Detox For Better Sex

your vagina is a microcosm of your overall health. If your vagina is not right, if your libido's not, right it means something. Like it's, not just like, oh, I'm getting older or oh.

It's something's right. We need to figure it out. That's the, that's if you can't remember anything else from this conversation for the people who are listening, remember that if, your, vagina's is okay, you're not.

Something's wrong. Let's figure out this is Dr. Talks. Hi, everybody. Welcome back to another session at the Solving Sexual Dysfunction Summit. And we have with us, very excited, is Dr.

Wendy Trebeau. Thank you so much, Dr Wendy, for being with today. It's great to be here. Feel free to call me Wendy on this conversation. Awesome, thank you.

So you know, this topic is really important because nobody realizes what our environment and our exposure to toxins is doing to our bodies. But before we get into that, how did you get in to this field?

I don't know if I've even told you this. My mess became my message. And my mess had two camel humps. So the first camel hump I'll squish into the 1st 35 years of my life where I had terrible genetics.

I was a child of the 70s, so we ate sloppy joes. Child of 80s we had microwave food and plastic, strep throat, ear infections all the time as a kid, pneumonia as baby.

By the times I'm in my teens, my gut is wrecked. I don't know this, though. I just know that I can't eat a whole bunch of foods, none of which included gluten, by the way.

Oh my God. So my husband was mentoring with a functional medicine doctor, you know, like one of the old guys in Boston. And he said to me, hey, before our insurance changes, why don't you go see him?

So I went to see them. I literally just delivered our second kid and now I'm really messy because I am nursing another human and I was exhausted. How am I going to go back to work?

So, I have my visit and I'm freaking out. It takes six weeks to get the results. He does a huge workup and i can't even wait. I call him on the way to the appointment.

i'm like, i cant stand the suspense. You have to tell me what's wrong. Do i have diabetes? Do I Have to prick my fingers? I can do it. Because no, you don't have Diabetes.

you have celiac. And I said, oh my dad has celia and he said well, it's genetic. You know, you hear the subtext, like, You're a doctor. You should have figured this out about yourself.

But you can't treat yourself, can diagnose yourself sometimes. So the first hump completes at age 35, where I get diagnosed with celiac, I'm introduced to functional medicine, and I transform my health.

And then I am like I got to do this. Like I've got do do for other people. It's not enough to just send my husband patients. I have to to this, so I go into functional and spend 13 years working on my Okay, fast forward, I'm now 48. I am in the throes of perimenopause and it's been pretty kind to me.

Like, not terrible. We come back from this amazing vacation in Paris and I, after I come, back not in my vacation, but when I came back I gained nine pounds.

My hair is coming out in droves and have a rash on my eyelids, my nose, under my chin and like I couldn't get through the day without kind of like picking at it because it was so itchy.

And what does every female who gains weight think is wrong? Your thyroid. I have access to the testing. My thyroid's perfect. And then I'm like, oh, I am 48. It's my hormones.

So I check my hormone. Oh, my, hormones are perfect! Now I remember like… Okay, functional medicine. All disease starts in the gut. Okay. Check my gut, so I do a stool test and it looks pretty darn good, which for me is surprising because I was celiac.

You know, lots of dysfunction here, but it looked good. Now I'm stumped. And then I hear this report on the radio that when Notre Dame burned, it released 500 tons of lead dust into the environment.

The closer you were to Notre-Dame, the more exposure you got. Well, guess when I was in Paris. I So then I was like, I have a lead, a clue, right? I might be able to unravel this mystery.

And I test my metals and they were 25% higher than previously and that got my attention. I said to my husband, oh my God, we all got it, but I'm the sick one from this lead exposure.

And that started me on this path. And then I had already tested mycotoxins from a free kit that I got, and I have five strains. Then I decided to test the environmental toxins, I don't know, a whole bunch, you know.

Gasoline fume, nail polish toxins. Perchlorate, which is an endocrine disruptor. I like had all this stuff. When I look at my husband, like I'm such a dirty girl.

We're writing that book. I love that. It's all personal, right? And then I was like, we need to get the message out because I'm the poster child for Healthy Living, Betsy.

You've hung out with me. I don't eat anything that's fun. And I drink alcohol, I exercise. Am high strung, but I am not a stress ball. Like I do everything right and I got all these toxins.

So everyone else does too and they will share that before I get diagnosed with celiac which is the end result of an allergy to gluten. Any food can serve as a toxin too.

So gluten for me was toxic. And before I got diagnosed, every month I was at the gynecologist like, I have bacterial vaginosis, yeast infection, itching.

I am not right south of the border, right? And when I stopped and transformed my diet and started to fix my gut, all those south-of-the-border, those vaginal complaints disappeared.

It's personal. It's funny you say that. So I had similar, very similar issues. And I think that's part of the reason I became a gynecologist was to fix myself.

I mean, I remember going through yeast infection after yeast, infection, after bacterial infection and thinking same thing, like, was it something I was doing wrong?

And like I almost stopped. Well, pretty much during that time stopped having sex because I thought, well, the sex is causing it. Yeah. Now the six becomes almost this dysfunctional thing because you're like You want to stop and enjoy the time with your partner, but in the back of your mind, you're like, if I do this, I'm going to get a bladder infection or a yeast infection.

Something's going happen. This is point one. Your vagina is a microcosm of overall health. So if your vagina isn't right, it means something. It's not just like I am getting older.

It's not. Something's is not right. We need to figure it out. If you can't remember anything else from this conversation for the people who are listening, remember that if your vagina is okay, you're not okay.

And this is a good point, too, because a lot of people, when it comes to sex drive, libido, people think they take it for granted until it's not happening anymore.

And then there's this, well, I'm getting older, or there are some of my hormones. But really, it could be these toxins that people are exposing themselves to that we don't even know we're exposing ourselves to.

Right. It's like you walk outside and you're like, hit me. You're walk outside and you get inadvertently bombarded. I call it death by a thousand cuts because if you live on this earth, you're getting bombard with toxins.

And most of them, when the painters come and they paint your house and smell those VOCs, that's obvious, but air and water quality play a role. What you are eating plays a roll and the toxins in your food is all invisible.

It's like an invisible pandemic. And so it really does trickle down, right? If you have inflammation in the system and the systems not okay, your sex drive is going to take.

And that's not okay. And also, I got to mention too, because we have some men here on this summit, that this is both men and women too. Yes, and actually for men, it's even more important for a man, like if you don't wake up with an erection, if have trouble getting an erect or maintaining an eerection or you have a good sex drive, That's almost a bigger red flag for man than women.

And not to denigrate women at all, but the mechanics of getting an erection imply that you have healthy blood flow. So if you don't have a healthy flow, then you won't get an erect.

If you're having trouble getting erections, it means you've got cardiovascular disease, right? Because you blocked arteries. It's very concerning from a long-term health standpoint.

And then if don' really care if your have sex or not, that's a concern for testosterone, especially for men. Women, you and I, like, we get stressed and it's sex or stress.

Baby, can't have them both. For men, they're like stressed. They're, let's have sex, right? So, but eventually that cortisol steal will impact their sex drive.

And so, it is really important. If you don't a sex-drive, that means something is going on. Certainly, if your relationship isn't intact, then you're going to want to fix that.

But if you relationship is intact and your hormones are normal and you do not have a drive, there is something going. We need to evaluate and fix it. It's a good barometer.

Yeah. And it's tough because we can't get away from these toxins. So what are the things that we need to be concerned about and how do we deal with it?

Okay. This starts the horrifying part of the conversation, right? So the preface is Rome wasn't built in a day. You will not transform this in the day and you're going to screw it up.

Have some compassion for yourself. It's a process. A journey. Not a destination. So, the easiest way to think about toxins is to thing about what you're putting in your body.

You eat every day. So if you eat food that has herbicides, pesticides, insecticides you are putting those in you body, there are anything from endocrine disruptors to microbiome disruptor to cancer promoting agents.

Then there's the things we drink. If we drank sugar, that disrupts the microbiome. And stresses the adrenals. if we drinking alcohol, thats a flat-out toxin that stresses liver.

We drink from any type of plastic water bottle or plastic bottle that's an endocrine disruptor that can ultimately throw things off. So the first category is look at like, what are you putting in your mouth?

What's going in there and try to level up wherever you can. buy an organic food, convert to glass or ceramic or metal for your drinking containers, or decrease or eliminate alcohol, like start to chip away at this.

That's the end category. Then there's the on category. If you're female, and if you are a male who's into your routine, you've applied 150 chemicals by the time you start your day.

Crazy, right? And that's found in newborn's cord blood. We cannot get away from it. And it's things, they're all endocrine disrupting. They're phthalates.

There are plastic derivatives. The all disrupt our hormones. Then, there are straight up chemicals, if cosmetics from another country, those are often contaminated with heavy metals.

And I want to go back to the end category. If you use a lot of Ayurvedic supplements from other countries, sometimes have had toxins deliberately added to them.

They don't do it in the United States, but they used to add heavy metal to Ayurevedia treatment in other country. So you need to be really careful where you're getting your treatments from.

So when you look at what you're putting on your body, are your products clean? Are your beauty, your makeup, shampoo, conditioner, hair styling, dye, all of that we absorb through our skin.

And then the last category is what's around you. I'm sitting on this beautiful vegan leather chair. Guess what? Vegan leather's plastic. The microphone is plastic, the keyboard is, plastic the mouse is.

Plastic. I have all these beautiful lights so I don't look wrinkly except those have EMFs, right? There's lots of ways, air quality, water quality. Our beds have flame retardants in them, our nail polish has chemicals in it, we drive cars that have gasoline.

There is just this never ending list of way we get exposed to things. And we either breathe them, absorb them eat them. They land on us. There's a lot of ways that we get it, but it essentially gets into our system and then we need to clean it out.

That's how we got exposed and we're getting exposed to heavy metals, that's lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic. Then lead and mercury are the top three most toxic substances according to a branch of the CDC.

So, that, and then the mycotoxins, which are the toxins that mold puts out. And if you're thinking to yourself, well, I don't have mold in my bathroom, cool.

That's good. It's a start, but one out of every two buildings has had water damage. So the statistical probability of you not living in, working in going to school in having a dorm, being at your friend's house, you've been exposed to mold because of where you hung out, And then the last category is that other, which is all of the other chemicals.

If you live near a highway, a golf course, an industrial plant, farm, just right off the bat, if you renovate your house, you get new furniture, all these are off-gassing experiences.

Let's talk about maybe what are the things that you notice when you have toxins. Like, how do you know you have toxins? If you live on this earth, here's the punchline, we're going to give it first.

If your live in this Earth, you'll have toxin. Congratulations, your toxins. Then the question is, is it clinically relevant? Are you someone who's really good at detoxifying, in which case you're gonna know that you are because you in amazing health.

You wake up in the morning, and you completely rested. Your body functions the way it should, You feel it looks the it way should. you can build muscle the you expect.

Your brain works. If you're female, your periods are fine. The regular, you have no fertility challenges. Your vagina is invisible, meaning it doesn't bother you.

You're weight is where you think it should be. Essentially, there's nothing you could fix, okay? I don't really actually know anybody like that, but okay.

Then, okay, there's the symptoms like hair loss, acne, brain fog, heart palpitations, asthma, anything with the gut, bloating, gas, diarrhea, constipation, any female, bad periods, heavy periods.

No periods difficulty conceiving, difficulty staying pregnant, low sex drive, that's men and women, weight gain, pain. And then there's the diagnoses, autoimmune disease.

That includes celiac disease, Hashimoto's. Then there is cardiometabolic, so polycystic ovarian syndrome, any type of hypertension or coronary artery disease or corneary vascular disease diabetes type 2, not type 1, although type one is an auto immune disease so type-1 diabetes for the unimmune part and type two for ongoing and then degenerative diseases like Parkinson's or multiple sclerosis or even dementia or cancer.

So if you fall into any of them, if any, of those you're like, oh, I have that, okay, it can track back to toxins. They're inflammatory. And so when we track it back to your sex drive and your female health and you're male health, what happens is, let's get really specific, anytime we get exposed to an endocrine disrupting agent, our hormones are part of that endocrine system and it throws them off.

And when you don't process your hormones properly or your endocrine disrupting agents because they look like hormones in the body, when do you process them properly?

They wind up as free radicals. Free radical are inflammatory, pro-cancer promoting, and pro dysfunction promoting. And so when we have those, they either get stored in our fat because it's like a storage depot or they proceed into phase two in liver to get bound and excreted.

But there can be dysfunction if you have dysfunction in your gut or dysbiosis, overactive beta-glucuronidase enzyme. Then, instead of pooping out your hormone that's inert, you recycle the toxic hormone.

Now you're back to ground zero, right? And what you start to see is fibroids, heavy periods, sexual dysfunction. It starts to snowball, so skew this towards women, but men aren't immune either.

One of my kids sent to one of family members. You have breasts. This family member was a man from the record, said to the family, you have breast, do you know you had breasts?

And I was like, that's an estrogen dominant state for men, right? So men grow breasts, women grow fibroids. Yeah. So you have toxins. If you've any of those things, it's important to start to work on how do we level up and how we get you healthy because you're meant to be vital, vibrant, healthy, alive, able and interested in intimacy till you are at least 100 and every decade should get better than the one before.

How do you get there from where you were now? Get rid of the toxins? Wow. And what are the, what things can we do to try to help get rid of the toxins?

I mean, definitely go see somebody like you and see like a functional medicine integrative doctor can do all the fancy tests. But, you know, for people who are like, Oh, I want to start today.

Yeah. So you bring up a really good point, Betsy, because there's things you can do on your own, and there are so many things that you could do in your home.

And then there is things I go, okay, work with someone like me or another senior functional medicine provider. The things can you do it on you own. You can level up your food. You can ditch processed and packaged food on on own you don't need a specialist for that.

you can minimize alcohol, you get rid of alcohol. You can ditch the plastic storage containers, You know, it's funny, my kids went to overnight camp and they both came home, I don't know if they bought it or if you were given a gift of a water bottle.

So they show up in the camp colors with the water bottles that are plastic. They came home three weeks ago. Do you know how much laundry two children generate when they come home from camp after three week?

It's awful. So you can clean up your laundry detergent. Anyway, I come into the kitchen the other night and these two plastic water bottles are sitting there and I'm like, no, nah.

I throw them out. My husband's like what are you doing? They're new. And he's in the game with me. We wrote the book together. And I'm like, no. He said, but they're good for hiking.

I said so are the aluminum, I am sorry, not aluminum. The metal ones that are steel that I've tested for lead and don't have lead that just as light as those.

It's the filling with water that makes it heavy, the metal is light. So get rid of the plastic water bottles wherever you can. Don't heat food in plastic.

You can do all that your own, right? Minimize your sugar. Level up your beauty products. Environmental Working Group is my favorite source for figuring out if what I'm using is clean.

Having said that, there are three brands that I love, so I'll make it easy on you. The three things I use on my face, beauty count four things. beauty counter.

They have facial toners, makeup, glow-ups, whatever, and then they have full-on makeup. So I use them for 80% of what I used. And then I'll use Mineral Fusions, which is another clean brand.

Then I will use Purity Woods, for face care. I then use Burt's Bees for lipstick. So I pretty much use four things. Those are four companies that are great.

And then you can level up your cleaning supplies, your laundry detergent, you're dish washing detergents. For that, I use Aspen Clean. They're EWG certified.

kitchen cleaner, floor cleaner laundry detergent and dishwashing detergents. So I put it all on auto ship and actually I was just notified today that my next delivery is coming.

Those are things you can do. If you do construction on your home, don't use any paint or varnishes that have VOCs, volatile organic compounds. They are cancer-promoting.

They're endocrine-disrupting. Don't use them, right? Like, go for no VOC paint. There's a company called Vermont Natural Casings that has stains. It's derived from milk, and it doesn't have any smell.

And you can stain your stairs. You know, we stain the chicken coop with it. We use it for any stains outside or in. So you can do all that. You can filter your air and water.

And what I say is filter it to the best ability of your budget. So if you could afford something on the counter, great. Everything's better than nothing.

Do what you do and filter you air, and or your water, if your going to do your whole house, cool. If you're going do room by room, that's great too. wash your clothes before using them.

Don't take them to the dry cleaner because that's formaldehyde. And maybe you want to be preserved when you're dead. I don't even know if I want it to preserved then, but you don' want be preserve when your alive.

It's not healthy for you. If you are going to buy a bed, buy it without a flame retardant. So if you have a gasoline powered car, don''t pump your own gas.

So there's a lot. I know, I was going to say New Jersey does not laugh. So my husband was so funny, like I'm not pumping my gas anymore. He goes, but it's more expensive.

And I said, great, we're spending so much money on detox because it is not cheap to detox. Look, our book is meant to be a roadmap to help you level up.

People can read the book, you can follow us online. It's all about how do you clean it up? But then there comes a point where, okay, you need the data, You need to understand what you're treating.

If you've done all that and you don't take a turn for the better, then you go, Okay, we need more data. We're missing something here. And that's when you would want to work with a functional medicine provider who can test you and not guess about what your got.

You can pretty much say, Oh, OK, based on your story, I know what's you got, but how will I when treatment is successful? Your energy will improve long before your metals are gone.

your hair will start to grow back long before your mycotoxins are gone. Like all of these things, you'll think you're done, but you are not done. You just feel better.

Okay. So that's when you want to work with someone is when, when need the data and or you've gone as far as you can go on your own. But there's so many things you could do on their own, and you hold the keys to the kingdom.

You made us so many great points. And as I'm sitting here, I need to go through my makeup and get rid of probably majority of it. Because I've done the whole environmental working group when I got the soaps and the shampoos and house cleaners.

But I forgot about the makeup. I will admit I am an Amazon buyer. God only knows when it comes to personal product what you're getting, unfortunately.

on Amazon. So that's another thing too. I have a lot of patients who are like, well, when they buy vitamins and supplements, everyone's so used to, all right, I just go onto Amazon, press the buttons and click and, or they go and buy the bulk size vitamins from Costco.

But they're finding, especially with Amazon there's been a number of articles where they know that there is counterfeit products. Yeah, it's bootlegged.

It sits in warehouses that are not temperature controlled. It's so funny, there's two things recently happened. My dad sent me an article yesterday about often supplements don't have what they're supposed to have and they have stuff they are supposed not to.

And I said to him, that's why we test our supplements for impurities, heavy metals, mycotoxins and other contaminants and we tests for does it have the level that it says it has, right?

So I'm not really brain conscious. I can't look at you and be like, oh, you're wearing Prada. But I'm brand conscious about supplements because you want to know where it comes from and know that you're getting it, I would say, from a physician-approved brand, a physicians-vendored brand because it's good in that case.

And then my mother-in-law said to us, we have all these supplements. She said, to me, yeah. I went to Costco and I got melatonin and it got sick. Okay, there's a lot to unpack there, but like why would you buy supplements when we have – we'll just give it to you.

She's like, oh, I feel like I use a lots. I'm like nobody's going to take more than me, right? Because I used like 30 supplements. So really, do – I was like be brand conscious.

Do make sure that you're getting things from places that are high quality, that have been vetted. Like we vet everything. We look at it. And then we make our own too.

And so you want to definitely be brain conscious and level up. Essentially the best time to level-up, especially if you're listening and you like, when should I, I got to do everything all at once, right?

That's a female and a very human thing to say is like okay, have to be perfect. In my response is, okay. If you have three personal assistants and unlimited funds, Have them take that project on and Level you up Wouldn't that be nice?

Yeah, right? But if that's not your life, don't throw everything out because that is hundreds of dollars. You're not going to move the needle by using it for another month or month and a half.

It's just not gonna move a needle. So what I see to people is as you're running out of something, that when you want to level up, okay? Because otherwise you get analysis paralysis like where should I start first?

So my coaching is always start with the thing that you need to buy. Go to Environmental Working Group, go to Think Dirty. I just heard of Yuca. But the EWG is my favorite.

They have an app. You can scan the barcode. If it's rated, it'll show up. So the thing you're running out of is really the top priority. As you buy more food, level up for organic.

You know what I didn't even think about what i've been doing and i'm like oh this I forgot this might be a problem is I buy special coffee at home that I know has been tested for mycotoxins because I Know that's a Problem with the coffee beans except for I've Been running down to Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts very often late late and going well that doesn't mean no good if I have the mic the mycotoxin free coffee sitting at Home, but I'm running out and getting the coffee from these other places.

Yeah. So coffee and wine, I'll say, are these dirty little secrets. They both have tons of pesticides sprayed on them and they're both, not the wine but the coffee is tremendously moldy.

You do need to look for organic coffee that is not mold. The two brands I know are Purity and Bulletproof. I don't even drink coffee, but my family, I'm like, you need to drink purity.

So we have all the different strains of it because I am like I do not care. I will get you whatever I want or whatever you want. Then with wine, wine has tons of pesticides in it.

And then when you layer on that when your drink wine it converts to sugar and feeds yeast and throws off your gut, which throws of your vagina. or throws off your adrenals because it's stressful and then that throws of your sex drive, you know, it is like circling the drain.

So I usually say go for dry farm wine, which is lower sugar, doesn't have the pesticides, is organic. You always want to level up, right? Like you're not going to be perfect, just want be better.

Yeah, yeah. Oh my goodness. There's so much, and we can probably talk about this for hours because there's just so many information, but you gave us some great places to start.

Is there anything that I didn't ask you that you wanted to mention? I think we just want to make sure we stress that when your sex drive, your hormones are off, or your vagina is off or you can't get an erection, and anything that's wrong in the realm of hormones and sex, it means something's not right upstream.

And it's important to figure that out because, like I mentioned, if you cannot get erections, that signifies coronary artery disease. That's concerning, right?

Like you don't want to have a heart attack. And so most guys aren't like, wait, I can't get heart and that means I have heart disease? Yes. So we really do want take those things seriously.

It's dysfunction in the mechanics. That implies there's just function elsewhere. so it's really important to not just poo poo it. You're not getting older.

you might be getting more stressed and less resilient. But all of the dysfunction that you're experiencing is reversible. I think that's the most important thing to remember is it's fixable.

It's reversible, don't just talk it up to getting older because that is not real. And I disagree wholeheartedly with that. Yeah, I agree with you. Where can people find out more information about you?

And I didn't tell you, can I tell we have a gift? Yes, yes. Okay, so a couple of things. So if you're interested in working with us as patients in the medical bricks and mortar practice, that's fivejourneys.com.

We're in Massachusetts, you have to get yourself to Massachusetts for the first consult. And then if you're in Timbuktu and you are like, oh, I'm not going to get there, we have an online brand called Dirty Girl Detox.

And that is for people who want to do programs, who to want get supplements, want some coaching or testing done, but not actually establish a physician-patient relationship.

It's more of a wellness behavior. That's dirtygirldetox dot com. If you want to read chapter one of the book or take a quiz to figure out how toxic you are or get, we have a huge guide that we give out.

So if you any of that, that's at dirtygirldetox.com forward slash gift. And then you can follow me on Instagram and Facebook. I'm at Wendy Trubo MD. so I am committed to bringing this into daily life so that you could transform your health.

Really. Thank you so much, Wendy, for being with us, because this has been just amazing. And I think it's something we all need to look into, you know, no matter where we are in life.

If we're dealing with symptoms, definitely. But, if you have family, friends, loved ones who don't have symptoms they want to be addressing this now before they develop those symptoms.

Yeah. Don't wait until you were sick like me. That's the bottom line, right? I was really sick. Yeah. So once again, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us and everybody go make sure you check out Dr.

Wendy and all those wonderful links and stick around because we have more great sessions coming up. Thank you for tuning into Dr Talks. We hope today's episode has enlightened and inspired you on your path to optimal health.

Each day is a new opportunity to make choices that empower your well-being. For more insights and strategies, subscribe to our podcast and visit our website, www.doctortalks.com.

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