Protect Your Family from Hidden Toxins at Home

Introduction to Environmental Chemicals 0:00

When i first started learning about environmental chemicals it was an alphabet soup of chemicals and it definitely pose an existential breakdown for me because it can be completely overwhelming but my purpose in talking about environmental chemicals is not to overwhelm people but to really educate and empower people so that they can make healthier and healthier choices for themselves. You know, the truth is, Jonathan, we are exposed to hundreds of thousands of chemicals that are in our environment.

They're in our food, they're in our water, they're in the soil. And at some level, we're all getting impacted by these different chemicals. And what we need to take a hold of is what we have choice over. Hey everybody, this is Jonathan Marks back with another show. Hope you're doing well today. Today's show is about the kind of hidden threats that are all around us. We're going to uncover how everyday exposures to plastics, pesticides, mold, heavy metals and more are silently impacting our immune systems, hormones and brain health.

Often driving chronic illness without clear answers from conventional medicine. Why it matters more now than ever? With the rise in allergies, autoimmunity, fatigue, anxiety, and neurodegenerative conditions, understanding the toxic burden on our bodies is critical, especially for those who feel like they've tried everything but still aren't well. We'll share practical, empowering steps anyone can take to reduce toxic load, strengthen resilience, and begin claiming their vitality, from simple lifestyle changes to targeted support for detoxification and recovery.

We're talking today with Dr. Kelly McCann, who is a board certified physician in internal medicine and pediatrics. She's trained in functional, integrative, and environmental medicine, known for her expertise in mold illness, chronic infections,

What Environmental Toxicants Are 2:06

and complex chronic conditions. At The Spring Center, which is thespringcenter.com, she has upcoming transformational programs. She guides clients from suffering to sovereignty, reclaiming their health, purpose, and power. And as always, we're building a community of people who are health-minded, If you wouldn't mind giving us a five-star review on Spotify or Apple or YouTube or wherever you're listening to us, this helps us grow our network and keeps us going. Thanks so much in advance. So welcome to the show, Callie McCann, MD.

How are you today? I'm great. Jonathan, how are you? I'm good. Thank you. So we hear a lot about toxins these days, but what exactly are environmental toxicants and how do they differ from other health threats? Thank you for asking. So environmental toxins can be a variety of different things, but we tend to focus on the man-made chemicals. And these come in all different classes. Probably the easiest way to think about them is some are persistent in the body, meaning once we get exposed, they are usually fat soluble and they stay in the body and they have very long half-lives, meaning it takes a very long time to get them out of the body.

These are things like many of the toxic metals, lead, mercury, as well as older pesticides like DDT, PCBs, which were banned for use in the seventies, but unfortunately are fat soluble and end up in our tissues. And then we have things that are non-persistent in us and generally in the environment. These are some of the contemporary pesticides, other things like phthalates and parabens, bisphenols, which are chemicals. Some of these are associated with plastics. The plastic particles themselves are more ubiquitous and persistent in the body.

And then I forgot flame retardants are also often Persistent in the body and so that's really kind of how we differentiate them because how you get them out and why you want to avoid them Depends on you know, how long they're sticking around this brings up a question for me, which is how do you avoid them? I mean, it seems like if they're in the environment Do I have to be paranoid or am I just gonna naturally get exposed? Is there a way to avoid them? I I think it's really about education, figuring out what are the most things that you're being exposed to, and then being smart about it.

When I first started learning about environmental chemicals, it was an alphabet soup of chemicals.

How Exposure Happens and Why It Matters 4:49

It definitely posed an existential breakdown for me because it can be completely overwhelming. But my purpose in talking about environmental chemicals is not to overwhelm people, but to really educate and empower people so that they can make healthier and healthier choices for themselves. You know, the truth is, Jonathan, we are exposed to hundreds of thousands of chemicals. that are in our environment. They're in our food, they're in our water, they're in the soil, and at some level we're all getting impacted by these different chemicals.

And what we need to take a hold of is what we have choice over. We have choice over the foods that we put in our mouth. We can choose to eat organic or not. We can choose to eat processed foods, which are not great for us, or whole foods. And then our personal care products. So think about, especially for women, all of the personal care products that we use every day. Shampoo, conditioner, you know, hair sprays, lotions, toothpaste meant to all of our makeup nail products everyone has you know fake nails these days everyone uses gel those things are toxic right nobody's talking about it and so we have choices over what kinds of products we put on our bodies And we can educate ourselves because many of these chemicals, not only do they some of them stay in the body, but they're disrupting our immune systems.

They're disrupting our hormones. They are leading to things like infertility PCOS endometriosis for young women. And then women who go through menopause, who have a really tough time, that's probably because of all the chemicals that they're exposed to, not just the change, right? Nobody's talking about that part. And then neurological dysfunction. Why is there such an increase in autism, ADHD, depression, anxiety? Yeah, okay, social media is bad, but we're all suffering from brain inflammation because of many of these chemicals, not to mention neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, et cetera.

These chemicals are really, really impacting us. So what are some symptoms that people might want to be aware of to talk with their primary? And would they talk to their primary care professional about this? I mean, what symptoms are we looking for to clue us into that there might be some environmental toxins in our bodies? So that's the tricky part. Actually, there's two aspects to what you just asked that are tricky. One, most conventional doctors don't have a clue. We were not trained about this in any of our training.

Even a lot of functional medicine doctors, naturopathic doctors, integrative doctors, if they don't have additional training in environmental chemicals, They may not really know how to delve into what is really going on with these environmental chemicals so you really need somebody who focuses on environmental medicine to be able to. Make those links now in terms of symptoms that's tricky as well because so many chemicals in a big soup. of our body are going to look different from person to person, but I think it's part of the total load.

So let me explain this concept of total load. If we imagine that our bodies are a sink and some people have really big sinks and big drains, right? These are the people that party like rock stars. They smoke and they drink and they, you know, die peacefully in their sleep at a hundred. Good for them. They have great genes, and they have lived a life where it didn't matter what they did. And then there are lots of people who have really shallow sinks and very narrow drains, and they're the canaries in the coal mine.

And then most people are somewhere in between. The analogy is that as all of the chemicals come into the body, the sink, that's the water coming into the sink, At some point the sink is gonna overflow when the sink overflows that's when the symptoms show up sometimes the symptoms will be regarding our immune system so things like allergies eczema. asthma, food sensitivities, or it could be autoimmune conditions.

Symptoms, Total Load, and Hidden Health Effects 9:35

Autoimmune conditions range from things like Hashimoto's, lupus, ulcerative colitis, Crohn's, rheumatoid arthritis. Those are some of the most commonly recognized autoimmune conditions, but there are hundreds of autoimmune conditions that can impact a variety of different systems of the body. And that's the immune system attacking the body. It's not supposed to do that. So those are some of the symptoms that we see. We can also see, as I mentioned, neurological symptoms, anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, sleep disturbances, chronic fatigue, and then, of course, more diagnoses like autism, ADHD, neurodegenerative disorders, as I mentioned.

We can also have hormone disruption. I have a lot of men in my practice whose testosterone are suppressed. They're woefully low. 20-year-olds should not have a testosterone of 200 or 300. That's unheard of in human society. 20-year-olds should have testosterone levels over 1,000, 1,500, maybe even 2,000, right? but they're being suppressed. And as a result, these young men have no idea that what they're experiencing is not normal. And so they lack motivation, they're kind of apathetic, they may not have the drive to do the things that they would otherwise do in their life because they don't have that testosterone to drive it.

It's really wrecking havoc on our biology, our physiology and not enough people really really are putting the pieces of the puzzle together. Thank you for that. That's kind of scary, but I want to talk with you. I want to talk with you about how we can avoid some of these things. So before we do, I just want to give people your website so they can go there to learn more. It's the spring center.com, the spring center.com. And you're located in Southern California, Kelly, where, how do you treat patients?

What are the conditions under which you treat patients? Do they have to be in California? Can they be remote? Let's talk a little bit about that and then I'll come back to asking more questions. Great. Thank you for asking. Yes, we do have a brick and mortar practice. I have several practitioners who work very closely with me and we are able to see patients who do not reside in California. Although the vast majority of our patients do, but we have patients come from all over the country. The requirement that I have is that people come to California first to establish care in California.

And then we can do telehealth. I have telehealth medical licenses in a dozen other states, including Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Texas, New York, Florida, and the Carolinas. And there are other states that may be covered as a telehealth situation. So if this is something that's of interest to people, they can check with the website and check with my staff. Good. So again, that's the springcenter.com. So I want to ask about two sources of what I've heard recently about pollutions.

One is plastic water bottles, and the other is the black plastic food containers that we store things in. Can you give us the update on that? Are these dangerous for us? Yes. No. Incredibly, incredibly dangerous. Uh, yes. I love to talk about plastic. Thank you, Jonathan. How did you know? Here I am drinking out of my glass, glass coffee cup. Um, so plastics, you know, they were the boon of the fifties. Uh, I just remember it's a wonderful life and like, You know, the phone call saying, hey, you got to invest in plastic, right?

Plastic has changed our life. Plastic comes from gasoline and it is unfortunately one of those substances that is combined with a lot of other chemicals and it's utterly ubiquitous. We can't imagine life without plastic these days. And it has made things very possible for us to do like, you know, we have so much plastic in our TVs and our computers and you know, we just love plastic. However, when plastic gets in the body, when it's in our food, when it's in the dust that we breathe, when it's in our air, we inhale these things, we ingest these things.

And the latest statistics are that we are eating about a credit card size of plastic every week. wow wow wow wow that's a lot oh my god that's a lot i can't imagine you know just doesn't doesn't sound appealing at all plastic water bottles are a huge

Practice Details and Telehealth Access 14:34

problem not only are they polluting the planet as is the rest of plastic But when we take off the cap and we put the cap back on when we're drinking our water bottle, it increases the amount of microplastics and nanoplastics in the water by like sevenfold, but still it's a lot. And if the plastic is being heated, you know, usually when we buy a plastic water bottle, even if we're keeping it in the fridge, we have no idea from manufacturer to delivery to the store how it was stored and so heat tends to break down plastics you're getting more plastic residue in the bottles and these plastics then are also combined with other chemicals such as phthalates those are the things that make plastic soft or bisphenols those are the things that make plastic hard and then oftentimes there's other chemicals, there's toxic metals in there, there are sometimes flame retardants depending upon what's the form of plastic and we're just ingesting them.

So whether it's wrapped in our food and therefore seeping into the food or if it's in our water bottles we're getting exposed to so much plastic And there are now studies that show that the smallest forms of plastic, because they can be broken down, microplastics, nanoplastics, there are nanoplastics in our brains, ovaries and testes, placenta, they're everywhere. And they're now finding that some of these microplastics and nanoplastics are in atherosclerotic plaque. So in heart disease, when we get that fatty buildup of cholesterol deposits underneath that, or maybe even the inciting event, is that excessive amount of plastic.

Whew. Crazy. Okay. So I guess that leads to two questions, which is, is there a way to get all of this out of our bodies?

Plastic Exposure in Water and Food 16:40

not at this time, no. So avoidance is really key. Even if we were doing plasmapheresis, which is where you basically exchange all your blood and you clean all of your blood, that may lower the burden of plastics. But once the plastics leave the bloodstream and they go into the tissues, They're there. And our liver, our kidneys, our organs of detoxification are not capable of removing these plastics. So this just builds up over a long time. And then as you said before, the sink overflows and we get these symptoms.

Yes. And remember, we're not just being exposed to plastics, we're being exposed to flame retardants and toxic metals and other pesticides and so many other chemicals. And I do want to talk a little bit more about plastic because it's not just in our food. Okay. Most people's clothing has some form of polyester in it. polyester is another form of plastic. Every time we wash our favorite yoga pants or our yoga outfits or our sports outfits or anything made of polyester, there is breakdown of those products that gets in the dust and it also gets in the water.

so now we've got plastic in the water from our clothes we've got plastic in the dust when we throw it in the dryer all of our plastic toys plastic equipment is slowly breaking down over time that plastic dust gets in our home dust and you know our children our pets are most exposed so that because they're crawling around in the dust on the floor so We really have to start recognizing it's not just about throwing out plastic water bottles and drinking out of glass. It's about looking at, you know, that may be the starting place.

Do that this week, right? Next week, look at your personal care products. The week after that, look at your cookware. Cause that's a problem to talk about a second the next week then start to look at where is the other plastic showing up in your house we use plastic toothbrush and. Lots of other personal care products. All of our kitchen utensils are often plastic. We might put things in Tupperware and heat our food in plastic. So we really start to have to look at the world with different eyes in order to see the plastic in our lives.

And when we start to see the plastic in our lives, then we can start to make changes. Storing your food in glass containers. Don't use a microwave. Going to the butcher's counter and having your meat or your fish or your food wrapped in paper not plastic. Same thing with your vegetables go to the farmers market by your vegetables at the farmers market put them in your own cloth bags so that there's your you're starting to avoid all of that plastic. Wow, so that's even the plastic bags that we have.

When I shop at the grocery store, I just pull from these rolls of plastic to put my food in all these bags, and that's really bringing a lot of plastic into the house. This really is demanding a whole look at what your life is like and how much plastic is in it, huh? Yeah, but if we all start to make subtle changes and demand that other industries make changes, then we're going to be able to preserve not only our health, but also the health of the planet. There's a plastic island in the Pacific that is, I think it's at least the size of Texas.

Holy crap. We are just polluting the planet. And then all of those animals, fish especially, are, you know, they're ingesting that plastic too, and then we ingest them. Right. You mentioned that plastic island. I think it's called the gyre. Is that the word for it? I don't recall the name of it. I think it's a gyre. There are about six or seven places in the oceans around the world where the currents bring all this refuse that's floating and they create this,

Reducing Plastic in Daily Life 21:08

as you mentioned, these huge island of refuse. Um, and there are ships that are beginning to process this stuff and clean it up, but it's a tremendous, tremendous effort. Yes, and so if we think about it, then we can start to do our part, right? Yes, good. Kelly, what question haven't I asked or what message would you like to leave with people today about how they can be safer in their lives and reduce the toxins in our lives? As tragic as this seems, I think the world is waking up these days. More and more people are recognizing that we have to do something different.

We have to do something different for ourselves, the children, our children, the planet. And the more that we can do that, the better. So there is absolutely hope I think we're not past the point of no return yet, but we really have to put the pressure on ourselves, have these kinds of frank conversations about where we're heading in our obliviousness being on this planet and taking care of our health. There are fantastic movements out there, the regenerative agriculture movement, that are really working hard to make our life here on the planet sustainable.

And you know, in terms of like, one's health, I spoke a lot today about personal empowerment and choice, and education and i absolutely believe that that is the only way that we are going to recover health improve the health of our next generations is if we are ourselves with. knowledge and understanding and hope that we can make a difference because every individual person can make a difference as these things are cumulative and we can't stick our heads in the sand any longer and assume that the government is going to take care of us or anybody else is going to take care of us that we have to take care of ourselves and we have to do our part.

Good. Thank you for those messages, and thanks for all these warnings. Again, if you want to learn more, you can go to thespringcenter.com. Dr. Kelly McCann is a board-certified physician in internal medicine and pediatrics. She's trained in functional, integrative, and environmental medicine and known for her expertise in mold illness, chronic infections, and complex chronic conditions through her private practice at the Spring Center. and her upcoming transformational program, she guides clients from suffering to sovereignty, reclaiming their health, purpose, and power.

Thanks so much for being with us today, Kelly. It's been wonderful to have you. Thank you so much, Jonathan. Good. So before we go, just a quick reminder. If you like what you heard today, please leave us a five-star review on Apple or Spotify or YouTube or wherever you listen to your podcasts. It helps keep this content free and coming to you and reaching the right ears. This has been Jonathan Marks with GoToHealth. And as we say at the end of every show, go to health. God bless, take care. We'll see you again next time.