Microplastics and Environmental Toxins

Mark Hyman, MD

Dr. Mark Hyman is leading a health revolution—one focused on using food as medicine to support longevity, energy, mental clarity, happiness, and so much more. Mark Hyman, MD is a practicing family physician and an internationally recognized leader, speaker, educator, and advocate in the field of Functional Medicine. He is the founder and director of The UltraWellness Center, Founder and Senior Advisor for the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, a fifteen-time New York Times best-selling author, and Board President for Clinical Affairs for The Institute for Functional Medicine. He is the founder and chairman of the Food Fix Campaign, dedicated to transforming our food and agriculture system through policy.

He is a co-founder and the Chief Medical Officer of Function Health. He is the host of one of the leading health podcasts, The Dr. Hyman Show with 150+ million downloads. Dr. Hyman is a regular medical contributor to several television shows and networks, including CBS This Morning, Today, Good Morning America, The View, Fox, and CNN.

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Full Transcript

Automatically generated. Please forgive any typos or errors in the following transcript. It was generated by a third party and has not been subsequently reviewed by our team.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Coming up on this episode of The Doctor Hyman Show, we are all inundated with these microplastics and these environmental toxins, but there is good news. You can detoxify from these things. You can actually get rid of them from your body. You have to do a little work, but you can.

BPA has a rapid clearance rate. So it doesn't really last that long in the body, only about five or six hours. Means about it takes five or six hours for your body to kind of metabolize and get rid of half of the BPA in your body.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Now, before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone via my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out function health for real time lab insights. And if you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, well, check out my membership community, doctor Hyman Plus. And if you're looking for curated, trusted supplements and health products for your health journey, visit my website, doctorhyman.com, for my website store and a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products.

Dr. Mark Hyman
What exactly are microplastics? Well, microplastics are tiny little plastic particles less than five millimeters in size. Now they can be as small as a grain of sand or even smaller, invisible to the naked eye. Microplastics can be broken down even further into minuscule sized plastic particles called nanoparticles. Now nanoplastics are less than a hundred nanometers in size.

And for reference, a nanometer is a billionth of a meter, so not very big. And are much, much more difficult to detect versus microplastics. So why are these so bad? They're pervasive in our environment. They're ubiquitous and have become a significant environmental concern due to their widespread pervasiveness in the water, in our soil, and our air.

And it can take anywhere between twenty and five hundred years for plastic waste to decompose. Even then, it never really fully disappears. It just gets smaller and smaller and smaller. Examples of how microplastics show up in our environment are everywhere. Now because of their small size, microplastics infiltrate ecosystems from the bottom of the ocean to the tops of glaciers.

I mean, the Great Pacific Garbage Pack is a microplastic island the size of Texas. It spans from the West Coast Of North America to Japan. Seventy Percent of that debris sinks to the bottom of the ocean. 14,000,000 tons of microplastics exist on the ocean floor. And microplastics have been identified in the core of ice caps in Iceland, where I just came back from.

Pretty frightening because it's very remote. Microplastics are easily ingested by wildlife, and then they bioaccumulate up the food chain, which then, of course, negatively impacts wildlife and human health because we're at the top of the food chain. So what impacts do microplastics have on human health? Well, in the CDC's national report on human exposure to environmental chemicals, scientists analyzed urine samples from 2,517 individuals, A6 and above, for BPA and they found almost every participant contained BPA. That's bisphenol a.

Now exposure from the time we're in utero is also going on. It's not just what we get when we're alive outside the womb, it's inside the womb. A recent study published in Toxological Sciences analyzed 62 placenta samples and microplastics were present in all of them with polyethylene, what plastic bags and water bottles and food containers are actually made of. These account for most of the nano and microplastics. Also, these microplastics affect our immune system.

They drive inflammation. Now when they're inhaled or ingested in our food, they often will cause what we call dysbiosis or imbalances in the gut flora. They'll cause oxidative stress and inflammation, which just drives further inflammation. And chronic systemic inflammation is associated with every known chronic disease. In fact, a new study in mice have found that microplastics have been shown to penetrate the gut barrier causing a leaky gut, which then creates more issues.

Right? We get more inflammation. And the food particles and bacterial particles then migrate into the bloodstream and the inflammation from there affects every organ, such as our liver, kidneys, brain, and they also affect our metabolic health, causing insulin resistance and worse. So this just screws up your whole liver gut axis and increases the risk of prediabetes and diabetes and insulin resistance. So they affect every aspect of our biology.

They also disrupt hormones. These are also called endocrine disruptors. And many plastics contain chemical additives like phthalates or bisphenol a or BPA and bromelated flame retardants, which are just few of the main ones. So let's look at BPA. BPA is structurally similar to estrogen and actually mimics estrogen in the body, which is why it's known as a xeno or foreign estrogen.

It binds to the estrogen receptors and then it alters hormone signaling, which is not a good thing. BPA causes epigenetic changes. So it literally changes the way your genes are expressed by something called DNA methylation. And then that causes all kinds of other issues, reproductive issues, cancer, metabolic issues, weight gain. It also affects reproductive system function.

So when you have exposure to these microplastics and chemicals, it impacts your ability to reproduce. And BPA, for example, impacts the female reproductive system and fertility by affects the maturation of eggs in the beginning of your menstrual cycle. And BPA is also associated with PCOS or polycystic ovarian syndrome and endometriosis, which by the way, is an autoimmune disease. BPA doesn't just affect women, it also affects men and it screws up spermatogenesis, meaning the making of new sperm. It's also associated with lower testosterone levels and reduced sperm count, reduced sperm motility, and increased sperm DNA damage.

Not what you wanna have if you're having a baby. And we call these changes epigenetic changes. They're they're imprinting on your epigenome, which then has transgenerational effect. So what happens to, let's say the grandparent can happen to the grandchild because of the insult that happened to the grandparent. This affects the fertility, a progeny of many future generations, which is very scary.

And we're seeing all kinds of weird stuff in animals, even in humans, general abnormalities, influence on brain sex development. And BPA also has bad effects for men. Right? They're anti androgenic. Androgens are male hormones that are responsible for the maintenance of male sex traits like, you know, hair on the body and muscle mass and all the things we like with men.

But BPA affects the brain sex development in fetuses and alters gene expression. So it literally changes the reproductive system of the developing fetus, which is really terrifying to me. And we're also seeing a lot of linkages to these environmental chemicals and plastics with obesity. They're called obesogens, carcinogens, but obesogens. And human studies have shown a positive correlation between urinary levels of BPA and your BMI or your weight.

According to the NHANES data, this is the national health and nutrition examination survey data, which is tens of thousands of Americans over decades and decades. Those are the highest levels of BPA exposure or more likely to be obese. Now, why? Could it be just because the people who were studied who had a high BPA also didn't pay much attention to their health for other reasons. That's called the unhealthy user bias.

Or maybe it's because they're eating more processed foods and eating drinking for more plastic stuff. Maybe that there's a reason there. But the mechanism is that it has estrogenic activity and it promotes fat cell division and accumulation. So basically BPA causes them some resistance. It causes more fat cell accumulation.

It inhibits the release of an important hormone called adiponectin, which is an anti inflammatory insulin sensitizing hormone, and it actually also helps regulate blood sugar, burning of fat, and it's secreted by fat cells. But when you have high levels of these toxins, you don't get adranectin and you don't get all the benefits. BP is also linked to abnormal cholesterol and, dysbiosis, which is imbalance in the gut floor. Endotoxemia, meaning toxins getting in body from the gut that that are caused by damaged gut lining. They're also linked to oxidative stress, to insulin resistance, high levels of fasting insulin, and also inhibits fat breakdown and and leads to weight gain.

So these are really nasty, and they're everywhere, and it's allowed in our food supply. What else does BPA do? Well, I mean, you probably don't want any of this in your system. And it's it's, by the way, everywhere. You really have to pay attention to cans and packaging and credit card receipts and ATM receipts.

All of these have BPA in them. So you just wanna you don't wanna touch them. Never get the receipts. Also, BPA causes cancer. It binds to estrogen receptors, the ones we call alpha and beta, and it activates the same signaling pathways in these estrogen sensitive tissues that you would from estrogen, and that leads to breast cancer, ovarian cancer, uterus.

It can even affect prostate health. This increases all kinds of bad things like cell proliferation, cancer cell formation, cancerous tumors. And depending on the genetics and your environment and level of exposure, your risk is gonna be higher. Now there are other mechanisms that, that that BPA can cause a damage with, and those include what we call cytotoxicity, which just means it's a poison. So it's just poi directly poisons the cell.

It creates oxidative stress and it damages our DNA, which has tumor effects. So there's just many, many pathways that this is bad for you. What else? If there wasn't something else, well, there's another thing. Right?

Heart disease. The long term adult exposure to BPA is associated with all sorts of things like heart disease, hypertension, atherosclerosis, plaque development, heart attacks. As we saw, the data is just pretty scary about this. Now the research shows, for example, a ten year study in The UK done by Meltzer and others found that higher BP exposure correlates with an increased incidence of coronary heart disease, more heart attacks. Another observational study, and this is observational, but it was pretty scary actually in the New England Journal of Medicine, and it looked at the presence of micro and nano plastics in the plaque of three zero four asymptomatic people who underwent carotid endarterectomy.

That's cleaning out the blockages in the arteries in the neck, and that can help prevent strokes. And they looked at the microplastics in that plaque and they tried to track it, how it correlated with heart attacks, strokes, and, death from all causes about thirty four months later. And what was really frightening was that polyethylene, one of these microplastics, was detected in the carotid artery plaque of fifty eight point four percent of patients. And PVC from PVC pipes, polyvinyl chloride from vinyl flooring, credit cards, medical devices, furniture was detected in twelve percent of patients. Now when they looked through, a special kind of microscope called an electron microscope, looks at very small, small things.

It showed visible jagged edged micro and nanoplast particles in the plaque significantly increasing the risk for for primary endpoint events, meaning heart attacks and strokes, by four hundred and fifty three percent. Meaning, if if you had higher amounts of micro and nanoplastics in your carotid artery, you had a much, much higher risk of having a major cardiac event or a stroke than those who didn't have those microplastics in their arteries. Now other studies have shown that people with high blood pressure and low heart variability tend to have higher total, urinary BPA. So that's concerning. So it can cause high blood pressure.

And heart rate variability is a very important measure of your overall cardiovascular fitness. So what are the top sources of microplastic exposure? You wanna know now that it's causing all these bad things. Well, ultra processed food and packaging. Just don't eat crap.

You're gonna feel like crap. It's not good for you. There's no reason to eat it. It's not actually food. You should never, never put that past your lips.

And and I've done many, podcasts. You can go back and listen to them on what ultra processed foods are and what they do, but it's it's pretty frightening. So where are you gonna find, also these microplastics? Well, cans, BPA lined cans, coffee cups, lids. We'll be drinking all these coffees.

I mean, bring your own cup. Bring your own can. Salt. Even salt has it. Table salt, which is, you know, ultra processed food also has a lot, but sometimes that has microplastics.

Tea bags. They know tea bags are fine, coffee filters, but they're not. Polypropylene is a type of plastic that's used to seal tea bags and it's kept keeps them kinda together in hot water, but not good because that plastic can leach into your tea. A single plastic tea bag at the brewing temperature can release, get this, 11,600,000,000 microplastics and 3,100,000,000 nano plastics. That's scary.

This is from the Environmental Science and Technology Journal. Current coffee machines, those plastic tubing and the plastic little things that they do, I mean, I don't I don't think we should be using that. Plastic water bottles, soda bottles, any beverage container, which is BPA line, plastic containers, cups, bags, shrink-wrap, tupperware, and cutting boards. You have to be really careful, and just try to use natural products. Personal care products, also another big source of these microplastics.

Face wash has these microbeads, exfoliants, phthalates, and lotions, creams, toothpaste. Use Skin Deep, which is a database from the environmental working group that gives you a guide on what to eat, use, and eat on your body and what to clean your house with that doesn't have all these crappy things in them. And watch out for your makeup. As I said, you know, skin care products are full of these microplastics. What about your clothes?

Well, clothes also are an issue. Polyester and synthetic fibers also are a big issue because when you wash them, those microplastics drain into our water supply. And a friend of mine, has a appliance company he's a CEO of in in, Europe called Archulek and has developed a microplastic filter, and he's open sourced it to all manufacturers of appliances. I don't know if they're using them, but they should. And what about kids' old toys?

Plastic toys, especially those made from polyethylene, which can lead to direct exposure to these chemicals when they're chewed or sucked on by kids. Kids stick everything in their mouth. So all these plastic toys for babies and kids are terrible. Also, there's a bunch of other places I mentioned, receipts, you know, credit card receipts, ATM receipts, gas station receipts, medical equipment like II tubing, IV bags, disposable gloves, and all that gets to us over time. They enter the body through food and water, through inhalation, through skin exposure.

That's kind of bad news, a little depressing. Right? We are all inundated with these microplastics and these environmental toxins. But there is good news. You can detoxify from these things.

You can actually get rid of them from your body. You have to do a little work, but you can. BPA has a rapid clearance rate, so it doesn't really last that long in the body, only about five or six hours. Means about it takes five or six hours for your body to kind of metabolize and get rid of half of the BPA in your body. The bad news, we're exposed all the time, so it's hard for the body to get to, net zero.

And we're gonna actually measure this in function health, panel. Soon, we're gonna measure BPA levels. So you can even test them. You go to functionhealth.com forward slash mark. We're not quite up there yet with that test, but we'll get there soon.

We'll also look at PFAS for every chemical. So we'll be able to start testing these things and you can see your exposures. So the first step is really to reduce your exposure. How do you do that? Air filters and water filters.

So water filters are great. You can use AquaTRU, a LinkedIn show notes. So just a reverse osmosis filter. Other types are fine. Swap out plastic food containers with glass ones.

Don't eat ultra processed food. Right? So you're gonna reduce your exposure to microplastics and phthalates and PFAS from processing and packaging. Swap out your plastic cups for glass cups. Use rock salt like Redmond's real salt.

That's my favorite. Never heat food or drinks in plastic ever in the microwave or anywhere else. Stay away from the instant meals that you cook in plastic, like a cup of noodles, soup, rice. Just don't do that. Avoid drinking from plastic water bottles, which is hard to do, but we should definitely be doing that.

Both to not not pollute the planet with plastic, but also to not pollute ourselves. A new study found that a liter of water from plastic water bottles contained, and this is scary, 240,000 detectable plastic fragments. I'm gonna say it again. A liter of water from a plastic water bottle contains 240,000 detectable plastic fragments. And that's about 10 to a hundred times more than previous estimates.

And about 90% of these fragments were nano plastics, not microplastics. Also, you can use a steel water bottle, a stainless steel water bottle. I would encourage you to do that. I have one. Avoid commercial to go coffee cups, like, from a coffee shop.

They're usually lined with BPA. Ask to fill a stainless steel travel mug or transfer the hot contents to a safe container, especially, right after you get it because I I don't wanna leave it in there. Avoid cans, especially acidic food and drinks like soda, tomatoes, leach out unless it's a BPA free can. There's companies that do make those. BPA concentrations up to 40 times higher in canned food from sterilization and pasteurization.

Don't try to have canned foods unless you know they're BPA free cans. Don't take the receipt. You know, you can these most of these have a BPA coating. You can email it or or or text it or something, but don't don't don't touch it. Don't use plastic tea bags.

Use tea bags that are organic, unbleached, a % plastic free, toxic free. Cotton coffee filters are fine. Don't use Keurig or plastic tubing for coffee. You can use a stainless steel French press, pour over coffee. And again, as I said, say no to receipts.

Bad idea. You get an air filter. HEPA filter is great. I like air doctor. I'll put a link in the show notes.

Watch out for, something called BPS. Because as soon as they find a chemical is bad and really, oh, BPA is bad, they come up with something else, which may not be better. Right? And BPS, is used to be replacement for BPA, but it can actually be more toxic. That's how you reduce your exposure.

That's the first step, is get rid of the source. How do you actually detoxify your body from the microplastics? Well, your body has a a built in detoxification system, so you have to support those pathways and it works better than any crash diet or juice cleanse. So you have to support it by eating the right food. Foods actually have components in them that help your body detoxify.

So what are they? Well, antioxidants in general help scavenge free radicals. They protect against DNA damage, oxidative stress. Vitamin c is great because, it's a great antioxidant, and you can get that from citrus fruit, oranges, kiwis, veggies. Vitamin e, another great antioxidant from wheat germ oil, nuts, some veggies.

Vitamin a, which is from grass fed beef liver, chicken liver. Grass fed meats often have vitamin a. Animal food is the main source. Plant foods don't have actually preformed vitamin a. Melatonin, which you can get in even in your diet, actually, from meat, fish, eggs, pistachios.

Lots of antioxidants you can take in terms of herbs, like quercetin, curcumin, of course, is in onions, garlic, and apples. Carotenoids are like you know, the I sound like were they from, like, carrots. And and yellow vegetables, flavonoids like berries, ellagic acid, and pomegranate, EGCG, which is in green tea, astaxanthin from algae and salmon, krill, curcumin, milk thistle. All these are great to use to help your body detoxify. These herbs have been well studied and they have been shown to actually up regulate many of your body's own built in detox pathways.

One of the so powerhouses here, and I have these almost every day, are what we call cruciferous veggies. Now these are things like broccoli, collards, kale, brussel sprouts, and so forth, bok choy. But a lot of other things are great too, like dandelion leaves, rosemary, and so forth. So all these can really help your your body to up regulate these detox pathways. Your body also has, a lot of its own antioxidant enzymes.

So you can upregulate those enzymes by having the right cofactors like copper and zinc for something called SOD. Catalase, another important antioxidant enzyme your body makes. It needs iron and manganese. Glutathione, really, really important. It needs selenium and cysteine and a number of other amino acids.

A grass fed whey is a great way to boost glutathione, which is high in cysteine. I use regeneratively raised goat whey like Mount Capra. Sulfur rich foods, also great for boosting detox pathways. So what are those? All the the broccoli family.

Right? The broccoli, cauliflower, kale, cabbage, brussels sprouts, watercress. Protein also, amino acids are critical for up regulating your detox pathways. So you wanna make sure you have at least a gram per pound of ideal body weight, and you have to really need that. Otherwise, if you're detoxing and you don't have the amino acids support your liver detox pathways, you're gonna be in trouble.

Also, you need to have, the right b vitamins, particularly the b vitamins b six, b twelve, and folate to support methylation. Really important. And you can get those from grass fed meat, from pasteurized eggs, poultry. Certain enzymes are really important. Hydration also really important.

You know, the solution to pollution is dilution. That's what we learned in medical school. Make sure you drink half your weight in ounces of water per day. Use a water filter, as I mentioned, reverse osmosis. Make sure you hydrate to get rid of the toxins.

So you wanna have plenty of urine, clear urine. If it's yellow, you probably don't have enough water. Fiber, really important. It's like a sponge that binds the toxins and prevents you from reabsorbing them. So try to eat twenty five to thirty grams, even up to fifty a day.

You can actually take fiber supplements like soluble or insoluble fibers. And insoluble fibers, for example, are nondigestible ones that pass through the GI tract. They add bulk to the school, but but you want soluble fiber, fruits and veggies, which has kind of like a gel like substance in the intestines and really helps all areas of health. That reduces inflammation. It feeds your good gut bugs.

It aids your blood sugar control. Also binds to the cholesterol and bile acids, helps your excretion. And many of these microplastics are fat soluble, so they're bound to cholesterol. For example, we saw in the, study on heart disease that the were detected in the plaque of arteries. Right?

Remember that? So we wanna eat more fiber, especially the soluble fiber that helps BPA exit the bile through your poop. Now there are different types and sources of soluble fiber. One of the best types is beta glucans, which are found in oats, but you want glyphosate, gluten free, whole, steel cut oats, pectins, which are in apples, oranges, pears, and nuts, the certain mucilages, which are, like, kinda if you put it in water, you'll gum them up pretty quick, but that's great, like flax seeds, chia seeds, psyllium seeds, inulin, chicory root. These are all prebiotic foods.

Drew some artichokes, onions, garlic, asparagus, and sweat. Also, you don't wanna hear about sweating. Sweating is really important. It's how your body gets rid of a lot of toxins. So in 2012, there was a study of human excretion of BPA in blood, urine, and sweat, and they found that BPA concentrations were higher in sweat than in urine.

And out of 20 participants, sixteen had detectable BPA concentrations in the sweat, but only two had detectable levels in their blood. So basically, they're fat soluble. So when you sweat, you actually have one of the main mechanisms to get rid of these environmental toxins. That's why I love saunas. The results of the study suggest that sweat testing can be a cool tool for checking BPA monitoring, and inducing sweating is a clinically useful tool to facilitate the release of BPA through the skin.

It's not routine for doctors to test BPA, but but it can be tested in urine or or blood, even in sweat, as I mentioned. Function Health's gonna be offering that test. Go to functionhealth.com/mark to learn more. But, yeah, I really wanna sweat. Right?

I really wanna sweat to get it out. Certain supplements can be very helpful. CoQ ten has been studied by researchers at Harvard, and it shows that it reduced free radicals caused by BPA in worms, which is, I guess, good. Chlorella also can help support detoxification. Probiotics also helpful.

They bind to BPA, phthalates, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, so it's like lactobacillus, bifidobacterium, saccharomyces biliary, all help your gut health, help improve liver function, prevent all kinds of stuff from going wrong in your body. They have great effects on your endocrine system. Also, you can take other supplements like n acetyl cysteine. I take that every day to boost glutathione. I also take lipoic acid, which is an antioxidant that helps boost glutathione.

And you can take some fiber supplements like psyllium or just take flaxseeds or even chia seeds every day.

Dr. Mark Hyman
In the case of toxins, how how do toxins actually interact with our biology, cause such problems?

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
Yeah. That is actually that's that's a rigor question. I kinda break into three categories. Category one is, while we pay attention to individual toxins and know a lot about the disease caused by individual toxins, number one priority is total by load of toxins. How much Arctic do you have?

How much leg do you have? How much spisphenols do you have? How much phthalates do you have? Etcetera. Because what happens is all the toxins cause oxidative stress and deplete glutathione from the body.

Glutathione is the most important antioxidant in our body, but more importantly, it's the key way we protect our mitochondria. And the longest living people with the least disease at the highest levels of glutathione. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right. If you

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
put glutathione, Your mitochondria die, and you die sooner and have more disease.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
Okay. So you got decreased total load. Then we look at okay. So now what do the toxins do individually? So they can range from this where classically the main problem with toxins is they've just placed nutrients from the body.

So for example, any enzyme that depends upon calcium in the body, they have high levels of lead, it displaces the calcium from the enzymes so they don't work properly. So basically, they poison enzymes. Why is that important? Bodies are enzyme machines. The body's enzyme machines.

Enzymes are working, our machine's not working, and we get

Dr. Mark Hyman
sick. Yeah.

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
That's number one. Direct poisoning of the enzymes by the topic. And this

Dr. Mark Hyman
is sort of emphasize that for a minute. Enzymes, you know, are are such a huge part of our biology that one third of our DNA codes for enzymes. One third of our entire genome is coding for enzymes that have lies metabolic reactions in the body and all those have to be functioning for us to be healthy. It's like the metabolic machinery that it has to run everything.

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
And

Dr. Mark Hyman
and toxins bind to those enzymes in a way that blocks their function leading to faulty biology, which leads to disease.

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
Yes. Exactly. Very well said, Mark. Exactly. That's what happens.

And going on with what you said about DNA, in the secondary or third area now, that's huge problem after the toxins is they damage their DNA. So when when you look at the research on the correlation between the bile of a particular toxin and a particular disease we're looking at, if you do it according to age, you don't see very many correlations until about the age of 50. Because up until about the age of 50, our body is pretty able to adapt to the damage to the of the from the toxin and work around it. But when we're here about age 50, there's two big things that happen. Number one is, our body load of persistent toxins has now become much much higher.

So these are toxins that take so long to get out of our body, we can't get rid of them.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
So PCBs, for example. If you go to a restaurant and eat farmed fish, some of the PCBs and the farmed fish have a half life ranging from ten to twenty years. It takes four half lives to get rid of the toxin. If you go eat that farmed fish Sure. And some of those toxins will bring your body for rest of your life.

So what happens Unless I live

Dr. Mark Hyman
to 200, then I'll get rid of them. Please.

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
There you go. Right. Yeah. You have to live to live with past a hundred to get rid of them. Okay.

Yeah. So then, so what's happening is the bio load is going up. But now the bio load going up, we've cumulatively damaged our DNA. So our ability to respond to them and and adapt to them has now become limited. And now all of a sudden, all the disease correlation start showing up.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So total load, damage to enzymes, and damage DNA. But there's more effects. Right? There's Oh,

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
maybe.

Dr. Mark Hyman
The immunotoxicity, which is leading to all the inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. Right? And mitochondrial injury, which leads to poisoning of our energy metabolism. So there's damage to our gut lining that happens because of toxins that damage our enzymes in our gut that make our gut not

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
be so orange. Yes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Every level of our biology, if there are endocrine disruptors, they just screw up our hormonal function. So every level of our biology, these compounds are are interfering with them. And, you know, I I I think, you know, the story, but, you know, the reason I got into functional medicine was I was living in China. And long story short, I got poisoned with mercury from the pollution there, cleaning out my air filter. Plus, I'd eaten tuna fish for decades when I was a kid, and I had lots of fillings.

And I had the level on a challenge test of a 87 Oh. Which is for those who don't know, like, if I see someone over 20, I get worried. Okay. I rarely see anybody over a hundred. I don't remember the last time it was a hundred.

I've had a couple of people who had higher levels than me. One was a dementia patient and but, you know, I I literally had every system in my body break down. My gut broke down. My cognitive brain broke down. My immune system broke down.

I felt allergies. Everything broke down. And and I developed chronic flu syndrome, and and no one could fix me. Went to doctor for doctor for years until, actually, I went to the conference where I first met you in Hawaii. And, in IFM conference, like, in '97, I've been involved.

And I was on a plane with a guy who's a naturopath, and I was telling him I just learned about functional medicine. I was going to my first conference, and I learned about this this, this naturopath. I was wondering, well, gee, maybe you should check your heavy metals. I'm like, what? Really?

So I did a hair analysis. I had a high levels, and then I did a a challenge test. And that was the beginning of my exploration of functional medicine. So I learned it the hard way. I learned it the hard way, and and I, you know, I find this as well in my patients.

So many patients are, you know, coming in with these diagnoses and underlying it is because it's toxic load. So, it let's talk about the kind of big categories of toxins. You mentioned a lot of Responsibly decision. Yeah.

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
Yeah. Immune system. Okay. So the immune system is very, very successful to bind all toxins. So I look so I just gave, you know, I just gave a lecture on, PFAS.

It's the prochlorinated compounds. And so I looked at

Dr. Mark Hyman
Forever chemicals that

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
are where where

Dr. Mark Hyman
were they from? Where did you get them from?

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
Worst place, fast food.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Fast food.

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
Popcorn, fast food are worse by far. I I I microwave popcorn.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Microwave popcorn. Okay. Because if you said regular popcorn, I don't know how to say it.

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
Regular popcorn is fine. It's all good. Microwave popcorn is problematic. Okay. Well, I was, looking at this, I was looking at, co I thought, look at COVID and PFASIS.

And look at people who had either no COVID or mild case compared to people who had a severe version of COVID. Once you got severe version, 50 to a % higher levels for PFAS in their body compared to those who do not get bad COVID.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Wow.

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
So just just a simple thing like that, enough damage to immune system, couldn't get rid of the COVID virus fast enough, now you got problems.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Immunotoxicity is a real deal. You know, I had a a a patient who would bring me up, like, Crohn's disease and done everything and turned out she had really, really high blood levels. You detox her blood and she got better. I see this over and over in my career.

You know,

Dr. Mark Hyman
the the the the some

Dr. Mark Hyman
of the chemicals other than metals that we can test for for blood tests. And we do that at Clinch and Health where people can get their own blood test. But also we do it through, you know, traditional sort of, challenge testing, which is where you take a chelator and it binds with metals and you can see what's going on. And and this the test is really not done in traditional medicine. It's a test that I do anybody who's got a chronic illness because I have to rule it out.

And often, I'm surprised. I had a guy, for example, who had long COVID, he was mentioned. And, I was kinda shocked. Like, he had his mercury was, like, 93. This challenge is really high.

His blood level was 18, and he was struggling with long COVID and gut issues. And I'm like, well, this is what's going on.

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
Right? Exactly.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And so I think it's it's if any every start looking, you start seeing it. And I think there's a whole swath of other compounds that are I would call them in a petrochemical sphere that are that are synthesized compounds that are are problematic. So what are the top compounds that are are concerning to you that that were exposed to on a regular basis? And and and where where are they found and how do we avoid them?

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
Yeah. Again, another excellent question. So when I look at the toxins, you know, the easy way to think about them is metals versus chemicals. So we're looking at metals, arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium. The four big ones, substantial portion of population have elevated levels that cause a lot of disease.

When we're looking at the chemicals, we have perfluorinates, the PFAS, the forever chemicals. We've got the, bisphenols. So people think, oh, BPA is bad. Let me get plastic that's BPA free. Well, guess what?

They put other bisphenols in, they're just as bad. Phthalates, a lot of the health and beauty aids have phthalates

Dr. Mark Hyman
in them. Those The skin Like sunblock or makeup.

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
Yeah. Sunblock makeup things like this. A lot of phthalates. But why is that problematic? Phthalates binds into receptor sites and get people diabetes.

Okay. So, there are so many chemicals. I've been kinda systematically working my way through. But so far, in terms of chemicals, these are the three I'm paying the most attention to.

Dr. Mark Hyman
BPA.

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
BPA and phthalates. Phthalates. Because there's just so much research. I'm not saying there aren't other problematic chemicals, but these three by themselves cost so much as There's

Dr. Mark Hyman
only a 44,000 other chemicals.

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
There's 12,000 of these forever chemicals. Yeah. Just one category is 12,000 chemicals.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I think that's the thing that, you know, somebody is just daunting for people because, like, we're living in the sea of these chemicals.

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
The the, you know, the newborn study that the environmental work group did show there were 287 chemicals in the umbilical cord of a brand new baby before it even took its first breath. And 217 of those chemicals were neurotoxins. Everything from flame retardants, pesticides, dioxins, PCBs, you know, DDT, things that were banned have been banned before long before or decades before these kids are born. They're in their mothers and they're in the environment and they're in these babies. So when you're born pre polluted

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
Now we're going to the next next set of toxins and that is the herbicides and the pesticides.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Agro thermo chemicals.

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
Yeah. And industrial chemicals for agriculture. So let's look at just one category, organophosphate pesticides. Okay? If you measure the by load of pregnant women, you measure the level of organophosphate pesticides, And you compare look at the IQ of children born to women with the top level organophosphate pesticides compared to women with the lowest level organophosphate pesticides.

And you iron out statistically all the differences in weight and ethnicity, things of this nature. Just look at organophosphate pesticide levels, highest levels, top 10% of women, seven point drop in the IQ of the children, and they never get it back. So in utero, the body is being saturated with neurotoxins. So is it any surprise the brain does not develop properly when it's both neurotoxins? Yeah.

So I said before that, I'm focused on PFAS, Vistrinol, Syntylates. You gotta focus on on the pesticides, particularly organophosphate pesticides are probably the worst of all of them. Whether you've got chlorinate pesticides are problematic and many other categories.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's true. I mean, I think, I read a study that that was based on farm workers' children, migrant farm workers' children. And they estimated that in the offspring of of that cohort, there were 41,000,000 lost IQ points in most children. And and, you know, I think they're everywhere.

Right? We're sort of living in a sea of them. We can't really completely avoid them. I'm on the board of the environmental working group, and there's wonderful guys there on how to find products that are low or don't have these compounds. Skin beef is their skin care database.

They have what household products that, you can buy for cleaning that are not gonna pollute your environment. There's ways you can choose food based on lower pesticide counts and 30 dozen, that clean 15. And there's guys that put animal protein and fish you should eat and how to reduce your exposures. So there's a lot of ways to reduce your exposures. But, you

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
know, part

Dr. Mark Hyman
of the problem is we really can't avoid them entirely. We're all like polluted. And and, I guess they were born pre polluted. So from your perspective as a practitioner, you know, you can see this, I need to see the data. And it's kind of terrifying if toxins are causing all diseases, what the heck can we do about it?

Because other than trying to reduce your exposures and stop eating fish and don't eat paint chips and, you know, filter your water and have an air filter in your house and go use these thin care products and stuff. We're still not gonna be completely able to avoid them. So so how do we actually, start to think about this from a practical point of view of of treating people Yes. With environmental toxicity and how do we diagnose them properly?

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
Yes. So there's actually some really good news here because there's some very simple things we can do that have huge impact on our toxicity. So first thing we wanna do is about Toxigarva. So I recommend that everybody get have their doctor measure a laboratory test called GGTP. So GGTP is a liver enzyme that in the past was measured to determine the person that hepatitis.

If a person has inflammation in the liver, they start leaking liver enzymes into their blood, and you measure enzyme in the blood and say, hepatitis. They stopped using GTT for hepatitis because other tests were found to be more reliable because GGG was reacting to other things. So it turns out within the cold normal range, 10 to 15 dependent on the lab, GGG goes up in proportion to toxic load.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
as you detoxify, GTT goes down. So I mentioned that couple one's program I did. So I mentioned my GTT then, and it was 27. And I thought that was okay because I saw the research saying, once it's 30, you have an eightfold increased risk of diabetes. Yeah.

Well, it's not concerning to go from 29 no risk to 30 more risk. I thought, well, 27 is too high. So I started getting more and more careful. Started getting more careful, went down a couple years later down to 24. Then I measure a few years late.

Few years ago, it went down to 17. I just measured it two months ago. I was down to 16. Yeah. So between a GTT between fifteen and twenty means you've done a good job of getting rid of enough toxins that the body doesn't have to increase GTT.

Why does the body increase GTT? Because it recycles glutathione because glutathione protects us from toxins. Okay. You're down to 15 to 20, you probably have a good job to rid of toxins. Now if you below 15, it may not mean you have low toxic load, it may mean you have a genetic inability to increase glutathione to protect you from environmental toxins.

So people I've seen with the biggest problems with environmental toxins have low GTTs. I call them the yellow canaries.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
They can't protect themselves. So right there, you have to monitor. Now what's the next thing you just think

Dr. Mark Hyman
about? I don't understand about that test. That test is a really inexpensive, common test. It's not part typically of your annual physical. It's not part of your typical hepatic liver function test.

You have to ask for it specifically. It's called GVT. And I think it's something that that I've been measuring on every single patient for because I can be high with alcohol, like, liver disease. It can be high with fatty liver, from diabetes, from a lot of other things. But it it it's a it's a very important biomarker.

And as part of function health, which was the company I cofounded, it's part of the standard panel you get for, you know, under $500 Right. A 10 biomarker, but it's it's really important because of that.

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
Smart. Yep. Like like, right on. Very, very useful test. So that way you can monitor what's going on.

So we at as, my teacher, doctor Bastyr would say, don't kid yourself. You know, you can think you're living healthily, but you might have this little thing you do here and all this this food you really love. You can't buy organic. Let me eat that anyway. You can find how many of your little, exceptions.

How bad are they adding up? Okay. Yeah. The second thing to do is report the device on natural decock system systems. And we spent millions of years evolving these things, and we sabotage them.

How do we sabotage them? A lot of the toxins are excreted from the liver into the gut where we then expect to go out through the stools. But we evolved that system and we're consuming a 50 hundred to 50 grams of of of fiber a day. Now we consume 15 to 20 grams of fiber a day. Yeah.

89% lower. Which means that instead of going out through the schools, it just reabsorbed through interpact recirculation. So number one, eat more fiber. Eat more fiber and your body get rid of things more more effectively. Number two, only organic and growing foods.

And number three, from your kitchen, remove all the plastics, remove all the nonstick things, only use glass and ceramics. It's the only safe things I'm aware of.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Filter your water?

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
Yeah. Okay. So what we do is we have a a carbon block filter right in the main coming to our house. So all the water, whether they're drinking it, whether they're taking a shower, is clean. And our air conditioning and the heating system in the house, we use what's called a Lennox filter, and it's rated at MERV 16, m a r v dash 16.

And that will give rid of 99.9% of the toxins in the air in your house.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
Very effective. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Very important to just kinda keep your home environment clean.

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
Keep your home environment. We spend more time.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Toxic materials. But I I think, you know, one of the things I was gonna bring up is this whole idea of detoxification. And, you you know, it was it was really from a perspective of a traditional doctor and training I had. It was quackery. Like, you know, our bodies detox, whatever, but, like, there's no reason to think about improving detoxification.

And and yet, when we deeply look at the science of the biology of detoxification, which includes your breath, your skin, your hair, your your stool, your liver, your kidneys. It's a whole system. And it it requires the right, building blocks to actually function. It requires the right materials and the pathways have to work. And and it it's it's a really well worked out model.

And yet we learn nothing about how to fix it except when you're in the ER. And I was an ER doctor for many years. Someone comes in with a Tylenol overdose. We give them this drug called drug called Nucramist, which smells horrible. It's not like rotten eggs.

You make them drink it, which is like punishment for taking the Tylenol overdose. And, and then you you have a bunch of charcoals. And and essentially, what this compound does is boost glutathione. It's an acetylcysteine, which is essentially a supplement. Yep.

Right? And I was, like, shocked when I learned that later, but it it literally will rescue the liver from failure after a big insult like a Tylenol overdose, which works by depletingly defined.

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
Yes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So, you know, we we kind of use it in traditional medicine. We just don't realize what we're doing. But I I think I think what I well, let me talk about is sort of breakdown. How do we optimize each of the types of detoxification systems we have? Because it's really about building in to your life the automatic ways to upregulate the biology detoxification in your system.

And I I I do that every single day now because I just built it into my life because I know I'm not a great detoxifier. I've checked my glutathione snips, and I have methylation snips. I have genetics that makes me more likely to accumulate toxins. So I have to upregulate those pathways. What what what's your approach to sort of giving people guidance, all the way from, you know, diet to lifestyle to supplements that actually help their biology do the things they're supposed to do.

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
Yeah. Very very well said. So number one and number two and number three are avoidance, avoidance, avoidance. Don't let the stuff into your body. And everyday choices we make.

So for example, do you pump your own gasoline? The answer is probably yes. Do you smell the gasoline? When you smell the gasoline, there's benzene going into your body. You're smelling something that doesn't smell right?

Get away from it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So we need n 95 filter?

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
Yeah. Right. N 95 filter on your nose. So anyway, avoid, avoid, avoid.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I hold my breath. It's great. I hold my breath for the entire time the gas tank is filling

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
your throat. Yes. It's challenging to know. So I think I'll I'll say some specific thing to to do, but it's every time you have a choice, look at what the less toxic environment less the lower environmental toxin load choices that you can make. So stand up when when you're pumping your gas line.

When you're having to go out to eat in a restaurant, well, talk to people at the restaurant and just one of your favorite restaurant. I'm getting a little far field here. Cook as much of your own food as you can. Okay? I just read a study on the way over here where it showed that for every meal a person eats out, they didn't differentiate between fast food and and regular restaurants, Fast foods are worse.

Every time a person eats a meal out versus cooking food at home, they increase their blood levels of the fresher chemicals by 1%. One % per meal. Okay. So, choosing where you eat your food is a way to start. Make us sure that food is organically grown.

If you are gonna go out, you have a failed place to go out, meet with the owner, meet with the cooks, and say, can you cook prepare your food in ways that are less toxic? And if you are gonna eat if you are gonna buy food that is from a grocery that's been prepared, come to you in plastic, or it's coming to you in lined, paper containers, immediately put it into glass. Somebody said, well, it's been sitting there since it was made and sitting there in the grocery store. So my lecture today showed, it's time dependent. Even though it's been going up as long as it's been in the grocery store, if you leave that container, it's still gonna keep going up.

So at least you can stop it there. So put everything in the glass container. I said before, increase your consumption of fiber. But it's also simple things like, do you take a multivitamin and mineral? The majority of population is deficient in multiple nutrients.

I mean, US population, ninety nine percent of people are deficient in one or more nutrients. Yeah. Half are deficient in five or more. So just right there, what are those nutrients needed for? Detox systems.

So use a good multivining mineral. Does not have to be super high dosages, but it has to be a little bit of everything.

Dr. Mark Hyman
How do environmental toxins affect our health? Well, they do it through a lot of different mechanisms, but they're basically poisons and they cause inflammation. They cause oxidative stress. They cause DNA damage. They cause disruption in our mitochondria.

They damage our, our stem cells. I mean, in the whole flood of environmental toxins, there's over 80,000 of them now that have been introduced to the industrial, sort of world since the early nineteen hundreds that we've never been exposed to before and we somehow have to figure out how to deal with them. Well, thank God we have a system to do it, but it's still overwhelmed. So environmental toxins, as I said, drive cancer. They are hugely impactful, for example, in blood sugar and insulin sensitivity.

Most people don't realize that diabetes and pre diabetes, and even obesity can be driven by environmental toxins. Something called bisphenol A, which is a, compound that's found in the lining of a lot of cans, plastic bottles, on paper, receipts from credit cards or gas stations. When you touch that, it goes through your skin and bisphenol a is a huge driver of insulin resistance and prediabetes, independent of what you're eating. It affects cholesterol metabolism. It drives inflammation, oxidative stress, mitochondrial injury, screws up our thyroid function, affects our appetite, leptin signaling.

I mean, pretty much everything gets haywire when we're exposed to too many environmental toxins. Now, the downside of living in the modern world is that we're all pre polluted when we're born. There's two eighty seven known environmental toxins found in in the umbilical cord blood of a newborn. Maybe they take out the blood of the umbilical cord, send it to a lab, and the average amount of toxins is two eighty seven, many of which have been banned for decades, like DDT or PCBs or dioxin and two seventeen of those are neurotoxic, meaning they're directly damaging to the brain. There's pesticides, phthalates, bisphenol A, which I just mentioned, flame retardants, heavy metals like mercury, lead, arsenic, and they have huge effects across the spectrum of human health.

So what are the ones that we should really be paying attention to that we really want to avoid and get rid of? The first I just mentioned earlier is bisphenol a b or BPA. It's found in plastic water bottles and canned foods. It's a synthetic compound that mimics estrogen in the body. We call these xenobiotics or xenoestrogens,

Dr. Joe Pizzorno
and

Dr. Mark Hyman
they're hugely impactful in regulating hormonal health and risk increasing years of cancer. And it's been linked BPA to breast cancer, to infertility, reproductive issues, obesity, heart disease. And, it's not that hard to get rid of it in your life. Basically, don't touch credit card receipts. Don't touch gas station receipts that come out of the machine.

Don't eat from plastic bottles unless they're BPA free or from canned foods unless they're BPA free. So make sure you look at that. If you use stainless steel, glass, bottling packaging. Look for BPA canned fruits. The next compound is phthalates.

Phthalates are also plasticizers, and they're found in food containers, children's toys. It's banned in Europe. There's a legislation in Europe called REACH. It gets rid of most of these chemicals that are allowed in America. And when there's ever an attempt to limit by law or a bill to reduce our exposures, the, food industry and chemical industry comes in hard with tons of lobbying dollars, millions and millions and millions, tens of millions of dollars to defeat bills.

There was one on this Finolet that got defeated. And, unfortunately, it was trying to be banned, but, it didn't pass because there was so much lobbying against it. But it's found in children's toys. It's found, in, like, the plastic little rubber duckies in the bathtub, so they stick it in their mouth. Bad idea.

Also, makeup has a lot of phthalates in it. So get rid of all your unhealthy makeups, and we're gonna talk about how to do that. But there's a beautiful website called ewg.org, the Environmental Working Group. They have a skin deep database. You can put in your product, what you like to use, or other products you can find that have no contaminants, and see the level of toxins and what they are and, and find alternatives.

So they also are, are really bad for you because phthalates cause hormonal chaos, they're linked to breast, different cancers, to birth defects, to thyroid problems. So make sure you, you check it out. And the basic rule is if you wouldn't eat it, you probably shouldn't put it in or on your body. Right? So for skin care products, everything goes through the skin.

When we go to the emergency room of the heart attack, what's the first thing we do? As a doctor, we slap on a a toothpaste tube cream full of nitroglycerin because it goes right through the skin, and it's the fastest acting that I'm taking it by mouth or before we can get an IV and we just slap that on. And so it goes to the skin hormone patches, testosterone gels. We know the fentanyl patch. I mean, there's all kinds of drugs that are delivered through the skin.

So when you're putting on your skin, it's actually getting inside your body. So you wanna make sure that if you wouldn't eat it, you shouldn't put it on your body. Like coconut oil, where you can eat that and you can put on your body, so that's a win. But there's a lot of products out there that are safe that you can use. Another one that's concerning is glycol ethers.

They're in household cleaning products, cosmetics, paints. They damage fertility, they lead to birth defects, they worsen allergies, asthma. And these and these are really bad because they're pretty much in all all of our household cleaning products. And the, environmental working group, EWG, also has a whole guide on household cleaning products. So you can use the least contaminated products or ones that have no toxins in them that work well.

So make sure you check that out. And there are so many other toxins like heavy metals, mercury, lead, arsenic. Mercury is from fish, from our fillings, from coal burning plants, pollution. Lead is often found in crystal wine glasses or glazed plates. I see many, many patients have those and they get sick from that.

It can be in the ground. It can be from coal burning, if you're living in a cement plant or a coal plant that basically goes up in the atmosphere, comes down in the soil. Your kids are playing with it, be dragged in the house, the baby's on the floor. So lead exposure is real. There's houses that still have leaded paint, all the leaded gasoline that was used for years, all that went in the air and goes down in the soil.

It can be in vegetables. If you're growing in an urban environment, for example, you're growing greens, you think you're eating kale and being healthy, could be full wet. Arsenic also is a big problem and it's found in rice many places because in the ground it can be in pressure treated lumber that you have on your deck and getting your feet. It can go actually in, in chicken feed to prevent the feed from going moldy, which is great for the feed and the mold, but it's not good for you and it gets in the chicken, you eat it. So it's pretty important for us to make sure that we get rid of those.

So I think the key is, we need to avoid toxins. And so the question is, what are the top strategies to reduce our toxic burden? Well, we can basically remove the toxins, but we we also have to upregulate our detox system. So, first thing is avoid plastics wherever you can. Try stainless steel, like containers, I have those, or glass containers for storing food in your in your fridge, stealing some water bottles.

Glass containers are great for leftovers. Don't buy water and plastic water bottles. Get a water filter. I like reverse osmosis and you can actually get a water bottle bring it with you. Make sure you detox your home.

Get simple cleaning products, laundry detergent, cleaning products for windows, for counters, for dishwasher stuff, everything. And there's a great source Thrive Market. You can get it's an online grocery store. Basically, you can get all the best cleaners from Seventh Generation and other eco friendly non toxic food companies. And now, of course, check out DWG's guide on household cleaning products, on skin care products.

They're great. So I think make sure that you just are diligent about getting toxins out of your home. Second is, mercury is a big one and often we don't pay attention to what we're eating and people eat tuna fish, swordfish, sushi. Sadly, all the oceans have been polluted and no matter where you get your fish from, it's pretty much pre polluted. Because microplastics, mercury, and other toxins, PCBs, farmed fish can be just as bad.

So there are a few kind of ways to get around it. One is to eat very small fish: sardines, mackerel, herring, anchovies. Small salmon can be okay, but still I can have Mercury. Also, there's a great regenerative aquaculture company called Seatopia. Fish and they actually provide beautiful, delicious, clean fish that you can get frozen, sent to your home.

It's amazing fish, actually. And, also reduce your exposure to, the the problems that are from, you know, all the the the chemicals in your environment by having an air filter in your house that reduces their airborne pollution. Indoor air pollution is a real thing, whether it's mold or whether it's, other things that contaminants, off gassing from furniture or rugs. I mean, you wanna obviously try to have a clean home and not full of products, but I mean, you buy a Tempur Pedic bed and it smells awful. It's off gassing.

Those are called VOCs, volatile organic compounds. You really wanna avoid those in your house. And then, you wanna start to learn about how to actually upgrade and increase your body's own detoxification system. And the best way to do that is by using a couple of strategies that are really important. One is maximize your intake of phytochemicals.

Plant based compounds, these nutrients and plants work on up regulating different pathways in the body, including a lot of detox pathways. There's amazing cornucopia of phytochemicals that work on boosting glutathione and boosting our detox pathways and increasing our ability to get rid of stuff. So the biggest category is the cruciferous vegetables: broccoli, collards, cabbage, kale, brussels sprouts. They really up regulate glutathione in the body and help to maximize the main detoxifier. Also, there are amazing things like garlic and onions that also contain sulfur that are great for detoxification.

Also things like rosemary, curcumin, ginger, and the skin of a lemon, like if you grate lemon into a salad or something, the skin of a lemon has limonene. These all help up regulate our detox pathways. We also need the right nutrients. Right? We need methylation support B12, folate B6, we need magnesium, selenium, zinc and many other minerals and vitamins to actually help up regulate our detox pathways.

We need amino acids and form protein to help put some of the amino acid pathways. So there's lots of ways we now understand the body's own built in detox system and we have to support it. The next thing you do is, sweat. So your body gets rid of toxins through both exercise increasing the lymphatic flow and circulation through exercise, increase circulation and also, saunas. So sauna is an amazing way to boost your detox system and help body remove a lot of the environmental toxins, your fat soluble and you can actually measure them on the sweat.

You also want to take the right supplements as I mentioned. So you want to take additional support about good multi, methylating support, zinc, vitamin C, glutathione, boosting stuff, and acetylcysteine, lipoic acid, milk thistle. A lot of other herbs can be used to help the boost the body detox pathways. So I highly recommend getting on a regular support system for that. I do because we're all exposed.

Sometimes if you have a real big issue, you might need to see a doctor and get treated like I did for mercury poisoning. I needed chelation. I needed to actually use a medication to help remove the metals from my body. It's lead. You can use EDTA.

It's mercury. You can use the MSA and they're they're extremely effective. They need to be used properly and safely with a doctor's supervision. There's a lot of steps to properly getting rid of mercury between a good functional medicine doctor.

Dr. Mark Hyman
If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Doctor Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to the doctor Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts.

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