Dr. Joseph Pizzorno

Yeah, that's actually, that's a really good question. I kind of break it 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 byload of toxins. How much arsenic do you have? How much lead do you have? How much bisphenols do you have? How much phthalates do you have? Et cetera.

Because what happens is all the toxins cause oxidative stress and deplete glutathione from the body. Glutathione is the most important antioxidant in your body, but more importantly, it's a key way we protect our mitochondria. and the longest living people with the least disease at the highest levels of glutathione.

If you quit glutathione, your mitochondria die, and you die sooner and have more disease. Yeah. 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 is where classically the main problem with toxins is, they displace 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 enzyme so they don't work properly. So they basically poison enzymes. Why is that important? Bodies are enzyme machines. What about enzymes on machines? Enzymes aren't working, our machines aren't working, and we get sick. That's number one.

Direct poisoning of the enzymes by the toxic.

Yes, exactly. Very well said, Mark. Exactly that's what happens. And going on with what you said about DNA, in the second area, or third area now, that's a huge problem after the toxins is they damage our DNA.

So when you look at the research on the correlation between a 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 from the toxin and work around it.

But when we hit 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. So PCBs, for example, if you go to a restaurant and eat farmed fish, some of the PCBs in farmed fish have a half-life ranging from 10 to 20 years.

It takes four half-lives to get rid of the toxin. So you go eat that farmed fish, and some of those toxin will be in your body for the rest of your life.

Yeah, you have to live past 100 to get rid of them. Okay, so then, so what's happening is the bile load is going up. But now with the body load going up, we've chemically damaged our DNA. So our ability to respond to them and adapt to them has now become limited. And now all of a sudden, all the disease correlations start showing up.

The immune system. Okay. So the immune system is very, very susceptible to environmental toxins. So I just gave a lecture on PFAS, the perfluorinated compounds.

Worst place, fast food. Popcorn, fast food are the worst by far. Microwave popcorn.

Regular popcorn is fine. Microwave popcorn is problematic. When I was looking at this, I was looking at COVID and PFASs. and looked at people who had either no COVID or mild case compared to people who had a severe version of COVID. The ones who got severe version had 50% to 100% higher levels of PFAS in their body compared to those who did not get bad COVID.

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

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 the population at elevated levels that cause a lot of disease. When we look at the chemicals, we have perfluoronates, the PFAS, the forever chemicals.

We've got the bisphenols. So people think, oh, BPA is bad. When you get plastic, that's BPA-free. Well, guess what? They put other bisphenols in that are just as bad. Phthalates, a lot of the health and beauty aids have phthalates in them.

Yeah, sunblock, makeup, things like this. A lot of phthalates. But why is that problematic? Phthalates binds into receptor sites and give people diabetes. Okay. There are so many chemicals. I've been kind of systematically working my way through, but so far, in terms of chemicals, these are the three I'm paying the most attention to.

BPA and 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.

Well, there's 12,000 of these forever chemicals. Just one category is 12,000 chemicals.

Now we're getting to the next set of toxins, and that is the herbicides and the pesticides.

Yeah, industrial chemicals for agriculture. So let's look at just one category, organophosphate pesticides, okay?

If you measure the body load of pregnant women and measure the level of organophosphate pesticides, and you look at the IQ of children born to women with the top level of organophosphate pesticides compared to women with the lowest level of 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 it isn't any surprise the brain does not develop properly when exposed to neurotoxins. So I said before that I'm focused on PFAS, viscidinols, and phthalates.

You've got to focus on the pesticides, particularly organophosphate pesticides are probably the worst of all of them. Whether you've got chlorinated pesticides are problematic in many other categories.

So there's actually some really good news here because there are some very simple things we can do that have huge impact on our toxicity. The first thing we want to do is detox the garden. 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 percentage of hepatitis.

Because a person has inflammation in the liver, they start leaking liver enzymes into their blood, and you measure the enzymes in the blood and say, ah, hepatitis. They stopped using GGT for hepatitis because other tests were found to be more reliable than GGT was reacting to other things.

So it turns out within the quote normal range, 10 to 50, depending on the lab, GGT goes up in proportion to toxic load. And as you detoxify, GGT goes down. So I mentioned that Corporate Wellness Program I did. So I measured 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 for diabetes.

Well, it's not concerning to go from 29, no risk, to 30, more risk. So 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 measured a few years ago, went down to 17. I just measured it two months ago, I was down to 16.

So, a GTT between 15 and 20 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've probably done a good job getting rid of the toxins.

Now if you're below 15, it may not mean you have low toxic load, it may mean you have an inability to increase glutathione to protect you from environmental toxins. The people I've seen with the biggest problems with environmental toxins have low GTTs. I call them the yellow canaries. They can't protect themselves. So right there, you have to monitor. Now, what's the next easiest thing to do?

Right on. Very, very useful test. So that way you can monitor what's going on. So as my teacher, Dr. Bastier, would say, don't kid yourself. You can think you're living healthily, but you might have this little thing you do here, and all this food you really love, you can't buy it organic, but I'm going to eat that anyway.

You can find how many of your little exceptions, how bad are they at enough? The second thing to do is support the body's own natural detox system. 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 when we were consuming 150, 100 to 150 grams of fiber a day. Now we consume 15 to 20 grams of fiber a day. 89% lower, which means that instead of going out through the stools, it gets reabsorbed through intra-hepatic recirculation. So number one, eat more fiber. Eat more fiber and you'll probably get rid of things more effectively.

Number two, only organically grown foods. And number three, From your kitchen, remove all the plastics, remove all the non-stick things, only use glass and ceramics. It's the only safe things I'm aware of.

yeah filter your water yes 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 on our air conditioning and heating system in the house we use what's called a lennox uh filter and it's rated at merv 16 that's m-a-r-v-16 and that will get rid of 99.9 of the toxins in the air in your house yeah

Yeah, very well said. So number one and number two and number three are avoidance, avoidance, avoidance. Don't let this 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 that gasoline, that's benzene going into your body.

If you're smelling something that doesn't smell right, get away from it.

Yeah, right. N95 filter on your nose. So anyway, avoidance, avoidance, avoidance.

Yes, it's challenging to do. So I think I'll say some specific things to do, but it's every time you have a choice, look at what the less toxic environment, the lower environmental toxin load choices that you can make. So stand up when you're pumping the gasoline. When you're having to go out to eat in a restaurant,

Well, talk to people at the restaurant, and if there's one of your favorite restaurants, I'm getting a little far field here. Cook as much of your own food as you can. 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 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 further chemicals by 1%. 1% per meal. Okay, so choosing where you eat your food is a way to start. Make sure that food is organically grown.

If you are going to go out, if you have a failed place to go out, meet with the owner, meet with the cooks, and say, can you prepare your food in ways that are less toxic? And if you are going to buy food that is from a grocery that's been prepared, come to you in plastic or come into you in lined paper containers, immediately put it into glass.

So you might say, well, it's been sitting there since it was made and sitting there in the grocery store. So my lecture today I 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 it in that container, it's still going to keep going up. So at least you can stop it there. So put everything into glass containers.

I said before, increase your consumption of fiber. But it's also simple things like, you take a multivitamin and mineral. The majority of the population is deficient in multiple nutrients. I mean, US population, 99% of people are deficient in one or more nutrients. Half are deficient in five or more. So just right there, what are those nutrients needed for? Detox systems.

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