Episode 21: Dr. Joe Pizzorno, ND on How Toxins Are Making Us Sick

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SPEAKERS: Dr. Andrew Wong, Dr. Joe Pizzorno

Welcome to the Capital Integrative Health podcast, a podcast dedicated to transforming the consciousness around what it means to be healthy and understanding the root causes of both disease and wellness. I am Dr. Andrew Wong, co-founder of Capital Integrative Health, an integrative practice committed to expanding access to holistic root cause medicine to the global community.

Dr. Wong:

Today, we’re bringing you a conversation with Dr. Joe Pizzorno, very excited to have Dr. Joe on today and Dr. Joe, for those of you who did not know, he is an internationally known Naturopathic doctor, the founding president of Bastyr University in 1978 and he coined the term ‘science-based natural medicine’. I think this is really upon a popularized natural medicine but also has been teaching it to many clinicians throughout the decade so he’s an educator, researcher, lecturer, author of many journal publications and books

including ‘Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine’, ‘Textbook of Natural Medicine’ which we all like and enjoy and learn a lot from and then also in 2017, a book called ‘The Toxin Solution’ and we’ll focus today on toxins because we know that this is really relevant to our health and really want to take a deep dive into this today. He has also been on leadership of the IFM, the institute for functional medicine and as a pioneer in environmental medicine so welcome Dr. Joe to the podcast. Thank you so much for being on today.

Dr. Pizzorno:

Well, thank you so much for your very kind introduction and the work you do educating people.

Dr. Wong:

Great. Well, just a real basic kind of forest view question as I’d like to say is you know, like just to have the listeners gonna get to know you a bit more is what motivated you to become a doctor, a clinician and specifically a naturopathic doctor?

Dr. Pizzorno:

A good question and surprising. If you knew me earlier in my life, you would not have realized I decided to become a doctor so I’ve always been totally oriented towards science so I went out and got involved in a PhD program at Cornell University after I got my undergraduate degree in chemistry and I was just you know, really enjoying the idea of doing research and unfortunately that was at the height of the Vietnam war and as became more and more clear that this was not a good idea for us. When I started getting at risk for getting drafted, I really much more deeply looked at well, do I want to be involved in war? Do I want to be involved in not war? And it turned out that the doctorate program I was involved in was contributed to the war effort so I said, “Okay. Heck with this, I’m going to do something different.”, left graduate school, went out to Seattle and I decided to work in medical research. Totally conventional research and I was happily doing medical research and same time think myself you know, I think I’m going to go off get a PhD in medical research instead. So, I started doing research, love doing it, and then the woman who married my roommate from college, one day when we were having dinner said, “You know, I just got cured of my rheumatoid arthritis”, and I said, “You did?”, and the reason I was so curious about that is because I was doing research at University of Washington School of Medicine department rheumatology trying to find a drug cure for arthritis and she was secure. So, what happened? She said, “Well, I went to a naturopath doctor and he cured me”. My thought was first off, this is an incurable disease. Kind of work with MDs and PhDs all over the country trying to find a cure and second thing is, what’s a naturopathic doctor? Okay. I mean I was so medically oriented, I didn’t even know chiropractors existed. Okay.

Dr. Wong:

Yeah.

Dr. Pizzorno:

Because they’re kind of the other major field at that point.

Dr. Wong:

Yeah.

Dr. Pizzorno:

And so, I went to this naturopathic doctor and asked him, “So, what did you do for my friend?”. He said, “I taught her how to eat properly and detoxify her liver”. I thought to myself, “What does the liver have to do with her hands and her knees being swollen?”. Now, remember, this is 50 years ago, okay? But I was curious so I went to this naturopathic doctor and asked him you know, what he did for my friend and he described it and I said, “Well, you know, I’ve got a personal question. I’ve become a vegetarian and I’ve noticed my body’s gone through some changes”. Now, when I asked the MD researchers I was working with. Please don’t take this offensively, Andrew. I was told diet does not affect you. It’s simply an error in your observation. Now, remember this is 50 years ago and that’s what conventional medicine believed. Okay.

Dr. Wong:

Well, I mean I went to school later on in time in medical school but no offense taken at all, Joe, because certainly in medical school, I think we kind of know that and you know conventional medical school that nutrition is not taught very well or certainly not adequately enough to carry rheumatoid arthritis or to make a dent in some of these really complex chronic illnesses that we often see now in clinical practice.

Dr. Pizzorno:

So anyway, so I you know, been objective. I asked the naturopathic doctor the same question, what these changes in my body mean for becoming vegetarian. He goes over to his bookshelf, pulls out Guyton’s Medical Physiology. I mean at that point, a standard core textbook in medical schools showed me physiology, what’s happening in my body by being vegetarian. But well, that’s interesting. The naturopath knows physiology better than MDs I’m working with but that wasn’t enough, okay, because I like doing research and then I did a research study that really grabbed my attention. It’s totally relevant here so we had an MD doing a post doc there on an investigational new drug for rheumatoid arthritis and we were going to test it with an animal model and the animal model at the time was a duck model because you know, the duck fins are just really easy to see how swollen the joints are. So, we got in the gut in the ducks that would have been genetically bred for rheumatoid arthritis as a standard model for drug testing. So, we brought them in and we put them in the vivarium and you can imagine what it’s like to be a vegetarian and being in a vivarium where they do animal research. It was just terrible so we would go and check out yeah, we got the right ducks. And now, this MD was a woman and she was a very kind-hearted person so we walked into the lab and we see these poor ducks stuck in these cages and they looked miserable. Okay, you saw my cat walk by. Anybody who has animals as pets and friends knows if they’re unhappy. You can tell.

Dr. Wong:

Okay.

Dr. Pizzorno:

So, she said, “Well, this is terrible”, so she got here with her husband and they found an empty lab so they got some sand and some plywood and built a duck run then they got this big plastic swimming pool, put some water in it so they could swim around, brought some fresh fruits and vegetables. Now, the duck’s quacking and happy, etc. Okay now, we’re waiting for them to get rheumatoid arthritis so we can treat them and we wait and we wait and we wait and after a couple of months, they didn’t get arthritis the way they’re supposed to so this woman had to close her post doc at the going away party. The MDs and PhDs were looking at her and say, “Oh, we’re so sorry your experiment failed and isn’t this awful?”, etc. I look at them and say, “Wait a minute. Don’t you see what just happened? They’re genetically bred to get rheumatoid arthritis but if you give them exercise and a healthy diet and make them happy, they don’t get the arthritis. Isn’t that better than a drug?”. Anyway, so when I saw that, I said, “You know, I think I’m gonna go a different direction in my life”. So, there you go. There’s my story.

Dr. Wong:

Great. That’s a great story and I think the ducks are really teaching us there in that story that your genes are not your destiny, right? I mean a lot of people have genetics and we can talk about that a little bit later here today towards you know, maybe not being able to detoxify as well but then when you take that environmental piece in there and the lifestyle that you know, can influence the genetic expression, that might actually cause people to you know, either avoid having detox issues, chronic illnesses or at least to you know, certainly ameliorate or reduce the expression of those. So, Dr. Joe, why do you believe that toxins are important to pay attention to? And I want to reference an editorial that you did in your journal, the IMCJ, where you said, “Are toxins becoming the primary cause of chronic disease?”, and you had that question so I’m curious now in 2021 here. What is your answer to that? If you do feel like toxins are becoming the primary cause of chronic disease, why is that?

Dr. Pizzorno:

Well, up until COVID, I was flying about a hundred thousand miles a year teaching doctors literally all over the world how environmental metals and chemicals have become the primary drivers of chronic disease and I came to that conclusion after looking at a lot of research. I mean just a huge amount of research and you can see that for disease after disease after specific toxins. As specific toxin levels go up, the incidence of the disease goes up as well. The one that really grabbed my attention was diabetes. I remember way back in the late 1970s or actually middle 1970s when I started primary care practice, I was so excited when I saw my first diabetic patient after nine months in practice. Okay. You might say well as a young practitioner, I wasn’t very full. I was fully booked within six months, okay? I’m a smart guy, work hard. Young patients like me got good results. It’s called a lot of patients so I finally saw a diabetic patient. So, way back then, diabetes affected like one half of one percent of population. Now, affects ten percent of population with one out of three people projected to get diabetes in their lifetime. What happened? So, I started looking and of course the first thing I looked at was sugar. I mean you know, those used to nutritionally I did think well sugar. When you look at sugar consumption, it doesn’t correlate with the diabetes epidemic so while I’m not saying sugar is good for people, it’s clear something else is going on. Then, you look at obesity. Yes, huge correlation with diabetes, okay? You know, a morally obese woman has like a 90 full, 90 times higher risk of getting diabetes but when I saw this study, it came out Dr Lee in South Korea which she showed that if you look at obese people who normally get diabetes but measure the bioload of environmental toxins which researchers are now calling diabetogens. Okay. We look at the bioload of diabetes, if they have low levels of diabetogens, it doesn’t matter how fat they are, they don’t get diabetes. Then, you look at a lean person, you don’t expect to get diabetes but if their body is full of diabetogens, they get diabetes. And I started looking at disease after disease after disease, I see the same thing.

Dr. Wong:

Dr. Joe, just a little PDA, public service announcement, I think Dr. Joe is not saying to go out and run the cheesecake factory and get all the cheesecake you can eat, right? So, in terms of you know, sugar and and everything, it sounds like obesity will be necessary but not sufficient to, meaning a metabolic syndrome in the setting of increased visceral fat and then are those toxins then getting stored in that fat and causing cellular and tissue damage, is that is that sort of an accurate interpretation?

Dr. Pizzorno:

Yes. I think the key here to understand is what we think about metabolic syndrome, etc. We think about insulin resistance, right? The cells are responding to insulin properly. Now, in the past, that could often be due to deficiency in chromium for example but now, what’s happening is this seems to be called diabetegons because they bind to the insulin receptor sites on the cells so the cells can’t respond to insulin. In other words, insulin resistance. The pancreas has to produce insulin to sugar into people’s cells to keep people alive and after a while, you know after 20 years, pancreas burns out. It’s overused, it dies and now you get diabetes. So, what’s happening is it doesn’t matter whether a person’s fat or not. If their body is full of these medicine, chemicals that block the insulin resistance their insulin receptor sites, they’re going to have insulin resistance.

Dr. Wong:

Is it kind of like a parking space idea? If there’s too many cars parking that space and insulin is the car trying to find that parking spot but there’s not enough space because the diabetogens are docking in those slots.

Dr. Pizzorno:

Okay, okay. That’s not the way looking at it. Insulin has to fit into the docking station. If there’s something already in the docking station, they can’t come in.

Dr. Wong:

Great. Thank you so much for clarifying that for all of us. What are some important you know, for the listeners out there right, what are some of the primary sources of environmental toxins in our lives that we might be exposed to whether that’s air, water, in foods, or other products?

Dr. Pizzorno:

So, that’s a good question and it turns out that we have two problems. Number one is specific toxins that cause specific damage in the body but we also have the issue of total body load because as the toxin levels go up, our ability to protect ourselves becomes less effective and we get more and more damage. Let’s go back to diabetes and let’s look at phthalates. Okay. So phthalates, what are phthalates? So, phthalates are plasticizers so whenever people are in contact with anything that’s plastic, they have a risk of getting phthalates into the body. You know, like shower curtains, how it hits the shower curtain. You smell the plastic, that phthalates is going into your body but there’s another aspect of this and that is health and beauty things so the lotions and potions we put on our skin to make ourselves look pretty and smell nicer. Well, they use phthalates to kind of give them that oily feeling and also to solubilize the fragrances in them. Phthalates bind to some receptor sites so I’ve seen a lot of research that was primarily US research so I was invited to lecture on environmental medicine in Australia later this month. Since unfortunately, the United States and South Korea actually collect data on the body load of membranotoxins in their populations virtually, no other country does it unfortunately, so when I was looking at Australia, I was trying to figure out how well does the data from the US apply to Australia and one of the things I decided to look at was what’s the instance of diabetes in Australia and as it compares to the United States then I looked at it and then I found a study that looked at by load of phthalates in Australia so I thought well, could it be a correlation? If phthalates are problem with diabetes, would there be a direct correlation between the amount of phthalates in Australia an the amount of phthalates in the United States and the amount of diabetes in Australia and amount of diabetes in the United States? So, it turns out, Australia has about half the incidence of diabetes as United States and they have about half the levels of phthalates as in the United States. I thought, “Well, that’s interesting. That’s exactly what I would have predicted”, so I thought to myself, “How about another one”. How about as you know, we now have an epidemic of kidney failure. One of the big factors in kidney failures is cadmium so I found a study that found the cadmium levels in older women in Australia. And there’s a study in the United States that looked at cadmium levels in older women in the United States, they were the same. The cadmium levels in Australia were the same as cadmium levels in the United States then I looked at chronic kidney failure. The instance of chronic kidney failure was the same in Canada and in Australia as it was in the United States. Exactly what I predicted. Then, I found another one and that’s PAHs or you know, the breakdown products of air pollution. Okay so they directly correlate with lung cancer as I’m sure you well know. Turns out, Australia has the highest levels of these PAHs in air, polycystic aromatic hydrocarbons in the air in the world and they have the highest incidence of lung cancer in the world so I’m saying, as I go look at this in country by country as their toxin levels go up, all the diseases you see in United States associated with those toxins, those diseases go up in the other countries as well. Long answer but definitely-

Dr. Wong:

No, that’s an incredible relationship there between you know, that has been really uncovered it sounds like and it sounds like in your book and your lectures, etc., you’re really uncovering these patterns that a lot of the general public and clinicians probably have not really realized. Of course, we all know that toxins are bad for us and you know things like this and you know, of course want to avoid polluted air and water and get our clean food, organic food but just the studies that have been demonstrating here that you just outlined, some of them here the relationship really between toxic exposure and levels and then incidence of various chronic conditions is pretty mind-blowing because it’s not something we’ve really thought about probably until very recently you know, putting it together that you put together in your book. I wonder about glyphosate. Is there any research that you found on like glyphosate and metabolic syndrome or other conditions?

Dr. Pizzorno:

So, that is very challenging. How should I say this? I have great concern about glyphosate. I’m a naturopathic family doctor but I coined the term ‘science-based natural medicine’ when I found a Bastyr because I believe science is a great tool to understand our world and to make good clinical decisions so when you look at the research on pure glyphosate as a chemical, it has some toxicity in humans. It’s not terrible, okay. I mean I don’t want to be intentionally exposed to it but it’s not that bad but we look at the research on glyphosate levels in the blood and disease, you see very strong correlations. It didn’t make sense that we see so much disease correlating with glyphosate but the glyphosate itself didn’t look like it’s that toxic. Well, now, look at the work of sarah leaning in France so he looked at the actual commercial products using glyphosate things like roundup and most people don’t realize that roundup is 50% glyphosate and 50% “inert proprietary ingredients” so international law allows these manufacturers to hid half of what they put in the product so then when he did the research on, he actually did animal research comparing what happens to animals on glyphosate, what happens to animals on roundup, around 1000 times more toxic than glyphosate so I look at glyphosate now as an indirect marker of exposure to a lot of bad stuff but rather glyphosate itself is doing. How much glyphosate is causing trouble? Unclear at this point.

Dr. Wong:

So in terms of roundup, that 50% entered ingredients, does anyone know like what’s in that or is that a proprietary thing?

Dr. Pizzorno:

So it’s proprietary but you know researchers like saralini you know, they’ve got the analytical laboratories. My undergraduate degree happens to be analytical chemistry, you can see what’s in it. So, what’d they find? Arsenic, petroleum distillates. Petroleum distillates, highly carcinogenic, very very toxic. I mean there are some things like surfactants, okay, which means it makes it easier for it to penetrate the plants. Okay, those aren’t particularly toxic. That’s what they promote. There’s all the other stuff just for surfactants. Well, yes, there’s surfactants there. There’s a bunch of other really bad stuff there too so he was able to figure out what it was and he said the petroleum distillates are counting for most of the damage.

Dr. Wong:

Wow. That’s really incredible. I had not heard that before. I know you said you had some new research on arsenic, any updates on that in regards to human health?

Dr. Pizzorno:

Thanks for asking that. One of the big mysteries I am addressing right now is why aren’t we more aware of the problems of arsenic? Because when I look at arsenic, the data is very clear. Arsenic is the worst environmental toxin we’re being exposed to and people are aware of lead as being a problem. It’s worse than lead. Okay. So right now, about 35% of people in the United States have arsenic levels in their body known to increase the risk of disease. What kind of disease are we talking about? Well, how about gout? 50% of gout appears to be due to arsenic. That not in the textbooks. Now, I’ll tell you the latest addition to my textbook in Natural Medicine. It’s in there. I think it’s the first medical textbook that’s actually intentionally put in the role of toxins in disease but here’s here’s here’s what’s even worse, according to a really good research study looking at over 3000 people, it was Native Americans in this particular study, they found that one-quarter to one-third of their major cancers, long prostate pancreatic cancer, were due to arsenic so I think myself why aren’t we more aware of how much trouble architects is causing? Then, another theme I’ve been studying, I’ve been looking at the something I’m calling unimportant molecules. okay so what do I mean by unimportant molecules.

Dr. Wong:

Okay.

Dr. Pizzorno:

If you look at what we just said is important for nutrition, vitamins and minerals things like that, that research was all done about a hundred years ago so a hundred years ago, when we’re trying to determine what’s important in food, we’re limited by our understanding physiology of the time and by the technology of the time so we’re kind of limited to well what things in food are necessary to keep animals alive and oh and by the way, there’s something to see. There’s really severe heart disease so we forget these vitamins, minerals, amino acids, things like that turned out just 42 molecules and elements being necessary for life and we then kind of made a big mistake that therefore, everything else in food was not important so now, when you grow foods chemically rather than organically, you start losing these other molecules so I’ll ask you a question.Take a wild guess. How many molecules are in food total, do you think? Look at all the foods available on the human fridge..

Dr. Wong:

I’m not sure.

Dr. Pizzorno:

I’ll give you the number. So here, we have 42 molecules considered important. Fifty thousand molecules were in food so we decided 99.9% of the stuff in food’s not important. Okay, now, let’s go back to my arsenic thing. So, one of the things I decided to do was to try to figure out well, are there unimportant molecules that are important for protecting us from arsenic? I think we’re going to find out when I’m talking about these unimportant molecules. Yes, they’re not required for life but they’re sure required for health so it turns out there’s some flavonoids that specifically facilitate the detoxification of arsenic. When we detoxify arsenic, it’s critical to be detoxified all the way to dimethyl arsenic because there’s a halfway step called monomethyl arsenic again technically monomethyl arsenic acid which is called MMA for short. MMA is more toxic than arsenic like eight times more toxic than arsenic whereas DMA, the dimethyl arsenic, is 400 times less toxic than monomethyl arsenic some people get stuck in the MMA stage so what helps make it go from the all the way from arsenic to MMA arsenic to DMA arsenic? Flavonoids. Well, isn’t that interesting? And then, another thing, flavonoids play a big role in helping replace the damaged DNA caused by arsenic so I had one of my researchers look up and give me a list of the flavonoids that both help to increase detoxification of arsenic and protect the body from arsenic. I looked at the list and said, “Look at that”. On that list were molecules I’d seen from my other research. I’d have been lost from the food supply. One of them’s called patellin. Sorry, I’ll probably not pronounce the name right. So, patellin which helps protect us from arsenic is 90% lower in chemically grown foods so we just lost 90% of our protection. I mean that’s not the only method of protection but because we are now growing foods chemically rather than naturally, we’re losing our ability to protect ourselves from toxins like arsenic. So, I think that’s why we’re seeing all this disease problems with arsenic because it wasn’t as bad 50 years ago when we were eating healthier food.

Dr. Wong:

Got it and like you said, we’re only measuring these 42 molecules. We’re not measuring 50,000 molecules in these foods so we don’t know what the levels of patellin are but you know, by buying organic would certainly you know, sounds like that would be one of the things, one of the strategies. What else can we do to improve our abilities to you know, listening here to process toxins and to detoxify, you know. If we’re kind of all exposed to this toxic load you know, I do want to get into that a little bit later in terms of what are some long-term solutions you know, to help restore planetary health probably but you know in general, let’s say we have you know, individual coming in that’s listening to this to start with that and on an individual level, on a family community level, what can really move the needle on our ability to process these toxins out of our systems?

Dr. Pizzorno:

Very, very important. So, there’s three areas we can cover. Number one is we have to make sure we have all the nutrients that are known to be necessary for human life. Well, we need to make sure we have them because the enzymes responsible for detoxification depend upon the vitamins and minerals and things like that. So, for example, if a woman is having severe anemia, maybe excess menstruation, well the key and the whole class of phase one enzymes are key for detoxifying these chemicals we’re being exposed to. They depend upon iron for their core so if deficient in iron, he’s not going to work as well so basically, good nutrition is critical. The second thing is to support the body’s own natural processes so for example, the way we get rid of all these chemicals is by them being processed in the liver and dumped into the gut. Well, when those systems evolved, we’re consuming 150 grams of fiber a day. Now, we consume 15 to 20 grams of fiber a day so now, we’re not consuming enough fiber to bind to the toxins that the body is getting rid of so they get reabsorbed through something called enterohepatic recirculation. The third area is glutathione. So, glutathione is one of the most important molecules in the body because it plays a huge role in protecting us from oxidative stress and for directly detoxifying many of these chemicals we’re being exposed to and the easiest and cheapest way to increase glutathione levels is by taking a supplement called n-acetylcysteine or NAC for short so if people take NAC glutathione levels go up. It makes it easier to get rid of toxins.

Dr. Wong:

Thank you so much for that comprehensive answer and I have a little tangent to that because I know there’s been some great fine talk about NAC not being available whatnot. What’s the latest on that? It seems like it’s available but what are your thoughts about NAC?

Dr. Pizzorno:

It’s clear the FDA is in the process trying to make it unavailable to the public and it’s inexplicable to me unless you want to be a consumer conspiracy theorist. Okay, so NAC you know, as a medical doctor you know, NAC has been used for years for people with cystic fibrosis.

Dr. Wong:

Yeah.

Dr. Pizzorno:

There’s a lot of studies out there showing people with cystic fibrosis, giving two grams of NAC a day and virtually no side effects and there’s a small portion of people have side effects but it’s very rare. Why all of a sudden do they want to make it into a drug? I don’t get it.

Dr. Wong:

So, we should all stock up on NAC potentially or?

Dr. Pizzorno:

I would encourage that, yes.

Dr. Wong:

Yes.

Dr. Pizzorno:

So, it’s one of my personal anti-aging supplements because one of the best ways to help age healthily is to have high glutathione levels.

Dr. Wong:

Great. And what are some food sources of cysteine you know, let’s say that someone can’t get NAC or doesn’t know where to find it, what are some good food sources of kind of increasing probably cysteine and glutathione overall?

Dr. Pizzorno:

Yeah so it’s just a cysteine so typically whey powder is the best alternative to NAC for increasing people’s glutathione levels.

Dr. Wong:

Great. Thank you so much. And then, let’s say someone has a history of toxic burden, you know. A lot of people actually might have toxic burden and not really know it, you know. They have diabetes, they have joint pain or whatnot and I think from our conversation, for the first part of this conversation, we’ve kind of realized that oh, maybe this is actually a toxic burden going on and this could be some of the root cause or even the primary cause but how can that person or people help to heal their bodies from this toxic burden if they already have some toxic burden that’s manifesting as an illness?

Dr. Pizzorno:

That’s why I wrote my book, ‘The Toxin Solution”.

Dr. Wong:

Great.

Dr. Pizzorno:

Okay. So, this is a key question. I think it’s critical for people to understand this. There are a lot of detox programs on the marketplace so I say, “People, wait a minute. Don’t go on a detox program until your organs of elimination are working properly”. There’s all this old by the concept of the among terms. Okay, so what do you mean by that? So, what has happened is because we’re being exposed to so many toxins at levels above what the body can get rid of, the bite sequesters a bunch of these things and that might say deep recesses of the body where they’re not very physiologically active, just try to get rid of them because they’re hard to get rid of. So, if you start doing a detox program that releases these deep toxins but your liver is not functioning properly, your kidneys aren’t functioning properly, your gut is toxic, you’re just going to make yourself more toxic. You’ll just redistribute them from where they’re sequestered to where they’re going to start causing more active damage so I recommend people go through a kind of a three-step process. Dtep one is stop exposing yourself to toxins. I mean seriously, you gotta basically realize that every day, every choice we make has a toxin component to it so start making choices to decrease toxicity every way possible. Do that for a couple of weeks and what people will find is within two weeks of carefully avoiding as many toxins as they can, they will notice the body are functioning better because the toxins can be broken into two classes or we think some chemicals more conveniently or more clinically useful is think about persistent versus non-persistent. So, non-persistent toxins, the body can clear out in a day or two. Persistent toxins take years to even decades to get rid of and near as I can tell, this is a real rough estimate. I say about half of the toxicity people are experiencing is from non-persistent toxins so if you stop your exposure to EPA and to phthalates, into arsenic and all the other non-persistent toxins within two weeks, people will feel better. And that then engages them to do the long-term work to get rid of those persistent toxins. It’s hard to get rid of so two weeks, avoid the toxins then let’s spend two weeks cleaning up your gut because remember, whatever comes gets absorbed into the body from the gut, first goes to the liver before it goes into general circulation. Well, if you keep on flooding the liver with toxic molecules from the wrong bacteria in the gut now, literally, it’s not going to have the ability to detox for everything else so killing up the gut. Then when I clamp the liver, get the liver function properly, use cold dogs is necessary used to be vitamins required, make sure all those enzymes work the way it’s supposed to and then, the third area is we are now having a kidney failure epidemic. A condition which was rare is now common so we have to restore our kidneys and the good news is we can do a lot to restore our kidneys and this is something I think you might find interesting about, Dr. Wong. As I was looking at kidney failure, it turns out most of the kidney failure is actually due to damage to microvasculature of the kidneys so if you can prove the blood supply to the kidneys, kidney function goes up dramatically. So, in my book, I say well here’s a bunch of strategies for how you get the kidneys functioning better. And the first part is stop damaging them like non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, extremely damaging to the kidneys so stop damaging the kidneys and then do things like blueberries, beet juice, chocolate, okay. All these have been shown to improve kidney function so you can go through and we’ve got examples of people looking at their eGFR that as they engage in these behaviors, their eGFR improves. You’re gonna love this one. There’s one study I found that looked at people with various stages of kidney failure and as you know, people in stage five kidney failure you know, their eGFR is below you know, depends on who’s looking at but below 30 maybe, even lower than that and thet are typically people who are going to need to be on dialysis or get a kidney transplant so one study, all they did was take people with stage five kidney failure and have them stop using non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. That was the only intervention. Six months later, their average eGFR went from 15 to 30.

Dr. Wong:

Wow.

Dr. Pizzorno:

So, it doubled just by stopping the damage so I use this with my students as an example. The body has tremendous ability to heal if we just give it a chance. This is what we need catholic doctrine has been saying forever. The body can heal but we have to help it figure out what’s stopping it. Here’s a great example, the kidneys will heal if you stop damaging them.

Dr. Wong:

Yeah. An eGFR of 15 to 30, I mean that might be the difference between someone needing dialysis and and maybe not needing dialysis it sounds like.

Dr. Pizzorno:

Yeah. If we could do that in six months just by stopping damage, what can you do if you add to that all the things that kidneys need to function better?

Dr. Wong:

That’s so cool and luckily, berries, beets and chocolate or cocoa are all very tasty foods so that’s very helpful. Let’s kind of make the connection for listeners in terms of toxins and some of the issues they might be dealing with like there might be hormone imbalance like adrenal or thyroid imbalances and also people are having I think increasing amounts of trouble losing weight. You know, everyone’s kind of you know, concerned about that. What is the relationship between toxins and hormone balance and then also with regards to weight gain and I guess resistance to weight loss.

Yeah, great questions. So now, you can see the conventional endocrine societies are now starting to use the term ‘endocrine disruptors’ so rather than say environmental toxins, oh, we’ll call it something different so we can pretend that we own it. Okay, sorry about the political comment there. So huge amounts of research, huge amounts of research so for example as PCB levels go up, that’s polychlorinated biphenyls that were banned over 40 years ago but they are persistent organic pollutants. The half-life of these things in the human body ranges from 2 to 20 years depending upon the particular PCB. Okay, so the more chlorinated the PCB, polychlorinated biphenyls, the harder it is to break down. So, you might go to a restaurant and order the farmed fish and in that farm fish will be PCBs and some of those PCBs will be with you for the rest of your life and those PCBSs directly correlate with rheumatoid arthritis in women and decrease thyroid function in both men and women. Okay. How about those phthalates I just talked about? So, not only do the phthalates block in some receptor sites, they block testosterone receptor sites so they’re basically feminizing men by using these agents because now the testosterone sites don’t work anymore and they’re getting estrogenic effects from all these other chemicals in the environment. I can keep going.

So, some of the- Yeah, this is incredible but it’s also depressing because I know that some of the labs which I won’t name you know, some of the conventional standard national labs, they’ve reduced their range of testosterone or T in men to reflect the you know, decline of testosterone and the mean or the average level of testosterone over the past five years and I think that a lot of it does have to do with these plastics and plasticizers unfortunately. And yeah.

Unfortunately, most laboratory normals are defined by what’s typical in the environment or in the population rather than by what’s healthy in the population.

I mean ‘environmental toxins’ does seem to be a more accurate way to describe them so I will go with that. Yeah. And so, what about brain health and you know, cognitive decline, MCI which is mod cognitive impairment or even dementia? Like what’s the role of I guess of toxins both in neurodegenerative diseases but also just in terms of brain health in general?

Huge. Okay, so we know we’re having an epidemic now of dementia. Okay. So, we start saying well could it be correlated with those neurotoxic pesticides we put on our food supply? So, let’s start with a fetus. So to look at babies born to women in the top 10 percent of bilobed organophosphate pesticides and comparing to children born to women with a bottom ten percent of bilobed, you iron out all the socioeconomic differences and look just at their IQ, the kids born to women with the top levels of organophosphate pesticides have a seven point drop in IQ. Three studies have now shown the same things and one of the studies follow these kids for another like five years, they never get the IQ back so what happens is the brain can’t develop properly in the presence of neurotoxins, okay? We knew that about lead that’s why we decrease lateral environment but how can we not pay attention to what’s going up or down phosphates? Now, let’s look at an adult. Let’s look at people with age 65, let’s measure their talkative function and let’s measure their body load of organochlorine pesticides so we have again organophosphate pesticides wiping out fetus’s brains and are damaging fetuses brains. Now, let’s look at another neurotoxic which is organochlorine pesticides and it turns out that as the organochlorine pesticide level goes up, the incidence of the dementia goes up as well so people in the top five percent of body load. That’s 1 out of 20 people

that’s not a lot they’re 6.5 times more likely to have alzheimer’s disease than those who do

not have a high body load of that chemical and how about the top 10 percent

three times more likely wow so that’s just one toxin then you add mercury to

that and I mean just these go talks after toxin our dementia epidemic is predictable based

on people by a load of toxins so as I keep on answering as you keep on answering the questions they generate

some questions that i’m thinking about I want to get back to this fat toxins

diet because we kind of all know I think we all agree now that healthy fats are good for you you know back in the back

in the 70s when it was like eat more snack wells eat more oreos you know low fat high refined carb you know it’s

contributed to the epidemic of metabolic syndrome that we have obviously in our country now and everything around the

world as well but you know fats aren’t bad it’s just that certainly the wrong types of fats

are are not good but what is the relationship I guess between environmental toxins and the amount of

fat someone has and where do those toxins end up do they end up in the visceral fat did they have been in

breast tissue in the brain which is mostly fat like does it just go everywhere and and I guess my other

question with that if there’s not too many questions at one time wait wait let’s just do one question one thing in time okay okay so first off

so the talk should be fat soluble or they could be water cycle okay so in

general the longest lives toxins in the body are fat soluble and gets stored in in the fat tissues and a number and

but nonetheless there are some others as well like bisphenol a so it turns out is a graph you can

look at prison’s levels of bisphenol and look at their body weight weight circumference things like that they’ll

go up in proportion to bisphenol a and that’s one reason why the researchers are calling many chemicals

obesitogens as well because they induce obesity so the toxins induce obesity if

someone’s already obese and has elevated visceral fat are they more likely to accumulate fat soluble toxins in that

fat let me address that a little differently so some researchers have hypothesized

that people may be unconsciously overeating to produce more fat to dilute the toxins so it doesn’t

disrupt their physiology as much wow isn’t that an interesting concept that is so interesting so it might even

sort of influence the hormones the the leptin and ghrelin and things like of course yeah that that you have to look

at that and and then remember and look at the other side so once a person has all the extra weight and it is full of

endocrine disrupting toxins when they try to lose weight those toxins get released

they feel terrible and also by the way zaps their thyroid and so it makes it harder for them to

lose weight because they feel terrible every time they try to lose weight yeah so they’re going through a I guess we

can call it a detox reaction or basically increase toxic load that they’re having to filter through plus like you said it’s affecting their

resting metabolic rate through the thyroid product so one of the things I started late later on my practice when

people came to me for helping with weight loss more and more I started getting into detox programs

rather than weight loss programs and their weight would go away when I detoxify them pretty interesting now you

know not as fast as you know extreme color restriction but much better results got it let’s talk about

sweating for a second because I know that sauna is very popular hot and cold showers are very popular what’s the role

of sweating and detoxification and are there certain environmental toxins that you need to utilize the sweat mechanism

to detox you know those yeah another great question great question

so I know if you’ve had a chance to do this but you might want to look at the work of steve ingenuous on md in edmonton alberta so I really

like the guy so he said well everybody thinks that sweat is detoxifying well how about we just take a dozen

volunteers put them in a sauna sweat them and then measure level of toxins in the blood in

the urine and in their sweat and here’s the kicker here so now with sweat effective to get rid of many

toxins it was effective and get rid of toxins that are difficult to get rid of like cadmium for example

but what was even more interesting and concerning they he found toxins in the sweat that

were not in the blood or the urine so what’s happened the body sequestered these things to try to keep them as much

out of circulation as they could and when we finally gave it by a chance to get rid of it through sweating myself oh

god thank you let’s get rid of this stuff got it so sweat it sounds like is one of the essential

very detox pathways perfect and and I mean there’s different protocols for this that people have

tried and you know I think there’s a lot of if you go on the internet there’s probably a billion different protocols for this what is your general approach

to you know how do you increase sweat I rather than say what exact temperature

people should do I you do it based on time so for example my wife and I my wife sweats at much

lower temperatures than I do in the sauna okay so you just have to look at what’s right for the person so I

recommend whatever temperatures necessary so they can sweat profusely for at least

20 minutes okay do long if you want to but the research shows that you get the biggest benefit after about 20 minutes

you still keep getting more back up that first 20 minutes is really critical and you must make sure you’re drinking both

plenty of fluids and trace minerals because while sweating we will lose some of the trace minerals as well and we

want to make sure they’re being replaced and also so the solution I recommend for sweating so not only 20 minutes of heavy

sweating I also recommend you use a solution that’s alkalinizing so I like using a solution which is magnesium

potassium citrate because that’s alkalinizing and that alkalinizing makes a little bit easier for body derive the

toxins thank you we have a we have a little side question

we wanted to I think just bring up we’re very interested and I think a lot of people are interested in

electromagnetic frequencies emfs and you know emfs are considered now a a toxin also so

we’re talking about toxins today what are emfs which I guess we we can talk about that briefly but how do they

impact our health and is that really a you know is that something that’s

synergistic with these other toxins that’s a very good question and I

honestly do not have good answer for you I did some looking at that research

several years ago and it was so messy I realized that

the metals and chemicals were way easier so I just have more research needed okay yeah what metals and chemicals the

research on the emf is it’s all over the place it’s evolving hopefully we’ll have some

answers in a couple years and just kind of going here and let’s talk about air and water

because you know these are some of the basic things we’re always drinking water we’re always breathing air what can we do to have healthier air sources first

and then we can talk about water for a sec so in terms of air if people have a

forced air heat and cooling system in their home they need to put in a whole house filter

so you can get a and it should be rated at least merv eight we personally have a merch 16.

so what that does is that it clears out about 99.9 percent of the stuff in the

air I can’t emphasize it enough the research on air pollution and disease throughout

the world it’s some of the strongest research on vinyl toxins anywhere so there’s no question that yeah we see

that that diesel truck going down the highway and spewing out that blue black smoke

and it kind of looks bad it is bad okay it’s very hard up to people so I say no

now if you can’t do a whole house filter by the way run it all the time always keep it running then you want to have

into the rooms that where you spend your most time get a good quality keep a filter so bedroom kitchen family room wherever

people spend the most time but you’ve got to clear the air portion and another nice thing about that is that this is what

might be called a passive way to decrease toxicity so I have to do this one time put this in and then you have

to do anything else at that point you just keep getting clean around have to do something about it that’s great

that’s great and do you have any recommendations for water filters anything so the same concept with water

filters so what you want to do is put on the water line coming into your home

a carbon block filter with a metal precipitator okay now the good news is that it’ll get

out get out the toxins in the water with two exceptions it’s not for getting rip arsenic it does not get red fluoride

but it also gets rid of chlorine so for example we have one of those in our house which means you have to put chlorine tablets into the tanks of your

of your toilets otherwise you’ll tell us the smell will great so that’s that’s that’s great

thank you for that and then this is a very overall question that I don’t know if anyone has the answer

to but if anyone does it would be used what are some practical steps to improve and clean up our environment you

know we all know that our just global environment is toxic how do we take steps you know you and i

lara you know just everyone kind of listening to this what are some

practical steps we can do so the power of the consumer manufacturers will create what we buy

and they’ll stop creating what we don’t buy okay so storage containers in your kitchen only

use class if it’s plastic throw it away okay so step by step only

buy organically grown food okay that way the conventional folk growers realize wow the losing markets

here I guess I better start growing my foods properly I mean just look at everything you do in your life healthy beauty aces

only choose healthy beauty aids that don’t have phthalates in them that don’t have lead in them don’t have arsenic in

them I mean it’s incredible what’s in health and beauty aids what’s allowed to be in healthy beauty aids so only pick

those that are low in toxins so the more we make these choices the more the world will conform and look

at here in seattle so I’ve been living in sale now for over half a century we used to have two health food stores

in seattle okay so for me to get a gag food I’d go to cell food stores and frankly the fruit and vegetables they

had weren’t very nice okay but I knew they were healthy okay but they weren’t they didn’t look very nice

now I can go to my local major grocery store and they’ll have an organic section in it why are they doing

that because of consumer demand so I know people have asked about you know the role of big agriculture and and

co-opting their organic label what is your opinion on organic versus regenerative and local and all this

stuff now that’s very valid and I think there are a number of loopholes in

the organic legislation now having said that still better than no better foods yeah yeah so I tell people

do two things one is see if there’s a local farm call okay so you do one of these co-ops where you pay the a farmer

certain amount per year and they’ll give you a box of water whatever’s fresh that or whether it’s ripening at that

particular point grow some of your own food I’ve been really experimenting with this a lot i’m to the point now where

i’m probably growing 25 of our calories on our own property which is wonderful because the food we

grow ourselves is way better than even organically grown foods from the grocery store it just

it’s fresher you can pick more fragile varieties things like that they’re more tasty yeah yeah and then

and then there’s probably some energetic properties as well to the food as well growing it and you know what kind of things do you like to grow

at your place there everything that I like to eat so let’s

see we have got kale tomato snap peas sugar peas

fava beans corn squash bell peppers hot peppers

I mean I can keep this delicious makes a delicious salad lots of fruit blueberries and and cherries and plums

and grapes that’s amazing well again thank you so much Dr. Joe for

being on today it’s been such a pleasure and bring lightning conversation about toxins and I think for those listening

out there if you haven’t checked it out please check out Dr. Joe’s book that he wrote called the toxin solution I think

that’s a really amazing book it’s going to be very mind-blowing to to a lot of you if you haven’t really

really made that connection until now in terms of the the really connection between toxins and

human health and we just have some closing questions that are more fun light kind of questions so if you

wouldn’t mind just if you would like to share with us do you have a morning routine and if so if you wouldn’t mind

sharing that with us well so my wife having more routine we

she makes us coffee in the morning and so we have a nice organic cough with everything organic in it and then we’ll

typically look at a news report of this nature talk for a little while before I go to work so

pretty straightforward get up early in the morning work have a cup of coffee and I don’t have breakfast until

typically about 11 o’clock in the morning okay it’s a little intermittent fasting and

and then in terms of the coffee since we’re talking about toxins today on this

Podcast what do you think about the mold free coffees do you think that people are going to starbucks or you

know other coffee places should they be looking for mold free coffee how important is that

I think avoiding more contaminated products is a really good idea okay

most people don’t really let’s go a little broader on that well most people don’t realize that 50

of the buildings in north america both homes and offices are water damaged and so they’re actually creating mold

problems in those facilities if you look at an adult onset asthmatic somebody who’s never had

asthma and his adult develops asthma according to one study that I read 71 of

it is due to entering in a new job or a new home that has mold damage

wow so so the coffee beans are getting the mold from not the soil but essentially from the water damage

building essentially well not for the cockpit it’s just how they’re stored in transport how they’re stored all moist

they’re all moisture building I mean anything I mean you you leave at room temperature make it moist mold will grow

on it yeah yeah what book are podcasts you’re enjoying the most right now and why do you enjoy

it I don’t tend to read books or brought podcasts I just look at the I look at

the research I mean I just I thought i’m curious about something this is the best answer that we’ve ever had on this

podcast I really like that a lot well I’ll go further with the research I don’t I don’t I don’t even look at just

the abstracts I look at the data tables because over half the abstracts have wrong information in them yeah I look at

data tables got it what do you do every day to cultivate joy besides I saw your cat there a little bit ago

you know that’s a good question i’m actually struggling with that right now so I used to be an avid basketball player I’d play on two hours of full

court basketball three times a week I love doing that I did it for almost basketball too yeah oh good yeah

unfortunately two years ago my my hip and my knees said that’s it didn’t go any further so I’ll play to everybody by

10 15 years in duration but so now i’m still trying to figure out what to replace basketball with and i

haven’t figured it out and it’s really bothering me yeah oh I think I think it’s great to yeah

it’s a great sport and yeah just getting into basketball a little bit more myself too so

but yeah we’ll we’ll talk more about that but thank you so much Dr. Joe for coming on again today really appreciate

it and how can listeners learn more about you and either work with you or I guess you know

interact with you in some way well thank you so these days i’m not seeing patients i’m i’m my main role I

think right now is teaching the doctors and writing in books and textbooks yeah so you know if people want to

want to be healthier get my book the toxin solution

read it and do it okay seriously people do it the first two weeks they will notice a significant

improvement in their health so that’s my recommendation get my books use what I say because it’s the best I it’s best I

know how to give people guidance great thank you so much again Dr. Joe and thank you to listeners for taking time to

tune in today and if you enjoy this conversation please leave a comment send a moment to leave us a review it

helps our podcast to reach more listeners we’re here to be of service to you bring you the the best best guess

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thank you