Environmental Neurotoxins: Their Impact On Parkinson’s

Joseph Pizzorno, ND

Well, thank you for your very kind introduction. Also, thank you for doing this work. Just yet, yet another chronic degenerative disease that a lot about, that information stopping you sounds a little fixed up.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

Yes. Let’s fix this. Dr. Pizzorno, as we get into our conversation, I wonder if you would just tell the audience a little bit about yourself. You’re known for being a true pioneer in the area of natural medicine. I just wondering how you got interested in this in the first place and where you’re where your journey has taken you.

Joseph Pizzorno, ND

Well, that’s a surprisingly interesting question, because while most people got into natural medicine because of some kind of personal experience with their health or a close family member, I got into it more intellectually. Let me just kind of back up a little bit. I’ve been involved in medicine now for literally over half a century. I started working in commercial medicine research. I loved doing research. I was working at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine, Rheumatology. I was working with an M.D., and Ph.D., trying to find a cure for arthritis, and was going great. I hadn’t had dinner with my college roommate and his wife. They have shared where I live. In their revision, I said, “Let’s have dinner and chat.” During that dinner, his wife said to me, “I’m suffering from juvenile rheumatoid arthritis in my ankles,” and her hands are underneath, etc. She said, “I’ve been cured.” I said, “What? It’s an incurable disease.” I know nothing terrible because all these researchers, not just at our local facility but all over the country, are trying to find a cure. I said you got cured out of sight, scientists. I was curious. She said, “Oh, I went to a naturopathic doctor.” I said, “What’s that?” At that point, I didn’t know anyone other than M.D. was doing medicine. I went to the friend’s doctor and asked them, “What did you do for my friend?” She said, “I taught her how to eat properly and detoxified her liver.” What the heck was her diet? Her liver had to do with a joint spacewalk. But anyway, no words, kind cure. I said, What? I spent a few days with you. See, I treat patients, but cures. She quotes miracle cure after miracle cure of people with commercial medicine can help. This guy, through these simple things like diet and detoxification, vitamins, and herbs, gets better. I thought, well, being intrigued was enough to make a difference in terms of my life. I was intrigued. Then the second thing happened, and that is that I’m kind of philosophical and kind of spiritual. I became vegetarian. I saw my body undergo a lot of changes as a vegetarian. I asked the animator MDs I was working with, What these changes mean. 

His comment was Your love. Remember, this was 50 years ago. His comment was yours and your observation because that doesn’t affect you. If you follow a standard American diet, there is no difference. I thought, well, I saw these changes. It’s kind of hard to ignore. I decided to logically ask the naturopathic doctor the same questions that the bookshelf pulls out, guides medical physiology, and shows me how to change my diet. This has changed my physiology in the way that the niche path knows physiology better than the M.D.s. I work with this researcher, and this is the one I’m working with. But that was kind of interesting. But it didn’t make a change. Yes, we work along, doing research, getting published—the good stuff. Then I was helping an M.D. who came to our lab and was doing a postdoc on a new drug for arthritis. Of course, I’m still on the drug model, but that’s fine. I helped her. At that point, we’re using a duck model. We use the duck model because their feet are kind of splayed out, so fill it with ease, and measure how inflamed their joints are. In the Statton duck model, they’re genetically bred to get arthritis. That was the standard model used for drug research. 

The gun that got into the ducks got him into the barium. By the way, as a vegetarian, being in a vivarium, where you do animal research, is a terrible place to be. But anyway, it was my job to do it. I’m sure you know what that’s like. Anyway, so we go to the lab and check the ducks, and they’re miserable. If anybody, as a pet, knows what miserable looks like, you thought Cage was like one foot by one foot by one foot. They’re just looking terrible. being a kind-hearted woman, and you want your doctor to be kind-hearted. She gets there with her husband, and they decide to make life better for the ducks. They get up plywood, some sand, and a plastic swimming pool like a duck run, throwing some fresh fruits and vegetables in addition to standard duck chow. Now the ducks are running around. Everything’s fine now. We’re waiting for them to get their arthritis so we can trust the drug on them. We wait, and we wait. They never got the arthritis that they’re genetically bred to get. Start the going-away party for this M.D. Everybody’s consoling her because all your experiments fail. It was terrible. Your postdoc didn’t work out. Look at them and say, “Wait a minute. If they don’t get to the root of the arthritis, they don’t need the drugs. Don’t you realize what just happened? You had a genetically bred duck that gets rheumatoid arthritis, which is so reliable and has drugs on it. They didn’t get it because you improved their environment and nutrition.” You know what? I’m going to go to the next SRO. Mia Farrow starred.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

That is such a great story and such an important message for folks to understand. We often come from the perspective that things are just going to happen. It runs in my family, etc., where, in my clinic, we often screen for the APOE4 gene, which impacts not just Alzheimer’s but Parkinson’s, ALS, M.S., and so forth. Yet we tell folks this is information that should be even more empowering to adopt this anti-inflammatory diet and lifestyle. Hey, you carry a bullet for it.

Joseph Pizzorno, ND

That’s all.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

 it’s all over.

Joseph Pizzorno, ND

I gave a lecture in New Zealand, oh, 20 years ago, on Alzheimer’s disease. At that point, everybody’s thinking about it. You show your sympathy for people who, before, had increased symptoms of it—no question about it—but now, look, here’s how much it increases the risk. Now look at these dietary factors you can avoid.

Joseph Pizzorno, ND

They decrease the risk more than they were before. it’s not that deterministic. It’s just you can be more careful.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

I have to be more careful. I want to frame what will probably be the remainder of our discussion over the next 30 minutes with a paper. I have to admit I don’t have it in front of me, but I recall it was either published in the Journal of the American Medical Association or in what would have been archived in neurology. JAMA, Neurology, was an epidemiological study looking at Parkinson’s disease over time, over the decades. While we know, for example, that Alzheimer’s disease is the most prevalent of the neurodegenerative disorders, with about 6.6 million people affected, and compared to Parkinson’s, around a million or so, one to 1.2 million, the incidence, the new cases of Parkinson’s, if we look at the rate of rise of Parkinson’s over time, it’s dramatic and it outpaces even Alzheimer’s disease. There’s that old question, and I’ve heard people like even Jeff Bland kind of mention that he’s sort of one of the other sort of founding fathers of functional medicine like yourself, that the genes once again, if we say, well, this is all genetic. The genes have not changed that much in 100 years. But what has changed is the environment. The environment. Can you talk a little bit about the environment and its impact on these chronic diseases, and, of course, specifically Parkinson’s?

Joseph Pizzorno, ND

Yes. 100% of the issue before our medical review, some of the research on Parkinson’s incidence here is going up, whereas it is fairly flat. Parkinson’s Clinic is going up. You’re well aware that we now suffer from heartburn, a chronic disease in every age group in human history. What happened? It took a while. People may see a lot of diseases due to genetics; no less than 50% of diseases are due to genetics. All the rest is diet, lifestyle, and toxins. As I now teach all over the world that environmental toxins have become the primary drivers of chronic disease, the very well-documented Parkinson’s disease is not quite as clear. Just a little more conflicting information is there to be figured out. There is no question about it. Neurotoxins have a big effect, but they also interact with their presence and connect them to their status. I’ll get that in a second. The disease that has the best research and is so illustrative of what’s going on is diabetes. Diabetes, way back when I first got into practice in the late 1970s, affected only 1% of the population. I remember it being practiced for about a year before I started; my first diabetic patient just wasn’t very common. 

Now it affects at least ten times or at least 10% of the population. The current projections are that one-third of people will get diabetes in their lifetime. Genetics didn’t change. Some people say, Well, from my worldview, what must be too much sugar consumption? Well, what’s interesting is that sugar consumption levels haven’t increased much either during that time or during this epidemic. Then you look at, well, what are the factors contributing to obesity? There is no question about it. People with obesity have dramatically more diabetes. But here’s the kicker: This is a lot of work that comes out of a research lab run by somebody actually in South Korea. What she showed was to actually look at obese people and then measure their exposure to environmental toxins. Obese people in the bottom 20% of bioload environmental toxins have no increased incidence of diabetes. A lean person with a top 20% environmental toxic load has 2% diabetes. It’s like, I’m not saying being fat or obese is good for you. 

Be clear. But it’s not. What’s the fat? It’s what’s in the fat. When the fat is full of diabetic genes, it is metals and chemicals from the environment that cause it. Guess what? You get diabetes. You say the same thing and show me every other disease. I’ve looked at the best predictor of most diseases: the level of toxins in a person’s body. Another one was a lot of good research, and it’s going to blow people’s minds away is arsenic. People think, well, the only problem spots are trying to kill you. Well, that could indeed be a problem, but it turns out that arsenic accounts for one-quarter to one-third of all the major cancers. About one-quarter of cardiovascular deaths occur now. “Wait a minute. What’s going on here? It turns out that 3% of people in America have arsenic levels high enough to be known to induce disease.” And where is it coming from? From the water, rice, chicken, or industrial contamination. What’s happened is that we have saturated our environment with all these toxins, including neurotoxins. Why? We’ve seen so much autism. Why so much ADHD? Why the increase in Parkinson’s disease? They’re all because of neurotoxins. Where are the neurotoxins coming from? We’re spraying them on our food. Organophosphates were a class of chemicals used in World War I in chemical warfare. We modified these toxic substances to be not quite so toxic. These chemicals would not be quite so toxic. Now we’re spraying it on our food, and now we’re wondering why we’re getting neurological damage. Why are kids so screwed up? We are poisoning the neurological system while making it worse. I’ve got one of my soapboxes here, making it even worse as we increase the exposure of our bodies to toxins from food. We have systematically removed the quality of nutrients from the foods. I wrote an editorial. You might find it by going to PubMed and finding it. The editorial is called Unimportant Molecules. It’s kind of facetious. So in that article, I point out that most of our nutrition research happened 100 years ago. 100 years ago, that’s where they figured out the vitamins and minerals and things like that. But we were limited at that time by its physiology. years ago, early in our understanding of physiology, and we’re pretty much stuck with just using. The second part is that the equipment we had to determine what was in the food was not very sophisticated. We’re stuck with animal models, from the military to what is necessary to keep animals alive. In some situations, keep animals for food. 

If something was not necessary to keep an animal alive or fertile, it was not considered important. We end up with 42 elements on the market: vitamins, minerals, and fatty acids. 40 to be important for health. Then, as we started growing food chemically, rather organically, as long as those 42 molecules were reasonably well maintained before all the foods just came up, you asked yourself, How many macros are there in it? We’re all talking. We talk now about all these wonderful nutrients that people talk about. These are phytonutrients. How important are all these great miracle things, etc.? Yes, . what those are in food. Look at all the liquids all over the world. About 50,000. We decided that 99.9% of the molecules in food were not important. So we grew food, and we lost it. Again, a difference. While technically it’s true, those other 50,000 molecules by 42 are not necessary for life. They’re critical for health. Some examples of what the critical for health looks like, for example, are flavonoids. 

You don’t need to know a lot about it. But fortune is interesting because, remember, I just talk about arsenic and how bad it is. Yes, water helps increase the rate at which we detoxify arsenic and protects our DNA from the damage from arsenic that causes cancer. Let’s look at what happens. We grow foods chemically rather than organically. There’s been a great study done where they did this with tomatoes. They agreed to put tomatoes in a greenhouse. It was a controlled environment—same sun, same light, same seeds, same soil, everything. Everything’s the same except for the fertilizer. They then, over one year, liked this study because they didn’t just do it once. They measured the fiber content of the food every month for a while and compared them, and they started looking at these other unimportant molecules they disappeared to only once they were maintained, the ones that were just enough for them to maintain the appropriate color for the food. The tomatoes are still kind of red and have a little bit of the flavor of the tomatoes, but everything else is planted 90% lower. What’s happened is that as we increase our exposure to these toxins, neurotoxins, etc., we’ve been removing the protective molecules from food that we need so we don’t get them damaged by the double whammy—neither providing bad stuff nor removing the good stuff.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

A lot of folks who may grow their tomatoes say, You eat a real tomato that I have grown. It’s very different from the one that you buy in the store. Then what you’re saying is that it’s due to the thousands of compounds that we’ve eliminated from the food. It’s so important to recognize. We touched a little bit on organophosphates and arsenic. What are some of the other major offenders that are out there, and how are they getting into our food supply or our bodies? Otherwise?

Joseph Pizzorno, ND

So, yes, good question. As I’ve looked at the research, many different pesticides are showing up. I wish there was more research on it. The ones where there was the strongest research were organic plastic pesticides, without question. Interestingly enough, to some degree, it depends upon a person’s genetics, and that is how well they’re able to detoxify. Organophosphates had a big impact on how toxic they were in their bodies. I’m now sticking with the standard ones that are neurotoxic. I consider anybody’s neurological problem all neurotoxins to be removed. Even if they haven’t done this research, there should be some other examples where they are causing trouble, and just because they haven’t been researched yet doesn’t mean they’re not causing trouble. I look at their organophosphates and the chlorinated chemicals that are sprayed on the food supply, and they all cause the same kinds of problems.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

Yes. We look at things like mercury, cadmium, and lead. As you say, we’re not presently on an individualized level, measuring some of the chemical compounds in our patients from a clinical perspective. But, we kind of automatically assume in the clinic that if you’re living in 2023 and, in the industrialized United States, you’re probably exposed. I have to tell you a quick little anecdote. I don’t know if Norman Shealy is at all Norman Shealy and I met each other. I have known him, probably for about ten years or so, since I started shifting my practice in this direction. I had a nurse who had been a nurse of his, and you may know that he lives in Springfield, Missouri, or the general area. She had worked for him in his clinic, and she said, I got to get you together with Norm. You’re going to love each other because he’s a neurosurgeon by training. Folks, if you don’t know who Dr. Norman Shealy is, he’s considered one of the founding fathers of holistic medicine and a brilliant man. 

One of the more prolific, Norm, certainly 35 books, but at any rate. I got together with Norm, and he was about 82 at the time. Of course, he’s going to live to 150, I’ll tell you. But he said he was despondent because he said, “I have been living this life of clean eating and detoxification and all this stuff. I recently did my blood work, and I tested positive for this compound, I don’t remember what it was, but it was like an additive in gasoline or something like that. I was like, well, first of all, detoxification, and I’m sure you’ll expound on this; it’s not a one-off kind of thing. It’s a mindset; it’s a lifestyle. How can we live cleanly? But then we eat because we have to remember that we will be facing these challenges. Even if you’re Dr. Norman Shealy,

Joseph Pizzorno, ND

Yes. Well said. I would like to go back to your comment about Mercury. I just thought, just before we got on, I just did a quick review of the research, and there at the top was a previous study looking at mercury, arsenic, and Parkinson’s and just showing how they directly caused physiologic abnormalities that induced Parkinson’s disease. I’ve looked at a lot of research on both mercury and arsenic, and some of my most dramatic cases have been people with early-stage dementia. I tested them for mercury, got the mercury out of their bodies, and the dementia went away. I just think it’s incredible. I had one very wealthy woman in Canada—the wealthiest woman in Canada. Well, what good is money if your brain is going away? She had early dementia. She had memory loss. All the typical things that you see—a cluster of mercury, mercury level 12—there are different kinds of tests you can use. But the maximum level, in particular, when I use this as fire curtains, is 50 things. I put them on my detox program. A key thing that’s important for the audience to realize is that detox is not fast. If you don’t want to detox, be too fast, because if you loosen things from the tissues faster than the body can get rid of them, of course, there’s plenty of Marmite; there’s plenty of examples. 

Rest up, seven. Anyway, it took, so it took. I started on my program and remeasured her after six months, and she’d gone from 50 down to 17. Her comment to me was, Dr. Pizzorno, I can now see the light at the end of the tunnel. I can now see my symptoms are starting to reverse after another six months. She’s now down to eight. She says most of her symptoms are gone. Another year and a half, she’s down to three, and all her symptoms are gone. She thinks I’m the best doctor in the world. It’s nice when a successful patient is great, but this is a woman. going to early dementia. Sure. 65 is not against the law anyway. All of a sudden, she got better. That was ten years ago. I had the opportunity to talk to her a couple of years ago, and she’s still healthy with a clear mind and working great. She said it didn’t work out. My body was the best thing that ever happened to me. It’s just important for people to realize that it’s not just one thing. Maybe Mercury has a little bit that is not too bad. Organophosphate me a little bit. Not too bad. Arsenic, a little bit, but not too bad. But the problem is that we don’t have these things in isolation. They’re synergistic. You have to realize that one plus one when you look at toxins does not equal two. It’s equal to three. One plus one plus one does not equal three. It’s equal to ten because that’s where the toxin levels are going up. We’re depleting our ability to protect ourselves, particularly with one of our favorite molecules in the body, glutathione. As you get more toxins, you do just glutathione, and that can protect you from the toxins.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

I have a couple of similar anecdotes. A patient we’ve treated with ALS from Maryland lives in a neighborhood where he said all the houses have radon. It’s just normal. They’re all built in such a way to ventilate the radon away from the house. But they live in a radon-infested area, and this gentleman was obsessed with using a neti pot, and his water supply was well water. He would use his neti pot every single evening and put this well water up his nose, essentially, which is a gateway to the brain. I can’t help but believe that water exposure in this radon-rich area played a major role in triggering his disease. We have another patient we saw very recently who had a very high lead level, has Parkinson’s disease, had a lead level of about 26, and it just in his blood got him on some DMSA, and I don’t know that we’ve necessarily cured his Parkinson’s. This is fairly recent, but he and his wife both said that the symptomatic improvement just in removing that lead has been very dramatic for him. It’s so important. Jeff, are you familiar with some of the data that’s come out, more recently because you mentioned chlorinated compounds, but it’s been big headlines in Parkinson’s on trichloroethylene?

Joseph Pizzorno, ND

I have not seen that one. Don’t tell me; I need to get it right.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

I’m not an environmental expert in this field, but trichloroethylene, as I understand it, has been used extremely widely in everything from being an industrial lubricant to being used in the dry cleaning business to being a common household chemical. it’s ubiquitous. The problem from an epidemiological perspective is that exposure to trichloroethylene has been strongly associated with the risk of Parkinson’s. We’ve just sort of lived in this back of trichloroethylene.

Joseph Pizzorno, ND

I can go back on something in the well water. Yes, everybody’s on well; the water must have a well water check for metal contamination. For example, I mentioned arsenic before the threshold for toxicity. With arsenic, we get about what’s called ten micrograms per liter of urine as a kind of threshold. That matches pretty well with what’s in the water supply. once you get about ten micrograms per liter of water, but to my surprise, approximately, you start seeing increased cancer, stroke, heart disease, and diabetes; that all starts at around ten. 10% of the public water supplies have arsenic levels; more than ten and only half of the water supply have reported arsenic levels from the very beginning. In terms of wells, many wells have high levels of arsenic. For example, out in Maine, there’s an area where the well water has as much as 3000 micrograms of arsenic per liter of water. So, quite a lot above what they say, first of all, 300 times higher. anybody’s use of water, particularly if you’re doing it with the neti pot, you’ve got to check your well water for arsenic, and it is a surprisingly common problem.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

Well, there’s a very classic environmental medicine study that was stumbled upon and well-published on the role of AMPTP in triggering Parkinson’s. Most people would not be exposed to it. This was initially observed as an outbreak of Parkinson’s in the Los Angeles area. I believe that drug addicts and opiate addicts had inadvertently gotten a supply of what they thought was heroin or something along those lines. But it was laced with a compound that ultimately turned out to be a mitochondrial toxin. As a result, triggered a Parkinson’s disease-like syndrome. These individuals were responsive to levodopa. If you ever want to see what these look like, all of the videos from the original Lancet publication are available for free on YouTube. But my point is that this was not only a great example of an environmental factor triggering Parkinson’s, but it also led to an animal model where people like Mayland, DeLong, Gary, and Alexander in his group could study Parkinson’s in the lab in places like Hopkins and Emory. But in the end, it also gave us insight into the idea that the mitochondria play a major role in Parkinson’s and that toxins, whether they be arsenic, lead, or mercury, cause Parkinson’s. In other words, we’re saying, Well, why is it that these toxins cause Parkinson’s? Can you talk a little bit about more of the biochemical and sort of cell biology perspective and understand why?

Joseph Pizzorno, ND

That is a very good question. I’ve been very deeply studying cancer lately, looking at natural medicine approaches to cancer. What’s fascinating is something most people don’t realize: mitochondria. For cancer cells to survive, they must sabotage the mitochondria. There’s some interesting research where you take a cancer cell that has a nucleus and then the cytoplasm and the cytoplasm, the mitochondria, and you transplant the nucleus into a healthy cell. It did not become cancer. If you transplant the mitochondria into healthy cells, they become cancerous. It turns out a lot of the diseases describe diseases of particular things, like cancer. It didn’t happen because the mitochondria were sabotaged by the cancer. It turns out that these environmental toxins make it way easier to sabotage the mitochondria. But equally important to love is the loss of unimportant molecules. Several molecules are normally in food that protect the mitochondria from not just cancer but environmental toxins. I mentioned it before, and I don’t know for certain whether it protects mitochondria. I do not protect the DNA; I’ve checked the mitochondria, but the issue is that when the mitochondria start becoming dysfunctional, it makes it much easier for the cells to become cancers, the mitochondria become dysfunctional, they start producing the ATP that neurons need to protect themselves from the environment to function properly. There are a lot of diseases. If you look at virtually every degenerative disease, there’s mitochondrial dysfunction associated with it. It’s pretty clear what’s happening there. Sabotaged mitochondria, everything. This doesn’t work as well.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

My goodness. Well, Dr. Pizzorno, now you’ve certainly raised concern about toxins by reputation. In this and the work you do and in this interview, can you share some ideas that folks can perhaps utilize in their lives? I’m worried now about toxins. What can I do about it?

Joseph Pizzorno, ND

Yes, I’m good. I’m glad everybody should be worried about it for good reason. Now, let me be clear. People say I’m going to a detoxification program. Okay? Most of them aren’t particularly effective. They are now going to be somewhat beneficial. But they’re not yet the problem. I want to be rear. People should not go into your detox program to release this toxin from the deep tissues because the biostasis wants to get rid of it. You can’t release them fast, and your body can get rid of them. I’ve written a book on it called The Toxin Solution. Here’s the basic concept: Number one, we got to avoid the start exposure. Just number one: stop the exposure. We get the toxins there. Come to the class of toxins. While people might think, well, chemicals versus metal, there’s a better way of looking at it. It’s persistent versus non-persistent. Non-persistent means that the body has existing detox systems that get rid of them easily. For example, with arsenic, the half-life of arsenic is like two days. If you stop being exposed to arsenic within a week, it’s all gone. Bisphenol has the same half-life. One-day-stop exposure is gone. But the other class, the toxins, are typically halogen-added chemicals like chlorinated or fluorinated chemicals. These have a long half-life. You look at PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls; they were banned 50 years ago, but they’re what are called persistent gas plumes. Once again, get into the environment. What’s to get in our bodies? It’s too difficult to get rid of these things after their half-life, which can range from years to decades. You’ve got your local restaurant, and you eat farmed fish. The PCBs that farmed fish will probably be with you for the rest of your life. Why is that bad? They’re neurotoxic. They cause cancer. Get-back rheumatoid arthritis, particularly in women, is bad for us. The reason I like to have people start with being careful, just like anything else, is because they do it properly. Within two weeks, they’ll start feeling better because of the biting and start working better. Typical things are gone. 

You have to be religious about it. I suggest that let’s clear up the gut because a lot of toxins come from the gut and the wrong bacteria go to the kind of bacteria in the gut. Once you have the gut, no longer producing all this bad stuff, now clean up the liver so the liver can detoxify by releasing fats. Then, finally, the other major detox system is the kidneys. Because of all toxicity exposed to, we have an epidemic of kidney failure going on now because of all these toxins people are exposed to, and these toxins are not just environmental chemicals or metals. Many prescription and over-the-counter drugs are causing damage to the kidneys. Then we got the organs of detoxification working properly. Now let’s do a saunas good deed. Anyone interested should look at the work of Steven Genuis in Edmonton, Alberta. He’s done this great work that puts people into sauna scrapes, collects their sweat, and compares what’s in the sweat to what’s in the blood to what’s in the urine. What’s fascinating is that toxins may come out of the sweat that isn’t in the blood or urine by crowd-sequestering them away as best they can and because it can’t get rid of them any other way except by sweating. 

Scientists are very effective at getting rid of toxins. Now, the protocol for a scientist that I’ve looked at is straightforward. The key here is that you need to sweat vigorously for at least 20 minutes. get that in about 20 minutes now. Start getting the toxins out. The temperature for doing that depends on individual people. Just to highlight, if you want to be quick about it, use a higher temperature. But in general, a little lower temperature, taking a little longer, getting sweaty—you can stand it for longer. typically take ten to 15 minutes to get the temperature up. I know. Do it for these 20 minutes. Plenty of fluids You have to relax. then I also recommend, with the fluids, adding a little bit of ice, things like magnesium citrate, for example. Because you acclimate the water a bit, it makes it easier for the kidneys to get rid of the activity of the toxins and for the body to get them out of the tissues. How often should you do it? In research out of Finland, where they weren’t looking at toxins, they’re looking at things like cardiovascular disease. They compared people who did science once a week to four times a week or every day. I’m not saying every day because that’s a lot of work. But what they found was that people would get farthest every day, decrease their cardiovascular disease by 50%, and decrease their dementia by about 75%.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

Wow.

Joseph Pizzorno, ND

It was never progression to dementia anyway. it’s clear. Saunas are very effective. But don’t think just doing saunas is going to be enough. You had to make sure you avoided the toxin, to begin with, and that you contributed a lot of dietary fiber. Most people don’t realize that the liver gets rid of a lot of these toxins. But our liver developed its systems while we were on a diet that contained 150 grams of fiber a day. The liver dumped garbage into the gut and bound the fiber out through the stool. Well, when we consume 15 to 20 grams of fiber a day, those toxins are reabsorbed through something called intrapack circulation. A great example is mercury. Mercury is hard to get rid of, but the body dumps about 1% of the by-product into the gut every day. You will get rid of it if you get a chance. But then, because the fiber is so low, the diet absorbs 95% of the mercury with all the stuff to get rid of because it’s important there for detoxification. Let me summarize a couple of laboratory numbers: Number one: avoid the toxins. Number two: plant fiber in your diet. Number three: regular scientists at least once a week, preferably twice a week.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

Well, that’s excellent. Dr. Pizzorno, do you have any programs or anything going on that you’d like to let the audience know about that they could participate in?

Joseph Pizzorno, ND

I’m on these days. These days, I just do education. I’ve got a book. Read my book, The Toxins, Pollution, and, frankly, People that Change Your Lives. But you have to do it. Maybe I’ve taught you that. Read your book. I had good luck. I said, What? Did you do it? Well, no doctor is going to do it. Don’t be bothered by the book; you do it a lot. You get the experience. Some real people have had dramatic improvements in their health within two weeks and over time, systematically reversing the causes of disease. 

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

Excellent. Dr. Joseph Pizzorno, thank you so much for joining me today at the Parkinson’s Solutions Summit. You’ve shared some very valuable information. Get folks thinking about the toxins in their environment, and that’s not just outside of the home. Yes, sir.

Joseph Pizzorno, ND

But one more thing: It’s like I wrote a textbook for doctors called Clinical Environmental Medicine. So for the doctors who are listening and who want to understand environmental medicine, Dr. Walter Cronin wrote the most comprehensive textbook available today on environmental medicine.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

It needs to be on the shelf or your desk with you. Open that.

Joseph Pizzorno, ND

That study.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

Just being used. But thank you so much for participating in the Parkinson’s Solutions Summit. We’ve learned a lot of valuable information. It got us thinking about the toxins outside our home, inside our home, in our food, etc., and what we can do about them. This is important for Parkinson’s disease and every other chronic disease out there. It is poisoning us, and there are solutions to addressing our toxic environment while still enjoying living in the modern industrial age. I, for one, don’t want to go back to living in a cave. So we have to learn how to live with it, and we can live well. Thank you so much, Dr. Pizzorno. I appreciate you joining us.

Joseph Pizzorno, ND

Thanks for the invitation.