Episode 76 – Toxins and Total Toxic Load
Speaker 1: 00:00 Welcome to against the grain podcast with Dr Chad Edwards, where he challenges the status quo when it comes to medicine. We get into hot topics in the medical field with real stories from real patients to help you on your way to a healthy lifestyle. Get ready because we’re about to go go against the grain,
Speaker 2: 00:21 but he was listening to the revolution health and wellness podcast today. Thank you for joining us. I am the one and only dominator. Nathan Arnold here with Dr Chad Edwards of Revolution Health and wellness. He is. He is an amazing physician and an all around swell guy and he loves Chinese food and long walks on the beach. How are you doing today, Dr Edwards? I’m doing well. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us today. And I’m really excited. What are we going to talk about today?
Speaker 3: 00:49 So we are talking about toxins and total toxic load. And so the, uh, the podcast that I did a couple of podcasts ago, um, you know, I mentioned in the last last podcast and certainly two podcasts ago, that was what it was, but it was on BPA, bisphenol a. it’s a chemical that’s in your plastic water bottles and a, it’s one of the most shocking things. It’s actually in the, uh, the thermal paper, you know, the receipts and things like that. It’s, it’s all over that stuff. Um, and so it’s just shocking how that stuff can affect your body and what it does or what it can do. Second, yeah. I have an ozark plastic water bottle over there on my desk if I’m drinking water out of the thing. Is that bad? Well, some would say yes. It is a, there are in those, in those plastics, there are endocrine disruptors.
Speaker 3: 01:41 And when I set out to do the podcast on Bpa, I was going to do endocrine disruptors, kind of that bigger overarching topic. And as I started getting into it, I was like, man, this is such a big topic that I gotta I gotta break this down a little bit and I’m going to start with BPA. Um, so I, I just started on that one and that’s just one of many, many toxins that we’re exposed to. And as I’ve started looking into this, and I’ve, I’ve heard this, you know, it’s just, it’s weird because I’ve heard it so much over the last several weeks, toxins, toxins, toxins, toxins, you know, a few months ago there was this big toxic spill into the Colorado river and I mean like nasty, awful stuff. And like it is going to be impossible. I don’t mean to be doomsday ish, but it’s going to be impossible to clean that up in a way that it never happened. I mean, that, that stuff’s going to be there for decades. That’s terrible. And uh, you know, interestingly, there’s, when I started doing the data on, on Bpa, they, my wife was having me read a book and I can’t remember the name of the book, but it was about how boys and hormones, their, their brains are screwed up and all that kinda good stuff. Uh, I mean, not, not all of them were not boys across the board, but you know, adhd is on the rise. Autism, you know, all these different things and what’s going on.
Speaker 2: 03:11 No, I just, I think it’s funny because your wife had you read a book about how hormones grew up boys’ minds and there’s always this battle of the sexes who was really the better sex. And so I just, I found that humorous out women are, there’s no question. Yeah, women are the best. Amen. Love women. So, um, uh, yeah, I, I, there’s no contest there,
Speaker 3: 03:33 but when I, in reading part of this book, it was fascinating because he talked about, and I need to look at the, at the sources for this, but he talked about fish, uh, that were discovered, gosh, uh, I may have to make it up. So it wasn’t the Hudson River and the Potomac and under this bridge they found fish that had eggs in them, male fish. So it’s almost like they were male and female. They were like, it was totally jacked up. Right. And it or, or what’s the auto sexual or. I don’t remember the term, but you know, where they’ve got, not bisexual but hermaphrodite no, no. Anyway, we’re getting off topic. So anyway, these, these fish were not normal and they, they attributed it to exposure to chemicals and this is in a river, right? You know, it wasn’t, it’s not like it was local and we just dumped something in right there and it sat there and it screwed up a few fish. I mean this was like, just like normal.
Speaker 2: 04:37 It was shocking to them, not just this river you’re talking about, but even in the middle of the ocean there is what they called trash island. Well, yeah, there is all this trash and plastic that’s floating around in our ocean and it’s. Was it like the size of like Texas almost or something. It’s like abnormally large fish go out there and they eat this plastic and then the fish get taken in by the fishermen and the fish end up in our supermarkets and we eat the fish and we’re ingesting all these talks and the, the amount of toxin. In fact, I had a patient that’s
Speaker 3: 05:11 living in France and came to see me and we’re just talking about some things and I just asked her, do you notice a difference in what you eat here versus what you eat there? And she said, absolutely no question, and I’ve talked about this before, you know, I’ve had the opportunity to go to Belgium and France and Italy and on medical things and you know, when, when we eat there, like I would eat here, I felt fine. Right? If I eat here like that, I feel bloated, feel like crap, more reflux, you know, all kinds of problems, fatigue, all these things and I don’t experience that there. Then, and I’ve talked about this before, you walk around Paris, there is a pastry shop, the petty see on every corner, on every corner in, in Paris, they’re all over the place. There’s a bread shop or a pastry shop on every block, right?
Speaker 3: 06:10 Seemed like they’re everywhere. And yet I don’t see many obese people walking around Paris. Right. And why. And I think it has to do with the quality of the food. Absolutely. Then you know, we had my buddy dj on talking about dude, you know, the, the hair stuff for, for men and how it’s detoxifying and supports normal hormones and all of those things. And, and he was talking about how there’s thousands of chemicals that are banned in Europe that we allow in our stuff here in the US and it’s in our makeup, it’s in our shampoo and again, these are Xeno estrogens. They’re endocrine disruptors, they’re toxins on different levels, allergens, all kinds of things. Then you look at the food that we eat and we have things like, um, a glyphosate or roundup, we had this probably the most popular podcast that we’ve done was on glyphosate and its effect on wheat and then ultimately its effect on us and you know, those kinds of things and you know, so we get toxins.
Speaker 3: 07:21 They’re not only on wheat but in soy and corn. And then we have genetically modified and hybridized foods never been looked at, you know, what effect does that have on the human? Never looked at that. So, but we have to consider that. Have you ever seen the Documentary Food Inc? Absolutely. Oh, it was amazing, shocking and very. I mean, it’s just, that’s, you know, consider the, uh, the little red streaks that you see in your chicken meat is probably arsenic toxicity. Their stuff is everywhere. In fact, Dr Jill Carnahan was just a brilliant woman and she tells her story, so I’m the, I don’t know her. And she told me this story and this is her. I heard it publicly. She got breast cancer when she was 25 and then after she recovered from that, she got Crohn’s disease within six months or so and she eats and she’s now in her early forties, right around 40 and she eats incredibly clean, pure, organic, all of those things.
Speaker 3: 08:22 Yet she still has high levels of glyphosate and it’s just because that, that’s in our environment. So we’re, we’re getting, in fact, she even says that 80 percent of the toxins that we come in contact with, we actually breathe in the air. Wow. So try and isolate yourself from that. You know, we’ve got chloride and fluoride in our water, which, you know, the dentist would say you got to have fluoride in your water. Well, for cavities you do, but for your health you should, not that it’s detrimental to your health. It is a toxin chloride there. It competes for iodine. Had a podcast a few episodes ago where we talked about iodine and the halides and all those things. Then the crap that we get in our food, the processing, the industrialization, where we’ve got all of these different chemicals that are our food that don’t belong there, and so now we’re getting bombarded with chemicals from every direction and so we’ll get patients that come in and they say, I feel bad and they might have a say.
Speaker 3: 09:20 It’s allergies and so the. What I wanted to talk about is this concept of total toxic load and you know, Dr Carnahan kind of described this in a really neat way. I’ve talked about this bucket before or I’ve thought about this bucket before and and you’ve got a bucket and all of these toxins, all the exposures and one of those toxins and stress by the way, because our body reacts to stress, it is. It is toxic to our health. So we take all of these things. Lack of sleep, toxins, heavy metals, environmental allergens, food allergens, food intolerance, all these different things. And we put them in this bucket and over time the level of junk rises up and when your bucket is full and it starts to run over, we start getting the manifestation of symptoms and some patients. Well, what would that be? Well, it could be anything.
Speaker 3: 10:13 It could be tiredness, fatigue, allergies, a sluggishness, fibromyalgia kind of things. I mean, anything like that. Uh, and there I’m doing a lot of stuff with lyme disease right now and I’m actually working on going to work with Dr Horowitz, who is probably the world’s leader on lyme disease. Just phenomenal. And actually just on a podcast talking about lyme disease and how your treatment’s oprah. Exactly, exactly. So, and I got to talk with them. The pay. I’m sorry, I got to talk with them. I had some patients that came to me because of hearing me on that podcast. And uh, so came to me from out of town and uh, and we got. I got to tell them about some of these things that we’re working on and I’m going to go do because this is something Dr Horowitz is doing something that many patients need a, they need to understand this, a multiple inflammatory disease syndrome.
Speaker 3: 11:07 It the multiple infections and get some resolution for these things and he’s just got more experience than anybody else I know. And so I’m doing a lot of work to try and go work with him and he’s already said he would take me in. Oh, I just got to get it, you know, fit into my schedule, but it’s just, it’s just really interesting. So infection is one of those things that can go into that bucket and when the bucket gets full it, you start having a run over of all of these symptoms. Well, you know, there’s a condition called multiple chemical sensitivity and so you’ll walk by, somebody’s smell her perfume and you just break out in a rash. But that’s. Yes, you may have a reaction, a reaction to that chemical, but it’s probably not the only thing. Well, if you were completely healthy and your bucket wasn’t full, you probably, I’m guessing you probably wouldn’t have an issue with this, but because the bucket is so full because of all of these toxins that we get from everywhere, any little thing will trigger it and we have this whole cascade of events that results in symptoms.
Speaker 2: 12:08 Every time you talk, all I can think about is like, why don’t we do test and I can be the Guinea pig and you will test these theories out on me. You’ll say, okay, you have some of these symptoms, like maybe I have high toxicity, maybe I don’t, but if like I try the things that you’re recommending and then I come on here while we do the podcast and we talk about like the results.
Speaker 3: 12:28 Oh, that’s cool. I’m. I’m all for it.
Speaker 2: 12:30 Yeah, because I’d be totally down to try different products and things that you recommend to see if it really does have an effect on my health.
Speaker 3: 12:37 Sure. Now I will say that the problem is if you don’t have any symptoms, then how do you evaluate? I mean, we can test certain things but it gets really expensive testing others, right. So you know, how do you deal with that, but you know, for, for patients that have symptoms, then we have to work on this concept of total toxic load and so there’s a lot of things that we can do to test this. But again, think about that bucket and what we want to do is reduce symptoms so that you’ve got a lot of margin, the buckets only half full or a third full or something like that. And when that happens you may not have any expression of symptoms when you’re exposed to something relatively mild. Right? And so we’ve got to remove toxins in every way, shape and form that we can.
Speaker 3: 13:22 Right? So you can’t do much about the air that you breathe, although you can do some things. There are some really nice high quality air filters that you can use and they will remove volatile organic chemicals, environmental allergen. They kind of, they pull all that stuff out of the air. They’re not cheap, you know, they’re probably five, $600 for something like that. But depending on the size of unit that you get a, but it was possible to get one that just fits around my face and I can walk around with it all day long. Yeah. But people might make fun of you will. I’m going to live forever though, so I don’t really care there because they’ll pass away and then I’ll be alive. Still an old great. Right? Yeah. So I’m not aware of one like that. But uh, uh, I mean certainly you can get your gas mask and the would look really crazy with a gas mask on all the time.
Speaker 3: 14:10 That’s true. Make sure you wear your tin foil hat as well. Yeah. And then everybody will know. It’s kind of like where your sign. Here’s your sign. We know. Yeah, that’s fine. Yeah, no, that’s just Nathan. I’m fine with that. So, uh, you know, you gotTa, you know, the air that you breathe, you want a clean environment, you and you know, some of these air filters in your workplace and your home may be a good idea for some people when you consider your water, you want to try and detoxify as much as you can. Uh, you know, things like a reverse osmosis water purification unit may not be a bad idea, although it does remove the minerals from your water as well. So you got to watch that. But there’s a lot of toxins, especially if you’re on city water, there’s a lot of junk, a lot of chemicals that are potentially harmful that we shouldn’t be getting.
Speaker 3: 14:57 Not Dimension, you know, like we’ve had multiple times where a city is there, water waterlines had been breached or something in there, there was a, uh, some kind of equal, either grew in the water or something and people got sick. Then if you want protection from like bioterrorism and you know, if you had something like that, it would protect you from many things. Uh, you know, if you’re a, you know, kind of a doomsday prepper, then, uh, you’re, you’re concerned about the vulnerability of our water supply and all those things. So you know, that would just be yet another, another benefit of doing a lot of talking about prepping on the show lately. Yeah, that’s. And it’s weird. I don’t know why a better good or foil hats on. That’s right. So, uh, you know that when it comes to your water, I mean getting, I don’t recommend bottled water because we’re now we’re talking plastics and you can get some of those plastics.
Speaker 3: 15:44 And I told the story about, you know, when I was in Iraq and having a, you know, there are our water came from plastic water bottles that sat out on a pallet under the sun getting beaten down on 126 degree weather and all of that plastic is just leeching into the end of the water. And how much, how much detriment to that do. I don’t have a way to prove anything, but just interesting concept a, you know, then we get into foods. I often recommend the Paleo Diet as an initial food approach to most of my patients because I think it’s, I call it an 80 to 90 percent solution for 80 to 90 percent of the people. Just a good way to try and clean up your nutrition, make sure that your meets are grassfed hormone free, know, preferably organic, doesn’t have to be organic, but just, you know, if it’s your local farmer that you know, and he grasps feeds and doesn’t give hormones and all those things, then probably still a good choice.
Speaker 3: 16:43 Uh, you know, same thing with your chicken. Make sure it’s true free range and that free range thing doesn’t, you know, we were talking about that organic piece, you know, free range just means that the chicken had access to the outside. Doesn’t mean he ever went out there. He just had access to it. Um, so, you know, getting chickens that truly grew up out, hunting around for bugs and stuff that, and that’s probably the best way to go. Um, then, um, you know, making sure that you don’t get other toxins in your food that you’re, you know, organic wheat doesn’t have all those pesticides and all of those things on them, you know, there’s so many things that we can do, but you’ve got to consider that total toxic load. And in our clinic we talk about the healthy trinity and we’re adding in the toxins into the nutritional piece to make sure that we address that in a comprehensive manner, but making sure that your nutrition is clean and doesn’t have all those toxins in it, that you’re getting sufficient sleep, you’re recovering from your exercise and your reducing stress and that your exercise is good.
Speaker 3: 17:45 And interestingly, I mean exercise is good period, but one of the ways that we can detoxify is through sweat, right? At least in part. So we, we kicked some things out through sweat so exercise can be beneficial in that way as well. And what’s funny is I was taking an exercise class because we used to have to take them to college. Like it was a mandatory thing is part of our degree plan and they said that if your exercises too strenuous, it’s actually bad for you. I would argue that in some ways that’s true because especially like you know, marathon runners, long distance runners, they have a high level of oxidative stress and some exercises hormetic it induces a this adaptive response where you can handle the, the oxidative stress, but with very long endurance activities, you exceed the body’s ability to detoxify those and so you’ll have oxidative stress and damage and you can age prematurely because of that.
Speaker 3: 18:46 So that may be what they’re talking about. I’m not totally sure what I’d have to look into it, but that’s a possibility. So just from that total toxic load perspective, eliminating as many allergens as possible, getting a good air filter, getting good water supplies, making sure that your sleep is good. Some people would talk about grounding. It may sound like Weirdo nutjob kind of where your, where your tin foil hat stuff, but now they make grounding pads that you can put on your bed and it goes down and grounds into the ground and it’s supposed to kind of stabilize some of the energy and I don’t know if there’s any truth to it, but there’s no harm to it. So, you know, maybe there’s some truth in energy medicine is very interesting. Uh, and certainly, you know, you get your, uh, eastern medicine with your energy Meridians and all those kinds of things.
Speaker 3: 19:33 So there’s, I just think it’s important for people to understand the total toxic load. How do we reduce that address, every single controllable factor and you know, hopefully we can reduce that total toxic load and symptoms go away. And then we can also do a lot of things for detoxification itself. We can do, uh, there are several antioxidants, things like glutathione, Alpha lipoic acid, you can key late heavy metals. There’s lots of ways to detoxify and get rid of this stuff that’s very potentially beneficial with no real downside. Most of the time, again, has to be evaluated on an individual basis, but there’s a lot of good stuff out there. Great. So I feel like I almost need to go build a biodome, grow my own food, uh, insure my house is covered with heavy metals and just pretty much protect myself from the outside world if I want to be completely healthy.
Speaker 3: 20:31 Yeah, sometimes I feel that way and you know, definitely. And I think you bring up a great point because there are some things you, I mean, you can, you can truly go crazy trying to get everything out of your life, but if you are doing pretty well or even if you’re doing, just know, know a little bit bad, whatever that means, detoxify as much as you can, get rid of as many things as you can, don’t go crazy. You’re not going to get rid of all of them. So just accept that, um, and, and do the best you can to, to clean up what you can and hopefully we get, get those so they get the total toxic load down where your symptoms go away.
Speaker 2: 21:09 And ulcers news. I know I’m being a little goofy over here making up biodome stories, but thank you for enlightening people about toxic load and things like that because we hear about it a lot, you know, but it’s like, well it. It almost seems like everything is bad. Or like today they’ll say, well, chocolate is good for you and then a week from today it’s going to be like, chocolate is bad for you now. So it’s like we don’t really know like what is good, what’s bad? We can only really try to educate ourselves I guess, and try to find sources such as yourself who are really trying to parse through the things that are true and parse through the things that are not true as far as nutrition is concerned or different factors that we deal with and you as a trustworthy source, be able to trust that your information is
Speaker 3: 21:57 usually spot on. I like the way you said usually. Well I can’t say always that’s going to be a liar. Like we talked about today. You’ve got to work through this stuff. Be Skeptical and look at the research. Look at the evidence. I’m absolutely, I think it’s wise to do that.
Speaker 2: 22:11 Yeah. So what would you recommend for people? Is a final parting
Speaker 3: 22:17 thought. I would say start with detoxify cleanup as much as you can. If you’re not feeling better with that, you need to get in with a functional medicine practitioner that’s going to evaluate where are you on your health spectrum and you know, certainly if you’re, if you’re close and can come see us, you know, we’ll do whatever testing is needed and indicated. Try and get you to where you look, feel and perform your absolute best. Okay.
Speaker 2: 22:41 They wanted to get in touch with you and come find you. I know that they obviously are listening to the podcast right now, but how can they call you? Can they email you, like what can they do?
Speaker 3: 22:51 Yeah, sure. Revolution Health Dot Org has all of our contact information and you can certainly call us at nine. One, eight, nine, three, five, three, six, three, six. Okay.
Speaker 2: 23:00 Dr Edwards, I’m off to build my biodome. Thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been a pleasure.
Speaker 3: 23:06 Hey, save me some space in that thing. We’ll talk to you later. All right. Bye. Thanks for listening to this week’s podcast with Dr Chad Edwards. Tune in next week where we’ll be going against the grain.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
