How To Optimize Your Body’s Detoxification System

once foods are sprayed you know the natural compounds they make these phytochemicals that work as antioxidants and are really important for our detox pathways are not nearly as prevalent because they they don't make as many of those phytonutrients when plants are sprayed with these chemicals [Music] welcome to doctors pharmacy i'm dr mark hyman and that's pharmacy then ffa or macy a place for conversations that matter and if you suspect you may be experiencing illness from the load of toxins in our environment and you're not getting answers you better listen to this podcast because it's one none other than my nutrition director here at the ultra wellness center maggie ward who's worked for a lot 12 years now almost no one's talking yeah something must be going right there she's an incredible nutritionist more than that she's uh got a master's degree in nutrition from best university she's focusing on whole foods nutrition has been really the anchor for our nutrition program here at the ultra wellness center in linux massachusetts for well over a decade she's worked before in new york she's worked in brooklyn and manhattan and doing hiv work and working with children's and adults and cooking classes she's also counseled and worked with so many families using this functional medicine approach to really get to the issues around buddhist medicine uh and here at del chu wellness center i think we were the first place in the country maybe in the world where you could not get a doctor's appointment without also getting a nutrition appointment because if food is medicine how can i practice medicine without a nutritionist this is basically my view and today we're going to be talking about detoxification and toxicity and the burden of toxins in our world now it doesn't relate to a specific condition because toxins can cause a whole range of problems right and and we're going to get into the details of it uh but first i want to welcome you to the doctor's pharmacy meg oh thank you i'm happy to be here and i'm excited about this topic it's a really important one and one we see you know really impacting so many of the people we see here it's really true i mean the two things that are just kind of blank spots in medical education are food is medicine right and the whole issue of toxins in health yeah so when i was in medical school we learned about acute toxicity you you know took a drug overdose if you got an acute exposure to a pesticide or heavy metals but we learned nothing about chronic low-grade toxicity from the 80 000 plus chemicals that have been brought into our environment since the turn of the last century including pesticides plastics phthalates bpa flame retardants you know herbicides glyphosate i mean you name it we are just inundated with chemicals and i remember when i was was researching a book many many years ago i found this study that looked at fat biopsies so people got liposuction yeah or they've got liposuction or they had a breast reconstruction or a mastectomy they would send the tissue to go be analyzed and they found that every single person in the study was a toxic waste dump yeah and they had things like ddt which isn't even out there anymore in the marketplace and pcbs and heavy metals and dioxin and all these pcbs i mean just nasty stuff that is stored in all of us and there was a study on babies and this was really shocking part of the environmental working group where i'm on the board and they found that in the newborn studies essentially they took umbilical cord blood before the baby even took the first breath and in the baby's umbilical cord blood there were 287 known toxins 211 of which i think are neurotoxic including mercury lead arsenic pesticides flame retardants pcbs ddt dioxin you name it we're in the baby's blood before they took their first breath and in medicine we never really learned how do you diagnose someone who's got a toxic overload how do you know if it's contributing to their health issues there's not a way to test for it right there are ways we just never learned it in medicine right you can do effects right there are ways yeah and we do that at the ultra wellness center we look for toxins we look for your own body's detoxification system so we're going to get into all that today uh and i i really a lot of it is focused on food which is why we're having you on here which is food is a big regulator of our detox system absolutely it's also a way we can overload our detox system if we don't eat smart and in fact the environmental toxic issue is how i got into functional medicine i know uh so years ago gosh uh probably 20 say 26 years ago i lived in china and i got mercury poisoning from living in china plus i had mercury fillings plus i ate a lot of fish so the combination of the pollution and all the rest of it caused me to have mercury toxicity and i just had no idea right and i went to doctor after doctor i had neurologic symptoms i had muscle damage i had autoimmune issues i had chronic diarrhea an irritable bowel i had severe brain fog and fatigue and memory issues and i couldn't sleep i mean it was just a mess yeah and i went to after doctor to dr harvard colombia here there everywhere and got no answers other than take this pill take this drug suppress the symptoms fast yeah you're depressed whatever you probably are because depression was caused by the mercury right and i finally uh saw this naturopath and he's like you should check for heavy metals and i did and i was shocked and i had you know i've probably done 10 20 000 mercury tests over my lifetime with patients probably more and mine was in the top you know 10 that i've seen wow and i and i learned how to really detoxify so we're going to get into it today but first of all um tell us about how prevalent these toxins are what are some of the things that we should be thinking about um and how and how and how do these toxins uh impact our health what are the kinds of conditions that are common that we see related to toxicity that we often mistake as something else right i mean and like we were saying before it can be anything right you can get toxicity and have any type of condition i think what is probably most common are neurological you know and that is a spectrum too where you can see kind of brain fog i think that's a very common you know description of what a lot of folks feel um but it can go all the way up into things like parkinson's yeah which you know with parkinson's conventional medicine we don't know really how to address that so when we're seeing neurological things that's one of the things that a good health history kind of tunes us into of like oh is this something we're probably thinking some toxins are involved here um so that's probably the most common thing but you know autoimmune conditions uh i mean for so many people it's toxicity is the one of the main puzzle pieces that we're thinking about for sure right i mean it's food allergies it's toxins it's you know infections those are kind of the big ones yeah um and metals always have been a big one you know i know you've been checking for mercury and lead forever but now we have more testing looking at different types of pesticides different types of solvents plastics and like you said they're out there and unfortunately more and more prevalent um and i think too you know the toxicity you're talking about that kind of is more recognizing conventional medicine we kind of look more at body burden right like like and maybe not very high in someone's blood sample when you check but it's being stored in fat tissue and organs and things like that yeah um so now we have more testing look at different metabolites in the urine and things like that that would indicate that there's there's toxins in there and it's true you know it affects a lot of different things and you know my friend uh joe pizorna wrote a book i think it's called the toxin solution maybe yeah maybe that's what you should know this a great book but he really went into the scientific literature this is not some oh you're toxic and you need to detox and it's some some fad little diet thing no no this is really deep science about the role of environmental toxins in human health across everything from obesity and diabetes which is a huge cause of that uh we call these obesogens right to autoimmune disease you mentioned at low levels these can be immunotoxins and they're they're often called autogenes right as opposed to obesogens right they cause autoimmune disease and they cause neurologic issues whether it's autism or alzheimer's or parkinson's or various kinds of neuropathy um it can cause gut issues because it affects your ability to digest your food right it can cause hormonal issues cancer sex hormone issues well well recognized to be interfering with a lot of our our um cancers and being contributed to cancers right and unlike you said infertility so across a spectrum of diseases whatever you show up in the doctor's office with the likelihood that toxins are on the checklist to think about is pretty high right right and we do that right in our in our packet that we have everyone wellness center wellness center yeah very detailed toxin history right right like what you know are you getting exposed do you an exterminator come in do you you know get your clothes dry cleaned how often are you eating fish what type of fish are you eating and just from a good health history right that really can key you in i'm like okay this is somewhere we have to look at um so you know just kind of being a detective right and having the time to spend with someone i mean just even here you know the doctors spend so much time with the patients going through everything but when i meet with them for their food you know they're usually the first time they're telling what they're eating and i'm like you know so you're eating tuna how often yeah right right twice a week oh my gosh there's so many strawberries this guy was really poor once and he all he did was he tuned every day and after like many years he was just mercury toxic and was chronically ill yeah you know just remind me this patient i had she she lived in the bronx when she was a little kid and her family was very poor and she had cockroaches crawling all over her when she was a kid and mice and this and that and she just was so obsessed with getting rid of all that so she moved to the suburbs in long island and she decided to have an exterminator come and spray in and out of her house every single month and she had a huge barrel of atrazine which is now banned which is a toxin and in her garage or well yeah she had so much nasty stuff in there and she had really bad parkinson's at 50 years old and i've seen this over and over when i hear people's stories farming is a dangerous profession not because of farm machinery because of the exposure right that's right yeah farmers have the highest rates of parkinson's disease right um so it can make you overweight it can make you have diabetes it can cause heart disease it can cause cancer it can cause autoimmunity it can cause neurologic issues it can cause cognitive impairment it can cause depression chronic fatigue i mean you name it i have chronic fatigue syndrome right among other things and and so that was really sort of a wake-up call for me to really understand and study our body's detoxification system but you know traditional medicine you know what what's really done about this right and well that's the tricky thing too you're talking about like you know affecting the gut and you know gaining weight i mean your ability to detoxify starts going down so you have this toxic burden and it's it's increasing and then people's guts are leaky and they're not eliminating as they should and that toxic burden becomes that much more of an issue so it's you know really a lot of it is obviously avoiding exposure where you can which is tricky in this day and age but also really ramping up the body's ability to detoxify and again nutrition is a huge part of that yeah and it's so interesting in traditional medicine because it's just off the radar you know like it's food i mean food doctors understand the food you know if you eat too much sugar you get diabetes and you know if you don't have fiber you get constipated i mean there's some understanding there's like zero when it comes to the role of environmental toxins is a focus for diagnosis or treatment and in functional medicine we we really focus on this extensively and we do it through like you said a very detailed history and through various kinds of testing so we test a lot of things um right both the load of toxins uh we test our ability to detoxify and we also look at genetics so can you talk about some of the diagnostics that we use yeah that are different here at the ultra wellness center in functional medicine right genetics is a really important one i mean it's never going to really give us a definitive diagnosis but when people have and and we kind of get into it a little bit more with some of the food certain genetic variations that compromise our ability to make something like glutathione right glutathione is our most like potent detox molecule and there's some of us we make it but some of us don't make it very well given our genetics so there's that's something called gstm1 there's these certain snips in there several in the detox category several in the oxidative stress category several methylation and they're all connected to detoxification basically you're talking about are like slight variations in our genes right that affect our ability to detox right and i think those we see those people right we're seeing that the folks that are at a higher risk because of their genetics and not being able to detoxify yeah so even if we don't know their toxic load if i see some of these genetic variations i i'm proactive and i put you know some more food or supplements that are more directed towards their genetics which is really the way you know functional medicine i think is is you know going um so the genetic testing is is really important we do a lot of different heavy metal testing um urine toxic metal testing which is the provoked urine test yeah that's what really looks at the body burden so there's a a chelating agent which basically binds on to heavy metals and will pull them out of the body because if you just try to look at metals in the urine unless you just had a really high exposure right you're not going to see it in the urine so this kind of pulls out what might be stored for someone so it's looking at mercury and lead and arsenic and thallium um mercury and led are pie the ones we see no stopping checking your blood is that okay or you can check your blood uh well against this case study i mean we do come we have folks that come back high in mercury and lead or arsenic um so you can check blood levels but you know blood's turning over what every three months or so so if you have ongoing exposure or you happen to catch it right when someone was getting a more acute exposure you'll see it but many times it's not there right right so you have a normal blood test right but actually be storing all these metals in your tissues your organs your liver brain your kidneys and you know the doctors will say well we checked your blood it was fine uh and you know sort of like the joke where the guy uh you know has dropped his keys on the street he's looking under this lamppost and his friend comes by and says what are you doing is i'm looking for my keys he said where'd you drop them while i dropped him down the street he says why are you looking over here as well because the light's better well that is not the right look in the shadows right so so what happens in traditional medicine we look at the blood test because that's what we do but it's actually not necessarily the most accurate view of what's going on right including with nutritional intestine right you're not going to see a lot in the blood so the functional testing we do with a lot of nutrients is very different um so you know that's a good example heavy metals we do now uh what's known as a tri-mercury test which i think is excellent it's looking at um recent exposure but it's but so they're doing a blood test but they break it down between methyl mercury and inorganic mercury so methyl mercury is typically the form that we're getting exposed to from environmental stuff like fish and food and you know if there's uh coal burning areas um then in organic mercury if your amalgams your silver fillings are maybe still off gassing that's you're going to see the inorganic mercury be high um so what you're saying basically is that if you have what calls silver fillings which are really mercury fillings they're not silver they're over 50 mercury over the course of your life you're chewing you're chewing gum you're grinding your teeth maybe and the off gas and we know this is true and we can measure the mercury from your fillings and when you see someone who has no fillings they don't have any of this inorganic mercury and people have a mouthful it's high and they get them out and then organic mercury goes away they get better off yeah absolutely so so that's been really this test has been really helpful for our practice over the last few years of you know trying to determine how much mercury that person is now getting exposed from their amalgams and then they look at how well you're excreting it so what are the levels in the urine and the hair um might correct me but i think inorganic is usually coming out to the urine a methyl mercury comes out to the hair so if you have some current exposure and you're also not seeing and get excreted you can assume that person probably has a fairly high body burden and we do this constantly a lot of it is just more nutritional supplements and food really support that person to detoxify obviously get them to stop eating fish or you know if they need to get their amalgams out get those out but the mercury goes down and their clearance goes up so that's been a really great test for mercury because it's very good and you know the whole thing about the feelings i just want to sort of jump back on that because you go to your dentist oh it's perfectly safe it's fine there's no studies on it and and they don't even consider it an issue but the interesting fact is that most dentists don't use the mercury fillings anymore they use the white fillings even though they say it's fine uh the other thing i'm going to say to the patients that i have is is well ask your doctor why is it okay to put the mercury in your mouth but when they remove the filling they can't throw in the garbage it has to be regulated by the fda's toxic waste so it's okay in your mouth but it's not okay to throw in the garbage right and it was really interesting is the fda just came out with a statement uh september 24th which basically said that certain groups should not have fillings and that there are higher risk from the off-gassing and the vapor for mercury fillings including pregnant women women who are wanting to get pregnant nursing women and and their infants children before six years old people who have neurologic issues like we talked about mercury related ones like parkinson's alzheimer's or ms people with kidney issues and people who have allergy to mercury that is fascinating to me uh because this is a review to 20 years of data and finally the fda finally and the fta is not a progressive group right for them to say this you know it's got to be it's pretty bad right now it's freaky for people because they're going wild i have to get my fillings out do i run to the dentist just a word of caution you do not want to go get your feelings out unless you do it with a dentist who follows specific guidelines that are designed to create a safe removal of the amalgam so you need a special dental dam so you don't swallow them you need high speed suction you need breathing oxygen the dentist should be wearing a mask there's all these precautions that need to be taken and they're usually done by biological dentists and there's a website called iaomt.org which is a dentist uh toxicology group that's trained to do this properly you can find a dentist in your area but i i think that you know if you have any chronic issues if you have high levels you can do the tri test which we do here at the ultra wellness center but it's really important to make sure that you are doing it properly uh and i would never if you're getting new feelings never get silver filling so this is shocking to me that the fda is finally you know in september shocking and sad right like it's taking this long but yeah because it's so it's so politically heated because all of a sudden you've got millions and millions of people with these silver fillings and you're going to have a run-on dentist and people are going to freak out so it's not a cheap procedure to take these out either right so it's it's not easy for everyone even if you can find a dentist but yeah i mean and to your point about i've had several patients over the years say i've had these in for 40 years and we test them and they're they're still off-gassing so um you know that it's definitely a big a big issue for a lot of folks um so that i probably is the most tested we we do look at you know solvents and pesticides uh the testing's a little bit been a little bit harder for for some of that um some of the labs uh we can't get like we did before you know with covet i think there's just been some issues but we do use great planes quite a bit for looking at different metabolites again and pesticides and solvents one of the labs that we use through cyrex who's typically our food sensitivity testing company they check for antibodies or immune reactions to toxins so you don't necessarily have really high levels of these toxins but small amounts can provoke the immune system for some people autoimmune so yeah so when someone's got on immunity and we're suspecting toxins you know if they're coming back reactive to a lot of different again they're looking at like benzene which is a solvent formaldehyde um different parabens and metals when they're showing reactive we know okay we've got to work with this person to help them detoxify to calm down their immune system because that's definitely something that's driving their inflammation so that's been a really helpful test i mean it's a little harder than for example like if your blood sugar is high and you're eating doughnuts and bagels and having soda every day you kind of know that's why it's happening so if you have a chronic illness you don't 100 know if it's the mercury or the pesticides or the chemicals and so you kind of have to design a way of living that is a low toxin lifestyle and i think you know i would like to go through a few cases of how we sort of would approach these patients but we really focus on one identifying the source right to identifying the patient's own burden of toxins the patient's ability to detoxify and then we focus on how to upregulate the body's own detox systems and and remove the toxins i remember one case of a woman who she had all these issues and she had really really high lead levels and i'm like where is the lead coming from she's a very wealthy lady and i was like where it's coming from and it was just hard to figure out i finally started asking questions well you know what kind of glasses do you have and what kind of plates do you have and yeah because i remember walking once to buy wine glasses in our local kitchen shop and there was the five dollar wine glasses and there were the 50 wine glasses and the rydell crystal wine glasses were 50 and like why are these so expensive for one glass because oh because they're they're made with lead and they help the wine taste better with the lead and i'm like okay then hey yeah so she had all these crystal pictures and crystal glasses that were full of lead she had all these plates that were designer plates from italy and france and had these glaze that was lead glaze right we got rid of all that stuff and she stopped using it and her lead levels came way down yeah yeah so and that's the thing though right it takes asking some questions and doing a little detective work to figure out so once you get an exposure it is you know you know there's a high level where where is it coming from which again you can't always determine but but many times you can and again i think the food quality we'll talk about that with the case studies but you know or obviously you want to avoid foods that are sprayed and everything but like joe bizorno talks a lot about this is that once foods are sprayed you know the natural compounds they make these phytochemicals that work as antioxidants and are really important for our detox pathways are not nearly as prevalent because they they don't make as many of those phytonutrients when plants are sprayed with these chemicals so when you buy organic local you know sustainable food you're minimizing the toxins coming in but you're also now getting more medicine giving a double benefit right so you're getting more of the chemicals that help you heal and detoxify and less of the toxins right and the reason the the wild organic foods have more of these protective chemicals is they have to work harder they got to protect themselves all kinds of like chemicals like pesticides and herbicides that make it easier for them to survive right exactly so the the chemicals they make to protect themselves from environmental insults like pests you know are good for us so we you kind of want them to be you know being exposed to stuff because then the food quality is so much better and and that's i think the the conundrum we're in is that there's more toxins and our food is not protecting us like it used to be able to you know or we got to really search out and that's a whole nother area we can talk about hey everybody it's dr hyman thanks for tuning in to the doctor's pharmacy i hope you're loving this podcast it's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that i know and i love and that i've learned so much from and i want to tell you about something else i'm doing which is called mark's picks it's my weekly newsletter and in it i share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health it's all the cool stuff that i use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health and i'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter i'll only send it to you once a week on fridays nothing else i promise and all you do is go to drhyman.com forward slash picks to sign up that's drhyman.com forward slash picks p-i-c-k-s and sign up for the newsletter and i'll share with you my favorite stuff that i use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer now back to this week's episode so tell us about this patient you had who had uh neuropathy and headaches and brain fog and irritable bowel right i picked him because you know neurological case which again we see a lot of but he's 63 year old man he had the idiopathic small fiber neuropathy um brain fog was a big thing with and headaches just he had a lot of pain in his fingers yep yeah yeah small fiber it's like yeah your fingers your hands your toes um and you know for years like 10 years and he was someone that you know he did a lot of conventional medicine but he had explored a lot already by the time he came to see us and seen a nutritionist had done acupuncture quite a bit so you know that's usually the folks we get right are people that are kind of out of uh their what they can do um so that was going on he also had a lot of ira bowel symptoms that's that was for over 20 years um he had been doing what we call low fodmap diet which is taking out certain sugars and fibers that can cause bloating but it's usually because there's significant dysbiosis and imbalances going on in the gut so he felt better from that but my concern with him being on that diet was he was so limited in what he was eating so he was about 15 pounds under weight definitely looked malnourished so that was my concern with him being on that diet um so when we um did a history with him this is actually a patient we had together he had several uh seven uh different fillings silver fillings in his mouth um he had a lot of fish tuna being the biggest one a big sushi eater several times a week yeah um it it fascinates me that so many people don't know that tuna is not food you should be eating i mean the government tells us pregnant women and and kids shouldn't eat tuna why is it okay for the rest of us right exactly so so that was definitely a bit of a red flag and he did a lot of travel with his work international travel including going to china so you know that was something like me yeah that was on our radar because of all those uh red flags um so we initially supported his digestion because he had a lot of reflux he was taking medication for that so different herbs like decolocized licorice and glutamine which is a protein that helps support the gut and gave them some digestive enzymes because right we always start in the gut even if there's a toxin issue you need to support the gut um and then i did support him further with the fodmap diet because he was feeling better but i really was focusing on getting more protein in him more good fats just getting in good calories with what he felt he could digest so when his results first came back his urine toxic metals which is that provoked urine test his mercury was at 31 anything over three is elevated we can see levels a lot higher than thirty minutes 187. i remember you told me that which is incredible um i've had i've had people 350 400 a few yeah yeah yeah so 31 you think on the spectrum what we see not bad but you don't need much mercury to cause problems right so that was there right the most toxic chemical known to humans other than plutonium yeah right i know and we put it in our mouth so we did the tri-mercury test for him which is looking at the two different forms of mercury methyl and inorganic um both of them super super high above the 95th percentile so you know remember he's a big fish eater so his methyl mercury came back high um and then the inorganic was was most likely from the amalgams um so his blood mercury so you're just asking about that conventional blood work you did have him check that through conventional blood work and he was 24. the upper end of the range i want to say is 15 right yeah but you don't want to be even up at 15. my question is oh when the doctors go oh his mercury level was normal i'm like is there a normal level of mercury for a human being what's the ideal level of mercury for human being it's zero right it should be undetectable and and and you know there is a normal level of blood sugar it should be 70 to 90. that's fine if it's zero you're dead right but mercury should be zero there is no safe level of mercury and we know that even at very low levels these toxins can be problematic so that's a good point right because when we do run it through conventional labs we do often see it around three four five but yeah should there be any in there you know and for that person maybe that that has a bigger impact than someone that can maybe detoxify it a little bit better so that that was quite high in the conventional testing um in his stool obviously we did checked his gut with everything going on he had high yeast levels his um nutrition profile was showing that he was very low in amino acids which again protein is really always where i start and focus with people because it's a very important part of the detox pathways yeah this is very common i mean i see in my patients often who have mercury toxicity very low amino acids and the reason is they're not not because they're not eating protein but because they're using up so many of these amino acids in the second phase of detoxification in the liver that require these amino acids right right so it's it's like again it's multiple things like he's not digesting well right he's on he was actually on a peptide he was on something that lowers acid which is affecting how you digest and absorb these amino acids he wasn't eating enough anyway that was definitely part of it and then um so the absorption his gut was compromised and then his need for these amino acids are higher with all the toxins he has so you know this is why his nutritional status was so important and we did cyrux testing the food sensitivity testing for him he was off a lot of foods again with his diet but he wasn't very strict with gluten and dairy which are the two things i told him to be more strict with and both of those uh came back elevated for him so um at the follow-up you treated him for his yeast you know you're working on his gut which is really important place to start and we did something you did the detox cube and dmsa so the detox cube is something that quicksilver scientific has put together that goes along with the tri-mercury test it has glutathione liposomal glutathione which is a really probably the most important detox molecule out there we do make it but again our ability sometimes is compromised or our need for it is higher um and the liposome glutathione is interesting because it's a tripeptide which means there's three amino acids and if you take it just in its normal you know form you're gonna not you're gonna break it down and you're not gonna absorb it um so what they do is they put it in almost like this fat molecule that's kind of how i think of it so that it keeps it intact so it can get absorbed um so we that the detox cube has the liposomal glutathione it has liposomal vitamin c good way to get a lot of vitamin c into the body which really important to have that antioxidant to support detox um the r lipoic acid is in there which is another important component and then it has a binder so you know as you're you're ramping up these detox pathways of the liver and whatnot that's getting spit out into the digestive tract and you want to bind that up and eliminate it so the binding aspect is there it's a form of silica i believe um yeah and then uh there's and then there's a supplement to go along with it like has b vitamins again these polyphenols and herbs detox all support the liver and the detox pathways um so we have really good success with that um but you also did in combination with the dmsa which is what they use for um chelating it's fda approved for chelating also chelates other metals too yep yep um what we found um so so that's where we started i worked on expanding here so we get rid of the source right we get them off the tuna right which we did from the beginning yeah so you got to remove the source right right and then and then you start to help the body detoxify but also use food as medicine because this is a big thing for right for us to understand is that that food actually has all these phytochemicals these plant compounds that have all these properties including up regulating our body's own innate capacity to detoxify these chemicals right so so tell us about how you use food as medicine in detoxification right and this was a tricky thing with him because again he really felt like he couldn't eat a lot i mean he was eating like rice cakes and things like that that he felt he could digest easily but i'm like there's no nutrition in there so we have to get so i started to get him to eat some more green vegetables and just cook them really well and make vegetable broths and you know just find ways to make uh these compounds uh the food more digestible so we can get these compounds we even did some green powders and things like that to to system until they could eat a little bit more food so he had kind of dug himself into a bit of a hole so getting him nourished was really important and the thing is too he didn't initially do well with the detox protocol i think because his gut was in bad shape so you had him hold the dmsa and we just slowly built him up on the detox cube so you know getting the gut sorted out is so important at first and that had a lot to do with his nutrition so once he started expanding his diet he was getting more protein he was getting more good fats we were getting vegetables which he didn't really like but you know he was he got so for people listening it's like okay i want to rev up my detox system in my liver and my body how do i how do i do that with food what are the top foods that you should be eating every day that are revving up your detox because look whether you have a disease or not whether or not you all need you've been diagnosed with high body burden of this or that or the other thing you can guarantee that all of us are living in a toxic world and are exposed to a myriad of toxins every single day through the air water food all the compounds are in contact whether it's credit card receipts or bpa whatever plastic bottles containers we're all exposed right um so in that context we should all really be focused on how to upregulate our detox system absolutely so at the ultra wellness scenario we really focus on food as medicine what what are those top foods that everybody should include every day to help their liver and body detoxify right good good uh yeah important point the cruciferous vegetables probably are number one um you know there's so many compounds in there that we've identified they are there's quite a few um you know broccoli cauliflower cabbage kale arugula's in that family collards kohlrabi yeah a lot of really just the dark greens and what they do i mean they have a lot of compounds but the liver has two phases of detoxification and you really want to support both phases to have good detox and the compounds like the sulfurophane which is probably most rich in broccoli sprouts support both those pathways so sulfation's a really important pathway that you want to support because that builds up glutathione right it does and it up regulates two enzymes right that the glutathione will then bind onto toxins so they become water soluble so that's a tricky thing like if you don't have good phase two detoxification in the liver and you're you get more toxins in the liver that can't be excreted so you need the second phase and glutathione is a really important part of that and these vegetables they're bringing the sulfur that supports that but they're kind of activating the glutathione so it makes these toxins water soluble so you can pee them out you can poop them out um so that's that's really important so that's really top of the list there not every day like i focus on where am i gonna get i get every day i have arugula or i have kale or i have broccoli or i have cabbage or collards or brussels sprouts cauliflower i make sure that i eat these things every day because they are the basis of and i have that gene that makes it hard for me to detoxify mm-hmm for glutathione yeah i'm really focused on what what are the other foods you want i like the alien foods which is like the garlic family garlic leeks chives onions scallions again you know sometimes digestion-wise if that's compromised there's certain ones that can be a little bit more difficult initially but there's a lot in that family and when you cook them you know it makes them more digestible so those are really really important spices and herbs i think we overlook them a lot and they are some of the richest sources of antioxidants and antioxidants they protect you from oxidative stress which we're all under you know just breathing in oxygen creates that but oxidation is part of that phase one detox and you want to counteract that oxidative stress so antioxidants are really important too so whenever you're getting color you know and cinnamon and ginger and turmeric you know they're really rich in antioxidants but they're also you know working as detoxifying yeah i mean so so yeah so spices and herbs sometimes you're antioxidant but they also have detox properties like rosemary it's a combination turmeric is great and turmeric yeah right right so pomegranates another one we you know we're always trying to push pomegranate and berries any time you're getting like dark pigmented yes skins is always a good thing so you want that color i mean we teach our kids you know eat the rainbow it's so important and green tea green tea and a lot of the teas like aruba's tea and burdock tea dandelion tea i have a lot of my patients you know not only are you bringing in these herbs you're staying hydrated so the food is really important um supporting the liver moving the bowels and then sweating yeah you know so good hydration we get people into saunas we get them getting massages poop pee and perspire yes a good way to put it and i think you know you're right i just want to look back on that some of the compounds because green tea also is so powerful yep and in japan they eat a lot of mercury fish but they also have their green tea a lot of green tea and it may mitigate some of those effects and it's a great chelator right an up regulator glutathione these categories that's right yeah so green tea is excellent i do you know encourage people to you know get their teas and get their fluids in at that way too also like lemon peel lemonade right and i often will grate lemon peel from organic lemons and put it in my salad or right and the thing is all these things add a lot of flavor right when people say they don't like to eat these foods and like you know they really enhance the culinary aspect of all this too so they're they're they're tasty which you know i think is really important too um so yeah the the spices the herbs the fiber is really important because that's the thing too and this with this gentleman that was tricky because he was on this lower fiber diet because of the the yeast and the what we call dysbiosis he was dealing with but eventually we had to really work to get some fiber up in his diet because that you know when those toxins are coming out you got to bind them up and you have to eliminate them through through the stool so um so the fiber piece is really important that soluble fiber which is like the pectins inside of fruit um you know ground up flax seeds and chia seeds you know are really really good too so artichokes are great also artichokes are yep they're kind of a super a super food so i think yeah artichokes pomegranate it's also fiber and prebiotic too the artichoke right exactly and so that's the thing it's a process so we get the you know i he we had to really build up slowly so we got the gut sorted out got him just more nourished got some weight on him got his protein up and then we could branch into really doing a lot more of this stuff and that's where the glutathione and things really made a huge difference for him and the protein you mentioned so important because often if you're vegan or if you're not absorbing or your digestion is not great you can't build up the amino acids you need right to detoxify so you need all these pathways to work and they all require enzymes right enzymes are catalysts that convert one molecule to another and and they're dependent on all sorts of helpers including all these compounds we talked about in food these are facilitators of enzyme reactions right there's also a lot of nutrients that are needed right so like the b vitamins right when you say cofactors are helpers you know a lot of the b vitamins are are supporting these enzymes a lot of them provide methylation support and methylation happens all over the body but it's a really important detox pathway too so when you're taking methylfolate and methyl b12 and some people again have difficulty kind of the b vitamins they get in through their food they're not fully methylating them or what i say activating them so this is where a really good b complex can be really helpful that has methyl covalent which is b12 and methylfolate because it will ramp up those methylation pathways that's one of the key pathways in the liver is requiring those b vitamins you also need other nutrients like magnesium magnesium is important absolutely mm-hmm right there they're supporting all those enzymes selenium right so selenium i kind of put in there it's considered an antioxidant because it helps to activate glutathione the best food source of people don't know is brazil nuts but it's it's pretty well known now they say two to three brazil nuts right gives you kind of your recommended amount of selenium so selenium is really key and a lot of the detox products that we carry will have some selenium in there for that reason so and this is why the nuts and seeds i like so much and they're great quality fats which are essential we need to eat them but they provide a lot of the zinc and the selenium and these minerals like magnesium that we need to support detox and selenium and you know all kinds of nuts and beans for magnesium right so you you do need a whole array of compounds and then you know if you kind of google you know like phase one phase two detoxification and look at the kinds of nutrients that are involved and the amino acids are involved and the foods are regulated i mean it's fascinating it is when you look at this and so in functional medicine we become experts in detoxification right and it really all comes down to food i i do think you know the supplementation really helps but you know there are things in food i'm sure we don't know about and you know they work synergistically so all these these nutrients are found in our food and again the quality makes such a big difference because again if you're getting them organic they've not been sprayed they have more of these these phytonutrients that work as antioxidants so what happened with this guy we treated him we yeah so i jumped ahead a bit and yeah right he he was doing a lot better again it took it was a long road for him to be able to tolerate the detox because again i think his gut and his nutritional status were so compromised so he had to build him up for a while before he could really handle moving out the toxins right you don't want to be moving out toxins if you're not eliminating well and your gut is leaky so we really focused on that and then worked him up on you know like the detox cube and such but at five years out when we uh looked at some of his labs his uh urine toxic metals which had been 31 is now down to 15. um so going definitely in the right direction right yeah the the methyl mercury from the fish was down in the 75th percentile partly because he won't give up some fish but he has really cut back um inorganic was normal um he had good clearance of both you know so when they looked in the urine and the hair he was now clearing them well um and his conventional blood work was at seven which again that's not a good thing but it was definitely you know i'm 24. she was better again weighed his headaches got better his neuropathy was improved right right so he's at least 50 percent better he says with the neuropathy and the headaches those are i think always his his top things but his energy's good he's got great weight he he's like you know thanks for making me eat more food um and his digestion is a lot better like 75 percent better and he said he you know if he goes off it's he now knows it's gluten dairy alcohol those are his three triggers and he's like if i get you know if i start going off and just have a little bit i i get set back no it's a good feedback loop yeah right exactly he's got good cues from his and you know we also uh use other things with these people we're going to talk about the next case some of the approaches but i mean we we used uh supplements that help boost the detox pathways right one of the the main ones we like to use is something called cysteine glutathione orally lipoic acid we use milk thistle selenium we use artichoke extracts and broccoli extracts and uh and we really focus on this very intensively to push these pathways right vitamins like you mentioned and i think one of the things we we um also focus on is how do we facilitate also other things not just the pooping and peeing but how do we get people sweating so saunas can be very effective yeah they're one of the most effective ways to help upregulate the detox system and get rid of these toxins because they're fat soluble and they're hard to get rid of they store the fat a lot of them right so you need to sweat in order to get rid of them and people exercise have lower toxin levels people who sweat have lower toxins so you kind of sweat every day yeah i think we all need to do that and what we see a lot of folks right that tell us they have a hard time sweating and that's always a key that you know they're probably not great detoxifiers so getting into saunas you know epsom salt baths are great right you get the magnesium sulfate coming in through the skin which is helpful but people can get a little sweat up that way um massage yoga you know some of that will obviously help circulation but helps the lymphatic system too which is how you move toxins out as well so we really take a big lifestyle approach um and mercury right you can chelate that out to a certain extent but solvents and plastics how do you know you is sweating them is a great way to get them out so it's it's a really important piece we don't really talk about it much but we really also focus heavily on how to reduce exposures not just from the one toxin we might know like mercury but a whole range of things right and they're everywhere um and i'm on the board of the environmental working group and we uh have all sorts of guides on how to reduce your exposure their sciences so how to reduce your exposure from fruits and vegetables what are the lowest pesticide fruits and vegetables right the dirty dozen and then the clean 50. how do you reduce your exposure from household cleaning products right from prosthetics personal care products whether it's makeup or shampoo or sunblock whatever we're using right what about animal products how do we eat animal products that have low toxin levels so fish how do you eat lowest mercury fish so we go through all these sources of exposures and we give people guides on how to reduce your overall toxic burden and upregulate all the pathways right right keeps you healthy for the long term exactly and you know and it's it's a team approach right because it takes a lot of time and a lot of education around this and and resources to support people so we have you know low mercury seafood lists and you know here's a clean list of of cosmetics that don't have some of these compounds in it that you want to be avoiding you know environmental working group we give everyone their their website and you know we have the little dirty dozen cards of you know people can carry with them to avoid these these highly sprayed produce and actually that was a lot of what we focused on with this second case this was a 52 year old woman who had a history of breast cancer back in 2017 um so she came to us more to prevent reoccurrence um because she was you know she had already had surgery chemo radiation she was on tamoxifen to help keep her estrogen levels low um which you know to prevent the reoccurrence of her estrogen-sensitive cancer but when we spoke with her i mean obviously cancer we were talking about right that's a a huge thing we see with with toxicity since so many things are carcinogenic um she when we did a health review for her health history she had three to four silver fillings um her diet was good but it was low fat and she was pescetarian so she didn't eat much animal protein which is okay you know it depends on what's going on for that person and she also had digestive issues she had quite a bit of reflux um she had taken out gluten and dairy because of her digestion not being great or she was low dairy but she had taken out gluten because she knew it made her digestion feel better but she still had some reflux when she came to see us so initially when she saw the physician here um she got dim diendyl methane which is the one of the compounds that you get from indole-3-carbinol which is from cruciferous vegetables right your broccoli so this is one of the compounds that we know is so important basically it helps to metabolize estrogen to the forms that are less less toxic so uh she was given some dim and we gave her my community which is from a company host defense which is a bunch of different medicinal mushrooms which are very good for the immune system for folks that have you know something like cancer and she had had some methylation support i think she was on a b complex and things so we continued her on that i had i really focused again on protein that's where i tend to start with people especially more vegetarian based um so we talked about clean fish she had been eating tuna so we talked about you know avoiding all the predatory fish swordfish is there blue fish you don't want to eat fish that are eating other fish so i went more to like salmon and some of the white fish and i think she was doing some seafood too um she did have some eggs we i got her on a good like just protein supplement and eggs also have sulfur they do so i you know my only concern with eggs is they're up there on the likelihood of being a food sensitivity but from a nutritional standpoint they're an incredible food and the you know the yolk has choline and all these like fat-soluble vitamins that are so important too so i definitely kept in eggs for her for that reason um and you know i told her to kind of do as little dairy as you possibly can and to stop coffee because of her reflux and we really you know that that first meeting besides protein and talking about like quinoa and beans and being a good pescetarian um was just trying to how do you increase these detox foods so i mean i really you know up to 15 cups of vegetables sometimes for people is what i'm pushing for folks that can digest them and the leafy greens especially when you're cooking them and stuff it's it's the easy way to do it we did some green powders too that she could add to her smoothies um so when her first labs came back the doctor had checked her for some of these other compounds and she had elevations and two types of phthalates and two parabens the phthalates are found in plastics they're in everything right i think they're like the biggest group of toxins that are out there so they're in there's you know you break them down to a lot of different things but two of the phthalates were high um yeah so cosmetics detergents plastics um some of the pesticides perfumes i mean whenever you see the word perfume on something right you know there's a phthalate in there and i can't believe people use these and they're learn everything um and the parabens um they're mostly and actually the environmental working group has a nice layout of you know different products that don't have parabens but they're in body care for the most part so when they came back that was you know between myself and the doctor a lot of what we talked to her about of again removing the exposure so because these are also known as xenoestrogens exactly these are xenoestrogens so given her breast cancer you know definitely there's a connection there i mean you don't know if that particular paraben or phthalate is causing her cancer right but the assumption of functional medicine is you get rid of all the bad stuff right you optimize the good stuff you give your chance uh body a chance right exactly do a better job at fighting you don't want that stuff in there when you're trying to prevent yeah stuff so so when she uh followed up with me she had stopped her coffee and her reflux was gone you know and said people have to take out coffee but sometimes that makes a difference she was feeling a lot better with her energy um and she was pretty good when she came to see us again really just being more proactive but when she started adding more protein and good fat she's like you know my i just feel like i got better energy i can think better you know and that's your blood sugar was doing a lot better and she wasn't coming to us to lose weight but she said her pants were fitting better and i always use that as a barometer like right if you're losing inches in that midsection you're losing the right type of weight which you know if you're carrying extra fat that stores toxins so you want to try to clear that out for that reason this is just such a great case uh and sort of highlights the way in which we do things differently at the ultra wellness center how we think differently right in functional medicine and address problems by really taking a broad view of what is the cause of the imbalance in the body and for many people it's toxic load uh and it can affect everything right it can affect your gut and immune system and weight and brain and everything but i think we use a very systematic approach of diagnosing your genetic risks of detox problems your body load of metals and pesticides and toxins we look at also how to up regulate all these pathways like we talked about with food and lifestyle exercise sweating drinking lots of fluids making sure fiber pooping very important and then how do you reduce your load like the environmental workout you go to ewg.org and look at these guys and start to clean up your house make your home a safe zone right right like what are your cleaning products and things i mean because you can use vinegar and some basic stuff to clean really well and and and that stuff is not regulated i mean our food isn't as regulated you know as it should be around toxins but our body care and you know what we're being exposed to there isn't even building materials you know like cleveland clinic we built our center for functional medicine and i was insistent that we make sure we do it through uh you know the environmentally safe compounds so there's no off-gassing from furniture no formaldehyde the carpet's on off gas the lighting is better for you the water's filtered the air is filtered so we really made an effort to create a healing environment and i think it leads to much much better health overall absolutely absolutely so so yeah she did i mean she also had some mercury and things like that but um and based off her genetics she had the gst-1 deletion so she needed some glutathione support which when she saw the doctor at her follow-up they gave her liposomal glutathione along with n-acetyl cysteine which helps the glutathione work and make more glutathione we gave give our product called oncoplex which is very rich source of sulfurophane which again very important for that detox pathway um and the doctor was like okay you got to get into sauna she had a sauna but she wasn't using very often just like sweat sweat sweat you know get these things out of your body yeah so so for those of you out there listening who suffered from weird symptoms who have various chronic illnesses who aren't sure what's going on you're looking at your toxic load looking at your toxin history upregulating your detox system is so important and you can do a lot of that on your own through the things we talked about but sometimes you need to really see somebody and that's really what we're here for at the ultra wellness center in lenox massachusetts we have an incredible team of providers nutritionists and and we work with people from all over the world over now resume through remote consults and we're happy to help you and i certainly uh became an expert in detoxification when i was sick myself had to learn way too much about this topic yeah but it's amazing how effective it's been in treating so many of my patients from everything from obesity to diabetes to autoimmune disease to neurologic issues to dementia to autism i mean you just name it it's such a powerful depression right allergies and i think um you know what you shared maggie was just so important it's giving hope where often people have no hope yeah especially in the world we live in now right it's it's unfortunately looking bleak with the way the environment's going so this is just something we all like you said even if you're not sick you need to be thinking how do you support your body and detoxify absolutely live clean and green that's what it is good food well thank you so much for joining us on the doctor's pharmacy this special episode of the house call we've been listening to maggie ward our nutrition director here at the ultra wellness center and we've been having a great discussion about toxins toxic load and how to detoxify and if you think you might have an issue or you've been helped by detoxification please share your comments with us we'd love to learn more about what you're experiencing if you love this podcast please share with your friends and family on social media subscribe wherever you get your podcast and we'll see you next time on the doctor's pharmacy you

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 73,789

Keywords: maggie ward, detoxification, detox, detoxifying foods, dr. mark hyman, the ultrawellness center, functional medicine, health podcast, the doctor's farmacy, nutrition

Id: mENeSVfPQ_M

Length: 56min 46sec (3406 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 26 2020