How To Transform – From Broken to Blooming

Introduction and Guest Background 0:00

Hi there. It's Dr. Jenn. Welcome back. I am so delighted to have my friend and colleague Dr. Wendie Trubow, here with us. Dr. Wendie is an IFM certified practitioner. She's passionate about helping women optimize their health. She works as a functional medicine gynecologist and through her own personal struggles with mold and metal, celiac disease and other issues, she's developed a deep sense of compassion and expertize for what her patients are facing. She is the author of Dirty Girl, and she has graced us with her time and her wisdom today.

Dr. Wendie, thank you for being here. Jenn what a pleasure to be here with like a friend who's committed to the same thing I'm committed to, which is, you know, resolution of disease, prevention of cancer, particularly breast cancer. And then, you know, I always said I said to someone the other day, the absence of a problem doesn't mean you're good. It just means you don't have a problem. So it's not just the absence of a problem. It's actually feeling freaking amazing. Yeah, that's the goal that you touched on.

A very key issue, which is that we are trained to think that health is the absence of disease. And I can't tell you how many people come to me. And it literally this is their opening statement. I'm healthy, except I have breast cancer and I'm like, oh, like. But that is how we think of things. We think of health as the absence of disease or diagnosis, but in fact, help is optimum function. And you have quite a health story and a health journey to share with people. So can you can you just give a summary of how you arrive to this place because you weren't born into functional medicine, you found your way into functional medicine out of personal necessity.

I actually married my way into it, actually. There you go. So so I'm going to skip a lot because there's a lot that went into this. Think of me as a soup that's been blended. So it's really hard to say, okay, this is the problem or this is the reason. But let's go back 52 and a half years I'm born and I have the worst genetics. Awful. I have to teach half our genes. The COMT I'm sorry, I have COMT. I have two vitamin D deficiency genes. I have two genes for celiac. I didn't know any of this because who did that stuff in the seventies?

Right. So fast forward to my teens. I have incidentally, a lot of people aren't doing it now either. Truth? Yes, true. Totally valid. So I didn't know any of that. And in my teens I had what I didn't know was irritable bowel and like weird food, things. Like I never eat oranges because when I did, I would get sharp stabbing stomach pain. So I thought that I was allergic to oranges. I stopped eating them for years and I had anemia that didn't respond to iron. No matter how much I took, I stopped pooping because it took all that iron because again, eighties, they didn't have gentle iron.

They just had iron. Yeah. So and it didn't do anything. Fast forward to my twenties. I now have multiple nutrient deficiencies and my irritable bowel has gotten to the point where I have no idea what setting me off, but everything sets me off. And I had room clearing gas like the kind of gas where you're like, Oh my God, when did something die here? It was terrible. It's like a deeply embarrassing kind of thing. And I just figured everyone else had a better quirk and was better able to hold it in.

Fast forward again to my thirties I have had trouble getting pregnant. My first pregnancy was a severely growth restricted 3 pound wonder who's fierce and still fierce. Oh yeah. So I have a crappy OB outcome and difficulty getting pregnant. I'm on my second pregnancy and after the pregnancy

Personal Health Journey and Functional Medicine 4:08

my husband says to me, that's why I said I married into it because he was into this before I was. My husband says to me, Hey, why don't you go see my mentor before our insurance changes? So I did. And he at the time did what I consider to be a massive workup. Now I'm like, That's just standard. But to me it was a lot because all I'd ever had was a CBC and an iron and a B12 panel, you know, and that was it. And he he diagnosed me with celiac disease, which is an autoimmune disease, ultimately responsive to elimination of gluten.

And so I went gluten free at 35, and that was my introduction to functional medicine. And I was really inspired and ultimately went into functional medicine because I thought, you know, I want to make this difference for people and we just don't have these tools to make the difference that I want to make in traditional, conventional OB-GYN. So I transitioned out and spent 16 years really working on my health. So fast forward again, I'm 48. I feel pretty good. I go on the trip of a lifetime to France.

I come home and I gain 9 pounds, lose half a year in my head and have a rash that's like on the creases of my eyelids and my nose under my chin. And no matter how much scratching it, never scratch that itch. And I'm freaking like What woman is like, Hey, sign me up for half my hair loss and weight gain so I check my thyroid. It's normal, I check my hormones, they're normal. Remember, I'm 48 and so I'm thinking, okay, these effing perimenopausal hormones are killing me. But no, my hormones were amazing, my thyroid was perfect.

I checked my gut. My gut has never been better. No, I'm really stumped and my hair loss is continuing and I'm really freaking. And I hear a report that when Notre-Dame burned in France, it released 500 tons of lead dust into the air. And the closer you were to Notre-Dame after it burned, the more lead exposure you got and the further away, the less this makes. That's right. The closer you are at this. Course. That gas. When I was in France, so week after Notre Dame burned and I got a lot exposure and I looked at my husband and I was like, I got a lot, but we all got a lot exposure.

But I'm the one who's sick from having gone to France. So I tested and my heavy metals were 25% higher than they had been. And I was like, Oh, that caught my attention. And then because I'm a data hog, I tested the Mycotoxins and Mycotoxins or the toxins that mold puts out when it's in your body. And just a little plug that 50% of buildings have been water damage. So it's highly probable that you've been exposed to Mycotoxins in your life or mold. Yeah, for sure. Mold is everywhere. It's ubiquitous. Yeah.

And the thing is that 25% of people lack the enzymes necessary to break down that mold. So unless you clearly are one of them, it goes right. Right. With your genetic panel, right? Yes. So that and that's why, like two people can be in the same moldy space. One of them has a crippling headache and is miserable. And the other person is like, what's wrong with you? Right. Right. You're faker. Right? You're such a faker. Yeah. Yeah. So I do the test. I have five mycotoxins in me. That's where everyone goes.

Oh, we need like an audience sound for "Eww, Creepy". And then I. Figured, go in for a penny, in for a pound, I'll test everything. So I tested the environmental toxins or what I'll consider other, you know, plastics, flame retardants, nail polish, beauty products, slate, all of it perchlorate, gasoline fumes. And I had a whole list of that positive and that that was the inspiration for our book because I looked at Ed, my husband and I went, I'm such a Dirty Girl. We're writing that book because I'm such a poster child for healthy living.

Yeah. And yet I still wind up here. So that's my story. So it's my main mass became my passion. Jenn Yeah. And that's such an interesting point because you're not someone who was living irresponsibly throwing caution to the wind, eating junk food like you were doing everything right. I didn't even replace the gluten free products with gluten free substitutes. Yeah. You know, you were just. You were just eating good, healthy food. Yes. And I exercised and I figured that I'm, like, doing a good job, like, you know, righteous.

I'm doing a good job, and bam, I am a Dirty Girl and we are all Dirty Girls. Even if you're male, you're a Dirty Girl. Yeah. So that that brings me to the first point that I want to talk about. And that's that when people think about breast cancer, they they weigh heavily on the it's a genetic disease. There's a genetic component. And I'm not even talking about the broccoli population. I'm talking about the population in general that truly believes that their family history is their destiny. So what say you?

I say your genes are 10% of your future and the other 90% is in your hands. You have control over what happens to you. You have agency control and there is always a possibility to pivot 100%. Yeah, yeah. Because breast cancer really is an environmental disease. Yeah. Yeah, I see. I see all cancers and breast cancers in that bucket. Yeah. For sure. End result of severe inflammation. What causes inflammation? Environment or toxins? What's the most common cause? Environmental toxins. And in that I'm including food because it comes from your environment.

So between food and all the other stuff are exposed to and then you layer on, you know, your thoughts, your stressful life, you're not sleeping, all of which you have control over, by the way. And you have a nasty probability for cancer, but your genes are only 10%. Yeah. For sure. And even in families where they say, well, my mother got breast cancer and I and I got breast cancer, you know, the we generally are growing up in similar environments to our to our mother. And we oftentimes take on similar habits to our mother totally.

So, yes, your mother had breast cancer. Your mother was also overweight, probably eating a diet full of processed foods. And then you you basically lived duplicated her same life, being overweight, living on a diet of processed foods, you probably are going to have a similar outcome. And I'm not me. I'm like not blaming the the patient. Right. Because you are a prime example of doing everything right and still getting sick. And it's because our environment has become increasingly more toxic. We are not living on our grandmother's earth.

We're not even living on our mother's earth now. And there are thousands of toxins that we can potentially come into contact with every single day, many of which are in our food supply or in our cleaning supply. We are in our cosmetics supply or in our personal care items, and these are not really tested and they're certainly not tested synergistically, right. They're not tested together. Even if I think I heard a statistic that only 1000 chemicals that are in all of those things that we talked about have been tested.

Okay. So so the EPA is something I've actually looked at because I was preparing for a presentation and I was like, okay, we'll talk about the EPA. So the EPA is the same age as me. We are the same age. It's 52, okay? 1970 and their job is to evaluate toxins that are reported to them by companies that are concerned that their their product might be toxic. So it's kind of based on the honor code, which I'm not clear that is a particularly effective way. So so essentially.

Environmental Toxins and Breast Cancer Risk 12:24

Because companies may they they may be motivated to not have them tested. Hypothetically. Right. So so it's it's reliant on companies reporting voluntarily. Hey, we think there might be a problem. And the philosophy is not prove that it's safe and then you can use it. The philosophy is develop it, use it. And if there's a problem, maybe then we'll evaluate it. So the EPA is essentially drowning. The last substance that they banned was in 1984. And I think a lot of your listeners might not even have been born in 1984.

Yeah. And so I was talking to two people yesterday about the EPA. They hadn't been born in 1984. I said, your whole lifetime, nothing's been banned by the EPA. And so this is why Erin Brockovich has a job, right? Yes. Yes. And so there's an incredible backlog, even with the things that are being reported. You know, you think about we're developing somewhere between 1510 thousand new chemicals every month to year. Like there's not even it's not even regulated. So we have no clear sense of what's being developed.

We know that there are 500 to 500000 to 2 million or more chemicals out there. And in the EU it is more regulated. You do have to prove that it's safe before you can use it. They have a whole list of banned substances, but in the United States there are nine substances in total that the EPA has banned. The last one was banned almost 40 years ago. And so I think the first thing to really think about is they don't have a lot of teeth to be able to enforce their mandates. And so we can't rely on necessarily the government to be keeping us safe because that's not their mandate.

Their mandate isn't keep us safe. Their mandate is keep us from dying from an exposure of one particular thing. It's a very different mandate than keeping us safe. Yeah. So we have to go to other sources to look for is the safe forests like Environmental Working Group. Think dirty. I heard of another one yesterday. I'll see if I can come up with it while we're talking. These are all apps that you can go to and check what are the ingredients? Is the product good for me? You know, test. Don't guess, get data.

Yeah, for sure. So talk to us a little bit about Dirty Girl. I know the reason that you wrote it. You wrote it because it's basically the story of your life and how these environmental pathogens can can really affect you. Even a healthy person can be affected by them. So talk to us a little bit about the book and and its focus and what you hope to accomplish with that. Sure. Well, when I got all these diagnoses and I was so sick, I mean, it doesn't I look normal. Right. You know, the thing about it is everyone's got something and you can always tell by looking at them.

So you couldn't really tell by looking at me that I wasn't well, but I was a girl. Yeah. And so you. For sure knew you weren't. Well, I knew I was like, yeah, this is not normal. Yeah. And that's something that's really important for people to hear, right? Because so many people go to the doctor and they know they are gaslit. Right? Right. They know they are not right. There's no question in their mind that they're not right. The doctor orders tests. And what is the doctor saying? All your tests are normal, right?

You are fine. The line of spying. Right. And it's because our medical system is built on failure and you have to fail before you can engage. Right? There is no health optimization built in. And so all of these people get dismissed as fine when they know they're anything but. Jen, I have to tell you, my mom has Addison's disease, which is very rare. It's a total failure of the adrenal glands for the last year. It's very rare. It's an autoimmune disease. And she got sick when I was 16. And I remember this because I would like walk in and be like, good morning.

And she'd be on her bathroom floor vomiting because she had no cortisone, no aldosterone, no ability to maintain her blood pressure and her ability to stand up straight. So she went to I don't even know how many doctors and a number of them remember this was the eighties. So there's a lot of misogyny. But the doctors, rotator cuff woman them said, I think you're depressed. And my mom being my mom wasn't like in their face, like, don't be a jerk. Like I might be depressed because I can't stand up straight, but that's not the cause of my depression.

My depression is incidental to the fact that I don't feel well, right. She had to wind up in the hospital with a pressure, a blood pressure of 60 over 40 before they took her seriously. And one endocrinologist walked into her hotel. Her hotel, her hospital room and said, oh, you have Addison's because you get this very classic bronzed look. JFK had it. She was classically bronzed blood pressure in the pits. And he said, you have Addison's. He diagnosed her in 3 seconds flat after being sick for I mean, she got progressively worse.

So, you know, the moral of the story is don't be don't accept gaslighting. You know, if you believe something's wrong, find a doctor who will work with you. It's generally a functional medicine doctor because we've got the tools, the time and the interest. Right? Like we're interested in sleeping it out. So. So, yeah. So back to Dirty Girl. It's really about having a roadmap to take power back and take back your agency and control the narrative and understand how to get your hands around the tools that you need to have a life in which you feel freaking amazing.

You are vital, vibrant, healthy, able, and interested in intimacy until you're at least 100, and that every decade you're better than the one before. This is a roadmap to get you there because even with good intentions, sometimes we don't do what we should do because we we need to we need, you know, good intentions don't always have good outcomes. So we sometimes need a roadmap. And this is really designed to be a roadmap. So for the person that is kind of out there and feeling like they they have that sense that something's wrong, but they can't they just really can't put a finger on it.

And they go to their doctor and they they get dismissed. And, you know, that's a hard place to be when it's not so much that the doctor is stumped because most traditional physicians, they have they feel really uncomfortable not knowing what to do for you. Right. And so when they're stumped, they kind of react and reflect it back to you, like make it about, you know, you're depressed or or that kind of thing because they feel uncomfortable with that. And that's why they tell you that you're fine and it's all in your head and that kind of thing.

So when that person is in that place, like, what? What do you suggest they do? Where do you start? Right? And I will say, I mean, I didn't have anxiety until I had kids. And then I was like, where did this come from? You know, these like what if, what if, what if, what if, what if, you know, what the what if truck drove over me and then backed up a couple times back and forth. Yeah. Yeah. So I will say there's, there's always, it's always worth seeing to yourself what component of this is a function of my fear speaking.

And if you can genuinely say like, you know, yes, I have a patient who literally lost all the hair on her body and ended up having Lyme disease. But because heavy metals mycotoxins aids and we've been growing her hair back, her hair is coming back, by the way, but she will now come to me with like all these kind of random things. And I say, look, we should mention that those things often travel together. Yes, they do. It's very common because having one makes you susceptible to the others. It's the same issue, right?

It's the same crappy detox that allows you to hold on to one. When you get exposed to another, you're like, Well, I'll keep that, too. We're loyal to our toxins in our bodies. So she comes to me still for follow up. And I said to her, Look, you genuinely have health related anxiety, genuine. So I don't want to make it seem like I'm pooh poohing it. And for this I don't think you need to worry, you know, like a bump or a bruise or this or that. So but we really genuinely do look at it. So ask yourself if there's some component of anxiety that's driving it and if you can genuinely pull that off.

And so, okay, I might be anxious, but I still have something going on. Trust yourself. The message here is don't give away your power. Trust yourself because you know what's going on in your body. And it's more about that you haven't found the person to work with you than that there's nothing wrong with you. If you believe there's something wrong with you, go to a functional medicine provider. They will evaluate you and you will get information. Yeah, that's so important. Trusting yourself, right?

Trusting that instinct, knowing that it's you're not okay, right? Like if you feel like you're not okay, you're not okay. And you need to continue that journey to find out why you're not okay and and reestablish that balance. I want to say something here, Jen, before we go on to the next thing, because some of the people listening might be like, well, I'm fine. And the other part of it is it's sometimes hard to miss when you're not okay or easy to miss when you're not okay, because if your brain's not working optimally, if you it's not like turning a switch on and the lights go on and all of a sudden you see that you're not okay because degeneration occurs slowly.

So you think to yourself, Well, I'm just getting older, so I'm not as strong, as vibrant, as resilient, whatever you say. So it's really important to take a step back and say, okay, if you have any complaint and I don't care what it is, you could say to me, I have a rash on my skin or fatigue or headaches or inflammation or seasonal allergies or irritable bowel or bad periods or literally anything you could say to me, my response is, there's something going on. Let's figure out the root cause so you can feel freaking amazing.

Yeah. So even if you think to yourself, I don't really think something's wrong, go back to. Are you taking Tylenol for a headache? Well, something's not right there. Headache is not a normal state. Yeah, and I think that's such an important point because we have normalized so many things in the traditional medical system because traditional medical doctors don't know how to fix it. And you and I both came from that system. So we know we know that in medical school, in residency, in fellowship, we did not learn how to get people well, we did not learn how to make people happy.

Yeah. Yeah. So different focus. So it's lyric and I think different focus. You know, I loved being an obstetrician and delivering babies and doing surgery. It's just a it's got different tools, right? You wouldn't ask your plumber to do your electrical work. And that's kind of what the focus on feeling freaking amazing. If you go to your traditional, conventional doctor, they have the different tools. They don't have the tools you need to get. You where you want to go. So what you really want to focus on is get the right doctor for the right problem.

Gaslighting, Trusting Symptoms, and Getting Help 24:18

If you have a mechanical issue, you want to wind up in surgery, meaning if you have a physical lump, you need to take it out, but you don't need to go to them for wellness and for for for thriving. So it's really about using the right provider for the right tools. It's just the wrong tools. It's not the best thing. They don't. Tools, I know. But I ultimately think that they should like that that system is so broken that diagnosed and manage symptoms, the system is broken. And our system, which is really designed for acute care, it's designed for if you break a bone or are in some kind of trauma or if you need your appendix out or if you have to give birth to a baby, like that system is great for the management of chronic disease.

It does not work. It doesn't work. The wrong system. Again, it's like going to the plumber for an electrical issue. It's just the wrong system. So so that's but but again, I, I don't, I think that system deserves to be acknowledged for what it does, like you just mentioned, for acute emergency, obstetric surgical. That's the right place to be if you want to thrive, you're just looking in the wrong place. Right? That's like that's like think you're going to meet Mr. Right at the bar? Definitely. That's not where Mr. Right is. Right, exactly.

Exactly. Exactly. So I want to get back to that whole normalization because we have blamed getting older as an excuse for not feeling the way that you think you should feel. And not and not not having optimal health. Right? Oh, you're getting older. You're getting forgetful. It's normal to be forgetful as you get older. Oh, you're getting older. Your joints age, it's, it's, it's normal to have achy joints when you're getting older, right? So we, we use age to normalize all of these things. But it's actually not true.

No, no, it's not true. And so we shouldn't accept these these excuses. Oh, you're just getting older because optimal people who are functioning optimally and we see this in the blue zones, they, they enjoy excellent health through old age. And it is possible, but you have to take a different route. Yeah. You, you have to get out of that trap of my genes or my future. My parents did this. I'm going to do it. And there's nothing else possible. You actually have to start to think about what do I want to create in my health?

Because the future is in your hands, but if you don't know it, you don't manage it. So so even knowing that you have agency and possibly day to create is the first step, right? Like you can't open a closed mind if you're listening to this and you're like, no, my mom has diabetes. I'm sure I'll get diabetes. This is not this is not the place for you to be, right? Where you want to be thinking about what can I create? We reject that conventional wisdom that you're supposed to fail and get worse every year.

So that's why I mean, I think you and I are on the same page. It it comes back to toxins because that's why we wrote the book, is to give you a roadmap to walk through. How do you start to clean up your life and your beauty products and your food and your stress and your sleep and your movement? How do you create a life that represents the health you are working for? How do you get there and how do you what are the toxins you need to get rid of? Well, I mean, all of them. Right. But you're never going to get there.

So how do you start to balance the scale so that you have fewer toxins so your body's not drowning under the waterfall of toxins? Yeah. So I think people are really intimidated by like the there's a conception and it may not be far from the truth, but like everything causes cancer, so I can never avoid everything. So like I said, I'm not going to do anything at all, right? I think that that's what so many people kind of perceive and attach themselves to. And then they're also stuck in, like, their habit and what they love.

Oh, I can't cheat. Oh, I can't stop wearing perfume. Oh, I can't change my laundry detergent. Oh, that dishwashing that natural dishwashing stuff doesn't get the dishes clean. Oh, this. Oh, that. Right, right. Oh, you know, I like the way that my laundry smells that kind of thing. And so they, they ground themselves in these beliefs and then they don't change. So and it is daunting to change everything at once, right? No, but you're not going to you're not going to change everything at once. Yeah.

Because that's not manageable now. So let's start with this. If you have some non-negotiable in your life that you literally feel that your life would be not the same by getting rid of like your perfume or your whatever the pick one. Okay, pick one thing that you're going to hold on to. Fine. Let's address that last. There's so many other things we can work on that you don't have. We don't have to pick a fight with your favored, favored heirloom, whatever. Right. Yeah. So there's, there's lots of opportunities to level up and have an improvement.

And then what I will say is when I was 22, I was a sales rep. This is why I went into medicine. I was a sales rep for a multimedia company, meaning I sold at the time slides and videos for companies that wanted to do presentations. I was 22 and every one of my clients would be like, So Wendy, I have a medical question for you. And I'm like, for me, I'm a 22 year old audio video sales rep. You're asking me? And they be like, Yeah, I really feel like you could answer my question. So I was like, Well, I come from a family of doctors and people think I'm a physician in training.

So I'll just go to med school. So I did. So anyway, one of my, one of my clients sat me down and said, look, we really like you. We really like working with you, and you wear too much perfume. We do not want to smell you when you leave this office, so you need to wear less perfume. And I was like at first for a, for for like a moment, I was a little offended. And then I was like, that's really one of the most impactful things anyone has said to me, because when you think about it, perfume is to mask body odor.

That was like why it was developed. And when you wear really strong perfume, everybody else has to smell it. But I don't really want to smell other people's perfume. And I actually have family members. I say them, Please don't come to my house wearing that perfume because the smell lingers even after you're gone. And I don't want to smell it, so please don't put it on if you're coming to my house because it doesn't smell good to me any longer. But if that's your thing, like that's your thing you can't get rid of.

Let's address your food and your sleep and your stress and your beauty products and your cleaning products and your how you wash your clothing. Like, let's, let's pick a fight with all the other stuff and level up and get you healthy so that you can tolerate that one excursion. Right. It's all about the balance. If you're being if you're basically being waterboarded with toxins. Yes. They all cause cancer because they all synergize and they all stress the system and they all build up in your fat, your bones, your organs.

But if you can start to pull away the toxins, sleep through the night, manage your brain so that you have thoughts that empower you, eat food that's good for your body. Move your body and sweat. Now you can tolerate some of the things because you're moving them, you're excreting them. So it's all about the balance of toxins as opposed to, yes, the innate number. And you don't have to be perfect. Perfect to see you're a surgeon. Perfection is the enemy of good. So you have to be good to be perfect, you have to be good.

And Jenn, I want to say something about food, because to me, that's the most impactful thing you can start with, because you do it every day, multiple times a day. But when people always say to me, oh, you know, I screwed it up, I'm, I, I cheated. First of all, that language drives me nuts because you didn't cheat on anything. You simply eat something that didn't work for you. So start to use language that works so that you empower your body. But more than that, the goal is not to be perfect and never have an eating excursion.

The goal is to be mindful of them, plan them into your life like you know you're going to a birthday party and you're going to have a piece of cake. Fine. But then the next night, the next day or next night, get back on your program. The goal is to shorten that time that you're off the rails. If you go off the rails, go off the rails intentionally and then get back on the rails as soon as you can, as quickly as you can, that's the goal. Not to be perfect. Perfection only exists in Hollywood on the screen where they've cut it and edited it and airbrushed it.

Like, that's not real, though. Reality is, humans have excursions in how they eat and it evolves over time. So you don't have to be perfect.

Reducing Toxic Load and Practical Swaps 33:36

I know I've beaten that one to death, but that was really important for me to just make sure people understand like, you don't have to be perfect, you have to be on a plan and get back on it when you go off. That's it. So I just want to summarize everything that we said today, because there's just so much gold there. It's not your genes, it's your environment. And the great thing about that, and I do want to say, even in Nebraska mutation carriers, right. Even in the people that have a very, very, very high tendency to develop breast cancer, it's not 100% right.

100% of people with a mutation do not get breast cancer, which means that there's something else in play, there's something else influencing our genes. And that's the environment. And we have so much control over the environment that we create, right? So it's not your genes, it's your environment. It's not your genes that you write. But without question, we have a significant amount of control over our environment and it's not control. And your story is a great example of that. But even when you run into these environ mental pathogens that disrupt your health, it's knowing and recognizing and trusting your instinct and knowing that something's wrong and pursuing that.

And you are a prime example that even if you do have mold illness, it can be reversed. Even if you do have heavy metal toxicity, it can be reversed. But you have to know about it. You have to discover it, you have to test for it, and you have to intervene. But but the knowledge that you can do something, you can reverse this. It's really important. And the message is the same with breast cancer. The truth is that breast cancer can be reversible, but you have to determine what caused the breast cancer, what's driving the breast cancer, what is it that's creating that environment that is driving breast cancer?

Because breast cancer is a normal response to an abnormal environment. And it's all those things that we talked about that are contributing to an abnormal environment. And so you really do need to trust your intuition and know that if you feel like there's something wrong, there's something wrong, and if you are not what you were before, it's not normal, right? We don't have to decrease in function with age. A decrease in function is due to either. You know, it's one of those things like if you don't move it, you lose it, right?

So we have to maintain our activity, maintain our mind, but maintain our body. And if we're doing that, we shouldn't have functional loss. And if you have functional loss, there's something interfering with your function. And so trust that intuition and pursue that. And our goal is not to be perfect, right? No one is ever going to be perfect except for maybe in Hollywood. Right? And even then, I've seen those I just seen those touched up pictures that Hollywood is in perfect either. Right. But it's not really a.

Lot of editing going on there. It's all. A fantasy. So that's why I'm saying is perfection is a fantasy. Yeah. And we put that on ourselves and then it creates a source of stress because we're not perfect. Right. But you know, you are very perfect as you are now. We just have to uncover all your perfection. Yeah. As opposed to, you know, buried under toxins. We just need to find you underneath all that. Yeah. God doesn't make mistakes, right? So God created all of us exactly how we were supposed to be created.

And our body knows to heal. We just have to make sure that we're giving it what it needs and taking away what is inhibiting it or interfere with it. And the language with which you use with yourself really matters. Because that language in itself can be toxic right now. And so the food that we eat should be nourishing. We should be moving in a way that is joyful and not creating more toxicity. Like if your exercise is stressing you out, you need to find a different mode of exercise. But also exercise can be a source of sweating and that can be detoxifying along with other modes of sweating.

So working on your detoxification processes, making sure that you're prioritizing sleep because it's really when we sleep that the majority of our detoxification is happening, right? Yeah. And decreasing your toxic load and as much as you can and you're not going to do it all at once, but you got to start somewhere. You have to start somewhere. Do you want to tell us some of your favorite things? Like, do you have a favorite cosmetics brand? Do you have a favorite cleaning brand? Your favorite self-care brand? I do.

I have all of that stuff. And let me just say, Jenn in the quest for in the quest for health. I screw it up all the time. So I don't want people to listen and be like, Oh, well, she's got it. Well, I've been at this for a number of years. Right? So the the things that we the things that we do we find are good because we've been working on them. So. All right. My favorite house cleaning brand is Aspen clean I use them for and they're environmental working group certified so I use them for. And everyone should know about the EWG, the Environmental Working Group.

It's it's something that you need to have in it as a reference and use it for any use. Not just have it use like I'm always. Because again, we can not trust the EPA as we spoke about in the beginning. The EPA is not power to protect you and it's not protecting and you cannot trust that right now. You need to you need to look beyond that. So Environmental Working Group really has their hands around what it what it means to be healthy and they use their data driven. So and I've been green washed a million times, you know, I see something you're scrolling through.

You're in a rash, you see it, you're like, Oh, that looks great. You buy it, you get it home. And you know, if you're like me, you've ordered maybe a four month supply because you're busy and you don't want to run out any time soon. And I have lots children and blah blah blah. So, okay, so I've been green washed a whole bunch of times. And then you wake up one morning and you say, I never check that, and you check it, and you're horrified by how unhealthy it really is. And then you use it up because you've spent money on it.

That's the that's the lesson here. So anyway, my favorite cleaning product is Aspen Clean. I use it for dishwashing washing machine, windows, floors, bathroom, all of the cleaners as well as dish soap. All of the things that we use come from Aspen, clean. And my favorite makeup brand, I have two. It's Beautycounter and mineral fusions. And it's so funny because my mom, I switched about it within the last year. I switched everything to those two brands and I'm on camera a lot. So at the end of the day, I've been on camera, but I also work in a medical facility.

So I put my mask on and take my mask off and I rarely ever do anything but touch up my lipstick during the day and maybe my under-eye cover up because it just gets faded. So I'll go home. And my mom said to me, You look like you just put your makeup on. And I was like, I put it on at 730 this morning and now it's 630 at night, right? So these are my two favorite brands because they last and they're clean. And again, EWG, highly rated certified. Yeah. Then my favorite skincare product is Purity Woods, which is actually developed by Brand, basically, who's one of my favorite people in the world and is all about healthy and getting toxin free.

And then what else did we have? What else? I mean, I think that that's a pretty good place for everyone to start. And remember, you don't have to do it all at once, right? You can pick one thing at a time and you don't get rid of everything you have. Like use it up and then replace it with something better. I think that that is the very best way for people to move forward because first of all, it's expensive, it's intimidating. Oh, what do you cook with? Great question. I use cast iron, I use stainless steel.

And then we have a few brands that are PFOA and Fat Free, so we are using those scanned pan from Scandinavia. MM. Great. So we use that. And but I want to just jump on to what you were just saying, Jenn, is where people say, where do I start? My response is start with what's running out. When you run out, level up every once in a while, you'll have done a good job and you can be like, Wow, look at me. I did a good job. I had picked mineral fusions just because I liked the brand and I liked the colors long before I checked EWG and had even any inkling of it.

I've been using them for years and guess what? They are clean so. So you might nail it if you if you had a surprise win, like celebrate that. I guess one less thing I have to level up. Exactly. So the thing you're running out on is the thing you want to level up on. And I use EWG and think dirty. Those are my two resources to check before I buy. Yeah those are those are great websites. I tell people where they can find you and where they can get dirty girl. Awesome. Do not go search Dirty Girl on Google.

You're going to get things that you don't necessarily or maybe you do, but it's not going to get you about. So so the best place to get the book is Amazon. And again, if you type in Dirty Girl, you're not going to find me unless you're really lucky. You're going to find other stuff. So type in Dirty Girl Detox book it's bright yellow or dirty girl trouble that'll that'll get you to the right place. That's the best place to get the book. And then we have our own podcast, which is called Feel Freaking Amazing.

So you can find me on Apple, Spotify, all of the major sites or sites have the podcast and then we have our website for our clinic, which is fivejourneys.com I'm on all of the socials at Wendie Trubow, MD and then our national brand, which is all about detox. We have supplements that specifically support detox and hormone balanced detox, actually, because hormones are a huge source of toxins for ourselves. Dirtygirldetox.com. Yeah, it's all in one wonder everywhere. Wonderful. Yeah, it was. You know what?

Real fast. I do want to talk about Zino estrogens because we touch on that and there are so many environmental chemicals that act like estrogen but in a very toxic way in our body and are actually, I believe, are responsible for the majority of breast cancers. Certainly the rise. I mean, think about it. Do you want to touch on that a little bit? Yeah. So so you language it beautifully that that these are products and substances that that our body thinks are hormones. They bind to the receptors and we still have to excrete them.

And it goes down the same hormone excretion pathway. And when you look at if you were exposed to one, again, this goes back to the waterfall and the deluge of toxins that we have because we're exposed to so much of it. It looks like a hormone, acts like a hormone has to be detoxed like a hormone and confuses the body and makes the work harder and makes it harder to even process our own hormones in a healthy pathway. So what we're really what happens is, you know, there's a lot of places this can go wrong.

So if phase one in your liver is too fast, you build up free radicals. Free radicals are toxic and inflammatory. So in order to manage the free radicals, what do you do? Store them fat bones, organs. Then you have women who can't lose weight. Then a phase two happens. Great. You put it in your gut to poop it out. But what if you're constipated or have dysbiosis or inappropriate bacteria balance or you have overactivity of the beta gluconate is enzyme and now your hormone or hormone like zone or estrogen is about to be excreted.

But instead, it's like it's like a murder mystery, right?

Zenoestrogens, Plastics, and Final Takeaways 46:36

Instead of leaving, it gets recycled into the body. And again, when it gets recycled, it goes from being water soluble, bound and relatively inert into a fat soluble, toxic intermediate that then has to be dealt with again. Increasing the body burden, increasing the body burden, increasing the body burden. And still you're have more, you know, hormones coming. So the zero estrogens are pretty nasty for us. I would say the most impactful thing, hands down that each of us can do is to not store our food in plastic, not ever microwave our food in plastic and not drink from plastic water bottles.

If you do those three things, that's like a really powerful start. Yeah. De-plasticizing your life is so important and I agree. Don't store in plastic. Don't cook in plastic, don't drink out of plastic bottles. But the one thing that people often don't think about that I think is a killer for people is if you are drinking coffee every morning and you're making those little pads, you are basically pouring hot water through a plastic pod and drinking plastic every single day with your coffee. Yes.

The other thing is, if you're if you're a tea drinker instead and you're using those beautiful shiny tea bags, those are made of plastic as well. So cleaning up your morning beverage goes a very long way towards your health. What are other is, you know, estrogens other than plastics that people should be looking for. So my big thing is antibiotics. And we not only the antibiotics that were taking when we get sick although they count and they are Zino estrogens but there are antibiotics in toothpaste in every single kind of self care product like body care products because they put in lotions and creams and all that thing and all of things so that they don't develop bacteria and them.

But in the meantime, your body sees these as, you know, estrogens. And then, of course, all the things that you were talking about, like the plastics and the nonstick that that's all those are all zino estrogens, fragrance, perfume, these are all, you know, estrogens. And so, you know, the more that we can pull them out of our environment, the less burden that they're going to have. And I really believe that they are a major contributor to breast cancer. They're all inflammatory and cancers literally the end result of nasty inflammation.

Yeah. So yeah I make sense. Yeah, it really. Does. Dr. Trubow, Thank you so much for sharing your brilliance and your wisdom with us and sharing your experience with us. Because I know sometimes it's really hard to be vulnerable. It's hard to to show all of that. And I think that it will really resonate with people that you really were doing everything right and you can seemingly do everything right and still get sick. And it's the person that can acknowledge that without blame or shame because, you know, you didn't come into contact with heavy metals on purpose.

You didn't come into contact with mold on purpose. Right? So these things happen even in people who are doing everything right. And it's the person that can acknowledge that and say, you know what, it happened and I'm not going to see my diagnosis as a punishment, but instead an opportunity, an opportunity to improve my health and you are a brilliant, shining example on how health can be achieved despite less than optimal genetics. But despite multiple talks and exposures, health can be achieved.

You just have to go out and get it. Health is not a passive process. Yes, it's an active process and you got to go get it. I couldn't have said it better myself. Thank you so much. Make sure that you follow Dr. Trubow about her podcast. Feel fricking amazing. Do go to Amazon to get her book. But don't don't say Dirty Girl. Say Dirty Girl Dr. Trubow and you can follow her on social. And it was so wonderful having you. Jenn was amazing to be here. Thank you, Dr. Simmons. Amazing. I mean, just such a pioneer for health. So thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. It's Dr. Jenn. Bye for now.