Toxins’ Insidious Effects on Health

Introduction to Dr. Wendy Tribble 0:00

Welcome back to another episode of the Restore Your Mitochondrial Matrix Summit. I'm your host, Laura Frontera, Ontario. I'm bringing you experts to help you boost your energy and fix your health so you can build the life you love. Today, my special guest is Doctor Wendy Tribble. Hi, Wendy. Welcome to the summit. Hi, Laura. Great to be here. It is so good to have you here. I mean, I'm new. You're new in my circle of friends in my life. I met you a couple of months ago, at a medical conference, and it was instant attraction.

I knew I had to have you in my circle of women. And so I'm really glad to have you here. You are a specialist in all things toxins. You're really big specialist on mitochondria. And basically anti-aging and reversing the effects of toxins in the body. So this is what everyone wants to know. And I want to introduce you to our audience. You, you specialize in helping women optimize their health and lives. As a functional medicine gynecologist, you actually have a Western medicine MD background and functional medicine.

So incredible. And you had your own struggles with more metal toxicity and celiac disease and other health issues. And that helped you really have a deep sense of compassion and expertise for what your patients were facing. And that was a really a big part of your journey to functional medicine. It sounds like. Yeah, yeah, well, you have a book. It's right there behind you on the shelf. This is a fantastic book. It's, you're the coauthor of The Dirty Girl. I love the the title of your book, ditched the toxins look great and feel freaking amazing.

And that's my experience of you is just saying how it is. You want to feel freaking amazing. Yeah. You've got you've got a clinic in Massachusetts, you have a telemedicine clinic, and you have online courses for women all over the world. So welcome, welcome. Huge warm welcome to summit. Thank you. I'm just so excited to be here. When I was like, yes, I'm talking to Laura today. Yay! I know you look at your calendar and go, I get to hang out with my friend. Exactly. So thank this is perfect I know, and I just I just have to say, I mean, tell a quick story to the audience before we jump in.

So my very first experience of you, right. The very first time I met you, you were sitting directly across from me at a dinner that we were both at. For practitioners, it was kind of a networking practitioner event, really fancy restaurant, fancy steakhouse. The seafood tower that they brought was insanely amazing. And I looked at you and you brought your own food, and you were not about to be. What did you call it? Gluten bombed, organized, gluten ized at a restaurant because you were one of the speakers at the event, and the next day

What Toxins Are and Why They Matter 2:51

and you had a big talk to give, and you weren't about to let anything take you out of your A game. And so that was my very first experience of you, is a woman who stands for herself, who does whatever it takes for herself on a shame and unabashedly, you just did what it took. And I've got mad respect for that, because a lot of people would feel very intimidated to come to a dinner with a bunch of doctors and bring her own food, because you do worry about what are they going to think about me? Am I going to be judged?

And I just I'm just sharing this story because I know there's people watching right now who have celiac disease, who have, you know, they know they have food intolerances, and they just don't want to be troublesome for other people and they don't want to, you know, bring attention to themselves. But you just do what it takes to take care of yourself. So I applaud that. And nobody judges you for that. In fact, we all have really deep respect for you for doing that. And you crushed it at your talk the next day.

You didn't get gluten, a meal. But Laura, you bring up a really, really important point because, okay, I would say 99% of people listening don't have celiac and 99.9% of the people probably don't have celiac or don't know they have celiac. And maybe there's 2% of people who have gluten sensitivity or maybe 5 or 10, but everyone else listening still runs into times when they might not be able to do what works for them, or might feel funny about doing what works for them. Right? Like, you go to the holiday party and it's so not food that you eat, or you go to your friend's house and you know that the food's going to be terrible and you don't want to eat a bunch of you know, macaroni and cheese or there's a lot of ways in which, as women, we do things that don't work for us because we don't want to make a fuss.

And my personal goal is to inspire and empower women to feel freakin amazing. But you can't do it if you're always getting setback around food, right? Like, you know, you do something. It doesn't work for you. Your setback, then you going to crawl out of the hole, you get back to good, and then another life event happens. So it's not just if you have food sensitivities. It's like you're on a special program. I always say to people, blame your doctor. Just see that your doctor said you, you know, you had to be on the special program because it works for you, right?

Yeah. So a lot of peer pressure out there. There is. But you you stood up for yourself and did what it takes. And I noticed and it was amazing. And that's you. And that's in that moment where I said, I want her in my life because she's bold and courageous and doing whatever it takes. So we're going to have a good talk today about mitochondria, about why they're important, about impaired mitochondrial function. But why don't we start with toxins? Because that's your specialty. This is the reason that you ordered or that you brought your own food to that restaurant.

So start by sharing what are toxins? I love this question. So any anything you ingest or put on your body or put in you around, you could be a toxin. So too much of a good thing can be bad, right? For me, gluten is a toxin for everyone. Heavy metals are toxins, toxic cleaners, nail polish has toxins, beauty products have toxins. And before we dive too far in, Laura, we really need to set the foundation for this. That mitochondria do not do well. When they get toxins. They don't like it when they're flooded and they don't function as well.

And then you go, what difference does that make? Well, your hair, your skin, your energy, your sex drive, your vitality, your joy of like your ability to live a life of contribution and empowerment goes down when your mitochondria are unhappy. So we have to set the stage of saying, all of this really does impact the mitochondria profoundly. So toxins are anything that you're exposed to that's serving to harm you.

Everyday Exposure: Products, Clothing, and Home 6:45

So that's a wide range of things. Yeah. And I would even say in that group I would put low grade chronic infections. Yep. Bacteria, parasites, stress stress stress is a toxin okay. Yeah. So where do we want to go from here. Let's unpack toxins. Maybe put them in some categories and talk about how they're impacting your health. Yeah. Let's talk about the ways that you're exposed I think it's easiest I put the ways you're exposed into three buckets. And then I put the toxins themselves into three buckets.

You can kind of start to I always think of it like that game in the arcade where you drop a ball in and then it trickles down and you figure out where it winds up. So yeah, the three ways you get exposed to toxins one, what you put in your body, that's your food. The quality of it, how you're digesting and absorbing it. Your your liquid that includes water. Are you drinking from single use plastic water bottles? What's the quality of the water itself? And then alcohol or kombucha from a plastic water bottle.

Anything that you're putting in you can be a potential toxin. And horrifying, horrifying. Laura in 1989. So we're talking, you know, more than 30 years ago, go bust in a Massachusetts study found that 1 in 6 deaths was due to air or water quality. 1 in 6 people were dying. And that was 30 years ago. And it's only gotten worse. So. So okay, what you're putting in your body then, what you put on your body. And if you're female, you have likely been exposed to about 150 toxins before you start your day.

Meaning when I say start your day, meaning start your job, whatever your job is, if it's taking care of the kids, if it's going to a paid work, if you're leaving the house, whatever. But once you've gotten ready in the morning, you've been en exposed on average, to about 150 toxins. Whoa whoa whoa whoa. Okay. It's 150 toxins coming from. Break that down. I know people have heard that before, but let's talk about where they're at. Look at the things that you wash your hair with. Dry your hair with putting your hair to keep it from being flyaway.

Then put it in to hold it in place the things that you're putting on your skin to wash tone, moisturize, make makeup. What are you brushing your teeth with? Everything that you use what are what are you using for deodorant. My my my one of my kids said to me then another one of my kids really needed antiperspirant and I was like, I am not going to give a kid antiperspirant because that means you are not sweating and not sweating is really bad for detox, I said, but maybe they need some deodorant because they're stinky, right?

They just, you know, my kid's entering puberty. He's a stinky little thing. So all of those things that you put on your body, I mean, nail polish, well, it was it broke my heart. I used to, you know, I'm a surgeon, so I have precise, precise aim. And I used to do my nails every Sunday. Drove my husband nuts. I did my nails laid with my hands on top of the covers until I fell asleep. And then in the morning. And I have perfect nails. And they did it myself. And every week was a different thing. And then I was like, oh, oh, it's not natural.

It's not natural, right? There's a lot of chemicals. Even though it's a better form. Yeah, it was still too much for my system because I had mitochondrial disease. And even before we jumped on this call, we had a little talk about eyelashes. And, you know, there's a lot of different options out there right now for people from gluon to now, the magnetic ones. And both you and I are wondering what heavy metals are in those magnetic eyelash, the the liquid liner that sticks it on that's, that's getting into your bloodstream and, and causing a toxic burden.

So I mean, it comes in so many forms. Wendy. Yes. It's it's really everywhere. And it can feel very overwhelming, especially if you're highly functioning and you're busy and you're like, oh my God, I can't deal with this. So let's just pause here for a second and take one little step down the rabbit hole to say it's tempting to want to throw everything out. Don't do that. Don't do that because you have to replace everything, right? Right. So what I would say is pick the thing you're running out of, whatever that is.

For me, it's mascara. Every six weeks, like clockwork, I, you know, get rid of my mascara because I had it on autoship for my boyfriend. You know, Jeff, Jeff's my boyfriend. He sends me everything I want. Super nice guy. So anyway, I had it on a autoship, and then I was like, okay, it's time to level up, right? So whatever you're running out of or whatever you're about to get a shipment of, that's the thing to look for. What can I clean up? Okay. You know, while we're on that topic, that reminds me things that people auto ship, feminine hygiene products as well.

Yes yes yes. Getting that get or getting you think about it. You don't want to put non-organic food in your mouth, but you put it in your vagina. So cotton that's been treated with pesticides, you're absorbing the pesticide. So yes, go for organic 100% cotton wherever possible. Right. So yeah, you totally you nailed that one. I just keep thinking of more things as we talk, right? There's so many things. It's nonstop, honestly. So that's the stuff you put on your body. Basically anything that you put on your body and you know, your clothing, anything you put on your body is a potential source of toxins.

And then there's the stuff around you, which is another oh, wait wait wait wait wait wait wait, what are they? Oh, hold on a second. So what comes to mind for me is what I call disposable clothing. So you go into the stores that shall not be named where everything is like $19 and it's literally made out of plastic. The clothes are made out of plastic. They're not made out of cotton. So that's your I need one outfit one time, and the first time you wash it, it's going to fall apart. Remember, we go shopping in those places in our 20s and 30s.

I don't shop there anymore. But, Yeah, clothing has toxins and the dyes, the dyes as well. The dyes and new, you know, that I used to love that new clothing smell, but it's super toxic. It's formaldehyde. And like, yes, I want to be well preserved, but not like that. That is not how I want to be, like looking good, because I've been basically replaced with with the stuff they putting you when you die want that. So. Oh, it's really important to wash your clothes well before you wear them for the first time.

And you know, we pretty much put a, put a, a fatwa on my, dry cleaning. So if it can't be washed, we don't buy it. Period. Yeah, yeah, I hear you because otherwise it's chemical.

Heavy Metals and Mold Toxicity 13:39

And so I was all excited. Laura, there's this natural dry cleaner down the street from my house, so I called them. I, I've just now had the brain space to look up and sort of go, oh, right. So I actually got the time to call him. And I called him like, hey, hi, what do you use? And he tells me this whole long name and he's like, it's supernatural. I said, okay, great. I go look it up. He is a big fat liar. It is not supernatural. It's a derivative of formaldehyde. And I was like, thank you very much.

Great talk, you know. Yeah. And we didn't go there. So there's it's not possible to do dry cleaning naturally. You can do dry shampoo naturally. Super easy arrowroot, whatever color you are like. I'm dark, so you either put charcoal or cacao in it. And any fragrance like an actual tea tree oil or other oil that you want it to smell like. Yes, you can do dry shampoo easily, but you can't do dry cleaning naturally. Doesn't exist. So we've got three buckets, right? So we've covered the first two, the third eating inside our body.

On our body. Okay. What's the third around you. So think, let's start with the bed you sleep in. Unless it's organic, has likely been treated with flame retardant, which is an endocrine disruptor which ultimately stresses the mitochondria. And even some of the organic beds that say they're organic when they track it back into the countries that it comes from, the oversight is very small. And so there's a chance that you're also getting pesticides in your organic bed. But you do your best. Right. It's you can only do what you can do.

So your bed your bedding, the there. This is a little interesting. If you're someone who has seasonal allergies, dust mites love down. And so even though down in and of itself isn't isn't bad if you have seasonal allergies and it's triggering you as a toxin, that way you can react to your down comforter. So I would say replace it with silk dust mites don't like it. What kind of pillow are you sleeping on? Is it plastic? You know what's in your pillow? What is in your pillow? Is it. Is it something plastic and then.

Or is it down or is it something else? What are you sleeping on? Then you think about do you live? I know there's a lot of people in Florida who live on a golf course, but golf courses spray to keep their grass nice and monoculture. Monoculture is totally not what nature wants. Nature wants variety. Monoculture grass is it needs to be sprayed in order to maintain that. So spraying on a golf course or spraying if you live next to a non-organic farm or if you live near an industrial plant, these are all places that are off gassing in some way or exposing you to chemicals.

What about, what about our just our home in general and the furniture and the flooring and the paint? Yep. All of it. There are paints now that are no VOC, meaning no volatile organic compounds. Those are bad for you. Toxic to the mitochondria. Everything's toxic to the mitochondria when you get down to it. So, yeah, if it's bad for you, it's bad for the mitochondria. So you can if you're doing construction look for a non VOCs. When you're cleaning your house, look for clean ingredients. My favorite site is environmental working group ewg.org.

Because you can either search by product to see like. And every once in a while you'll get a product right. And you'll actually pick the product that's highly rated. One out of my 300 products that I checked was perfect. It was my Physician's Formula bronzer, and I was like, oh, go me one product, one product, one product. Everything else. I was like, oh, okay, no moving right on. So so you can either search by product, see if you did a good job, or you can search by category to see what their recommendations are.

So I always recommend going there. Look for so something just to make it easy on people because I've already done all this work. My favorite makeup brand is Beauty Counter because they sell everything. So for me it's one stop, right? It's I go and I get everything on my face at beauty counter. And then the things that we clean our house with is Aspen clean. And they have they have everything from dishwashing detergent to, dishwasher. And then they have soap and they have things to clean your floor.

They everything. Going back to what you asked about the other stuff that's off gassing, there are some ways you can do shopping, like Wayfair has an option. It's kind of buried in the search and filter on the left. Maybe it's on the left, maybe it's on the right. But in the search and filter, you can filter by sustainable sourced. And even within that you can search by proposition 65 approved. There's a lot of or you can search by certified organic. So you can shop with Wayfair in ways that won't off gas, which is really nice.

That's how we got our most recent couch, because we needed a couch and I was like, I don't even have time to go to the store. So we got it off Wayfair and it was sustainably sourced and no and no, no flame retardants, which is really important thing. Yeah. And you know, if it came off Wayfair, it looks good too. Exactly. It looks good. It doesn't smell I do not gas. So so it's really important to think about what you're doing. And, you know, just a note, I think we should probably talk about what are the buckets of toxins, because I'm about to say if you're a weekend warrior and your house was built before 1978, it may have lead paint in it.

So if you're a weekend warrior who loves to do DIY projects and like, oh, I, you know, renovated the wall, I'd ripped out this, I ripped out that you're getting exposed to lead. So it's really important to understand the sources of toxins so that you don't expose yourself unknowingly. Yeah, absolutely. My, my dad, is a general contractor, you know, from the 60s and 70. And when we, you know, tested him for metals. Sure enough, not surprising that there was a high level. Oh. I'm sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're pretty common.

So that's the first bucket is heavy metals. And that's we're looking primarily at lead and mercury. But we're also looking at arsenic thallium and cadmium. But I would say you know tier one is lead and mercury. Tier two two is arsenic thallium and cadmium. And lead is primarily found in homes built before 1978. Industrial processes. Lead pipes are still 10 million homes. The United States that have lead pipes. It's 22. It's in our water. So it's in our water. It's in our water. It's contaminated in the ground.

So you can get exposed in a lot of different ways. Also, if you came from someone who had high lead exposure, meaning if you were born to someone who had high lead and it does cross the placenta, and then if they nurse you go for them because it's great. However, it is a detox event for them and they release toxins into the breast milk, which you then drink. You know, I just had a new appreciation for the fact that I was raised in a log cabin. No joke. We had, we had wood walls, no paint. Go mom and dad.

That was totally right. Yeah. Yep. Although one of the guys I did a summit with grew up on a non-organic farm and said he was so sick by the time he left his parents home because of all the pesticides that he was being exposed to, he was like, I actually felt better when I moved away. Yeah. So it's these subtle things. So, you know, think about it. Your neighbors, I, I love my neighbor. He lies on the ground and picks weeds. He and his father. So I was like, oh, cool. It's a natural yard, right? No.

I drive home one day and I see he's got a can of roundup and he spray, he's spot spraying and I'm like, do I say something or do I not say something? I didn't say something because I honestly never talked to him anyway. Okay. We were like two houses away. Yeah. But even your neighbors spraying their yard if they mass spray can drift over to you.

How Toxins Affect Health and Mitochondria 22:00

So there's more about the things that are around you. You know, what's being sprayed in your in your environment. Okay. So going back to the categories the lead and then the mercury is fish and feelings or being born to someone who had mercury. Let's say the heavy mercury fisher mahi mahi. That delicious fatty tuna belly Chilean sea bass swordfish and you know it's so funny. I mean, this is what I do for my career, right? I'm like evaluating people for their toxins. So I'll say to women, okay, do you eat sushi? Yes.

How often? Only twice a week. Okay. You're eating the heavy mercury fish only twice a week. And I'm like, oh, buddy, one serving is enough for most people for more than a month. Meaning one serving of the heavy mercury fish six ounces. Yeah. Has enough mercury in it that it should keep you satisfied for mercury for at least a month. So for mercury. So like you got your quota while we're on that topic. So, so you might go for some salmon instead. Yes. But I challenge you to find wild caught salmon at a sushi joint and not farmed.

So and that's full of all kinds of pollutants and toxins. And so I'm to the point now where I don't need it anymore. Yeah, it's a little bit of damned if you do, damned if you don't, Laura. Because if you think about it, the farm raised has its issues, but the wild caught is full of plastic. Even though the salmon doesn't have mercury, it's got plastic. So my general philosophy, because it'll make you nuts. I mean, look, we wrote a book on it, right? It makes you nuts. And so my general philosophy is you do the best you can with the information you have.

You don't sweat. You don't sweat anything except sweating to get the toxins out. All you do is like sweat, go sweat, exercise, sauna, sauna, blanket, Epsom salt bath doesn't make you sweat, sweat, but don't sweat it. I it I love it. Okay, so what other buckets of toxins should we cover. So we got the metals. And then there's the mycotoxins. Mycotoxins are the toxins that your body that get put out in your body when you're exposed to mold. So when you have mold in your body you make mycotoxins and you can measure them and they can make you sick as hell.

So and stress the mitochondria. So we want to evaluate around you. You know, you think about buildings. I heard a report that over 50% of buildings in the United States have some type of mold damage, I believe. Right. So mold in buildings, schools or super moldy dorms or super moldy. So right there and there is an a human who's grown up without being exposed to a school brain. And then if you go to college, you go to the dorms. So and then if you, you have a 5050 chance of having a building with water damage.

So pretty much you can assume that you've been exposed. And then about 30 to 40% of the population has genes that make them more susceptible and react to it. I got those genes. I got all the bad genes. So, it can cause hair loss. It can cause it's implicated in degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis, dementia, straight up dementia, brain fog, thyroid dysfunction, rashes, difficulty losing weight, I mean, you name it. And pretty much mycotoxins are implicated in it.

Oh yeah. Terrifying. And then the third bucket is all the other stuff. So that is your gasoline fumes, your paints, your nail polish, your beauty products that are endocrine disruptors, the clothing that has formaldehyde in it, the herbicides, pesticides, insecticides. That's where glyphosate falls. It's the most commonly used herbicide in the world. In 2014, there were like 250 million pounds used. You can't even you can't even figure that number out. It's like, what is that? Right? That's how much was used agriculturally.

You can't escape it. I mean, it's literally impossible, at least in the United States. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, the other thing I want to go back to around mycotoxins, a lot of grains are moldy because, you know, you think about it, they get thrashed and they sit and they're moldy as they sit. And that's actually corn, oats, wheat, all of it's moldy. And so if you're eating a lot of grains, you can get exposed to it that way. Coffee's moldy. A lot of it. Unless it's tested. Yeah. We've got some good options for coffee.

Yes, you can get some good life boost.

Reducing Exposure and Supporting Detox 26:30

What else you got? There's bulletproof. There's purity. Yeah, I don't even drink coffee. But those are the two I know. I love life boost girl over here. Good stuff. Okay. So we've got all these buckets of these three buckets of toxins. Yeah. All right. Now how are they impacting our health. You mentioned briefly endocrine disruptors. We could go down that path and talk about what they're doing to your organs to your mitochondria. To your hormones. Yeah I mean let me share with you. Before I got diagnosed, I really was sick head to toe.

So I lost about half the hair on my head. I had a rash on my face that would not quit. I had brain fog, I had fatigue, I had no sex drive. You know, I could still have an orgasm, but I didn't want to. I was like, just don't bug me, you know? I'm tired, I couldn't lose. I was not overweight, but I was about 15 pounds heavier than I am now. And it didn't feel good, right? I was like, it doesn't feel good on my body. I don't feel like I look good, I don't like, you know, I had this extra chin. Yeah, I feel like I look good.

And I had messed up periods. I had crazy hot flashes. My sleep was disrupted. I just was a mess, right? It was like an end in the discovery of. Or the exploration of what? What on earth is going on here? Because this is not normal. You know, we say you're meant to be vital, vibrant, healthy, alive, interested in, and able to perform intimacy until you're at least 100. I was nowhere near that standard. And when we did this evaluation, I had heavy metals, mycotoxins, and a whole bunch of others. Right.

And, and and really, because we're talking about mitochondria, when you think about when mitochondria are not healthy, you get tired. You don't recover as well from from stressors. You don't sleep as well. It impacts everything down the line, you know. So and you don't do detox as well because your liver uses your liver, your brain, your muscles are all heavy. Utilize hours of mitochondria or high concentrations of mitochondria. And so if they're not functional, your liver can't do its job to detox you.

So I mean, it's it just piles up. You pile it on. So there's hope right. There's always hope. We can we can minimize our exposure and we can heal. So can you share with us how to do that. Sure love to because there's always hope. So it's really important. You can't really do detox until you've managed what I call the platforms of life. So that is eating properly, handling your gut, making sure that you're pooping every day 2 to 3 times a day. Okay, so eating well, pooping, making sure that your minerals and nutrients are balance, that you're getting what the body needs.

You know, the mitochondria love cook your it loves carnitine. So giving the body what it needs making sure you sleep. Because if you don't sleep, you don't drain toxins out of your brain. And you don't rest and recover, making sure that you're not an inordinate stress. All right. So being being hard on yourself, stressing about things that you can't control, those actually take a toll on your adrenals, your liver and your gut. And it shuts down detox, which means your mitochondria don't heal. Not at all.

Having a relationship with yourself that's healthy. I always say to people who have a really loud conversation about themselves, take on my view of you instead of your view of you. Take on someone else's view because it's it's so much more empowering than your own view at times. If you can't get out of your own way, look at yourself through another lens. So having a relationship with yourself that's healthy and then having relationship with others that's healthy, these are the platforms. And then having a why?

Why would you do this? Why does it matter that you work on your health and that you bring your own food to a restaurant and be weird, right? Why does it matter? Because you are living for something bigger and you're out to make a difference. So handle your platform. And then we talk about, okay, what's a girl to do, right? You want to figure out the major sources of exposure in your life. You know, if you live in a house built before 1978, you're going to want to invest in making sure you clean the walls and clean the floors.

Routinely filtered filter the air, filter your water. Eat high quality food. If you are eating heavy mercury fish, stop. If you have mercury fillings in your mouth, get them taken out by a biologic dentist. Not just the dentist who's like, sure, I can take that out. I did that once. I was so sick. And then I went to a biologic dentist who protected me. So make sure you're protected so you don't get a big body burden of mercury on top of, you know, already having mercury look to see how you can clean up what you're putting on your body as you run out.

Level up only as you run out. Don't don't do a clean sweep unless you have a personal assistant and unlimited funds, in which case, great. Stick them on that and say, okay, you have 30 days to transform my health, right? Right. And then and then look to see what's around you that you can control. And that's the most important thing, what you can control. So my daughter's car died. We we drove it into the ground. Right. It was like 15 years old. It has 180,000 miles on it. It is now going no further.

And I'm like, I'm not putting $6,000 into it. So we got her a new car and guess what? New cars have like Reeboks. That's like 300 different chemicals set off gas indefinitely. So I was like, there's no way that you're going to drive around in this car unless we get you an air filter. So we have control over that, right? I can't control the new chemicals, but I can control filtering the air. So look to see what you can control. And and I'm like, hey, if you feel like driving with the windows down, it's good, right?

Like, let the car air out indefinitely because it means it keeps going. Or at least when you get in your hot car, open all the windows and and let that air out before you close it in and turn on the air conditioning. Yeah, exactly. Quick, quick easy. Hack. Yeah. I mean, it's so funny because I was seeing all these things that say vegan leather, vegan leather, vegan leather. I'm like, that is plastic by another name. Guys, vegan leather is not any better for you. It's just better for the animals.

It's not better for you. Right. So it but it's it's a marketing thing. So look to see what you have control of. And then there are specific things you can do. And these are not the popular things Laura okay. So I just want to acknowledge upfront that most women, when I say this to them, they get mad at me. So, okay, don't get mad at me, right? I'm just the messenger. Alcohol is really bad for you. What? I can't have my glass of wine every single night. It's. It's a little munch. Yeah, yeah. So. And then you have to distinguish.

Are you looking for the experience or do you, are you looking for a stress reducer. Because we can replace your need to have a stress reducer with something that will reduce your stress. And if you're looking for the experience we can look for a nonalcoholic wine. We can look at a spritzer that has a 10th of the alcohol in it. We can look at different ways to satisfy that experience. But the alcohol in and of itself is really toxic for you. A it's a toxin. And B your liver goes, oh wait, I got to deal with the toxin instead of all the toxins.

I got to deal with this immediate toxin that could kill me, right? So so it's really important to, it's really important to not make your body work harder than it needs to. What else is not popular? Sugar? Sugar. Sugar, sugar. Yeah, it's those two things. Alcohol and sugar. Like. So what kind of sugar? What about coconut sugar? What about sugar and still sugar? So sugar. What about organic cane sugar? What about having all these different sugars? What about what about monk fruit? Monk fruit is not sugar and does not raise your blood sugar.

So monk fruit stevia are both fine. We actually are growing stevia in our front yard. It is so sweet. Like so sweet. So you can use those. They do not raise your blood sugar but any form of sugar will raise other form of. Sure. So coconut maple sugar cane whatever. Yeah. Brown sugar. Maple sirup. Yeah. We tapped our trees this year and boiled it down. Man, that stuff is sweet. Oh, my gosh, you so live in Massachusetts. You tapped your trees. We've never seen it in California. I don't think you'll have these kind of tree.

Right. Like you don't have these big. There's maple trees, but, yeah, I don't I don't know, I think it's the tree of choice. You know, it was. It was what? I live in Newton. And it was what Newton planted. They planted maple tree. So all along our streets and everywhere, there's these big maple trees, like on our right, on the corner of my yard, we have three Howie and we. Well, we might be a generous term. We did not tap it. My husband and son tapped in because I was like, we don't want to project, right?

We're busy. We are busy. How about it? Okay, so wine, sugar. But I'm addicted to my stress. I get that. But yeah, you can be addicted to your stress. You just have to. You can't be addicted to your stress and complain that you're not optimally healthy. They are mutually exclusive. So if you really want to get healthy, you got to like break the chains, right? Start to trust the universe. Be kind to yourself, set realistic boundaries and and look, I don't sweat a lot of my. My mom walks into my house and I know she cringes every time she walks in because my house is a mess, because they don't have the time to clean it up.

It's clean. But there's just stuff I clutter, clutter, clutter. I don't even know where to put it. I'm like, I don't know what to put this, but I need it. I know I'm going to need it, right? So I know it drives my mom nuts. My mom's house is pristine. It's gorgeous, I love it, I walk in, I'm like, I wish I could be like this, but honestly, I don't have the time. When you have like four kids, two and a half, four kids. Yeah, and a bunch of business. I have four kids and now four businesses. So yeah, that's it's not a priority. Right.

So I don't walk in and then I'm a I do walk in. I'm like, oh I really wish it were neater. But unless I'm going to clean it I'm not complaining. You know. So so it's like like oh my battles like oh exactly. So stresses look I live it, I get it and it's not in our favor. It's just not in our favor. So there's a lot of things that we can do. And it takes a focus and it takes a community and it takes being connected to like minded people. So you're not feeling like you're doing it alone right. Yeah. You know our practice we live it.

That's like I work with people who every day are like in the game of how do I clean up my health? Yeah, yeah. So fine, fine people. Right? Like, that's why I love you so much because you're all about it. Yes, I am, although I did not bring my own food that night because I don't have celiac disease, but I, I've been thinking about as we've been talking, there's some non-negotiables for me in my everyday day to day, purified water number one, absolute non-negotiable. Everywhere I travel, I get purified water delivered to the hotel first thing, you know, Amazon delivers water everywhere you go.

So that's the first thing. A non-negotiable for me is chapstick. I'm just saying, I was just thinking, what are my non-negotiables? Yeah, I got it. I got to have moisturized lips, clean chapstick, Burt's bees. So pooping every day. Pooping every day is a non-negotiable for me. Yes, but at all costs, I must eliminate that toxin for my body. Or that day is going to be cloudy and tired and not productive. And, and then whole real foods, those are kind of my big non-negotiables as long as I have those four things.

Oh, and I need to have a bed. I don't like to sleep on the sofa. I like to have a bed. How often does that come up? Well, you know, if you're staying at somebody's house or. Yeah, I, I would go to a hotel and get a bed. I cannot sleep on a sofa. It's just doesn't I like that. I like, but those are kind of my non-negotiables in life, you know, to your point, I work with somebody who's who's walking the walk and talking the talk right. Yeah. 100%. This has been incredible. Such a fun talk with you Wendy.

I know we could go on and on and talk for hours about this. But bottom line is you've outlined the main toxins the buckets that they're in how to not be perfect because none of us are perfect. Perfectionism is impossible. But how to minimize our exposure and then heal. And I love the platforms that you outline to like all those things have to be in place for you to heal your body. This is like get your stuff in order. This is really important. Get your relationships in order. Get your mindset in order.

Totally. And I just realized, like we did a lot of the work for people. We put together a guide so that they don't have to do the work because it can be overwhelming. Like, oh, what pot and pan do I use, right? So if you go on our website, which is five journeys.com/promo, we put the guide together. People can just put the email in and download the guide. Great. And we'll have a PDF. We'll have gifts and guides from you on this list on this summit. So, you'll be giving away some of that stuff here.

And where else can we find you? Tons of places. Instagram at Wendy True, MD, also on Facebook at Wendy, MD and we have our own podcast, the Five Journeys podcast, Live Like You Matter. And obviously the book is on Amazon, which is Dirty Girl. Ditch the toxins look great. I feel frickin amazing. So good, so good. Thank you so much for being here, Wendy. It is always fun to connect with you, and I look forward to the next time we see each other, which is going to be in about a week, so I can't wait.

Great to talk to you Laura. Do take good care. Bye now.