EFR 872: The Top 5 Foods That Naturally DETOX Your Body, Best Daily Immune System Boosters and How to Test Your Home and Water for Heavy Metals and Toxins with Dr. Aly Cohen, MD

00:00 - Chase (Host) The following is an Operation Podcast production. What do you think is the number one thing we can do today to detoxify our bodies the most?

00:09 - Aly (Host) Great question Number one thing is I have been practicing medicine now for 20 years as a rheumatologist, which is essentially well. It encompasses a lot of things. Now. You might think of Lyme disease that affect the joints. You might think of rheumatoid arthritis that affect the joints. I write my books about environmental medicine and how environment plays a key role in human health. So I really like to see what's offered in this world with enough science and evidence as we can find to apply it to health and wellness and disease management and disease prevention and disease management and disease prevention.

00:43 - Chase (Host) As much as I see about this food, this supplement, this wellness behavior is great for detoxifying the body, detoxifying the liver. I see as much, if not more, kind of counterpoints going. You don't need any detoxification supplements, you don't need to detoxify the body. All you need to do is just let the body do its job. Is that a fair statement?

01:05 - Aly (Host) Hi everybody. I'm Dr Ailey Cohen, integrative rheumatologist and environmental health specialist and author of the new book Detoxify, here with you on Ever Forward Radio.

01:15 - Chase (Host) Whoop. There it is. Let me put you on the Whoop Physical Activity Tracker. I have been wearing this on my wrist, man pushing, five years now. Whoop helps monitor my health. It includes a robust sensor suite that allows me to monitor my key vital signs. It monitors my sleep cycles, my sleep debt, performance and quality. I love also getting some feedback in the gym. It helps me train smarter. That's because Whoop measures and accumulates my training activities and daily effort with a strain score that helps me understand when I should be taking a break or I got a little bit more in the tank. I should really be pushing harder. All this and so much more. No matter what your goal is with your personal health wellness, whoop is going to bring eyes on in a way that you can understand, that you can manage. You can measure and track your progress. I got a great deal for you. You're going to get a free month of the Whoop app. You're going to get the band for free when you head to joinwhoopcom. Check the link in the show notes today to get your deal free month, free band. Or head to joinwhoopcom slash ever forward. That's joinwhoopcom slash ever forward today.

02:31 Welcome back to the show. My friends, I'm so glad you're here with me here today. Welcome to Ever Forward Radio. I'm your host. If you're new, let me introduce myself. My name is Chase. I'm an army veteran, a certified health coach, wellness entrepreneur, and I've been hosting this show for wow, it's been a hot minute. I launched it back in January of 2017.

02:48 So we're in year eight and I bring awareness and attention to key areas of our life that I feel help us move forward in life and to keep living a life ever forward. We're going into conversations with experts, thought leaders, community leaders, friends of mine that I feel just embody one or all of these areas talking physical, mental, emotional, spiritual well-being, and today I sat down with the new homie, dr Ailey Cohen. She is fresh off the release of her brand new crucial book that everyone needs to run to the bookstore or check the link in the show notes I got it linked for you on Amazon called Detoxify the Everyday Tox harming your immune system. More importantly, how to defend against them. We're diving into the top five foods to detoxify your body, even the top detoxifying supplements that you might want to reach for when you're feeling sick or traveling or need a little extra help when the nutrition and activity just isn't cutting it. She's going to be helping us understand what is the number one thing we can do today to detoxify our home. Healthy body is great, but when you step into your home, where we all spend most of our days, we could be consuming or surrounding ourselves with things that are possibly undoing all the hard work we've been doing to detoxify our bodies to live a healthier life. And she's going to be proposing some life-saving solutions to minimizing disrupting immune system triggers and activating the body's natural detoxification systems. After our conversation today, you're going to discover simple and even affordable steps to lead a more toxin-free life.

04:24 All the details for everything we talk about with every guest is there in the show notes. You can find us at everforwardradiocom or watch the video over on YouTube. Just go to youtubecom, search for Ever Forward Radio. Boom, I got you covered in beautiful 4K studio goodness. So this is Ever Forward Radio. The point is to help me and to help my audience understand key concepts of life, of wellness, to move us forward and to keep living a life ever forward. I always want to get that interpretation from my guests. So if I were to ask you what does ever forward mean to you? If you were to go. This is how I live a life ever forward. How would you interpret that?

05:01 - Aly (Host) Well, I think resilience is just so critical and in the world that I live in, which is medical training, medical information, keeping people healthy, I have lots of you know, sick and well patients for the last 20 years. You know ever forward is the inspiration to keep going, despite obstacles that include your health or, you know, you know, pain control. There's just so much. But ever forward means keep going, that there are answers, and I like to bring answers to people's worlds, if I can.

05:31 - Chase (Host) There are answers. I like that. There's never a right or a wrong answer. I always appreciate everyone's interpretation.

05:37 - Aly (Host) Yeah, no, I agree with you. I think that well, nowadays we have certainly lots more information and sources for it. Whether it's correct or not is a whole nother story. But, um, I think, being open-minded to what people have to offer I mean, I started off pretty close-minded as a Western trained doctor and, uh, I've come a long way in terms of what's out there and who to listen to and what thought. What I thought was might, might be crazy or a little bit, you know, fringe um bit fringe. It's measuring the risk benefit of everything and putting that into play, particularly in medicine. I find that that's a very useful way of thinking.

06:15 - Chase (Host) So a Western trained doctor, you are in fact an integrative rheumatologist. So to kind of set the stage for the rest of the conversation, I want to just make sure that we understand and establish your authority and your background. What does that mean, and how long have you been practicing this form of medicine?

06:31 - Aly (Host) So I have been practicing medicine now for 20 years 22 years as a rheumatologist, which is a specialty off of internal medicine. I was trained in internal medicine, first, had to go through medical school, medical training as an intern, as a resident in internal medicine, and then I chose a specialty called rheumatology, which is essentially well. It encompasses a lot of things Now. You might think of Lyme disease that affect the joints, you might think of rheumatoid arthritis that affect the joints. So originally it began as sort of a field around joint pain and it's evolved, you know, into so many different other areas in that time period. But internal medicine, rheumatology, is a specialty in Western medicine. Then I went on to train in integrative medicine, which is a holistic approach. It's very evidence-based, it's board certified, it's a real thing.

07:20 And I was lucky to train with Dr Andrew Weil and his program, which was the first to train physicians, and that was you know. With Dr Andrew Weil and his program, which was the first to train physicians, and that was you know. He started that, I think, in around 2000. But that actually really opened my eyes to a lot of different topics and I eventually made my way into environmental medicine as an area of research. I write my books about environmental medicine and how environment plays a key role in human health, so I've been doing this a long time and I've pulled in different aspects of training. I'm also trained in acupuncture, so I really like to see what's offered in this world with enough science and evidence as we can find to apply it to health and wellness and disease management and disease prevention.

08:05 - Chase (Host) I love it. I'm a huge fan and advocate for this East meets West kind of approach to medicine because it's worked immensely for me over the years in both acute and chronic issues. But I really appreciate that as well, because when I hear that, when I see that someone's still practicing a little bit of foot in both doors, it tells me you are very open minded and you are very. There are certain things that this train of thought teaches us and we can apply for our health and wellness. And then other ways that you know, hey, let's stay creative, let's explore old world modalities and just really see what the body responds to, because I believe everybody is so unique and different. We have a lot of tried and true things that work, but you know, hey, let's leave some room for exploration and leave some room for things that maybe can provide us relief. Uh, but we don't have that just hardcore, typical scientific answer for.

08:59 - Aly (Host) Yeah, well, I think, having done this job for a while and seen as many patients and ailments and um, you know, use many medications in the world of rheumatology, people need medication, so we need Western medications. The question is, how reflexively do we need those medications? For the vast majority of conditions, you know, we really have chronic illnesses, we have things that we can put thought to before initiating those medicines, compared to, say, acute medicine. When you end up in the ICU, you need medicines, you need them quickly. So I think that judging that, triaging, that decision making, is really quite important.

09:37 And I've also come to learn that medicine is not an exact science and there are so much spaghetti on the wall, trial and error. I mean, I can just speak as a rheumatologist who deals with, you know, 20 years of rheumatoid arthritis. As an example, when I was in training, they just developed biologic medications, which is a class of medications that kind of hits the immune system higher up in the immune cascade. And since that time which was very shocking and amazing at the time, in 2004, I guess it was that was the first you know drug that came out that worked as it did for rheumatoid arthritis and it really, you know, it really upended what we were doing for those patients at that time to keep them less disabled, less pain, more function. And we now have over 20 medications for that in that area, in biologic therapy. Do all of them work on the same patient? No. Do all the mechanisms of those drugs work the same in the same patient? No. And so there is a lot of spaghetti on the wall.

10:42 Medicine that's Western, that we have to appreciate. That, despite all the great medicines that are developed, we also have to know that they don't all work for everybody and that there's a risk benefit ratio in terms of side effects and risks and which patients can take them. And, that being said, when you plug in a whole nother world of tools, you know Eastern medicine, acupuncture, mind-body medicine, vetted supplements and I say this very we'll get into this, I'm sure, but vetted supplements that have evidence to them in terms of their ability to decrease inflammation. And then you also understand how our environment has changed so dramatically over all of these millennia, and understanding how to get back to a place with lesser triggers to our body and our immune system. All of this put together as a gestalt that really I'm proud to say, I feel like I'm getting a handle on but, by no means would I ever say that I've reached the, you know, the finish line.

11:41 - Chase (Host) Well, a lot of what we're going to talk about today has to do with detoxification, and before we kind of dive into the thick of that, I want to kind of just get some, get a few like hard hitting, maybe top of mind foods and supplements and things Cause, at least for me, when I hear detox, detoxification uh, there are a lot of maybe biases or certain expectations of what I've read or see on social media, and so I would love to kind of just run through a couple of rapid fire with you Top five foods to detoxify your body Foods with potassium.

12:11 - Aly (Host) Yeah, foods with potassium are great. We know foods like potatoes have even more potassium than bananas.

12:18 - Chase (Host) Really.

12:19 - Aly (Host) Yeah, yeah, and you can even boil. By the way, people don't know you can boil banana skins and actually get quite a degree of potassium from the skin. But there's lots of ways of getting potassium. But it goes to the question of do we get enough potassium in a routine diet anyway? I mean and I'll talk to the deficiencies that I've seen because it plays into detoxification, um, but potassium, you know is is important.

12:48 But I would say, if I had to read, number or rejigger all the you know the list that's above about to, you know, come out. I would say water is probably number one and I say that that's separate than food, and I know that we're going to get into food. But when it comes to foods, it's really interesting. Um, I look at, you know certainly, whole foods, foods that have not been processed, made into ultra processed, you know um, concoctions, um, as being really critical because the more simple the food you eat, the more it's in line with our genetic template for millions of years.

13:16 Right, I often try to bring people back to perspective of where we are. We have evolved for millions of years and it really hasn't been until, say, the last 100 years of our whole time on earth that humans have experienced such an explosion of environmental chemicals, but particularly in food and water and that type of thing. And so when I think about you said foods, and I thought the first thing is it has to be clean, like it almost. If it's a whole food, it almost, in my mind, the quality supersedes the macro.

13:48 - Chase (Host) Let me hold you right there, because I want to get into this and we will, but just for like, for the sake of this one through five, sorry, let's go. No, no apology needed. Like you know your stuff and this is great. So I know it's kind of hard to be asked a question about one specific thing and not talk about it.

14:02 - Aly (Host) I'm just so excited, chase, one specific thing and not talk about it. I'm just so excited, chase, I can't re-grab it all at once.

14:09 - Chase (Host) So, rize, you know if you were to go, you know, hey, one through five in terms of importance or efficiency when it comes to detoxifying the body. Where would you rank potassium?

14:14 - Aly (Host) Well, I think it's potassium would be pretty high, but not so much as in my opinion I don't think of it as necessarily a, you know, detoxifying mineral or vitamin really.

14:28 - Chase (Host) So maybe four, number five yeah, maybe four, or five.

14:32 - Aly (Host) I think of things like foods that have potassium in it, certainly like cruciferous vegetables, way at the top.

14:38 - Chase (Host) Exactly, yeah, and excuse me, that's exactly what I'm talking about here. Foods with potassium.

14:43 - Aly (Host) Yeah, absolutely so. It may not even be so much the potassium component that's doing the detoxification, although of course it's great to get nutrient value but it tends to be sulforaphane and um glucosinolates, and these are just, you know, for your audience. You know terms that are really well known to be associated with cruciferous vegetables, and those are the chemicals that tend to really rev up the liver's ability to detoxify.

15:07 - Chase (Host) So four or five.

15:09 - Aly (Host) Four or five.

15:10 - Chase (Host) Four or five, okay, and actually you bring up sulfur that was another point, foods with sulfur. Where would you kind of put that in one through?

15:16 - Aly (Host) five Amazing, also been really well studied to help with the body to detoxify. So, um, allium vegetables and, um, you know, uh, onions and leeks and and those types of things sulfur related foods are, you know, containing foods are really quite helpful for detox.

15:33 - Chase (Host) So yeah, potassium, I think it's five, and so maybe would you go sulfur, four Possibly.

15:38 - Aly (Host) Yeah.

15:38 - Chase (Host) Okay, what about fiber rich foods?

15:40 - Aly (Host) Ooh, getting exciting here so fiber riveting stuff.

15:44 - Chase (Host) Ooh, this is so exciting.

15:46 - Aly (Host) Um, I'm such a geek, um, so fiber is really critical. Um, I'm almost excited to hear your two and one at fibers Number three, my goodness, um, but fiber is a binder. I mean we need fiber again. Anthropology we have evolved for millions of years to have a hundred 200 grams of fiber a day. Now we have like five to 10 on a standard American diet if we're lucky. So fiber binds chemicals. Fiber keeps the gut healthy, the gut microbiome strong. Fiber does, I mean, look, the rates of colon cancer go down because, you know, with higher rates of fiber intake. So you know, we do know a lot about how fiber has evolved with humans. And uh, yeah, it's a wonderful detox component.

16:28 - Chase (Host) One, two, three. Which slot would you put that?

16:31 - Aly (Host) in. It depends on what you're going to say, for one and two I might have to swap around.

16:34 - Chase (Host) So I'll just give you the other two.

16:35 - Aly (Host) Yeah.

16:36 - Chase (Host) Fermented foods and green tea.

16:39 - Aly (Host) Oh, okay, so that's interesting. So I would probably put fiber at the top.

16:43 - Chase (Host) Fiber number one.

16:44 - Aly (Host) Yeah, because it encompasses so many foods. So it's kind of a more of an umbrella. You know substance in my mind I mean there's different types, there's soluble, there's insoluble. But you know, for the purposes of this conversation. And number two you said was when you put tea it would be pushed down. Yeah, green tea is really remarkable. It has ECGC, which you know God, I can't remember the long name agalic acid, but there's a really strong component in green tea. That's really remarkable and it's antioxidant. You know components. It has certainly effects on the immune system, which is my area. You know components. It has certainly effects on the immune system, which is my area, you know and it's wonderful.

17:30 The question that always keeps popping up is the quality in terms of its chemical components, which is, so you know, such an important issue, and then certainly caffeine components to it, which we have to be very careful because that's dehydrating, stimulating, but dehydrating which kind of works against detoxification when it comes to water. So there's a fine balance to juggle these components, but people can do them incredibly safe and there's certainly caffeine-free components to it. You can buy certainly caffeine-free, high quality green tea. Third thing you said, or you said there was another one.

18:03 Fermented foods, green tea. Third thing you said, or you said there was another one Fermented foods. So fermented foods and fiber certainly are two great GI, gut microbiome, you know, protection mechanisms. Fermented foods are remarkably good for the gut and helps, you know, stimulate and help microbes thrive that are healthy for us. So, non-pathologic microbes. So fermented foods are wonderful, and boy, how do you toss up these in a list of one to five, but pretty good stuff. I mean, no matter how you order them, they're all really quite helpful.

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20:33 So I would like to next move on to where I think a lot of us might go to or just see, and that's detoxifying supplements. Things we might take with the specific intention of this is going to detoxify me, and you know we're going to get into what exactly detoxification supplements things we might take with the specific intention of this is going to detoxify me, and you know we're going to get into what exactly detoxification means and what happens in the body. So kind of just getting these key supplements maybe top of mind might help us better understand application later in the conversation. So again kind of same thing. Top five here NAC, green tea, again milk thistle, activated, activated charcoal, and I left one open.

21:09 - Aly (Host) I wanted to see maybe if you had a detox supplement of choice so, when it comes to detox supplementation, I'm very conscious of you, know sort of what they're made of, what's their quality and that kind of thing. Um, go through that list one more time. Activated charcoal okay, so let's go one by one, because I'm sort of what they're made of, what's their quality and that kind of thing.

21:26 - Chase (Host) Go through that list one more time Activated charcoal.

21:27 - Aly (Host) Okay, so let's go one by one because I'm older than you.

21:31 - Chase (Host) This is like not a good test for me. I offered her some strong coffee. If you were to show me pictures, I'd get them wrong after you flip them over, so just be conscious of my age.

21:39 - Aly (Host) Okay.

21:40 - Chase (Host) I got all kinds of nootropics over there. We. I got all kinds of nootropics over there. We can get your brain firing.

21:43 - Aly (Host) Oh, please, please, please. So you know activated charcoal is interesting. You know charcoal runs with a lot of bad characters in general charcoal.

22:01 So again, there's no real way that I'm able to suss out that there's some type of organic, usda organic form of charcoal, because it's not in our food system. So anything that's not in our food system, including supplements, will not be in any way regulated, even with limited regulations that we have, which we'll get into if you want. But the idea is that activated charcoal really can have some bad players in it in terms of how it's sourced, how it's packaged, how it's manufactured. Any fillers, where it's drawn from. It could be naturally occurring heavy metals, it could be naturally occurring talc. There's things that are in our soil that we have to be very arsenic even. We have to be very conscious of. Where is charcoal coming from? How is it created? Where is it coming from and does it bind? I mean, the intention is right from charcoal is to bind right. When we think of charcoal back in the day when we had poisonings, food poisonings and overdose poisonings, they would do activated charcoal to help you absorb some of those acute exposures.

22:59 - Chase (Host) And can you walk us through maybe, what exactly does activated mean in activated charcoal?

23:04 - Aly (Host) Well, I don't think it has as much value as people think it does. I think it's um kind of like the word heavy metals there's heavy doesn't really apply anymore because there's so many metals. And how do you describe heavy? I mean, that's a whole nother conversation.

23:19 Other than like my favorite type of music Heavy metals, sure, but I would not say that and I'll be honest, there's components that I probably am not answering because I don't know as much about that. But activated, as far as I've ever seen, doesn't really mean so much. Activated like you light a fire or you have to heat it up or there's some component to the mechanism to make it work. I think activated means the application of how you use it. You're activating it in the system or you're activating, you're putting in an environment where there's binding available.

23:49 - Chase (Host) Like almost, it has to be activated.

23:52 - Aly (Host) In a way, that's my understanding of it.

23:54 Um, you know I could be wrong again. I just, uh, I don't use it as often as people think or you know in general. So you know, but activated or not activated charcoal was really kind of an you know, an old way of um and it may still be used, actually in acute settings um to really bind toxins from an acute exposure, from an overdose, um, you know. So that's something that that was used and I think it's carried into the health and wellness world Um, I've seen a lot in the sauna scene.

24:24 - Chase (Host) Uh, a lot of saunas. I mean it's carried into the health and wellness world. Um, I've seen a lot in the sauna scene. Uh, a lot of saunas. I mean it's a great upsell. Uh, you know, pop a liposomal activated charcoal packet before you go into the sauna. It's supposed to help bind any toxins while you're in the sauna to make that purification, detoxification process even that much better.

24:40 - Aly (Host) But yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I'm not sure I know either, and you know, the thing is is that, again, they're not monitored, they're not regulated. I don't know what's in those packets. Um, they don't have to disclose what's in those packets, which is even scarier. Um, but it's also in other products. I mean, there's deodorant with activated charcoal.

24:59 There are things we put on all parts of our bodies to hope that we're going to get cleaner. From the you know the chemicals that we experienced with the idea, the notion that we're cleaning our body to keep us healthier, I would say there's so many other routes to go to do that. That's what I write about.

25:16 - Chase (Host) Let's get into maybe two. So if you could kind of prioritize these activated charcoal, milk, thistle again, green tea, nac, and is there any other one maybe comes top of mind for you or you think is very common?

25:28 - Aly (Host) Yeah, milk thistle is a great one. That's great for people who have history of liver disease, if it's again done well and a clean product. It's been pretty much considered very harmless as long as it's kept within a reasonable dosing. People shouldn't go nuts with any supplements of Um and that can get them into trouble. But um, so I think milk thistle is a really nice one because it's affecting the liver in a very healthy, positive way. Um, does everyone need to take it? Not necessarily at all. I think there's again 20 different ways. We can also just start working on this process, not so much end up at milk thistle only, but um, nac and acetylcysteine.

26:05 Um has been been very helpful and also helping with liver enzymes and detoxification. So, um, it's been used in the medical world to offset Tylenol poisoning. So we use that acutely in the hospitals when someone has a Tylenol poisoning. Um, yeah, so that's how that really might have gotten its kick. Um, but um, yeah, so it's. It's pretty interesting stuff. Um, not at those doses do we use over the counter. Um, but you know it has its ability to help the the liver kind of you know, kind of get its start again from being toxic. Um, so that's not a bad idea.

26:40 Um, if you needed a supplement, if you want a supplement, that's not a bad idea. Um, if you needed a supplement, if you want a supplement, that's you know. Then there the green tea aspect is really again. It um, it's anti-inflammatory. Is it detoxifying? I would say that there are certainly components that are detoxifying. Um, when you're helping the immune system balance itself, you're in a way detoxifying, but you certainly want to let the immune system do its thing too. I mean, we don't want to suppress our abilities natural, our body's ability to do what it's best at, which is really to manage as much of our environmental exposures as possible. And some of these supplements are very helpful, but they won't do as good of a job of keeping us cleaner, as you know. Harnessing really very basic, you know, choices.

27:27 - Chase (Host) And you know what about? The point comes up for me. There's a lot of as much as I see online about this food, this supplement, this wellness behavior is great for detoxifying the body, detoxifying the liver. I see as much, if not more, kind of counterpoints going. You don't need any detoxification supplements, you don't need to detoxify the body. All you need to do is just let the body, ie really the liver, do its job. Is that a fair statement?

27:58 - Aly (Host) It depends on the person, you know, because every person has their own set of issues, right, if you have a history of chronic health conditions, you know you're overweight or obese. You have, you know, maybe prediabetes, or you have, you know, some old injuries from infection or from chronic use of antibiotics or what have you. I tend to look at medicine and people as an N of one, where we have to really hear what their story is, what their exposures are, what their water comes from, where they live, what their childhood stress was like, which plays into, by the way, the prevalence or the incidence of autoimmune disease. We have good studies on that. I talk about that too in the book.

28:43 The idea is that almost all of our experiences, including what we eat, what we drink, what we're infected by, what our, you know, cheese was in, and Oreos that I grew up on and you know I mean I write about this If anyone could do it, I could do it right, you know, in terms of cutting down some of these triggers, these exposures, but when it comes to sort of an algorithmic everyone should do this or everyone should do that I get very worried about that. That's how Western medicine works If we want to think about it. Right, we have to have algorithms for public health measures, right? There's no better way to help masses of people than to have policy and oversight, and you know to. Really, that's how we had better sanitation.

29:24 I mean this is why we're living in a world with far fewer infectious diseases because of some of these modalities that are for the masses. When you're talking about individual risk, individual health, you know potential, I think you also. We now know so much about what our environment does in terms of those things and how it lays the groundwork for potential disease. It's your exposome, your epigenetics, where you can affect how the genes play out. You're not going to reorder the genes, you're not going to affect the genes necessarily, but you're affecting the proteins that sit on the genes and will allow those genes to express as disease or to stay quiet, and that's what we have a lot of control over.

30:07 - Chase (Host) So what do you think is the number one thing we can do today to detoxify our bodies? The most kind of more of that internal lens.

30:17 - Aly (Host) Great question. Number one thing is stop buying crap, stop buying junk, stop bringing it into your home. It gets into your body, and I mean that from a global perspective. We have been taught to have cleaner kitchens and bathrooms. We've been taught to have beautiful lawns and keep up our landscape, so we need spraying every week with the signs that have an X through the children and the animals they're walking.

30:40 If you look at those signs at least where I'm from, you know we have been sort of you know, marketed to such an exhaustive state where we think we need things we have no need for. It's remarkable. So the number one thing I always say to people is if you stop buying so much of the stuff that has harmful, you know, contaminants, ingredients, that's a great place to start. You save money, um, which you can put towards far better things that are effective and productive. Um, you save more of the environment from having so much packaging back into the world. Um, we don't need a cleaner for a door handle and then the windows and then the surface cleaning and then the carpet and then the couch. I mean, in what world do we need all those different products specific to those?

31:30 - Chase (Host) It's good marketing.

31:31 - Aly (Host) It's great marketing, because fear makes people buy stuff, whether it's aesthetic fear of being older, aging, getting sick, having your children get sick or your pets get sick versus, you know, keeping up socially with the Joneses. Your lawns have to be so beautiful, you know, or else you're going to be shunned by your community, right? We don't want to be out of our community and kicked out of community, right? So it plays into a lot of the choices we make which end up not being either cost-effective, financially feasible or even healthy. Whatever you bring into your home gets into your body.

32:06 - Chase (Host) Okay, Okay period.

32:08 - Aly (Host) We now know this.

32:09 - Chase (Host) Yeah.

32:09 - Aly (Host) So when I mean get it out of your home, I'm really saying by getting it out of your home it will not make its way into the human body. So that's a really critical piece. We have studies that show that dust in homes is remarkably loaded with toxic chemicals from products dropping off and making the rain to the floor.

32:31 - Chase (Host) Which has got to be mind-blowing, because people think you're home, you're inside, you're safe, you're controlling all of these factors to keep a clean home. But I don't have a resource off the top of my head, but I have heard how the air quality and the pollutants and chemicals inside the home nowadays compared to, I think maybe even just like 20, 30 years ago are exponentially worse. So people think they're living this clean, healthy life indoors, but you actually might be better off just stepping outside more often. That's being absolutely no. It could be more true, hey friends, quick break from a conversation with. But you actually might be better off just stepping outside more often than being inside.

33:06 - Aly (Host) No, it could be more true.

33:07 - Chase (Host) Hey friends, quick break from a conversation with Ailey to bring your attention to something that just might actually move the needle the most for you. I know Ailey is talking detoxification and she is giving you some incredible things to do. This is a great start, but in my opinion, we got to know what's going on under our hood more specifically, beyond just how we feel. But getting our labs drawn, looking at key biomarkers, can really help us optimize, even potentially get ahead of chronic illness, disease or God forbid, even life-threatening situations. Let me put you on to Joy and Blokes this is not just another telemedicine company. They use data-driven diagnostics and science-backed therapies designed for longevity, menopause and optimal health span, guided by top-tier clinicians and expert health coaches. So on the other side of the data, it's you, but better.

34:02 I would really recommend checking out their complete hormone panel. This covers 56 hormone related biomarkers to help you better gauge things like energy, mood and sex drive. These all rely on hormone balances. It's super simple link for you in the show notes, but it's basically three steps. You're going to complete your health history and then order a lab test to better understand your hormone levels. Then, secondly, you're going to go over your results with a licensed healthcare provider. And three, then you have the opportunity to start your personalized treatment plan and track your progress with their team, or just take the information and run with it. So to snag this exclusive discount on any one of their labs for men or women head to joyandblokescom that's J-O-I-A-N-D-B-L-O-K-E-Scom, slash chase, C-H-A-S-E to schedule your labs and get started today, Linked for you, as always in the show notes under episode resources no-transcript, because what happens is we have gotten our homes, have gotten much more economically, you could argue.

35:10 - Aly (Host) I don't think improved, but in terms of saving heat and air conditioning, right. So we've sealed our homes to such a degree now to save on all these bills and to keep air from getting into our home that we're not getting clean air in. We're not opening windows, we're not using plants that clean the air, and then we're loading in all of the products that I was sort of describing here, and what it does is it keeps those chemicals in your home. Even cables have flame retardant chemicals, right.

35:40 - Chase (Host) So they don't light on fire.

35:41 - Aly (Host) You know, then, the stuff we spray, the air fresheners, the. You know the plugins, the incense. You know our own perfume and conditioner. All the things that we bring in will stay in our home and typically we'll get into our carpeting and floors and then it will be on our hands and it will get onto the paws of our animals which you know I have a soft spot for and our children. You know the man and the hand mouth touching um and toys on the floor and where they live.

36:09 So this concept that to clean your body really begins by cleaning your home, I think that's really an important message, because those things will get into our body by what we touch through dermal you know skin exposure, certainly with a variety of chemicals, including BPA, and we inhale those because they aerate off, especially the volatile organic chemicals.

36:33 And so from all these different routes into the body, you know air ingestion, dermal and, I'll argue, intravaginally with feminine care products these things are getting into us and they're measurable in our body, you know, fluid. So the idea about what's the number one thing stop buying it, get it out of your home, keep your home where you can control the best right. Work is not always easy to control if you work for others, but you have so much control over your home, which means you have so much more control over what gets into your body.

37:03 - Chase (Host) So I guess hopefully I'm answering that question. No people answer yeah, absolutely, Thank you. And when we think detoxification, that means that there's something wrong. There's a health issue that I'm trying to rid my body, my home, of. Do we have to be symptomatic in order to focus on need to focus on detoxification?

37:24 - Aly (Host) So we are loaded with chemicals. I'm loaded, you're loaded, as much as we don't want to believe it. We are loaded with many chemicals that we can't always control, many of which we can, which is where I go. I go where we can control and make huge differences, because I test my own body, I test my patient's bodies, I have, I read all the papers where other people are tested. So we have a really good understanding that you know we're going to be walking through modern day world, being exposed things that we can't always, you know, fix or not.

37:57 Those chemicals don't always, as you said, show up as a rash, show up as heart failure, show up as chest pain, show up as something where we can tangibly feel, you know, or see a cause and effect type of experience. Now there are some dermatitis experiences where people touch things and within a certain range of time, they'll have a rash, they'll have a redness, they'll have something that makes them feel that they had a reaction. But the vast majority of the chemicals that we're now, you know, kind of exposed to in the United States, which runs around 95,000, um that are allowable chemicals that are not required for testing for safety or toxicity before going into the products that we use and we love and we put on our skin and we eat. Even there's a real problem that these chemicals are getting into our lives and we're filled with them. There was a great study in 2005. It seems like an old study, but it's almost emblematic of where we are, maybe today, but Environmental Working Group did a study where they took the cord blood of 10 babies.

39:10 These are the cord between mom and baby umbilical cord when the baby's born and they tested that blood to see what was in it. And this is in 2005 and they found over a hundred no, I'm sorry, 275 chemicals that were industrial chemicals. Some of them are legacy chemicals, meaning they were banned, like DDT, from decades before, and so it gets into our environment. If those chemicals can't break down, they will make you know they can show up because they may take longer than other chemicals that break down, say like BPA, in about a six to eight hour time period, that half-life. So there are chemicals and their properties vary, but knowing that and knowing which classes do that gives us more control over getting them out of your body, and I can give examples of that. But the idea that these chemicals don't necessarily have to smack you in the face to give you problems is the whole basis of the work that I put together to show the research on that. Over time, extremely low levels of exposures can increase risks for various health conditions.

40:20 - Chase (Host) Yeah, that was going to be my next question. It kind of just made me think. Well, I think it should be. It would be ignorant to think that we can just live our lives today in the modern world, unless you're, you know, in the woods somewhere. You made a log cabin, living off the land, kind of thing. But if you choose to wake, up.

40:35 - Aly (Host) Even those people are contaminated. Even still, there's studies on that in the backwoods of Maine and these people have been tested. I believe it so interesting.

40:42 - Chase (Host) I mean, could we not make the argument that, yeah, we're going to be exposed to these things and if it's not causing a problem, if I'm not symptomatic, if I'm not having a health concern, I'm going through my life, you know, year after year, just because it shows up in some kind of test I do at home or a lab, you know, with my doctor. Is it really a problem?

41:03 - Aly (Host) Well, I guess the question is if you're a mixture of chemicals and your body becomes kind of a mixture, a soup of many different chemicals, what is the threshold by which your body then has too much? And the triggering of a mechanism like hormone disruption, endocrine disrupting chemicals or EDCs? They've been studied to affect the normal physiology of hormones that we've had for millions of years, so they can do lots of crazy things. That's why they're called hormone disruptors, because they can increase receptors and they can downplay quantities that are made. They can mimic estrogen and testosterone, so they're mimickers. Then they could also have immune system effects, not just hormone effects, some of these chemicals, which is what I write about.

41:48 So the question is really we don't know each individual's threshold and the development of disease. Is this really kind of intricate dance between our genetics, our lifestyle and our environmental exposures? And two of those things, three things we can really make a difference in and I'm offering that up because the science backs it. So if we can lower these low-level exposures, that don't necessarily cause us problems, but knowing that in a mixture of our body over time and fluidity we get exposed to lots of different things, right, we go to different places, our age group, you know you could be drinking all day, and you know in college, and then you go off and then maybe you're in an apartment that has lots of vinyl flooring and what not. You know, there's so much variability to our lives.

42:38 The question is not to get freaked out, it's not to. That's not the messaging that I want to show people. I want to show people that within the choices that you have within the context of your life, there are many good ones and that when you make better choices you lower exposure. And when you make lower, you know you lower your exposure. The science shows that you're lowering your risk of those diseases developing. So, even if it doesn't show up, you, by having good behaviors and good habits that begin and I say early, because I teach high school and middle school too to give them ideas about this the earlier you start the habits, and they're good.

43:18 These kids are good at it. I mean, these kids are. I can even talk about my own kid. They know how to look up their products products?

43:29 - Chase (Host) Yeah, are you finding that this next generation actually? Cares about things such as toxins in the home and, you know, things affecting their bodies like at this level.

43:33 - Aly (Host) I think if I were to talk strictly about, say, my own 15 and 17 year old and a lot of the middle and high school students, they are really worried about fitting in, looking good and getting girls or boys or whatever.

43:45 - Chase (Host) Yeah, classic teenager and it drives their decisions.

43:48 - Aly (Host) But they are savvy enough to know that there can be junk in them and they're really good at technology, so they can look up this stuff really easy. And I said to my son before he went to summer camp I said you can get whatever junk you want, as long as it's rated a two or below.

44:05 - Chase (Host) Oh, interesting. And what do you mean by two or below?

44:06 - Aly (Host) So, on environmental working group, long as it's rated a two or below oh, interesting, and what do you mean by two or below? So, on Environmental Working Group, and there are several good apps Cleria, yuka they pull from a lot of the same data, by the way, so it's really kind of interesting. But Healthy Living is an app from Environmental Working Group. They're very reputable as a group. I've worked with them, ken Cook and all those folks. They have created a database called the Skin Deep Database where you can actually look up your products.

44:31 So when I go teach high school, I toss these items at the kids and they giggle and they get all uncomfortable and then they go right at it and they look them up and I say, well, what's in them? And then they choose better. And so when it comes to this decision, I mean this population's demographic, which is so critical because, by the way, hormone disruption this is the hormone demographic right. And so we want to consciously be thinking about sort of this demographic who uses the most products in 24 hours than any other demographic, by age. That oh yeah, oh yeah. On average, 17 products in 24 hours.

45:05 - Chase (Host) Why then? Why so many products?

45:07 - Aly (Host) Because they just want to look good and smell good and they want to be like. You know, I'm telling you, I the stuff that I hear from my kids, I mean it's like they're always into something cool or new or something they saw on TikTok, but they're also really proactive about trying to be healthy. Now, whether that's because they have illness themselves or some health condition because that's again we can talk about that what we're seeing really in epidemiologically in terms of health conditions, or they have a family member that's sick or whatever it may be that's driving them. They're very conscious about their bodies, but also in a good way, in terms of making choices, and it's really the best demographic to grab ahold of when it comes to educating. I mean, I speak to every demographic and there's never a time when you should not think about it. Even the elderly believe it or not?

45:57 But you know the idea that we're shifting disease to younger ages and these diseases, especially autoimmune and rheumatologic diseases that I write about, they're occurring in families or in people, I should say, with no family history. So these are de novo cases of lupus, rheumatoid, sjogren's syndrome, type 1 diabetes. You know all the autoimmune diseases.

46:20 - Chase (Host) And these are typical diseases where we would see some kind of familial relation or genetics playing a role a familial relation or genetics playing a role.

46:31 - Aly (Host) Yeah, there may be a small genetic component, but technically you might see some of these diseases later in life, certainly the chronic health conditions like diabetes, obesity, hypertension. But autoimmune diseases tend to be shifting. They're shifting younger and again de novo cases and people want to know why they're getting sick. Because they wouldn't have expected it, they wouldn't have had it in their family. People want to know why they're getting sick. Because they don't wouldn't have expected it, they wouldn't have had in their family, they don't think that their their lifestyle is you know. You know they're not going out and doing horrible things in their lives and so there's the sense of why me and when did this happen? So you know, I just want people to think that you know we're laying down something that's very hard to talk about, which is delayed gratification. Right, everyone wants instant gratification and you're really talking about this for human health.

47:13 You're saying, if you make these changes, make some better decisions, very simple swaps, very practical, nothing over the top, which is what I write about and what I post on and all that you can really cut down what we call the body burden we call that in science body burden, which is sort of the overall accumulation of exposures and if you do that, you're lessening the risk of not only developing a disease that may be affecting, you know, your immune system, like the immune disrupting chemicals which I talk about in the book, similar to endocrine, but really immune focused, and that's how a lot of these triggers are affecting those diseases and how we can kind of and it's also flares, by the way, it's not. So, for instance, I manage a lot of patients in my rheumatology practice that already have, you know, diagnosed lupus or diagnosed rheumatoid. You know, and how you manage those diseases is critically important, right? It's not just not getting the diseases. We'd be lucky if we didn't get anything right.

48:16 - Chase (Host) Right, yeah, but we don't want to wake up the sleeping giant, kind of thing.

48:19 - Aly (Host) Exactly, and a lot of that has to do with reoccurring immune triggers, idcs, immune disrupting chemicals, stress can do it, poor sleep can do it, all of that. But what I focus on with what I write about is a lot about the chemicals, because they're so much easier to manage than stress. In some ways, you can't always change your situation as easily as you can by not buying a product.

48:41 - Chase (Host) Very true, yeah. So that kind of leads me to what are these most common everyday toxins?

48:47 - Aly (Host) Yeah, so you can class them out by you know their compound structure. You can class them out by which organs they affect, like neurotoxins or liver toxins. There's lots of ways to define these chemicals. There's so many of them that you know what's easiest to say what products they tend to be in, because that will be easier, I think, for the audience to understand, which obviously was my journey as well. So when we think about, say, for instance, a class bisphenols, I'll start with bisphenols. People might've heard BPA. Right, bpa is bisphenol A.

49:19 - Chase (Host) Used to be in like every plastic ever Correct.

49:23 - Aly (Host) Yeah, so it used to be in every plastic ever. It started in the 1930s. It was developed and was found to be right out of the starting gate in the 1930s to be estrogenic, meaning it could mimic estrogen. Okay, and they knew this. The farmers knew this. They would feed BPA to chickens and chickens would get bigger and fatter and muscular. They would literally feed it as part of the chicken feed and they knew that it had estrogenic effects. Then they were considering using it as a medication for various health issues. This is back in the 1930s, right, but they developed something called diethylsilbestrol or DES, which actually had more potent ability to be estrogenic and that actually was given to women by prescription from the 1940s to the 70s. And that actually was given to women by prescription from the 1940s to the 70s and that had a whole host of health effects. So we've had some bad trial and errors.

50:15 But then BPA got a second look and the makers of Bayer, for instance, they found out and certain companies knew that when you took BPA in its you know, I guess, its original form but manipulated it it could make an epoxy resin. It could be. The molecules could be put together and made into a very hard plastic. It's kind of the story of BPA in a way. And they used it as you know, the bottles of bare aspirin, right and it became used in everything, right. We started having and this is moving into World War Two in the 1950s where chemicals exploded in terms of how many and what they were used for. But think of plexiglass and fighter pilots, you know military right. That all started from that area of BPA research when they were starting to see how you could take molecules and put them together and make a clear epoxy resin, you know, in terms of its ability to be pretty tough, anyway. So what ended up happening is BPA sort of took off and it became thousands of other components BPS, bpsip, ppf. So there was lots of bisphenols.

51:22 Bisphenol A, the original, was found to be estrogenic and because of that and because of the studies that came from third party researchers, like my co-author for two other books, frederick Vomsal, he's a renowned emeritus professor who helped, along with all his colleagues, to discover how BPA was estrogenic in that, you know, formulated the endocrine disrupting chemical classification and that was one of the first. But BPA is now used in everything, so it was taken out of baby bottles. A lot of his work led to that, because very little has been removed from the US market. I mean, very little has been moved from the US market for chemicals. They're allowed and then you can't get them out. It takes research and billions of dollars to get them out of our market, even if they're bad. It's up to manufacturers to get rid of them off the shelves. It's not the US government, but BPA is now in places like the canned foods. It lines the interior.

52:26 - Chase (Host) We're not completely gone. Oh, no, no, no, it's not gone at all.

52:29 - Aly (Host) It's still one of the number one production chemicals. The only place it was taken out of in 2012 was plastic baby bottles and sports bottles.

52:39 - Chase (Host) I remember this wave of uh. I remember Nalgene bottles were like the craze when I was in high school and early 2000s. It would say BPA free.

52:47 - Aly (Host) Yeah. So the problem BPA-free is that BPA has been substituted with other, what we call regrettable substitutions.

52:54 - Chase (Host) Come on, so are we just trading one evil for another?

52:58 - Aly (Host) Well, the plastic industry is. What we need to do is be smarter, which is what I'm trying to teach people that we have to do it ourselves for our own bodies and our own health. And it's not that complicated. In other words, instead of having any type of plastic where some company says it's BPA free, but by the way, they substitute like three other bisphenols that can do the same thing or worse, why don't we just go with glass and stainless steel? Why don't we take materials that we now know and we're going back to are? The matrix is so strong that nothing can leach from them, even if they're heated up and so is this really?

53:33 - Chase (Host) I see this craze going on right now. The there's this movement of removing when you get a to-go hot coffee, yeah, taking that lid off the top, and you're like I'm detoxifying my hot beverage because the the heat, the steam, it's particularly the top lid component. Is there truth to that?

53:47 - Aly (Host) um, I love the fact that someone's even considering that. You know, like when did we think like that? That's wonderful, but I will say that ideally, not just one off, but ideally, the best way would be not to have the cup at all. Um, you know, because we know the plastic lines, paper cups it's like a interior.

54:05 - Chase (Host) It's like is it a wax coating or a plastic coating? It's a plastic coating.

54:09 - Aly (Host) Oh really If it was wax, you'd see it go to the top when it's heated. But technically it's, it's a plastic coating. And here's the thing we don't know what kind of plastic coating, we don't know what's in it, cause it's not required to be tested or to be, you know, shared with the consumer. So again, I I'm very realistic. I color my hair. You know not that anyone can figure that out. You know I have fun, I go, I eat, you know, skittles here and there and I do some stuff here and there. But I've moved from where I was living with this stuff to a place where I feel like I've drastically reduced those exposures. And not only that, I test my own body for it. So I can kind of see some of my behaviors on a one and one level. But what I look at is the epidemiology of huge studies that are well run, and that's what I like to share because that guides my choices and guides what I share with audiences.

55:00 - Chase (Host) Speaking of plastics, talk to me about microplastics. I feel like that's all I can read about in the world of toxic chemicals, fertility and just kind of like the root of all evil. These days, I feel like we're seeing a lot of microplastics rise to the top. What's going on with that, and what role do microplastics play in the toxification of our homes and bodies?

55:21 - Aly (Host) So microplastics is like you said. It's really making the headlines and whenever we see things in the headlines, we think it's the only thing to be talking about. But I will tell you it's making a lot of headlines because it's the research is now evolving. To look at these things right, I will tell you that for decades we didn't have the research. No one wanted to fund these studies.

55:44 - Chase (Host) Now we know that we Well, they didn't want to get caught.

55:48 - Aly (Host) Well, it depends on who's funding it right Because the only people that are looking into these studies are really people who don't have skin in the game to get, you know, in trouble with the companies that are making them. So that leaves only a small group of you know, maybe academics and people who are untethered, so to speak, to be able to do this work. The idea that the precautionary principle, which is what I talk about in this book and other work, is that we have to be thinking about, even if there wasn't hard and fast science, that the precautionary principle which was set up in the 1950s for lots of research work where we had to say that, even if there's not hard and fast evidence for a cause and effect relationship, but there's ample information, perhaps even in animal studies or epidemiologic studies, things like workers, occupational workers that get exposed and we find out information but we didn't throw them in to begin with. That's unethical. The precautionary principle says it makes good sense not to do it If we have alternative choices and it's not a big stretch, right? The precautionary principle means let's take caution, let's not jump in, knowing what we do know, even if it's not hard and fast cause and effect, because cause and effect is very hard in humans, right, because we have so many confounders, um but uh.

57:05 Microplastics. Back to your question. Sorry, um but uh, microplastics. Back to your question. Sorry, I tangent. Um, you know it is a big issue because it it takes it to the point where we almost are a little bit more fearful because we can envision it right. It's very hard to envision a class of chemicals like BPA and bisphenols or phthalates, which are in fragrance chemicals to make them, you know, fragrances, last longer and to have a longer shelf life, or solvents which are in materials and building materials that, um, you know, are linked to a whole bunch of autoimmune diseases that I talk about. Um, there's different classes. Microplastics sort of, are a little separate because we can almost envision our credit card. We can envision, like you know, our bodies.

57:50 They, you know, there was a recent study where they took um in open heart surgery. They took off what are called the atheromas in the middle of the surgery. They would take off these, um, these plaques, um of the heart vessels which are getting cleaned out for these surgeries, and they looked at, um, what was in them, and they found we now have the technology to see these microplastics in these cardiac vessel atheromas. They're also in blood, they're also in breast milk, they're also in brain tissue, they're in placenta and they're also in believe it or not testicles and in penile tissue. So the sexier you get with how you frame it in the media, the more attention you're going to get, which is not a bad thing.

58:34 - Chase (Host) Yeah, I heard this, that I might be butchering it, but I think something like currently about half of all men, or there was a a test of men in their sperm and about half of them all had microplastics in their semen, just kind of like testing off the street. So think about that. Yeah, you know, whatever the percentage is, I don't care if it's 10 or 50. It is there, and just think about that as someone who recently, you know, got pregnant.

58:59 - Aly (Host) I'm like man, so you look great, by the way thank you.

59:04 - Chase (Host) We're just. I'm like I'm passing that off to my son. You know any percentage of what creates life. I only want to be healthy as possible. So just to think now it's so much more real for me that any part of that could be detrimental to my future son's health is scary. It's terrifying.

59:24 - Aly (Host) It's terrifying and, um, you know, it's often when people become parents that they start to wake up to this, which is not.

59:31 - Chase (Host) I mean this has been top of my mind in my world for a while. But now, ever since this year, I mean, I have been diving so deep into water purification, air purification. I got air purifiers in the house and getting a new water purification system, getting all the chemicals out, cleaning, getting new furniture, and it does make you kind of think. You know, I care about my health, I care about my family's health and, you know, my partner, whoever's in my home. But, man, when I found out that we're going to be bringing new life into this world, times a million, like nothing is good enough. I'm trying to down throttle myself and I got too carried away. But it really does make you think and really kind of pulls up a big magnifying lens to what am I bringing into my house.

01:00:11 - Aly (Host) Yeah, no, and all good instincts and and I applaud. Look, I did the same thing. I was eating cheese whiz and McDonald's drive-thru with my first child. I mean I couldn't take enough of the pancakes and what have you. So I mean I've been through this also. Um, and a lot of it comes with maturity and kind of understanding your place in the world and, you know, kind of feeling that there's an after you, you know so to speak.

01:00:35 So I applaud anyone at any stage in their lives kind of cleaning things up a little bit.

01:00:41 - Chase (Host) It could be a cancer.

01:00:42 - Aly (Host) It could be your mother, it could be your own, it could be autism, it could be any number of exposure to an illness or condition that makes you, you know, inspired, but certainly new life, absolutely. Um. But goes back to that question of well, if it doesn't hurt you, what do we do about it? Cause they're finding these microplastics, incidentally or intentionally, but certainly not necessarily related to a clinical manifestation or symptom. Okay, what are plastics made out of? So microplastics are really teeny, teeny, teeny, tiny pieces of plastic. Right, everyone can wrap their head around that. The question is well, what are plastics made out of? They're made out of the BPAs. They are sometimes loaded with phthalates. If they're coated, they're sometimes loaded with other chemicals, like the perfluorococcus, which make them nonstick or make them grease proof or stain proof. They may have other chemicals for flexibility. They may have other chemicals in there. So the idea that plastic is just plastic and we have like Tupperware in our body which, by the way, I think just registered for chapter 11, which I find very interesting.

01:01:46 Tupperware just filed bankruptcy yeah yeah, it's so interesting, so maybe there is a movement. I mean, how do you know? You check the market, but there's, you know. But the idea that you know we're exposed and we have this all over our body doesn't necessarily make people motivated to do anything, unless it personally affects them health-wise or, in your case, becoming a new father. And I think you know that's part of the problem is that we, we, you know, we just don't act on things unless we're either in pain, we look not attractive, um, you know, there's just some motivators that make us do stuff, but for the most part we don't. Because we're busy, we're trying to survive, we're trying to get food on the table, we're trying to like work, four jobs, we're raising kids, we're taking care of old parents, so like I get it.

01:02:37 But what I try to lay out again is that there's very practical ways, very practical ways to reduce these exposures, even microplastics. There's ways to reduce microplastics. Again, I post on this, I write on it. The idea is that. Number one change out the materials that hold your food and water, whether you store that food and water, whether you carry it with you, whether you're cooking it, whether you have spatulas. I have a blanket question here, because I feel like a lot of these things can just come down to plastics.

01:03:09 Yeah.

01:03:09 - Chase (Host) Would you say it would behoove me and my audience to eliminate plastic as much as possible in terms of plastic containers, cooking with it, storing with it, water bottles, anything, everything. Should I focus on getting rid of plastic to live a more detoxified life?

01:03:26 - Aly (Host) Yes, very simple answer there you go.

01:03:28 - Chase (Host) I like it, I like it.

01:03:29 - Aly (Host) Because here's the thing again risk benefit ratio in medicine, risk benefit ratio in life. It's an easy swap. I always love the easy stuff, Cause I'm like, ah, that's easy you know, that's simple and it's even probably cheaper. Um, you know, when I go out for you know takeout food I bring my big stainless steel camper. You do, you betcha, I have a relationship with our Indian food people and our Chinese food people and all our favorite foods that we love and here I am thinking you know, I've got my to-go water bottle.

01:04:00 - Chase (Host) I keep with me everywhere. I've never thought about bringing a to-go food container.

01:04:03 - Aly (Host) That's what my book is for. That is what I post on.

01:04:06 - Chase (Host) I'm trying to give people ideas which is stainless steel, by the way.

01:04:09 - Aly (Host) Yeah, interior, what's the top?

01:04:12 - Chase (Host) She got me Okay, classic little sippy top Right so you really haven't done the full Monty on this.

01:04:19 - Aly (Host) The idea is that you don't want.

01:04:21 - Chase (Host) If you're going to do it, I mean, come on, you're making the effort, you're bragging about it.

01:04:24 - Aly (Host) I love it.

01:04:25 But you got to get away from the plastic straws, the plastic top. It's more effort to unscrew a top. We're like an effortless society. Now Everything is like sit on your couch and let the world do it for you. We got to get back into doing ourselves. We have to scrub the stainless steel pan and not rely on the ceramic, whatever it is coating or nonstick. We got to get back to basics. You know vinegar for cleaning and you know Castile soap and you know sea salt for scrubbing. We don't need 20 cleaners. We can make one that cleans a lot of stuff If you want to get rid of. You know infection in your home. You got a new kid coming. You take a little isopropyl alcohol to clean surfaces if you really needed to go that far. But soap really breaks up lots of things. Soap and water basic. You know just the idea of going back to what our grandparents kind of used.

01:05:18 that really just makes sense and from a scientific perspective we know that those chemicals are far safer if you do them right.

01:05:24 - Chase (Host) Let's talk about air. What contributes most to home air toxins and what can we realistically do to detoxify the air in our homes?

01:05:35 - Aly (Host) I think the number one contributor is what we do. We spray things. We want to make the house smell nice for the holidays. I mean pumpkin spice and peppermint, this and whatever. I mean you know it's, it's lovely to smell these odors. There's bay breeze, I mean. I had a whole drawer of plug-in stuff when I was like a new mom and my new house.

01:05:58 - Chase (Host) I finally had a house instead of apartments.

01:06:00 - Aly (Host) I mean, this is stuff we all go through, kind of. You know, you start to get new things in your life, whether you move, whether you start a family, whatever. So I had this space that was my own and I got to control it Right. So I was having fun, right. I have a whole drawer of plugins and incense and candles and every holiday I would swap out stuff, and boy did that turn out to be the wrong thing. And I remember the day that I dumped the entire drawer in the trash. I mean I remember it because I just read all about phthalates and how phthalates can affect, you know um congenital, you know babies, uh, especially male um genitalia, and that's been well studied by Dr Shauna Swan and all of her colleagues.

01:06:41 - Chase (Host) Oh my God, her book countdown blew my mind. I read that like four years ago. That's why I first kind of got exposed to pun intended the world of microplastics.

01:06:51 - Aly (Host) Yeah, so her work has been remarkable and I've worked with her too. But she, you know, this is science at the academic level, you know, not selling products not. You know, you can really hear what they're doing and understand what they're doing and what they're showing. But back to the, the plugins and the air quality. We tend to do most damage to ourselves as human beings. We end up bringing more stuff into our lives. So I'll give you a fun story, you know. Again back to my teenagers, um, who I'm sure are going to appreciate this. Um, but one of them's really into scents and perfumes. And not perfumes, fragrances, you know, like all the guys in middle school are like swapping. I mean, I'd rather this than, like you know, drugs or something but but needless to say, they're like swapping colognes.

01:07:38 - Chase (Host) Swapping Axe Brays. Oh my God, it's insane.

01:07:40 - Aly (Host) Like this is like a thing, right, I'm thinking all right, it's not crack, it's not cocaine.

01:07:44 You know like I'm thinking okay you know, right, exactly, as a parent, you have to decide which battles are worth fighting, right? So you know and he doesn't listen to me with anything, right, you know like here I'm writing you know stuff and whatever. He is careless. But I said to him, you know, you know, what I decided to do is, um, you know, first of all, he was sneaking this stuff and as if it was like really, you know, clandestine, and I said, well, why don't we do this? Let's do an experiment. And I basically ordered non-toxic fragrances and I don't share brands or anything, as you'd probably know, cause I'm in academics but, um, I found brands that were on you know, um healthy living and these apps that were really good at doing this. Like, environmental working group is a very good consumer advocacy group that that does this um vetting of products, um, personal care and cleaning and all that stuff. And I found some fragrances and I bought them and it was like sort of a sample pack and you know what I found.

01:08:42 And we sat and we sprayed on cards cause he knew how to do this and he would go, you know like, he visited like the big stores and he would go like this and we would kind of rate them. And then finally I found one I liked and he found, he liked, and we both got perfume, you know, colognes and he got. It was, I guess they're, like you know, male and female odor scents. Now, like you don't even get female perfumes and male colognes merge. A lot of these scents.

01:09:05 It is, it is, and they smell good, but you know, you can sense a little bit more of a feminine odor, maybe more than a male, but anyway, we just had fun with it. And the idea was I am dealing with the hardest critics. My children, right, the ones who don't want to listen, don't care, have all the body image problems that teenagers have and, you know, want to get pretty and less, you know, clean skin and meet the girls and whatever. And yet I'm finding that there's a crack in it where they, they really do want to learn and understand. So he's now trained or, I guess, worked with his friends and, like you know, yeah, they got some bad ones in there in terms of colognes, but boy, he shows me what he buys and it's pretty interesting.

01:09:47 - Chase (Host) Uh, I recently got a home air purification system called Jasper and, uh, this isn't a plug or anything, they're not a sponsor but I was really amazed at how it works. It's kind of like for lack of a better term it's automated so as I would cook or if I lit a candle. Oddly enough, this kind of blew my mind the most when my wife two rooms down in the house, you know, so we keep the Jasper in our kitchen, we got a bedroom and then another bedroom when she uses her hairdryer, that air purification system goes haywire, it goes into overdrive. So basically, as things get into the air, it will kick in to purify it more, and the hairdryer is probably the thing that it does the most. Besides that, if I overdo it, I cook steak a lot with butter, grass fed butter. If I get a little carried away with the butter and kind of burns, that really sends it off as well. And so it's.

01:10:42 That's been eye opening because these are things that we've been using a lot in our house. You know cooking certain things, the hair dryer, certain candles, incense not all the time, but you know trying to set a vibe here and there and I was just blown. So if this thing is working baseline and then, based on what I am doing in my home, it is kicking into overdrive. How long have I just been exposing myself, my wife been exposing herself to all of these. I mean, I don't even know what, but just now, to have something in my house showing me, that has been very eye opening, so that I'm, if I choose to light a candle, if we get a candle, bring it into the house. I'm scrutinizing that label and ingredients a lot more, or even not even using things as much as I used to.

01:11:25 - Aly (Host) Yeah, and I think that you're getting sort of tangible information from what you've chosen to sort of motivate you and you know, again, that's why we lack that and so many of these chemicals get into our bodies that they don't have an alarm system. And if you're going to test yourself, any given test for chemicals gives you that moment right. Tomorrow it might be different. You might've washed out of certain half-lives of chemicals that are broken down. You may have stopped having canned food for a week, which is again a great story and a great Harvard study that they did, you know, just changing out lunch to clean homemade soup versus they use Progresso in the study.

01:12:06 - Chase (Host) Yeah, You're talking about. I think I know what you're talking about. It was the study of just introducing canned soup into a diet of a group of people. I think it's just a couple of days.

01:12:13 - Aly (Host) Yeah, just over five days. And then a three-day washout and the same 75 participants had just clean soup and nothing else changed. So it was Progresso for five days, progresso, then three-day washout and they had an 1100% decrease in BPA in their urine, which is how it's tested. And BPA again has a six to eight hour half-life versus a lot of other chemicals that have varying half-lives, which means how much 50% breaks down in one period of time, then the 50% again and 50% again. That's how half-lives work. But it goes to this question of do you need to know it exists to do the work? And I would say to you you don't, because I'm very cost-conscious. I want people to know that what they change doesn't have to be costly. And I'm telling you, people are already exposed. So here's what you do you swap out your cans to frozen foods. You can reduce those canned BPA chemicals, the epoxy lining.

01:13:12 - Chase (Host) Is this all cans or is this something? When we go grocery shopping, because canned foods are very economical. They have a long shelf life, people are putting them in their bunkers for prepping, so to speak. So having food is good, saving money is good. Is there something that we can be looking for in canned foods that might be a better option?

01:13:29 - Aly (Host) Pretty much nothing.

01:13:30 Nothing really yeah Well, so there's very few companies and I mean few, maybe like 0.001% that will actually havea coating that may be made out of vegetable oil, like made out of oleo. Resin is one of the substitutes. Again, we're not really allowed to know and it's very hard, proprietary wise, to understand some of these concoctions, but only like 0.01 percent of all cans is not made with bpa. And we're talking organic foods. I mean people are thinking, oh, it's an organic product. You know usda organic, which is the only thing in this country that has teeth in the us food market organic food just coated with microplastics.

01:14:03 - Chase (Host) Well, yeah, I mean essentially bpa?

01:14:06 - Aly (Host) um, I don't know about microplastics, I haven't seen those particular studies, but it wouldn't surprise me. But the idea is that you can by changing that behavior. And, by the way, when I talk to different groups of people, different socioeconomic backgrounds, it used to be in the old days that BPA was. I mean that canned food was the only way to sustain poor communities. It turns out that's not the case, that people can buy frozen USDA organic foods and they get the benefit of not only having USDA foods which don't have, are not allowed to have genetically modified ingredients. They're not allowed to have synthetic preservatives, colors, taste chemicals of any kind, coloring preservatives, colors, taste chemicals of any kind, coloring and artificial and manufactured pesticides and manufacturing chemicals like farm residues and that kind of thing, fertilizers. But the added value of frozen organics, besides being accessible, I mean in every big box store in the United States has their own organic frozen lines of vegetables and fruit. It's really true.

01:15:12 - Chase (Host) I think isn't Walmart now the number one distributor of organic foods across America?

01:15:16 - Aly (Host) Could very well be. I remember Target years back never had a competing frozen organic people until all of a sudden I started seeing they have their own line. So it's very lucrative, but the beauty of frozen USDA frozen organic foods is that those products that produce is actually frozen. The second, it's picked for freshness but also it maintains all of that nutrient value.

01:15:41 So what's beautiful in a food system that we have, again, very little control over? You know, I always talk about the serenity prayer and everything I do right, what we have control over and what we don't and having the wisdom to know the difference.

01:15:54 But in the food system, which is getting a lot of attention, as it should, we have very little control of how our food is grown and picked and manufactured and shipped and how long it stays in kind of sub temperature refrigerators before it goes for four weeks to another store, because that's how they maintain flow in case there's a blight on some you know crops or what have you, you know, to go to a big box store. The idea is that it maintains all its nutrient value when it's flash frozen. Fresh doesn't fresh can often, I mean, unless you have the beauty of having, like you know, a farmer's market, like we have in new jersey um if you're skipping all the middleman stuff and just growing it yourself.

01:16:34 - Chase (Host) Yeah, if you get it.

01:16:34 - Aly (Host) That morning and, hopefully, if it's organic. You know kudos to the USDA. You know certified organic farmers, which is a big hustle, or you can know your farmer and understand what they use, even if they're not organic. You know I support, you know, local businesses and farming, but the idea is that's picked that morning in the nutrient value which is so critical to detoxifying against chemicals. So that's another component of this. So the higher the nutritional value of our food, the more detoxification value it holds against everything else. Yeah, it blocks some of the mechanisms of epigenetic changes that these chemicals do, some of the mechanisms of epigenetic changes that these chemicals do. So you have this. You know I'm going all over the place here.

01:17:15 But frozen organics great, great investment, easy to use, very accessible and definitely in line with the cost in certain socioeconomic environments, of course. But buying in season buying, you know there's so many hacks that you know I like to lay out and give people ideas, because not everyone is in an area where there's a great supermarket, right, you know, not everyone is living a life right now where they're exposed to organic or fresh foods because they could be traveling abroad, or, you know, traveling at all, or, you know, living in a dorm room or you know an apartment. There's so much fluidity to life, yeah, and I think that has to be something that people think about like, okay, you know an apartment, there's so much fluidity to life, and I think that has to be something that people think about like, okay, you know what, right now I can't do much, but I'm going to plan to keep doing what I can and that is what I think everyone can do. But, yeah, I think that there's so many easy hacks. But part of detoxify the book that I wrote and part of the messaging of how to succeed at reducing illness or managing flares or controlling our chronic health conditions, is not only removing a lot of what exposes our immune system to be triggered and these immune disrupting chemicals.

01:18:26 But we have so much science on the foods and the components of food that actually offset what we call DNA methylation, which is the changes to our genes. Our epigenome is essentially what we're manipulating by lifestyle, by choice, by products, and I think if we understand the science on it, people will get it and they'll start harnessing some of these very simple swaps. It's, it's not complicated, trust me. I didn't know anything and it's taken me 15 years and hopefully it'll make people won't have to wait 15 years for this information.

01:19:01 - Chase (Host) What about our water? Are there chemicals or the things in our water and I'll say just, you know, typical public drinking water, tap water that we should be worried about in terms of toxification against the body, and how do we realistically detoxify our water?

01:19:17 - Aly (Host) So my favorite topic hopefully maybe another book in the future, I will say because it's just such a dense topic, I'll tell you the punchline is easy. The punchline is easy, it's the story I want to give, but for the purposes of what I put in this book Detoxify and what I write about a lot and lecture on is that, in very simple terms, our US water although thank God it's not a third world country which we know, where the water quality is far worse, but the US drinking water quality is so poor. It is so poor because it's basically using outdated regulation. Same with the food industry, you could argue, same with the cosmetic and, you know, cleaning product industry, which has no regulation, but the US has regulation.

01:20:04 We have something very simple. We have the Safe Drinking Water Act, which was put into place in 1974 with some amendments early on, and the Safe Drinking Water Act really covers the 160,000 plus or minus wastewater treatment plants in the United States that service approximately 85% of the US population. Okay, the other 15% of the US population gets its water from wells, whether it's a personal well in their home, you know area, or it's the local town well, or it's the you know municipality well. I grew up on well water.

01:20:42 Yeah, I mean, and I grew up on well water right On a farm in Pennsylvania, you know. So that explains a lot, right?

01:20:48 But um, you know the idea is you can't go backwards. I don't believe in regret, I really don't. I believe in moving forward, ever forward, and so the water issue is really interesting, because, well, water has its own issues. One of you know, simple issues are that it doesn't require testing unless you move and sell your home. That testing is so limited that it doesn't even handle more than a dozen chemicals that are required perhaps.

01:21:15 It's very limited. Remember 95,000 chemicals we now have that get into potentially all of our water systems from air, from lakes, from streams, from sewage, from aquifers. All of those things feed into our wastewater treatment plants and our wells. If you think about soil, right, because rain brings down the chemicals in the air and it gets in soil and soil is very absorptive Think of a tissue paper right, and so wells have their own issues of collecting chemicals, potentially 30, 40 miles away there's a great book which I love talking about, called Tom's River, by Dan Fagan, who was a professor at NYU I think he's still practicing, but anyway, I mean a professor but he won the Pulitzer Prize for this story and his book is terrific.

01:22:02 But the idea was that he described the wells that were contaminated in Tom's River, new Jersey, when the Seba Geigy Corporation moved from Ohio River Valley where they were contaminating the water and they were kind of sort of kicked out and they moved to New Jersey because we welcome everybody and, um, in New Jersey they really had these unlined pits with very toxic chemicals and it ended up making its way into all of the you know, the wells of the whole that that coastline area, and then there was a lot of sickness, a lot of kids getting cancers, and I don't want to say the punchline, but obviously there was a discovery of this issue and the the idea is that what I took away from that book, which was so important to me at the time, when I was like, what is going on here? Soil is super absorbent and that if you have a well, what is going on here? Soil is super absorbent and that if you have a well, even you know, maybe you're at a top of a mountain. That would be fantastic, but most people are not. And so soil, being absorbent, collects water from rain, from floods, from a lot of the things that we're dealing with now in terms of natural disasters. So we have to really be thinking about wells. Now, that's 15%.

01:23:09 Let's go to the 85% of Americans that are serviced by wastewater treatment plants. Back to the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974, it only covers 91 chemicals. 91 chemicals, one of the only changes that we've had in I don't know. Let's do the math 50 years, okay, I was born then. Okay, we've had only very few changes to the water system, including recently with the PFAS chemicals. There was some regulation changes that was still going to only manage six of the 15,000 perfluoroalkyl chemicals.

01:23:49 - Chase (Host) Why is this not being updated?

01:23:51 - Aly (Host) Because the infrastructure the monster has gotten. I mean we have 160,000 wastewater treatment plants If you even slightly lower the maximum contaminant level for water to a. You know, you know lead has dropped over the decades. We can remember lead and even that's still not at zero. They want it. It's a goal to change lead levels in wastewater treatment plants, but it's still at something like 15 parts per billion. I write about it. I can't remember the exact number, but the idea is that it's not feasible to make 160,000 wastewater treatment plants have new infrastructure to accommodate all of the thousands of chemicals that have come out since 1974.

01:24:36 - Chase (Host) Can they ever catch up?

01:24:38 - Aly (Host) Can they ever catch up? No, they can never catch up because we don't have the regulatory bodies set up to do so and look at these chemicals. So you know, what's also interesting is that at these wastewater treatment plants and, by the way, these people do really good work I've been to these sites in New Jersey. I've gotten three-hour tours. They're monitoring for terrorism right, we think about that kind of issue and they're covering the 91 chemicals and these folks do a great job. Screens are everywhere and blah, blah, blah.

01:25:06 But the problem is is that wastewater has to be treated. That's why it's a wastewater treatment plant. The sediment has to be removed, the chemicals have to be, the water has to be cleaned. So they add in detergents, chlorinated detergents, other types of detergents that, when they mix with debris, can create other chemicals, volatile or organic chemicals. The detergent chemicals don't get removed after they're added. The chlorine is added chemicals don't get removed after they're added. The chlorine is added, doesn't get removed, and it ships right out of the wastewater treatment plant through PVC piping. 20, 30 miles possibly lead in your home or infrastructure, to your home and to your glass or to the restaurant that you're eating at. People don't think like that, right, I never did.

01:25:50 - Chase (Host) So should we just stop drinking tap water?

01:25:54 - Aly (Host) Well, I think, you know, instead of freaking out, which is what I kind of did and I was on the ledge for a lot of years, and now I'm off the ledge because I think there's ways to think about this you want to do 80%, good, 20%, you know, I think to myself like 80, 20, what's a good ratio? You know we can aim for 50, 50, if you're not even close, or even 10, who knows? But whatever point is is that you move along. You know this journey of making changes, and one of the things I say about water is the best way to manage. Whether it's well water or tap water, who cares?

01:26:25 You're going to fix it when it hits your home, when you're going to use it to drink, use it to cook, use it to maybe take a bath, wash your kids, wash your pets, whatever. I don't particularly like people spending a fortune, and it is still kind of a fortune. You know what depends on your means. But five, four $6,000 to do a whole house filter to me is not cost-effective yet, and I've watched these, you know all of this stuff shift in terms of pricing. Um, I think it's much more effective to do, you know a shower head that has a carbon block, that you can.

01:26:59 you know filter head that you can get at a big box store for 20 bucks really and I write about it.

01:27:02 - Chase (Host) Yeah, I got one. Uh, I think it's called like jewel or Jew I'm butchering the term but I got it at Erewhon and it's great.

01:27:09 - Aly (Host) It's like a picture filter, you know like it's kind of like the drop-ins we used to. You know, and I used to have one of those picture filters and they were pretty expensive. You bought a lot of those drop-ins and you changed them every three to six months and it kind of added up.

01:27:20 But those same carbon block, maybe activated charcoal carbon activated carbon um, that can be put in a showerhead, and then you can get replacements and it's not expensive and you know they can be found. I buy them for my, um, my showerheads. And then what you really want to do is invest in something that's come down and priced dramatically, which is a reverse. As most you. Any filtration is good. I will never argue against anyone making an attempt to get some filtration, whether it's a refrigerator, carbon block, which is typically what they are, faucet, remember. Anything that moves water through quickly is going to filter out less. Anything that moves through slowly, which is reverse osmosis, going through three canisters more or less into a tank, so you make water, kind of while you sleep.

01:28:08 And, yeah, there's a waste issue which people always ask me. And then there's also oh, is the water dead? It has no minerals? Okay, we'll get there. But I same questions every time, which is okay, um, but the idea is that reverse osmosis is the material that is so tightly woven that it has such small pore size. Nothing gets through by size. Okay, doesn't know a mineral, it doesn't know lead. It doesn't know a mineral. It doesn't know lead. It doesn't know PFAS, it doesn't know good from bad. It's simply based on compound size. Okay, fun fact, my dad is a kidney specialist. He's 85, still practicing. He basically brought dialysis which was when we didn't even have kidneys for people to commercial market in the 70s?

01:28:52 Yeah, I mean people don't remember when we didn't have dialysis or kidneys, but fake kidneys, so to speak. Needless to say, water for dialysis patients in the 70s was mandated by the federal government to be reversed osmosis water.

01:29:08 - Chase (Host) So why wouldn't we all want that Precisely? Why shouldn't that be? The all want that Precisely. Why shouldn't that be the mandate for everybody?

01:29:12 - Aly (Host) Precisely, but it was designed interestingly enough to be small enough pores to catch viruses and bacteria because simply that could kill a dialysis patient who's immune compromised. They had no concept of phthalates, or I just spit, I'm so excited. They had no concept of phthalates or BPA or compounds that were bigger, because there's nothing bigger. I'm so excited they had no concept of phthalates or BPA or compounds that were bigger, because there's nothing bigger. I mean, they're all bigger than a single-celled organism like virus and bacteria.

01:29:37 So you know, if you get that you're good, but the idea that it's still. My dad still gets checks from the federal government. The water people come every month and he has to do a tour of these tanks that are reverse osmosis water for these dialysis patients, to you know, move through their blood and clean their blood. And you know now that these RO filters are somewhere like 275 bucks for mine and they used to be thousands, and I've watched the market and now I'm like shouting on mountaintops because isn't that a better system where you pay up front 150 for a plumber to do it in one hour, by the way, one hour they take longer. You know you're gotten taken. Switch out, split the waterline, put an RO filter in under your sink.

01:30:21 I prefer the ones under more surface area, less change outs. There's a lot to it, but I write about it. The idea is that if you could do the upfront 400 or so dollars and the cartridges are maybe 30, $40 every six months or even a year if you're lazy the idea is that it's so much cheaper than buying bottled water then doing the pitcher drop-ins. There's just it's so much better in terms of convenience. So I'm a big fan of those filters for well water or tap water. I bring it with me. I take it with me to restaurants. It's not weird anymore for my kids.

01:30:58 - Chase (Host) Especially not in LA, yeah.

01:31:00 - Aly (Host) Well, you should see New Jersey Like there's none of this going on. You guys are. It's interesting being in LA, but I mean I will say that you know culture shift and habits are not easy to start, but once they get there they stick. I will never see my kids. You know microwaving, microwave food, I mean in plastic. You know only lots of junk, but they don't do it in plastic. It's just not even part of their culture anymore.

01:31:26 - Chase (Host) How bad is that? How bad is it really to microwave plastic?

01:31:29 - Aly (Host) I mean, how bad is on? You know, we're on a scale here, right On a scale of one to 10, if I want to.

01:31:36 - Chase (Host) I got some takeout or some leftovers I want to put in the microwave. How bad one being not so bad, 10 being the worst to reheat it in the microwave.

01:31:44 - Aly (Host) Bad is in the eyes of, in some ways, the beholder. The bad is that there's a simple switch, so holder. The bad is that there's a simple switch, so it's bad for being lazy. It's not bad that I can justify has one more chemical or less chemical? Or I can measure it or I can't measure it. It's too in flux. What I would say is, if there's a simple swap, it's bad to not make that little extra effort to move that food into glass and stainless steel and heat it properly, you know, without having the plastics get into the food.

01:32:10 - Chase (Host) Yeah, but we? But can we say that by microwaving plastic we are increasing the amount of plastic microplastics getting into our food?

01:32:20 - Aly (Host) Yeah, it's likely. I don't know about microplastics in terms of size, but certainly you know the compounds that make up plastic. Okay, yeah, I mean, I look, I I didn't do it for years and I was taking care of 10 other things that I thought I was being. So it's a journey, you know. You start to layer in without going crazy nuts. Um, the idea is to empower yourself with each move and not to be overwhelmed. It really is.

01:32:41 - Chase (Host) The last area I want to get into and this has just been a very eyeopening conversation, thank you so much for all your work is um. You know, the body we kind of touched on it earlier, particularly the liver. The body has a lot of great processes and systems to detoxify us naturally. I feel like naturally is kind of redundant, but when we talk about the main detoxification pathways in the body, what are they, how do they work and how can we really optimize our body's natural detoxification systems so that we maybe don't have to worry as much?

01:33:17 - Aly (Host) Yeah, um, and I hope people aren't worrying. I mean, there's such a balance um to motivate Um, so I'll. I'll begin to answer that question with a very, you know, a little background. I studied anthropology in college when I was still going to bars and drinking, having a great time, and I was studying anthropology because I kind of was fascinated by how we got here in simple terms, like what you know, and I think it's played into everything that I do and write about, because I think it's too simple to think we just plopped here with nice shoes and great cologne, Right. So when I think about what your question is, I say well, why aren't we harnessing the physiology that we've evolved to have, even though it may have problems, given our modern day onslaught of chemicals that our body never has seen in a hundred years, literally a hundred years, even though we've walked the planet for 4.5 million? The idea is that we want to utilize what we have capable. Is it always effective? Maybe not always, but certainly we could at least start there.

01:34:23 So, when it comes to detoxification, in terms of the ways that I list, you have to first clean out your body with clean water, because otherwise you're just filling your body up with everything you're trying to get rid of. Okay, so you have to stop the input. Okay, and I'll. I'll give you an example. I go to the gym. I usually don't because I like to run outside, but when I go to the gym I always find it interesting that people are sweating and working and they're doing all this great activity, and then they get into the showers and on the walls are three bottles, you know body wash, shampoo, conditioner and they're loaded with chemicals. In fact, you don't even get to see what the product is, because it's stuck to the wall. You can't get them off.

01:35:08 - Chase (Host) It's just like blue orange cream. They have a great name.

01:35:13 - Aly (Host) I can't I don't even want to promote anything, but they have great names to think that you're cleaner and sweeter and everything is better because you're now showered after your great workout. Well, long story short, you literally just sweat it out Physiologically, anthropologic, evolutionarily a lot of toxins, because we have studies on that. I talk about them in the book and in previous books.

01:35:36 - Chase (Host) That's one of the points of sweat.

01:35:37 - Aly (Host) Right, sweat was one of the best mechanisms we've ever evolved to have to get rid of components in our body. Waste tissue, I mean waste debris from cellular activity. I mean it doesn't even have to be toxins per se, it can be just our waste material. Our body makes, you know, a whole bunch of waste products. Right, we pee and we poop, but we also have stuff that comes out in our skin, and so these people, and myself included, gets in the shower and all of a sudden you're inhaling the phthalates, you're breathing it in, you're lathering on this stuff and you're walking out as dirty as you walked into the gym.

01:36:09 Oh, come on, Don't tell me that, yeah, I mean you might feel good and I feel good, but I'm just saying it to me. It's like you know, guess how easy it is to bring your own stuff.

01:36:18 - Chase (Host) Or would we be better off to just rinse off? Just water, nothing.

01:36:22 - Aly (Host) Yeah, Rinse off water. How about not even showering? I mean, if you can get away with the stink? You know, anthropologically, we have a whole microbiome on our skin. You know what is so terrible about not showering as much, as long as you don't stink?

01:36:36 - Chase (Host) So if I go work out or if I'm physically active and I sweat, yeah, towel off.

01:36:40 - Aly (Host) I mean, you know.

01:36:42 - Chase (Host) So get it off the body, yeah, you don't want to just necessarily walk around sweaty.

01:36:45 - Aly (Host) But, I'm just saying. The point is is that I think we overclean. It's like our homes. It's a metaphor we are overcleaning a system that was beautifully designed to help us detoxify.

01:36:56 - Chase (Host) So then do we? Is it really that we just have a complete wrong idea? Or rather let me say that again Do we have a misconception about clean and unclean?

01:37:08 - Aly (Host) I think so. I mean, I think it's a great question. I think there's clean to an extent right.

01:37:15 We want to have sterile procedures for medical surgeries and we want to have, you know, public water that's not going to give us cholera, you know, and you know we want certain cleanliness. But maybe the question is, do we go too far? And how do we rein that back in? And that is a lot of what I talk about is I'm trying to rein back in some of the perceptions that we bought into just from marketing and life and growing up and comparing ourselves to others. I mean, it's all natural, right, we're human, yeah, but I think what we may want to try to do on our own journey and our own perspective is kind of tone back what where we are, and thinking about what goes in, on and around our bodies and trying to limit. And I again, I always talk about feminine care products. You know there's a world of cleanliness around feminine care products and the female anatomy. That is so crazy because we're built to actually have a self-cleaning mechanism in the vaginal canal.

01:38:12 You all have a completely, totally other, separate like uh, I want to put you to the term yeah, and I give this example if you have people listening is that, like when women take antibiotics for any reason, you know, maybe they have a cold flu, something they have to take antibiotics for, they'll often get a yeast infection. Well, why is a yeast infection happening so often, so associated with many antibiotic courses? Well, it's because you're killing off the bacteria in the body pretty generally, which includes the vaginal canal. And what do you think is balanced in the vaginal canal? The microflora, which includes yeast. Naturally we do have yeast in there, that's part of our being. So that's usually an overgrowth of, you know, microbes that are yeast as opposed to you know, and so then eventually it goes away.

01:39:01 Or you treat the yeast infection to recant, you know, create balance. The immune system's the same way, the hormone system's the same way, our microbiome's the same way. We have to kind of go more towards balance than kind of like getting rid of this and getting rid of that and knocking out this, because that's really where a lot of human disease, certainly immune system disorders, have been traced back to is sort of this imbalance. And while we're living at such a heightened level, Well, ellie, this has been incredible.

01:39:29 - Chase (Host) I just want to say thank you again for coming on the show and for everyone listening, as this is coming out or very soon your new book will be out Detoxify the everyday toxins harming your immune system and how to defend against them. I'll have all of your book and your information down in the show notes in the video box for everybody. But is there anything left to say that we haven't? Or is there any other fun fact, tidbit, aha moment that you want to just leave the audience with?

01:40:10 - Aly (Host) getting sick and how I got into the business of environmental health and I talk about sort of my journey with cheese whiz and Oreos and you know I want people to realize that it is a journey, it's not overnight, but people can seriously make a dent in in their future health and also future generations, cause we also know these exposures. As a new dad, you know in utero exposures matter and I talk about a lot about that.

01:40:30 - Chase (Host) We can even go back to the third component that you mentioned earlier, that we right now can't change for ourselves the genetic component, but we can begin to change for future generations.

01:40:38 - Aly (Host) Absolutely. And so, therefore, getting in early with people's mindsets, in teenage years, in high school, middle school, you know, building a culture around removal of things we just don't need. And listen, some people are going to say, like my hair, like you know, I'm not ready yet, right, but maybe I do 90% better with everything else I'm trying to do and I test my levels and I do do that. So the idea is that you, just you really don't want to be scared into doing nothing. It's about being proactive, it's about taking one step at a time. It's about allowing yourself and I talk about this, the four A's in my book, about the four A's of environmental health, as a kind of a you know what I teach my other physicians actually how to take this very difficult topic and make sense of it and use it to your advantage.

01:41:32 - Chase (Host) And practical.

01:41:33 - Aly (Host) And practical and cost-effective. So there's nothing really that I'm missing there. I mean, it's just a matter of just being aware and then starting on the journey, but allowing life to happen as well. You know, you, just you know weddings you know, parties.

01:41:49 You know travel, which is harder to control, which I talk about in the book in terms of ideas for managing travel when you're not able to control your food and your, your, all your. You know your tools and your cooking products and all that stuff. But the idea is it's a journey and I want people never fear diminished or overwhelmed. It's about jumping in at your own pace, um, and we know that there's definitely benefit at the end of that. So, um, so, keep people, you know, keep people motivated. That's what I like people to hear.

01:42:19 - Chase (Host) Well, this is fantastic. Thank you so much.

01:42:21 - Aly (Host) Thank you for having me Chase.

01:42:23 - Chase (Host) For more information on everything you just heard, make sure to check this episode show notes or head to everforwardradio.com