Dr. Aly Cohen
speaker
699 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard May 2025
Dr. Aly Cohen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah, the forays was something that I designed because I teach doctors, I teach high school and college students. And after doing this a long time, you start to figure out what is the simplest way to chop up this topic into a way that people can really absorb it. So the forays are very simple. It's basically number one is assess.
You have to assess the situation to really know what you're trying to fix, right? So in the book, I have a 50-question survey that really just asks very basic questions. You give a one or a zero answer. You add up those numbers to kind of see where you're starting from, which is reasonable and shouldn't be overwhelming, but it's good questions that everyone can answer.
So assess is looking at the problem.
Yeah. So do you filter your water? Do you use do you dry clean your clothing? Do you travel through big cities to go to work or to home? I mean, these are all different, very reasonable questions about exposures that anyone could wrap their head around. And once you get a level, a number, you can kind of say, OK, let's see where I can go with this.
The second A is avoid, right? So we can avoid. I call it avoid and swap. But avoid is really, do we really need all of these cleaning products? A door cleaner, a window cleaner, a sink cleaner, a carpet cleaner. You know, there's a lot we can cut back on. that we've been marketed to in terms of keeping up with the Joneses in terms of cleanliness, antimicrobials, bacteria fears.
We want to keep our microbiomes healthy, and we don't need all of these products that we've been told we do. So avoiding is one good way, like air fresheners and all that, but also swapping. Having the ability to swap out what we do like using to cleaner versions, making smarter choices. This is really part of this whole process, right? We want to keep some of the stuff we like.
The third A is add. And this is really kind of critical because you can take away all the triggers, all the environmental chemicals, all the exposures that are harmful in the world. But what you also need to think about is how do you give the human body things that it needs to thrive at the cellular level, at the organ level? So, for instance, there are nutrients in food that we now know.
Not only help us nutritionally for growth and development, but actually offset the effects from harmful chemicals on our epigenome in terms of our gene expression. So we have food that is essentially medicine to offset modern exposures that we are now seeing. But we also want to add in things that help detoxify the human body. So sweating is remarkable.
It's something we've held on to for millions of years. We want to add in great sleep. So not just quantity, which we all think about rest and feeling alert, but we also want to think about how do we get the best sleep so that we can clean out chemicals while we sleep through what's called the glymphatic system. It's the fluid around our brain and our spinal cord.
And as we sleep, we're really kind of washing these out in many ways. Science is really robust on this. So adding in exercise, adding in sleep, adding in nutrition sounds very anthropologic to me, right? So that's the kind of things I want people to think about, taking away the problem and adding in solutions. The last of the A's is kind of, you know, like this is life. It's called allow.
That's the third A. And the third A allows someone like myself to go get my hair colored because I actually really want to keep doing that for a while until I change my mind. It's traveling to other countries and not having access to certain things that I might want to have part of my life like I do at home. It's birthday cakes.
It's anything that we need to really keep us motivated and know that this is not about perfection. It's about being realistic and having this process, removing these chemicals, detoxifying in a way that is personal and is a journey for everybody. There's no regret. There's no rush. It's a process that you layer in over time.
Yeah. So, you know, we have a wild, wild west of chemicals that go into our personal care products and certainly in our cleaning products. Again, we are not required in the United States. The government does not require manufacturers to test any of the ingredients, any of the ingredients that go into these products. before they go into our home and potentially into our bodies.
And so the idea that anything can go into them really means that it could be thousands of chemicals and often are. So when it comes to cleaning products, a lot of things that are added, particularly are phthalates, which are fragrance and odor, because we want to clean with products that have odors like lemon that may not be real or...
ocean breeze or, you know, pumpkin spice when it comes to candles and cleaning products and those kind of things. So those phthalates actually are proprietary. They are not required to be tested again, and they extend the scent or the fragrance to have a longer shelf life. And phthalates are linked to a whole host of endocrine and immune system issues in the human body. Like what?
So we know with phthalate testing and phthalate studies that are quite robust that they can contribute to changes in male genitalia from a newborn exposure or in utero exposure perspective. They've been linked to affect hormones like insulin, which affects sugar, thyroid gland. They can affect growth and development, fertility issues, but they can also increase inflammation.
Again, from an immune system perspective, someone who takes care of immune and autoimmune disease patients for 22 years, these exposures are pretty pervasive. And so we don't want phthalates in our bodies, especially during vulnerable periods of development. So as a pregnant woman,
You know, as a young child into our teen years and even during menopause, these are vulnerable periods where hormones are really going up and down. That's when many of these endocrine or hormone disrupting chemicals and immune disrupting chemicals can have greater effect. So we want to be thinking about that.
But other chemicals in cleaning products, quats are a group of chemicals that were added particularly after COVID because they really went after the microbes. We were very afraid of microbes for good reason, right? We didn't want to have a virus affect us such as COVID.
So the cleaning industry went nuts and they started putting in so many toxic chemicals that really wipe out the microbiome of our skin and can get into our bodies and can be measured in blood and urine. So, again, there was a free for all. It's a wild, wild west. Lots of chemicals we don't need. Let's go back to basics. Let's use things that our grandparents used.
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