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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So 60 to 90 is where I like to aim. So it's not how much you take because everyone has an individual need, absorption issues of the gut. All these things are variable. But what the goal is is to live at a level where your blood is 60 to 90 in a range that's normal of 30 to 100. So nothing excessive, but just high normal. And that's easy and cheap and available, vitamin D3.
The third is probiotic, probiotic to help the gut microbiome for all the losses that we go through in terms of stress or, you know, foods that don't agree with us or chlorinated drinking water, any of the kind of the targeted chemicals that hit our guts, you know. you know, processed foods.
Having a probiotic that's healthy, reasonable, affordable every day to me is offsetting some of the losses every day. And then the last piece was the omega-3 fatty acids. If done well,
and a highly concentrated DHA EPA is remarkable for so many normal physiologic processes, including improved sleep, including mental health, including inflammation that I use with my immune and autoimmune disease patients. higher levels. So you have to sort of adjust what you're taking and why you're taking it.
Those four things to me really do give the human body a great ability to manage most of its physiology without being excessive, but done well. And selenium will be very helpful every day if you're exposed to any number of inputs that expose you to mercury.
Yeah, so fermented, I mean, there's just so many foods that are good for human health. It's hard to list them all because fiber is another area that you could talk about in terms of what we're missing, what we need, and what binds chemicals. But fermented foods are really great because the composition, the acidity, the way that they handle the gut microbiome, and let's list a few, right?
Things that I don't like, like kimchi, you know, sauerkraut is not my favorite, but it's loaded with, you know, probiotic and prebiotic components. But then, you know, there's other things like pickles and vinegar, things that people can wrap their head around. But fermented foods in general is what feeds the microbes in the gut microbiome. It's an ecosystem.
So by eating those foods, again, food is medicine, right? When you eat those foods, you're supporting the buggers that are in your gut that are in 26 feet of bowel. that line this tube that we call the gut and you're feeding the good guys.
And those good guys are making, you know, for a better word or not, poop, essentially small chain fatty acids like butyrate that actually circulate through the body, get to the brain are very healthful. So they help with mental health and that gut brain connection. So if you sit back and you think to yourself, this is an ecosystem that I'm contributing to.
It's like feeding your salamander in middle school, right? You're watching this whole process go through and then you're feeling the physiology change. Fermented foods are great. And it's been part of the human diet again for millions of years. The question is, can we get them consistently? Can we get used to certain foods and really start craving them consistently?
So that we have them in a way that really supports most of our diet when we have access to it.
So I care about it and I really wouldn't be even here talking to you about it if it wasn't for years ago when my golden retriever got sick. I was a young mom and I had this beautiful four and a half year old golden retriever named Truxton. And he got sick and I thought, you know, he swallowed a sock or something happened where he just, you know, he'll get better tomorrow.
Well, he also developed what was, you know, at that time we found out was autoimmune hepatitis. So his immune system basically had turned against him. and attacked his liver. And his liver, hepatitis liver, was the size of a golf ball by the time we got him diagnosed. And he didn't last, you know, he lived maybe six more months very comfortably, but he lived six months.
And my sadness over this puppy, this, you know, first born child of mine, so to speak, was just so heartbreaking. And I started to question his exposures because I had no other way to explain a young, healthy golden retriever with such a rare diagnosis in dogs. So I looked at his water and I looked at his air quality and we live on a farm in New Jersey. So I worried about pesticides.
I worried about the red vinyl plastic toy that he was sucking on all the time. And I didn't know this at the time, but I was really kind of performing an environmental health survey. And now we have it in the book, right? But it took 15 years to get to this point.
And having layered in question after question of what's going on in human exposure from what I was learning about animal exposures, it really just took off. And it was a mission of sadness, but of also curiosity. And also being sad that I didn't learn any of this in medical school. And it's still not really being used in training of any health care professionals in any large way.
And that's a shame because we have so many ways to get this information to people to do better in terms of their choices and their health risks. So my journey really came from a place of sadness, but it has led to so much good in terms of what I'm able to do with curriculum and teaching. And this is actually my third book. The first two were in Oxford University Press.
One was a textbook and another was another consumer guide, more of a guidebook. This is the first time I'm reaching out to everyone in a way that's super easy to navigate. It's tangible. It's got a 21-day plan so people can just start right in. and really make simple choices. It's got a food pyramid that starts and ends with quality and looks at food packaging and detoxification processes.
It's just a really, I think, easy way for people who have no concept of this concept to get into it and get started.
Yeah, it's a great question because, you know, at the time I didn't know anything about environmental health, zero. And it began the journey. But, you know, at the time we were looking at his toy, his red plastic toy, very common dog toy. And it turns out that in terms of human studies, especially occupational studies of people who work with polyvinyl chloride as a chemical,
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