Environmental Toxins: Lethal Hidden Dangers

Introduction to Dr. Wendie Trubow 0:00

Welcome back to the conversation. Today I have my dear friend, Dr. Wendie Trubow. Hi, Wendie. Hi Laura. So great to be with you. Yes, it is. We're going to have a great talk about toxins today. And I want to introduce you to our audience. You're an M.D., you're an IFM certified practitioner. You're an absolute expert in toxins. You know, at one point you had the largest functional medicine practice in America. You have still have a functional medicine practice in on the East Coast. You have authored a book called Dirty Girl.

You can see it right there behind you. Ditch the toxins. Look great. Feel freaking amazing. I love the way that you name books. It's so good. Are you free to say what your next book is going to be called? Because I shudder to think what is it? Sweaty and bitchy from sex to brain function, master menopause and feel freaking amazing. So good. And you know, I love your your story. I mean, you you were a gynecology surgeon and you like dumped all that to work in functional medicine. And I just love it.

You and your husband have an amazing practice. So I wanted to bring you on here because you're an absolute expert in toxins. And and, you know, this summit is all about getting down to the root cause of what's causing our issues, what's causing our chronic health problems. And so let's kind of get into maybe we start with some myth busting. So what are some of kind of the misconceptions about toxins and about the world we live in and kind of the narrative that we're being fed by what, say, big food, big pharma, the media?

What is it? That's really let's talk about the untruths. What's really going on here? Right. Happening. All right, Laura, you know, all those things you go to the doctor for and you're like, I have a little bit of headache. I have a little bit of fatigue. You can't lose my weight. Whatever. Fill in the blank. Right. And the doctor says to you, well, you're you're just getting a little bit older or everyone in your family has that look at your family history. It's just normal. You should expect it.

And you go home feeling like, well, okay, well, the future looks kind of more of the same and not very inspiring. That's a huge myth. You don't get sick because you get old. You get sick because the longer you live, the more toxins you're exposed to. And those toxins make you sick. And most of the time you can't smell them or taste them or feel them. You only feel the impact of them. That's the biggest myth. In fact, the thing that I really dedicating my life to is you're not getting sick because you're getting old.

You're getting sick because the more toxins you accumulate make you sick. That's. Let's pause there. Boom. We can stop now. No. Right. And this conversation. That was perfect. So it's not a hormone problem. It's not an adrenal problem. It's not a thyroid problem. It's not a gut problem.

Myths About Toxins and Aging 2:56

I mean, yeah, those are all problems. But underneath that, underneath that is the problem that needs to be solved, which is going to start making all those other systems come into balance. Yeah, you really can't get into balance until you've taken away that massive insult. And for most of us, it's not one thing I got to let exposure that caught the world's attention. So I got a diagnosis really fast because everyone was talking about all 500 tons of lead that came out of Notre Dame. But most people, it's not one massive exposure.

And even for me, I had a massive exposure on top of what I'll call death by a thousand cuts. We have death by a thousand cuts every day from the things we're eating to the things we're putting on our body, to the you know, look, I'm sitting on this gorgeous vegan leather chair. You can't see it, but it's a gorgeous vegan leather. Guess what? That's plastic. And guess what? Those are endocrine disrupting. So it's really death by a thousand cuts. I'm sitting in front of these gorgeous lights that I texted you a picture of, but guess what? Those are EMFs.

You know, you can't really get away from it if you live in the modern world. And oh, by the way, here's my plastic covered microphone, my plastic mouse, my air quality. It goes on and on. And so I think it would be valuable to talk about how do we characterize these different toxins and how do we get rid of them. But the biggest myth is that you can the second biggest myth is that you can get rid of all of them. You're going to you can't. You can't not you know, I was I was just talking to Evan Brand before you came on and he said, wait, I wrote it down because it was so good.

He said, There are no nontoxic people left in the world. There are no nontoxic people left in the world. So now we don't want to paint a doom and gloom, but what we want to do is help you understand that there are strategies to live your best life in this toxic world. But before we go into that, we talk a little bit about the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency. Are they really protecting us? They have no teeth. So so they're trying to chew our food with no teeth. So, no, the EPA and me and the EPA are the same age.

We were both born in 1970 and the EPA. So the EPA is 53 years old and it in its lifetime has banned about nine substances. And the last I read a year ago, they had not banned substance since 1984. Okay. '84. So yeah. So they and in other previous governments, their ability to enforce was taken away. So they have a huge mission with very little enforcement ability and most companies are the way that that toxins get to the EPA is their self referred. Well, if you make your business on some chemical use, you're not going to self-refer, right?

You're going to you're not going to say I think there's a problem with my chemical because it would tank your business. So the whole system is very poorly designed because you're not incentivized and we're very different than Europe. You only have something removed from the from the market. Now, when it has a preponderance of evidence, it clearly states and shows that it's harmful. Most of the things in Europe, you have to prove that it's safe before you can use it. It's a much better approach. But here it's it's still the Wild West and the EPA.

Yeah. The EPA does not have the tools to monitor you. Take care of them. So what I'm hearing is that this is your job. I'm by your I'm saying the good listeners right now this is your responsibility to understand what's harming you and take steps to helping yourself because nobody's coming to save you, least of all the EPA and the government. Correct? Totally agree. That's a bold statement, right? Yeah. I want to go back to something you said, Laura before we go on. You said before we before we jumped into the EPA, you said it's not about doom and gloom.

And I agree inevitably hopeful. And and what I will point out, though, is that there's a group of people who need things to be doom and gloom and need it to be scary and need it to be bad enough before they'll take action. So I'm here to tell you it's time to take action, right? We can no longer wait. If you're listening to the summit, it's because you have some motivator for wanting to be healthy and so if you're hearing it, I'm talking to you, it is time to get healthy because you're only going to get more of the same and worse.

Yeah. And I, you know, I've been trying to have our audience understand that this isn't a one and done experience. So myself, all the speakers on this summit, Wendie, were constantly working on detoxing our bodies. It's as normal as brushing our teeth. That's as normal as taking a shower. It's as normal as vacuuming our home. We work on detoxing our bodies because they're constantly getting dirty, hence Dirty Girl behind you. We constantly have exposures coming at us. I just did a test, a toxin test recently and I have cesium and thallium that is shown up out of nowhere.

Right. So is it a new exposure? Is it something my body's finally safely feeling like it can get rid of?

How Toxins Overload the Body 8:06

Because I've done so much detox work and my cells are just pouring, you know, toxins out. And it's new stuff that's showing up because my body's finally ridding of it. I mean, who knows? But we can't really tell. Is this new or is this an old exposure? The point is, my body's releasing it. And so this is something that's ongoing for us. Now, I want to you know, we have speakers coming here talking specifically about medicine, metals or specifically about mold. And I brought you here to talk to talk specifically about environmental toxins.

But before we jump into all those environmental toxins, I would like you to discuss the relationship, the interplay, the connection between molds, metals and environmental toxins. Okay. I love the story. I'm glad you asked this. So think of yourself like a rain barrel, okay? And your rain barrel when you're born is is hopefully empty. Now, we know it's not because when newborns are born there, you have anywhere from 100 to 250 to 350 chemicals in their umbilical cord blood. So you don't technically start life with an empty barrel, but imagine you have this empty barrel.

And as you go through your life and you eat and you live and you have stressors and you have trauma and you have exposures. And don't forget, being born is an exposure because when women are pregnant, they release up to 50% of their body, stores of toxins into the fetus and it crosses the placenta. So this rain barrel starts to fill up. And when you overfill your rain barrel, you have symptoms. Okay. So what does that have to do with metals, mold and other toxins? Well, each of them independently acts to start filling up your rain barrel.

So when I got that LED exposure and I gained all that weight and my hair fell out and I had that rash and I felt awful. And my brain wasn't working. That was a clear example of my my bucket was pretty full, my rain barrel. And then that lead exposure served as the the final straw that overflowed it. But I was pretty full before we even got there. So how they interplay is that metals are corrosive to the gut, mold is corrosive to the gut, environmental toxins irritate the gut. So when you they essentially synergize with each other.

So when you have all of them in your bucket, your body, they all independently act to irritate and inflame the system, but then they synergize. So now you're like, What's going on? I eat really well, but I have irritable bowel or I have bloating or I'm fatigued and I get enough rest, right? It's those times when you think you should feel better than you do, and then you go, Oh, I'm just getting older. And my response is, No, you're getting more toxic. So they all interplay and interweave to make you sicker.

This is this is, I think, mind blowing for people as they sit here and listen. Like there's so much there's so much that we need to unpack here and so much is affecting us. So in terms of emptying that rain barrel and being able to kind of get ahead of it. Right. So we want to we want to move toxins out faster than they're coming in. So we do need to address metals. We do need to address mold toxins. We do need to address environmental toxins. But I want you to talk about those environmental toxins now.

Where are we getting them from? I mean, I think it's known that people are drinking toxins. We're eating toxins. We're breathing toxins. But it goes even deeper than that. So where are these coming from and what are the main let's talk about the main broad categories. Yeah, okay. This is I when we started this work, it was because I was such a mess. And so it it I said, I think I created a system to think about it just because otherwise it's just this ocean of exposure. So, so how I think about it and I'll invite you to think about it as one one category of exposure for environmental toxins are the things you deliberately put in your body.

Your intentions are good. Okay, I'm not calling anyone a bad person. Your intentions are good. You're working hard. But we get toxins through the air, through eating and drinking. If our food has pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, AIDS, we get those into our body. If we, for example, eat lots of organic vegetables from California, that has a lot of thallium in it and so. Remember, I've got thallium. Anything, right? And you eat or I'm like, Oh, I know you eat organic now because you have thallium.

So if you eat organic food that the soil in California has a lot of thallium, so you get exposed. If you live in an area where there are wildfires, when wildfires burn, particularly the pine needle trees, they are those forests store mercury. They're very generous. They store mercury. But when they burn, they give it back to the environment. It's heavy, it falls. So if you see what. California is, the Mecca of forest fires and I've got mercury showing up right now, too, which which has been lower at other times in my life.

And so, yeah, that one is making a a comeback. And I'm wondering, is this a new exposure in the last, you know, a couple of years? Is this like what's going on? Yeah, it certainly can be. So if anything that you put in your mouth, if it's contaminated food, your body gets exposed. So then you say, okay, Laura, we haven't talked about this, but I'm hoping that your listeners don't go crazy. But but there's two things that I put in the category of these are the devil. So alcohol and sugar are the devil sugar because it feeds you.

That's a bold statement. Wendie True. But I know I'm waiting for the meme to come out. Sugar the. Devil. Sugar the devil, you know, wasn't.

Environmental Toxin Sources 13:53

But sugar is extremely inflammatory and alcohol is not only extremely inflammatory, it shuts down your detox. So everything else just builds up while you're dealing with what I'll call a clear and present danger, which is alcohol poisoning, because that will kill you. So those two things you put in your mouth and they are devastating for your health, not to mention the herbicides, pesticides, insecticides, heavy metals, artificial colors, artificial flavors, preservatives. So all of those ways we deliberately put into our body, let's pause.

Questions, comments, or you want me to keep going? Keep going. I think. Don't say another. Word. Be disruptive. This is a disruptive summit. You know, by the end of this, people are either going to be like, I love Laura and all her friends or this is crazy. I, you know, but most of the time people hear it and they and they think, okay, they're nodding their heads like, thank you for having real talk. Thank you for not just standing in front of a podium in a stuffy medical conference and, you know, not talking real.

At the end of the day, you and I are human and going through the same experience that our clients are and our patients are and they appreciate the real talk. Trust me, they would much rather hear the down and dirty. I mean, you wrote a book called Dirty Girl. Yeah. So, okay, so if you really want to be ultimately optimally healthy, sugar and alcohol need to be eliminated or decreased. That's just there's no there's no nice way to say it. It's so funny. So, you know, we functional medicine practitioners that live here in San Diego, there's a group of us that get together from time to time.

To and I'm very jealous of that. By the way, I don't live in California, but I'm jealous of that community. That community we're here. There's a lot of us in Southern California, so we'll get together and go to dinner. And it's so funny. Like nobody orders alcohol and everybody wants to be early dinner and wants to be home by 8:00 so they could be in bed by nine. I literally we are the most boring group to hang out with. We love it. You know, we love getting together and talking, but we don't. Nobody drinks and everybody goes to bed early.

Yeah, it's good. You really can't detox on a broken foundation, so not drinking and going to bed early are supportive of your system. So I'm in line with all that. Okay. And here's the interesting thing. You know, people listening right now are like, no possible way. I cannot give up my nightly nightcap or I can't give up, you know, my that's when I have my need time is until, you know, from 10 to 11 or midnight, everybody in my house is simmer down. And now it's my time to do me. And what I will tell you is, if it sounds impossible, once you start to heal and you start to feel better, you start looking for things that you can do to feel even better.

And once you start removing having these things and shifting these habits, you feel so good when you wake up in the morning and you can get you're so productive in your day. You don't want to do those things anymore. So trust me, it becomes a I don't even want to drink that or eat that and I don't even want to stay up late anymore because I feel so much better when I don't really. And I would say for people who when I just said, you're like, oh, how would I cut down my alcohol? So I always ask people, Are you looking for the actual alcohol?

Are you looking for stress relief? Are you looking for an experience? Figure out why you're drinking, right? As you're drinking. Because everyone's drinking around you. Okay, well, don't hang out with those people or then you're looking for the experience. So get sparkling water with a little bit of juice in a glass that looks like an alcoholic drink. Right. You don't want to look different if you're trying to fit in, but if you're drinking alcohol because you feel like it's reducing your stress, it's not technically.

So let's look for other ways to replace that. And if you're drinking alcohol because you're addicted to it, then we have a different issue, right? We're going to figure out what's the issue that we're solving. But for a lot of people, we're looking for that experience. We want to. So I say to people, get your drink, sit where you normally sit, do what you normally do, but just don't do it with the alcohol, replace it or have a spritzer where you have 10% alcohol and 90% nonalcoholic so that you tilt the scales.

We're just looking to tilt that seesaw enough so that you can tilt it towards health and away from illness. Exactly. Is perfection possible? This is what we talk about all the time in my community. And also, you know, I talk about traditions and culture and family. You know, there's a there's a lot of experience around food and beverage. And so, you know, this is a really charged topic when we start telling people are asking people or inviting people to start shifting the way that they're experiencing food and beverage and family experiences.

And I'm like kind of one of those I'm one of those people. It's like on Thanksgiving, on Christmas, on New Year's, like, do your thing, have your family fun. Like, don't give up the family traditions. But unless you have celiac disease and should definitely not be eating gluten. Right. I know that's new. But you know, other, you know, otherwise enjoy your family, have the experiences and do good 95% of the time. Right. Do well now because. You're so funny, Laura, because I never really thought about that.

But like, I don't need sugar. I don't really. So I made pies this year because they were pretty. I made a purple pie and I made a cranberry pie and that one was bright. They were both really bright, bright purple and like bright red, bright reddish pink. But the recipes both called for over a cup of sugar in a pie. I mean, we're talking like this big. It called for a cup of sugar. And I was like, no way. So I cut it down by about 60%. And so I would invite people to look at how can you level up and still have the experience. Absolutely.

You know, and and the avoidance of pain is a huge motivators. If you feel good, don't take yourself, you know, just to fit in because you don't want to make a wave. Absolutely. Well, I want to dig in deeper into more categories of toxins. I want to talk about solutions before we go into that second part of our talk, though, which which will continue here in a moment. I want to thank you so much for joining us today. And to our audience, I hope you're finding our conversation insightful and helpful if you're a summit purchaser.

Stay right here, because we're about to dove even deeper into this discussion with Dr. Wendie Trubow If you're not, click on the button on this page to get access to a continuation of this conversation and many others, and really get the tools you need to reclaim your health. If you're watching this continuation of my talk with Dr. Wendie Trubow, thank you for being a valuable member of our community. We're going to dove right back in. Dr. Wendie, I would really like to talk about some other categories of toxins.

You know, we've covered some food toxins, air toxins. What about things that we don't even think about could be toxic in our environment. So, you know, everything from our furniture to the materials that are how home is built with to the soap that we're using for our laundry to that, you know, concealer that we're putting under a dark circles under our eyes or the anti-wrinkle cream or the, you know, whatever it is that we're using or the even things that we're giving our children toys. What do you have to say about all these categories?

Yeah, so you just basically straddle the other two categories. So the second category. So the first category is what you're putting in your body food, drink, alcohol, sugar, water, whatever. The second category is anything that you're putting on your body. So that's your head to toe, your hair coloring, your hair products, including your shampoo, conditioner, whatever you're using to keep your curls tamed or your hair not frizzy, whatever that is, the makeup you're putting on your skin. But before that, before you put your makeup on, you tone your skin, you moisturize your skin, you put on those anti-wrinkle and the anti dark spot cream and all of those things.

The lotion that you're moisturizing with, the clothes that you're wearing, did you dry cleaned your closed? Are they full of formaldehyde? Are they not full of formaldehyde? Did you wash them with something that's safe or not safe? That's so that's a category, especially for people who do a lot of self-care. That's a category that's it's often rife with exposure because by the time as women, by the time we sit down to do our day, we've been exposed to 250 chemicals. Okay. A lot of them. Let me talk about this for a second, because people always want to know, like, Laura, you're 51 years old.

What the heck are you doing to look the way you do? So I'm going to give some full transparency non-negotiables right now, and I'm going to follow it with my recent test. So I full transparency. I color my gray hair. I've been gray since I was 18. I have been coloring my hair the majority of my life and I do it every two weeks because I am literally I have a skunk striped and I am so gray. So this is I my community knows this over and over is I this is my non-negotiable. I color my hair. It's my thing.

What I don't do I don't do my nails. I don't, you know, have less lash extensions. I don't have tattooed eyebrows. I, you know, pencil them in every day.

Everyday Exposure in Products and Home 22:48

I don't I there's a lot of things I don't do. And I have swapped all of my skincare products from moisturizers to anti-wrinkle to and there's a lot of good products out there. You guys, you just can't shop at Target for them. You just can't shop at Nordstrom for them. You got to go online and find the really clean products. And you know, when these book is probably full of suggestions and recommendations there, my website is full of suggestions and recommendations, but here's my claim to fame. Even with my non-negotiable, I just ran a toxin test, the one that I found, cesium and thorium.

I have, you know, like zero environmental toxins. I got no parabens, I got no phthalates. I got all the organic compounds. I got nothing crystal squeaky clean. Now, this is because of the products I switched out, but it's also because of my regular detox routine that I do just like brushing my teeth. So I'm going to have my non-negotiable and I'm going to live a real life in a first world country and be a modern woman and fight aging. And I'm also going to keep my detox pathways. Okay? So I just have to get off that soapbox.

First thing I say it is possible you do not have to be, you know, to run around with stinky armpits and no makeup and gray hair if you don't want to know. And again, perfection is not the goal. Improve enough so that your body's natural processes can take over is the goal. And my non-negotiable is that I have magnetic eyelashes. That's my non-negotiable. You have beautiful eyes. I love them. But I've got eyelashes on. So that's my non-negotiable. I don't yet color my hair. I said to my husband, I cannot cope with that.

I are just not organized enough. So if you want a woman who does not have gray hair, you're going to need to get another woman. And he was like, I think we're good. I don't think you have a gray hair issue. Do you have a gray swath? Hold on. Let's see. Can you see it? Yeah, it's barely I don't. Have a lot, but it's there. I'm like 80% gray at this point, so I think would be. Beautiful having it be. Gorgeous. Not ready. I'm not ready. When you're ready, I'll cheer you on. So anyway, that second category is all the stuff that you're putting on your body.

And again, you don't have to be perfect, you just have to be better and the best time. Do you want to talk now or later about how to level it? Let's talk later because we can go categorically how to level up. Okay. Okay. So that's the stuff you put on your body. Then you touched on all that other stuff. So that is your air quality water qualities in both, right? So air and water quality according to a 1989 study from Massachusetts and I'm from Massachusetts, indicated that one in every six deaths is can be tracked back to air or water quality.

And that was in 1989. It's gotten worse. So the water the air quality that you're breathing, the water that you're drinking, these can be highly contaminated. The products that you're using for your furniture to clean your home, for your for while I mentioned the EMFs, anything that is around you, particularly if you're doing construction on your home that often has volatile organic compounds, viruses, these are pro cancer forming. If you get a new bed, there's a flame retardant in it. Guess what that is thyroid disrupting.

And that's part of your underground system. And that throws off the system. So and then don't forget, one out of every two buildings has had more damage. I'm sure Nafisa talked about talks about this, that it's almost impossible to get away from damage water damaged buildings between our home or school or work, our dorms where we hang out. Visiting a friend, we went to look at a property three months ago and I got three steps into the house and I went, Oh no, this house has mold. And I left. But not everyone's lucky enough to experience it very quickly so you can get mold exposure.

I mean, this is a blessing and a curse. You have very bad mold detox pathways. Yes, immediately. So that's good. You have like spidey sense for mold, but it's not. I mean, what happens when you check into a hotel and there's mold there and you're there for a conference, you're kind of stuck or you got to move, right? Yeah. Know, there's always an upside, right? So if you're sitting there thinking, oh, I'm like that and it's awful. No, it's good you can protect yourself. Yeah, it's always an upside.

So basically that other category is everything around you, your car, your car's 10,000 chemicals. So essentially, unless you're clear that it's clean. Also that new car smell is not good for you. I mean, no, man, people who love new car smell, I hate it. You know I hate it. It gives me a headache. It makes me feel like I'm very sensitive to fragrances that I have. You know, I know my genetics. I've done my, my, you know, my DNA company DNA. I know that I suck at my detox pathway suck. And so, of course, I'm one of those people that that feels it when I get in a new car.

My God, I hate that smell. It makes me so sick or fumes like I've literally dumped all my perfume. I had all these beautiful, expensive perfumes, Chanel and and I was like, you know what? This stuff makes me sick every time I put it on. I cannot do this anymore. And I just don't. Laura, you're like you're like the epitome of that old joke where the guy goes dark. It hurts when I do this. What should I do in the toxic job. Doing. That? I actually meet everyone who comes to my house. They can't wear perfume.

I can't stand the smell. I'm like, If you're going to come to my house, you have to take your shoes off. You can't wear perfume. Those are the and it's gluten free. Those are the three rules. If you don't like the rules, we can assume. Otherwise. I'll have a coffee date by Zoom. Where you slather it on. In fact, we don't let patients wear perfume in our office either because we have so many sensitive people, including myself, that we just said, you know what, this is safe space. No, no. Cologne, perfume, no smells.

If I can smell you more than, like, six inches away, that's too strong. Yeah. So I want to invite people watching right now to let go of their people pleaser and let this be an inspiration and an example to you of what's possible when you stand in your power and say, These are the rules in my life. If you're going to be in my life, this is how it's going to go. And you have to say it like that and do it in a nice way. But stand in your power and don't be the you do it in an empowering way. You don't have to be the high maintenance relative, right?

I mean, get some labs done and show them my detox pathway suck. This is why this is happening. Do you see I have all these exposures here it is in black and white. This is what's happening. Let's back up a step. I don't know that people totally understand that when you have things that are scented, the delivery mechanism to make that scent stick around is under disrupting. So so air fresheners, those diffusers, perfumes, they all fall in that category of endocrine disrupting because what's used as the delivery mechanism makes them so potent, but it also makes them so bad for you.

But here's what I'll tell you. Look, I've been doing this a long time, and I'm old. I'm older than you. So what I say to people is that doesn't work for me or I don't feel well when I do it. Those are two things that nobody can argue with. Right. You know, I used to tell a story of the day I fell in love with you. So you were at a medical conference and we went to this dinner. We were invited to this dinner together. And you sat across the table from me in this fancy steakhouse, like, really fancy.

They were bringing towers of seafood, and it was like all family style. It was just this beautiful display of food. And you're sitting there not eating anything. And when the main course came, you under the table, you had a little ice chest and you pulled up your little metal, you know, bento box, a takeout container that you had that you had prepared in your hotel room because you bring a full kitchen with you when you travel, because you are a severe celiac. And if you get gluten, you're done.

And you were speaking at this conference, you couldn't afford your brain, too, to go south. So you were here at the steakhouse and you put your your dinner on the table and you just start eating it while everybody else is, you know, being served. I'm like, who is this woman? Like, she's so powerful. She has no problem being here at this dinner and just bringing her own food. And I've been to multiple dinners with you where we went to a fancy place. Remember the Greek place where we all I mean, it was here, you put this on the table, I got my food and I'm here to socialize and have fun and I'll have a beverage and here's, you know, my dinner.

And so you stood in your power because that didn't work for you. And it doesn't affect our friendship or our ability to have fun. I mean, it's like that's Wendie like Wendie does Wendie, Laura does Laura. And we just do it in the same space. Yeah. No judgment, right? So. No, but I mean, I have gotten peer pressure for not drinking. I stopped drinking when my second kid was like a year old because I drink a whole bottle of saki myself. Taste agree. But it took me a month to recover. I wasn't hung over, I was messed up and I said to myself, okay, so if you clearly have no adrenal proper function and until you can tolerate small amounts, you can not tolerate large amounts and we're not going to do any.

So I stopped drinking, but I've had people over who are like, You should drink. Like, why? I don't feel good when I drink. And like you should still drink. And I'm like, I don't feel good when I drink, but things so. And you still get pleasure.

Reducing Exposure and Detox Basics 31:58

We're not drinking. I mean, we've done some fun trips in Las Vegas and been to some crazy places where you didn't drink. And, you know, I don't drink. I don't like how I feel when I drink. And so it's very hot for people who are into peer pressure. It's very hard to it's very hard to counteract the comment. I don't feel good when I do it because then you'd be like, You should feel badly when you do it. Nobody says that to you, right? So so it doesn't work for me is what I say to my kids when they propose some cockamamie thing like, oh, that doesn't work for me.

And I don't feel good when I do that. So these are no fucking opening statements. Okay, so in the time we have left, what I really love to do, I mean, I think we covered the main categories there. Any other category we need to cover. Just those three and on and around. Okay. So now keeping ourselves safe. So strategies around staying safe and getting these toxins out of our body. Okay. So I have to be honest with you, Laura, it's not that interesting and it's not that sexy. Okay? The majority of what I'm going to recommend is stuff that 80% of people can do.

If you're listening to this, you can do this. Okay. Always focus on the foundations of your health. What do I mean by that? I mean, put food in your body that looks like food that isn't preserved, that you don't need to read a whole bunch of labels for that's minimally processed. You can cook your vegetables, but don't cook them to death right there should still be some nutrient value in them for the broccoli. It should be bright green. You want your food to be pretty. It pretty food. Move your body regularly, get sweaty, sleep enough.

Most people, particularly North Americans, are chronically under slept. So get to bed usually by ten because after ten your adrenals kick out a second wave of cortisol that can impair your sleep. So there is actually a reason physiologically to go to sleep by ten. It's because you kick out cortisol if you don't make sure you poop every day at least once, because otherwise you're just building up your toxins in your gut and that messes up your hormones and puts you at risk for endocrine excuse me, estrogen dominance.

You don't want that. So eat, sleep, move, poop and de-stress every day. Okay, but that's the foundation. And then it's not sexy, right? We're not like, Oh, here's the lean mean. There's not a magic pill. These are not some. That's it. That's the magic pill. But it's not sexy. Not a supplement protocol that I can do to substitute that. And then, you know, we just completed our program and and every week go to people, okay, now we're going to wash, rinse and repeat. We're going to do the same thing every week because consistency and maintaining yourself is actually where the value is.

Because then you can tolerate those excursions on the holidays. So that's the first step. Manager Foundations. And then the second step is, as you run out of something, so Rome wasn't built in a day, you were not going to fix your toxin exposure in a day. Don't freak because that messes up your stress. Just know as you run out of something, that's when you want to level up. You're running out, level up. Do you want me to give specific brands that I love here? Yeah, do it. All right, let's make it easy on you, because I've made all the mistakes so you don't have to.

So my favorite brands for facial care, for facial products, I use Purity Woods and I use Beautycounter and I use vintage traditions. Those are the things that I use for skincare. Then for makeup, I use mineral fusions and beautycounter to clean my house. I found a great brand. It's EWG Environmental Working Group Certified. So they have, you know, I've made some mistakes and not gotten the best. Now I've gotten the best. Aspen, clean aspen. I don't know about that one. They're fantastic. I love branch basics and I truly, truly free.

I don't know them, but I love branch basics. I just happened to put Aspen on auto shop because they have window cleaner floor cleaner bathroom cleaner laundry detergent. They have everything. And so it's just easy and it's on auto shop. I might change your life in the laundry world with truly free. Really? Okay, go. Go free. I mean, I've outsourced it, but yes, I'm happy to anything that makes it better. And I mean, my teenager said, Mom, I love the smell of this. Can you get this more often? Like, what is it?

What teenager cares about cleaning products? And it's all essential oil scented. Hmm. So we'd like a scent, if you like. Unscented. They do have an unscented as well. But if you like scented, which we love, essential oils around our house. This is amazing. But anyway, so Aspen clean. I got to check that out. Okay. What else you got? Okay, so we were talking about I got distracted. So things you can do as you run out of something level up. That's the bigger hair products. Like that's the thing that is so hard. Hair products.

It's organic. I think it's like organic baby. It's I haven't used it in a couple months because I stopped using product in my hair. I just was like, What do I need this for? I don't. But for shampoo and conditioner. Shampoo and conditioner. So what was your attitude is for shampoo and then conditioner? I can't think of the name of it. I'll have to get that offline, but it's in a brown bottle and it smells really lovely and they're both. Here you are. Is really good too. Yes. Here's what I would recommend.

Go to Environmental Working Group EWG.org They have an app and you can type in shampoo, conditioner, hair product and you can sort it by the cleanest. I usually go for a one or two and it goes all the way up to like ten. Don't get it. Ten. If you look up what you have, you might have nailed it. Ten is bad. Ten in May. In most of the world, a ten means perfect world. A ten means the worst, a one incorrect. You want two one. So go for the ones or the twos if you really can't find something and systematically level up because it's a new app.

There's a new app, by the way, are you familiar with Yucca? Yes, I've heard of it. I haven't used it yet. Why you like Yucca plant? And so I've been playing around with that app and they claim that they are absolutely bias free. They don't accept money from their companies that are on there to rate them higher, like the Better Business Bureau, you know, as a big frickin joke, you pay money to be part of the Better Business Bureau and you can pay money to get a bad review off. I know this because my husband is owns a business and paid for the better but better business bureau forever.

So I was always skeptical. Like, is Yucca like that where people pay and they claim they're not and I've been playing with it and you could do a bar code and they actually have more products on it than EWG does. I feel like EWG is like forever trying to catch up, catch up, catch up on products. But I've been testing my products and finding they they rate from 1 to 100. I actually scanned a product the other day that was a four, which is bad in that one. The higher the better or the lower the worse it is.

So 100 would be better there. But anyways look up that app to yeah. Having a. Chinese. So okay so as you're running out of things level up and then there's some things that you can do like. Don't take a close to the dry cleaner. And most people will say to me, but my dress and I'm like, yeah you don't need to dry clean it. Most, most things. I have one item that I am not sure how to wash and I don't wear it because I don't know how to wash it. But almost every other item that says dry cleaning, you can probably put it on a gentle cycle and wash it so you can just.

You know, kind of fight off this, wash your pits it. Yeah. Wash the stinky bits of it so you don't have to wash the whole thing. The reason I'm picking on dry cleaning is because it's the, even the clean ones. I'm so excited. I saw one that said, Oh, we're clean. And I was like, Great. So I called him. I said, What do you use? And he literally told me this thing that was this long, the word was this long and write it out. So then I had to go look the word up, I look the word up. It's just a fancy way of saying formaldehyde.

And I was like, But you're clean because I knew it's a clean form of formaldehyde. I'm like, No, dude, that's a total oxymoron. There is no clean form of formaldehyde. That's the stuff they use to preserve you when you're dead. They're not using that on my clothes, so Don't dry, clean your clothes wherever possible. Speaking of formaldehyde, you and I both got a lot of it when we were in medical school. Because you're working over 12 hours and these things are preserving your breathing and breathing it.

Great. Yeah, a whole thing. Awful, awful. They got them. Really. I'm really far away from med school at this point because I'm old. That's a benefit. And then you want to make sure that you're filtering your air and your water, because remember, air and water are implicated in lots of issues. So here's where here's where whatever you can do to the best of your budget is more impactful than doing nothing. So you don't have to be perfect. You don't have to get everything and it's okay. This is probably going to be heresy, but it's okay if you can't deal with something right away to deal with it later.

Don't let it be a source of stress. So filter your air if you can do a portable filter that you take with you. Cool. If you can do a whole house even better. We filtered the cars because both my husband and my oldest kid got a new car and I was like 10,000 chemicals later. We're not going to do that. What do you like for Park Filter? Let's talk about that. I cool air yeah Tim A.T.M. they make a portable it's about 12 inches it goes on the back of the of the seat and it filters the car. That is in place, what Evan Brand suggested in his interview.

So that's two of you now that are saying this is the this is the product. Great minds think alike and false, never disagree. So here we are. So filter the air in your car, filter the air in your home, your work, or test it, see how it is. And then, you know, my husband thought I was nuts when, you know, I went through this crazy, toxic overload and we've spent the last four years. So it takes a long time, right? It's not an overnight thing. But about two years ago, I said to my husband, we got to filter the air.

I'm sorry, we got to filter the water because we live in a municipality and technically it's good, but there's pee fast that they're not even testing for. So we filter this. Forever chemicals, the ones that are in nonstick cookware. And a crying, disrupting. And in sporting equipment that's, you know, flame retardant and waterproof. Yeah. Yep. And all that. Yeah. That material that is steam. Steam. When they, when they show pictures of putting the catch up on a shirt, it doesn't stain. Those are endocrine disorders.

When you go camping, your little tent that has all kinds of flame retardant and crap and water repellent sprayed all over it. Yeah, all of that. So we filter our water and we thought our water was pretty good. And what was amazing was our filters filled up. It's they said to me when I bought the system that, oh, you'll need to replace that filter every two years and this filter every year, and the big filter needs to be replaced every year and the little filter needs to be replaced every six months.

And on one hand, I was like, It's so expensive. And then I keep thinking all those things I didn't get exposed to. You can't study yourself, so you don't see the parallel track of what you didn't get. You can't see that. But it's very impactful because the water is so different. When we filter, especially with a new filter, we can feel the difference in the water. It's amazing. So I highly recommend filtering those things. And then if you can get a leather chair, if you need a new chair, do that.

If you're getting a new bed, get a bed without flame retardants because you don't need to sleep on that. You have a brand that you like. I do. My favorite is Birch and my second favorite is Avocado. Birch has the most certifications and avocado has not as many certifications, but they're both really good and they both also have toppers, so they're both firm and I like a soft bed. So I actually got two toppers on my Birch bed in that. And let's see. So we're filtering the air. If you're going to do construction on your home, don't use products that are that off gas.

So just like that new car smell, there's that construction smell aim for products that don't smell. So that includes paint, no VOC paints because it takes forever for them to off gas. Don't use them. We also found a stain by Vermont coatings. It's good for outside and inside, so you can use it on your treads on your stairwell. We used it on our chicken coop because I said, well, you know, why would we put toxic stuff on the chicken coop? And then we're going to eat the eggs. There's something. So I didn't want my toxic I didn't want my chickens to be toxic to make any sense. So Vermont natural coatings, they make an indoor nature.

It's derived from way. So if you're severely allergic to dairy, you probably shouldn't use that. But otherwise everyone else should be fine. And once it's dry, I would imagine it's not not. It might not even be the way in dairy that you're allergic to. It could be some other component. So yeah. So, so I would start with those things because they're very impactful. But again, you cannot detox on a broken foundation, so you must, must, must eat, sleep, poop, move your body and de-stress every day.

I love it's the foundation that's the boring stuff. But you do the sexy stuff. On the last few moments that we have here, I would love to hear final words of encouragement and support, and I would also love for our audience to know where to find you, how to get in touch with you, how to work with you, how to get your book through this. It's in the bookshelf behind me here. All right. So I think the most important thing to remember is that you are on a journey and you're not going to be perfect and you're going to have setbacks and you're going to have detours.

And it's all part of the journey and you're meant to take it like that. It's okay. Don't go crazy with small things. Focus on just keep moving forward every day. You will make massive improvement over the course of a year. Don't give up. It's not perfection. It's improvement that you're focusing on. So that's the inspirational thing. And then on all the socials I'm @WendieTrubowMD we have a brick and mortar in Massachusetts. So if you feel like you need functional medicine with an insurance coverage, we do that in Massachusetts.

It's a membership practice that's fivejourneys.com And then we have an online brand for people who might not want to come to Boston in the winter. And that's Dirty Girl. I'm sorry, that's drwendie.com And that has programs, coaching, testing, supplements, community. So it depends where you want to go. And then if you want the book, you can get chapter one at drwendie.com or you can get the book itself off of Amazon. And I would recommend if you type in, if you want the book, don't just type in Dirty Girl because you're not going to get the book, you're going to get something else.

So take your Dirty Girl Trubow book or Detox book and that'll aim you in the right direction. So you don't want to end up on a porn site. So this is like the thing you didn't realize when you the book, which is so funny, I hope that bitchy and sweaty doesn't end up down the wormhole as well. I don't think it will. But yeah, I think. That for people wondering, what am I talking about? That's your next book. That's book to know. Dirty Girl has been censored by Facebook because they thought we were porn and we're like, We're advertising supplements, guys.

It's not porn. But yeah, they things you don't things you learn you don't know, you don't know. We looked. Hilarious. Wendie, as always, it is an absolute pleasure to chat with you, to spend time with you, to do life together. I'm so honored to be your friend and so glad that you came on to speak with our audience. Thank you so much for all the wisdom that you've dropped on our audience today. Laura, my pleasure. Right back at you. Yeah, until next time, everyone. Take good care bye now.