Golf and Toxicity

Testing 1, 2, 3. Testing 1, 2, 3. Live. Bring this up. Welcome everyone. I want everybody to log on. It's, uh, 7. Should be streaming all across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Substack, Rumble, and inside Dr. Rob's circle. We have a special livestream tonight. Hi everyone. Hi Leah, thank you so much, Leah. Really appreciate you. All right, do a sound check if everybody can, uh, make sure they can hear me. Just Give us a wave, thumbs up. Perfect. Thank you, Leah. All right, we're gonna let everybody hop on here. This is part 1 of our Golf and Toxicity series, so we're going to stream live tonight at 7 PM Central, tomorrow at 2 PM Central, and then again on Thursday night at 2 PM Central. So we'll let everybody hop on. Appreciate everybody taking time out to, to spend time tonight to learn about this. Um, you know, we're, we're constantly trying to, uh, share information and educate patients, and this is a story from, um, a patient of ours Ashley Kurtz, who we'll talk to later tonight in the circle, that really made me think we should discuss this in greater detail. Please encourage everybody, if you know somebody who golfs, you know golfers, share the stream. We're just going to wait and let everybody get on. Hey Brooklyn. We have folks on in the circle outside of Leah. If you're on live in the circle, just hit the chat. Let me know you're there. And then on Instagram, let us know. My best friend growing up and to this day is live in Las Vegas. He's a big golfer. Christopher J. Murray. He is sitting there live on YouTube. Good evening, sir. All right. Got to share this with your golfing friends. Do you know anybody who golfs? This is going to be of interest. All right. We're going to get going here. It's 5 after. I respect everybody's time. So let's get into it. Good evening, everybody. I'm Dr. Whitfield MD. Tonight is the beginning of our 3-part series, Golf and Toxicity. Tonight, um, we want to start with a topic that I think most people don't understand completely. We want to talk about golf and toxicity. Now, when you think of golf, I'm sure you think of a relatively, um, like a healthy sport, you go think of fresh air, you think of the beautiful manicured grass, you think of sunshine, you picture yourself walking maybe on a great beautiful Saturday morning. And although golf should be a stress reducer, many times, as my best friend Chris and I have enjoyed together, it's, it can be very stressful. It should improve your cardiovascular health. Walking's great for that. And that is the frame we are all sold. That is the picture that the industry paints. But I don't look at the world through the lens of marketing. I think everybody at this point knows how, uh, kind of, uh, to the point I am specifically. And as a surgeon who looks at underlying physiology of my patients and toxicity, I see something entirely different. It's a highly engineered environment. With, in fact, a lot of chemicals, and those actually have biologic consequences. And certainly, the more time you spend there, week over week, month over month, year over year, in that environment, the more toxicity can build up. So tonight is part 1 of our series. We are calling it The Hidden Toxic Burden. We are going to look at exactly what is on the golf course and, more importantly, what is in the, uh, potentially in your body. So once again, I've, I've said I've had patients who lived on golf courses, and then recently a patient of ours who played golf their entire life and worked on golf courses brought this more to my attention. So tomorrow in part 2, we'll cover how this chemical exposure directly affects surgical outcomes from the fairway to the operating room. And on Thursday in part 3, I will walk you through the SHARP method, our specific approach to recovery engineering for patients with toxicity burdens. But tonight we have to establish a baseline. We have to look at the data. We have to break it down to really break down the illusion of golf and its relationship, if you will, um, to maybe what's bringing toxicity to us. So let's talk about the grass. To keep a a golf course looking like a perfect green carpet, essentially, it requires an immense amount of chemical intervention. Nature does not create just a perfectly manicured grass. It puts up a fight. To win that fight, the course, the superintendents of the course, the, the staff of the course have a whole arsenal of compounds they use. 2 chemicals in particular dominate the landscape when it comes to maintaining golf courses. The first is chlorpyrifos. Say it with me, chlorpyrifos. It is a broad-spectrum insecticide. It is so toxic to the human nervous system, so damaging to neural development, that it has been banned from use on food crops. You cannot legally spray it on an apple. You cannot spray it on corn. You cannot use it on tomatoes. But it is still legally applied in massive quantities to golf courses across the United States. So once again, you can't spray that on food. It's been banned. The second chemical is chlorpyrifos. Chlorothalonil. Chlorothalonil. It is a heavy-duty fungicide used to prevent mold and other turf diseases. In Europe, it is completely banned. The European regulators looked at the data and classified it as a known carcinogen. Here in America, that compound is the number one most applied chemical on our golf courses. So these aren't fringe chemicals used by a few golf courses. These are the standard operating procedures for golf course turf maintenance. And the general assumption is that because you aren't eating the grass, you're perfectly safe. So once again, it takes those chemicals in massive amounts to protect the turf, the grass that you play on, and the assumption is basically false. It is a dangerous misunderstanding of human physiology. Now here's where the intrigue actually lies. How does it actually get into you? So if you're just looking at it and walking on it? Is it something that you're inhaling? You might think you're just breathing in the spray when the wind blows, but the data tells us a much more direct story. A landmark study by Putnam and colleagues published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry looked exactly at the mechanism of exposure. It's very interesting what they found. They found that 60% of the golfers that they, uh, were studying absorbed the chlorpyrifos through skin contact. Once again, 60%. Think about the mechanics of the game. You touch the grass when you place your tee, you pick your golf ball up, You clean clubs. You inadvertently will be touching, whether it's your hands and face, the cart, the clubs. All of those things come in contact, a contact with the turf at one time or another. You may eat a snack at the turn or something. All these things are just different exposures or opportunities for exposure. The chemical transfers from the turf to the ball or to your hands and it absorbs through the dermis. So our skin is not impregnable, impenetrable, as, as we all know. It's a highly, uh, porous organ. And the systemic effects of this constant low-dose exposure are not theoretical. They are measurable, and they can be quite devastating. So last year, in 2025, a very large study was published in the journal of the American Medical Association. And it was by a group, Krasanowski and team. And they didn't just look at golfers. They looked at populations living near golf courses. And the findings were pretty staggering. After adjusting for patient demographics and neighborhood characteristics, living within 1 mile of a golf course was associated with 126% increased odds of developing Parkinson's disease compared with individuals living more than 6 miles away from a golf course. Now let that sink in. 126% increased odds in severe neurodegenerative disease, and that's linked directly to basically where you're living in proximity to the golf course, which comes from potential interaction from the chemicals, and as it potentially, potentially gets into the water supply. And the dose is, is what makes a difference. And on the golf course, the exposure is constant. So what happens when the chemicals actually enter your system? It get into your body. What's going on? Now, the body is highly intelligent. And all those things get filtered. And then ultimately what we do after it's filtered into the liver, and then our body's like, oh, we have to get rid of this— the carcinogens enter your bloodstream, you know, your, your body wants to get rid of it. So it protects your brain, your heart, and then once it's passed out, it wants to sequester it, and that's often in fat. So The storage of toxins in fat has been known for a long period of time. Fat is— it's a preferred storage facility for toxins. And this brings us to a critical physiological concept that we deal with every day in my clinic, and it's called the weight loss paradox. I have a lot of people who are potentially trying to lose weight but they have a difficult time, or when they actually do lose weight, burn fat, and, and that's their goal. But when they burn the fat, they release toxins, and sometimes they don't feel well as a result because these are released back in their bloodstream and elevate these levels. So the clinical data shows a 15 to 25% increase in your blood toxin level for every 10 kilos of fat loss. Now, 10 10 kilos is a fair amount, but you understand the picture. So increasing your fat loss releases those things into your system. So think about the irony of that. You're trying to get healthier, you're dieting, you're exercising more, you're losing weight, but you're simultaneously creating a, like, an internal tox event, maybe overwhelming your system with more of like a Herxheimer-type reaction. You're flooding your system with the very chemicals your body tried to actually protect you from. Now, as a plastic surgeon, um, we are looking at tox tests all the time. We probably have the largest toxicity burden tests on patients in the literature. Um, now the thing about liposuction is very disruptive to fat, and it breaks it apart and releases those things. So many times I won't do cases on patients with high level of toxicity without upfront treatment. So we're physically moving and disrupting this fat from the storage, uh, or being where, where it is being stored. Now, if a patient has a high toxic burden from years of environmental exposure like we've been talking about, like playing golf twice a week for many, many years, that can be a highly inflammatory fatty layer. So when we operate, we may mobilize this and cause more toxicity. So once again, many of the times that we are looking and reviewing our patients' preoperative toxicity tests. And I'll just take a moment here to dive a little bit deeper. I have told patients I will not do their fat transfers based on their toxic birth. So now many people listening might not understand that, and many patients might be frustrated by that because other surgeons would. And I don't feel that, that's the best way to serve the patient. So we want to help them reduce their toxic burden because we feel strongly that preparation will enhance their postoperative recovery. So patients who experience more severe or prolonged inflammation or brain fog or chronic fatigue afterwards, That would make sense because you're, you're releasing more toxins. So, and I'm not sharing this to scare or fearmonger or anything like that. I'm sharing this because we make treatment plans based on a patient's data. We customize it to each patient. We make decisions based on it. It's about understanding, you know, what's going on in each and every patient. I don't think you can engineer a proper recovery if you do not try to look at these factors and discuss them with the patient and try to come to an informed decision about what to do for them to help them. You have to know what's in the tissues before you operate. I think this is the foundation of everything we, we try to do in our clinic, in my practice. And now, understanding the science obviously is a component. Reading the JAMA studies is important, but seeing it in my patients that's where, like, all this theory becomes reality. And tonight, I'm not just going to give you data. I'm going to share with you a real clinical story from a patient of ours. And in just a few minutes in our live Dr. Rob Circle community, we're going to interview Ashley Kurtz, a patient of mine. Ashley has spent her entire life, mostly on the golf course. I just talked to her a few minutes ago, and she reminded me, in addition to playing golf her whole life and going to college and playing golf, she worked as an attendant at a golf course for 6 years. So she has more than enough experience with exposure, and certainly her toxicity test is one of the more impressive ones you'll ever see. So we're going to walk through her exposures, her symptoms. We'll let her discuss what she wants to about her surgical situation and recovery. And we're not broadcasting the interview live on all these other platforms. This will only be in Dr. Rob's circle. So everybody, I will give you time to hop off the other platforms. This is the prize, if you will, for those who are serious about understanding their health, their environment, and the recovery. Um, the interview with Ashley is going to be happening shortly in Dr. Rob's Circle. So for everybody listening, you can go to drrobscircle.com to join. It's free. Um, if you can't, um, get to that, you can go to my main website, drrobertwhitfieldmd.com, and then click the join there. So, um, we'll be, uh, in there shortly. I'll give everybody time to hop in there. I'll get her loaded into, um, the StreamYard that we're using to stream, and then we'll have a chat with her. Just gonna get her on.