemical toxins and some metals is through the bile and the bile dumping into the GI tract. And bile normally recirculates back into the blood. So if your bile's got toxins in it, you're trying to get rid of it, fiber can help hold on to the bile and it will go out in your stool. So you poop it out. So pooping and peeing basically is very, very important for this process as well. And if you want to break down the detoxification systems that your body uses, which is what the depuration is trying to tag on to and move out for you, there's 3 main phases. The first phase is an oxidative phase called the cytochrome P450 system. This is enzymatic detoxification. And it tends to take things that are fat soluble, like a lot of the endocrine disrupting chemicals, and put them through this oxidative step. And then at the end of phase 1, they are turned into a less fat soluble, a more polar substance, and then they can go through phase 2, which is an enzymatic conjugation process that goes on. So phase 1 is a basically an oxidative movement from fat soluble to water soluble. Phase 2, which then picks up other toxins that weren't fat soluble, is going to be conjugation. And the best way to think about conjugation is you've got the toxin now here, and the enzyme system will put something else on it and help it leave your body. So I would usually teach students that the goal of that is to be like an anchor and hold on to the toxin so it can go out through the urine or the feces, right? That's phase 2's job. Phase 2 is where things like glutathione work and glycine works there. And there's a process called glucuronidation. There's a whole bunch of other processes there. So these are all things that can be supported to help you Then phase 3 is after phase 1 and 2, then these bound product go and they're either gonna be eliminated through the urine or through the bile and the GI tract. Again, which is why we want enough fiber and we want enough water going through our body so that these things leave us. It's very, very important. Now, another way to step it up to the next level would be, uh, to do an actual detoxification process or protocol. And this is something that you would have to find an environmental medicine physician to do with you. So if you're looking for this, uh, what I would search in the physicians in your area would be environmental medicine, uh, or environmental toxicology. And this is something generally— the toxicologist, the specialty as a toxicologist, generally is involved in people with more acute and life-threatening toxic exposures. Chronic long-term low-level exposure is not as commonly treated in toxicology community. That's more of an environmental medicine approach. So you want to look for somebody who does these things. Now, the other thing you could search for would be chelation. So chelation is the actual adding of a drug to your system to bind up a toxic metal and take it out of your body. And those people, if they're trained to do that, usually are trained to do other things as well. The reason I say you need to find a healthcare provider to do this is Um, depuration, where you're just promoting your body's eliminatory activity through sweating and fiber and water and, you know, basic nutrients and stuff like that— we all can do that sort of stuff. When you get to putting drugs in your body to remove things, that can have a benefit and a risk at the same time. And although there are some chelating substances you still can buy online, it appears, and, uh, get without a healthcare provider's help. I really don't recommend that you do that because those things used without a bigger picture of depuration and also replacing of the good nutrients that leave with the chelator, if you don't have somebody managing that for you, it can be very dangerous. And I have seen in my practice over the years a large number of patients who had or did some sort of chelation protocol. They did it without enough support, and then they wound up with some other problems. So in trying to get rid of this toxic stuff, they were given or used certain drugs to try and remove the stuff, but they weren't The good stuff wasn't put back in, etc., and they would wind up with musculoskeletal problems, a lot of muscle issues, heart problems, neurological problems, etc. Can be really, really bad overall. So that's why I'm saying if you're going to do something like chelation or very specific drug-induced detoxification, work with a healthcare provider that can monitor you because that's really kicking up the intensity of what you're doing quite a bit. Now, what's another thing that we can do for avoidance? So the first thing would be, uh, we're gonna talk about ways to avoid foods and drink that may be a problem. But because a lot of this stuff is now in the water systems, uh, water filtration is very important. And a lot of people kind of, you know, I've talked to people in areas where the, you know, the water comes from a pretty, uh, pristine source, etc. And they don't realize their pristine source water is then going through a municipal water system that has certain toxicity built into it. If you remember just looking at those forever chemicals where it went from 70 parts per trillion down to 0.002 or 0.0004 parts per trillion, it doesn't take very much in your water to start to mess with you and your health. So one of the things that you can search for is a water filtration system that you can use at your house and look for it to filter out those forever chemicals. Okay, so normally one of the easier ways to do those searches is If you use that family I said and you, you use that PFAS, uh, you know, so that's the, uh, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, right? So PFAS. If you just do a search for PFAS water filtration, you'll come up with a number of different water filtering products. Some are small, some are large, so you can find one that fits in your budget, uh, that will filter the PFAS out. Now the other thing, if they're listing that, they will usually list do they also trap metals. And so you at the very least would want to look for the big ones like lead and mercury and other stuff that we might find that way. So water filtration is very important, and water filtration both for what you drink but also what you cook with, because you don't want to be um, you know, filtering your drinking water and then cooking with water that's full of these forever chemicals because they're not going to break down when you cook them. Okay, usually. So, um, filtration becomes very important for your water, uh, to the degree that it's probably one of the— you know, if you're, if you're going up from depurating and sweating and moving and doing all this stuff and then you're looking at prevention Water filtration is probably one of the cornerstones of prevention, and it's very, very important. The next thing is food. Food is a giant vector into your body for toxins. You want, to the degree possible, to buy organic food in the areas where you have the most toxic fruit and vegetables. I will put in the links in the on the YouTube notes, the show notes. a link for a list, and there's a list called the Dirty Dozen and the Clean 15. So it's the, it's the most toxic produce, the Dirty Dozen, plus a few, and the Clean 15 are the least toxic produce. So let's say, you know, and nowadays, you know, we have inflationary pricing of everything, especially food. Let's say you're going to the store and you're going to buy produce. And you're going to look and try and pay the extra money for organic food, but you don't have enough money to buy everything you need in, you know, in the organic section because of the price. Well, if you take a list of the Dirty Dozen with you and at least make sure to buy those foods in an organic fashion, and then look at the Clean 15, and you can probably gamble on those and, and take those in non-organic. It's it's a way to navigate that. Now, yes, if you buy everything organic, it really helps. What you need to know, though, is organic food is not exempt from these chemicals. They just have lower amounts, but they're enough lower that at least you know because you're not going to stop eating, they're enough lower that they would be beneficial for you to look for. So. The other one I brought up, which is a little bit specific, is the glyphosate. And because that's— I showed you how pervasive that is in the bloodstream of humans now. The first thing is you want to look at lessening your intake. So filtered water, organic food where you can. Next thing would be binding substances. So again, fiber is very helpful here and other binding Then supporting your detoxification system. So that has a lot to do with basic things: the B vitamins, trace minerals. So you could take you know a B complex and trace mineral complex very simply, and then supporting things like glutathione function with vitamin C and vitamin E and. like liposomal glutathione or, or alpha-lipoic acid or something of that nature. And then the other thing is, uh, vitamin B3, its active form called NAD+, is actually very supportive of, uh, of the first phase of detox as well. So the other side of it is, as your body is dealing with all this junk that's in it um, you're, you're naturally going to make a lot of free radicals, a lot of pro-inflammatory chemistry. So like I said, when we're supporting glutathione, that's helping us both with phase 2 detoxification. It's also helping us with the inflammatory chemistry. So there's a number of things you can do there. Now, as I said before, if you're going to do detox strategies, if you're going to do, you know, things that you're putting in your body beyond your food and drink, Please get the advice of a healthcare provider. Remember what I always say here, I'm a doctor, but I'm not your doctor. Don't take healthcare advice from people on TV or YouTube or the radio, because that doesn't, you know, always work out well. Get some professional advice on this before you start taking anything. But you can start to kind of clean the system up. You can look at water filtration. Because water is a big vector for this, both through drinking and food. You can look at having as much organic produce and meat as possible to diminish— you can't eliminate it, but to diminish these chemicals coming into your body. And then you can do things that your body naturally does to try and get rid of stuff, like moving it around, sweating, keeping hydrated. Keeping enough fiber going through so that you poop the toxins out, etc. And then after that, you can get specific with these things that help to get rid of these chemicals out of your body. But again, the more specific it is, especially when you get to like a chelation drug or real specific dosing of nutrients to prime detoxification, it's good to have somebody who has a big picture around that, that they can look at what you're doing. And, and make sure that it's balanced. Okay. So we're running down to the last few minutes of our program here, and the first thing I want to remind you of is, remember, this is information, it's not healthcare advice. So please, if you're going to do any of this stuff, find a doctor or healthcare provider who does environmental medicine, detoxification, chelation, that sort of stuff. They're going to be, you know, educated about this. Get some good advice around that. Do things that you can to decrease your exposure. So filtration of water, organic food where you can. And if you have to pick and choose with organic food, those links that I've provided from Environmental Working Group look at, you know, the dirty dozen, the worst, most toxic produce, and, and the cleanest. Unfortunately, when it comes to meat and animal products, you really do want to try and err on the side of, you know, wild source and organic, etc. Again, those aren't going to be pure, but they'll have less toxins in them than your average animal will. And you want to remember that plants bioconcentrate toxins into them. And then if the animal eats the plants, they bioconcentrate the toxins, and then you eat, you know, the animals and the plants, you bioconcentrate it more. So being at the top of the food chain, that's one of the negative sides of being at the top of the food chain, really. All right. Well, we're just about done here. So again, if you're looking for the show notes and you're wondering where all these links are and stuff, go to the YouTube and on my YouTube page. You will find this particular video and a bunch of other ones. And then under the video, if you're on your phone, on the right lower side, there'll be a little V and click on that. That'll open the description box. The links will be in there. If you're on your computer, go to the left-hand side. It'll say more or show more. Click on those words, click on the word more, and that'll open up the description box and all that stuff will be there. If you're watching live on CTR Radio or Facebook, etc., we don't put the notes there because there's not really a place to put them. And if you're on one of the pod burners, great. Thank you very much for doing that. The show notes will be over on the YouTube channel. D-R-A-N-O-W, dranow.com is my hub website, and then on YouTube it's just D-R-A-N-O-W. Online, Dr. A Online on YouTube. All right, well, so I know that's a little bit of a downer, but I tried to hopefully leave you with, um, the things that you need to do to make it not quite such a downer. But I've got to get off the air now, so I'll see you all next week on the radio.