Protect Your Hormones in a Toxic World

Kashif Khan

We have someone with us here today, Dr. Margaret Christensen So first of all, thank you for joining us.

Margaret Christensen, MD

Thank you.

Kashif Khan

We’re going to dive deep into how environmental toxins and exposure affect our homes and, therefore, our health outcomes. For anyone that’s listening, again, for women, this is so much more of a priority now versus grandma’s reality. We don’t live in the same reality anymore. Since the 1950s, I think we’ve added another approximate 150,000 toxins to our arsenal. a toxic burden that we now breathe, eat, smell, and live among. So we cannot expect to have the same habits and have the same outcome. We have to understand how we need to be prepared for today’s reality. So we’re going to dive deep into that. So before we get into the toxin side and what that’s doing to our body as a foundation with your brilliance, maybe you can help us understand the hormone side. What are we actually dealing with? Just the basics of, how our body uses hormones

Margaret Christensen, MD

Well, hormones are messengers in the body; they’re like sending an email from one end of the body to another or a text message, telling it to do something. We have different types of hormones. We have what we call steroid hormones. And those are things like cortisol, estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone that come out of that lineage. And cholesterol is actually the basis for that. And then we have other types of hormones, things like neurotransmitters, which are more long and insulin-rich, more along the lines of peptides, and a little smaller in size. So hormones are signaling molecules. They’re telling one part of the body to do something. So if it’s the thyroid, then the thyroid hormone is telling your body to produce energy. And if it’s estrogen, then estrogen is telling your body to grow the lining of your uterus or grow your breasts, or if it’s testosterone, it’s helping with libido, whether you’re a man or a woman. And if it’s insulin, again, it’s managing your blood sugar. So hormones are signaling, and molecules are messengers that tell the body. Okay. Hey, what’s up? What’s next? And what do we do?

Kashif Khan

The way you describe it, I’ve read some of what you put out there. You talk about this dance of the hormones, and you paint this picture. So tell us about that dance. What was that?

Margaret Christensen, MD

Yes. What’s really important is to understand that, again, there are different types of hormones. And let me just kind of talk about some of that and then how they all interact with one another. That’s one of the most critical things in terms of trying to figure out what’s going on in your body: understanding that it’s not just one thing. You can look at it. You have to look at it from a functional medicine perspective: as a whole system, how does everything interact? We have things like your stress hormones, which would be adrenaline and cortisol, and then the brain is signaling that production, that part of the brain is called the hypothalamus and is signaling your adrenal glands for adrenaline, cortisol, and DHEA. Those are all involved in the stress response. And then there are sex hormones such as testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, and their derivatives. And those that are produced either in the ovaries or the testicles are also produced in the adrenal glands, postmenopausally in a lot of folks. And then we have hormones, like insulin, for blood sugar management, which is one of the primary ones. There are other ones, such as leptin. It’s important to understand that all of these work together, and when you have high levels of stress hormones, they are going to impact your production of, for example, sex hormones.

You make more estrogen but not enough progesterone. You can get heavy bleeding or endometriosis, or it knocks out your testosterone if you’re a guy, and then you have no libido and difficulty with erections. Those stress hormones also trigger insulin production. So insulin is your blood sugar management hormone, and insulin tells you, Hey, I’m hungry; I need to eat because my blood sugar is too low or too high. All the diabetes that we’re seeing is related to that. And insulin itself then feeds back into your estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone enzymes, affecting the levels of those particular hormones. It feeds back into your stress hormones and can impact those. All of those can affect how well you think you’re feeling. What do you think you’re sensing? Can you have brain fog or not? Are you happy? Are you sad? So there’s just this dance. When we’re looking at it, we can’t just look at one thing by itself. And I didn’t mention the thyroid in there because a lot of people understand that’s what helps make energy in our body. And again, when you have a lot of inflammation going on in the body, inflammation raises cortisol levels, insulin levels, the thyroid, energy production, and then also sex hormone production. So that’s the dance that’s going on.

Kashif Khan

Yes, no kidding. It is complex. Where do you start? With so much going on and so many pathways intersecting with each other, how would you know where to start with somebody when you’re working with them?

Margaret Christensen, MD

Well, a lot of times, it’s really a good history. From a functional perspective, we actually start with how stressed your mother was when she was pregnant with you. Then what are the different stressors that have been in your life? What are your current symptoms that you’re having? For example, if you’re having things like infertility issues, endometriosis, or polycystic ovarian syndrome, you have uterine fibroids, you have super heavy bleeding, and you have no libido. Again, if you’re a guy, you’re having erectile dysfunction. We’re seeing that in younger and younger men. It’s just horrendous. That’s some of the common ones, and then the other piece I would talk about would be neuropsychiatric symptoms. I talked a little bit about, again, neural inflammation before we started and understanding that all of these hormones play a role in whether or not you may be having anxiety, depression, irritability, bipolar, or anything else. We start with a good history and, you know, figure out, Okay, what are the symptoms you are presenting with today? We go back and look at how many different stressors, traumas, talks, and exposures you have had to get to this point today. That’s where we can start helping you sort things out. I’m sure a lot of other people are talking about just the role of detoxification, because we know that the toxic burden that we have now is really where so much of the hormonal disruption is that we’re seeing.

Kashif Khan

Now that’s good. The work that you do revolves around that toxic burden. We’re going to dive into that. I want to ask you, since we’re talking about the dance, before we get to the inputs, if there are also the metabolites we make from our hormones, the toxic byproducts of the hydroxy acids. How do you know if it’s an external source or if you’re making something internally that is inflammatory in nature? How much does that impact something like brain fog? Where is the neurochemical? Is it the inflammation from the hormone metabolite itself? How do you play that dance?

Margaret Christensen, MD

Well, again, I think this is where we are required to have whole-system thinking. What is really tragic, I think, in the way we are educated today and certainly in medical schools is that we are in silos and nobody’s talking to one another. But if you get a good history out of somebody, then that’s how I know where to start.

Kashif Khan

Many are there. Are there functional tests you can use that would maybe determine what quality of hormones you’re producing?

Margaret Christensen, MD

Absolutely. I mean, I just start with a big, basic plan, a bloodwork. Okay. We’re looking at the complete thyroid hormone, TSH, Free T3, Free T4, reverse T3, and thyroid antibodies, if you want that. And then I’m looking at an adrenal stress index at the same time; I want 4 to 5 cortisol patterns throughout the day. Then we can also look at blood levels of hormones. We can look at salivary levels of hormones and urinary metabolites of hormones. One of your questions that you just asked is, How do we know where some symptoms are coming from? A lot of times, we don’t know. We don’t know initially without starting to dig deep. But what we do know is that there are some basics: where is the hormone produced, how is it metabolized, and how is it gotten rid of? If we can just start with those things, oftentimes that’s where we can help somebody get better.

Kashif Khan

Yes, I know. Like in the past. You’re talking about causes. One challenge we often see is that the training that you were talking about, I think, with homeopathic M.D., in terms of what the ranges are, what is actually a red flag, and how do you actually implement it? Because all of a sudden you’re up against a wall against what is believed to be true? How do you determine for yourself some personal insights? Where do you need to focus on what sort of standard majors are kind of off?

Margaret Christensen, MD

Right? Unfortunately, a lot of the standard rangers are completely bought and paid for by big pharma. Let’s look at cholesterol. Normal cholesterol when I was in medical school was 250. And we have done nothing—zero, zero, to impact the rate of death from heart attacks, particularly in women, by lowering cholesterol. Cholesterol is the singular molecule out of which our estrogen comes out to test. Testosterone comes from cortisol. When we’re low in cholesterol to ridiculous levels, that’s a problem. Again, we can, and there’s not one kind of easy answer here. A lot of it is, as I’m looking at different levels of hormones, their metabolites, and their adrenals. What’s your blood sugar going on at the same time? How much stress are you going through? Those are the things that I’m putting together. I know that you’re into genetics. Part of getting a good family history is, for example, having a family history of alcoholism. That tells me a lot. That tells me a lot about certain pathways in the body and also about certain nutritional deficiencies and extra stresses that you may have. Also, we need histories of, for example, cancer and all that.

A lot of that can be genetically determined. But as we know, just because you have the genes for something doesn’t mean you turn it on. What’s turning on is the environment, the environment that’s coming across those genes to turn the genes on or off or shut them down. When I’m doing a hormonal workup, first of all, I’m just going to start with, Okay, why are you here? What do you want help with? Then get a very detailed history going back and looking at stressors, nutrition, environmental talks, and exposures. We can get into what those toxins are, but it’s a big deal. Maybe the next question is to ask, Okay, where are the hormones? Where are the vast majority of our hormones metabolized? Tell me that, and then I’ll fill in the details.

Kashif Khan

Yes. So the way we look at the cascade, we personalize a little bit in terms of the genes that actually convert cholesterol to, like, cholesterol being the seed for everything. You convert it to progesterone, testosterone, and estrogens. And the uniqueness of how we do that is highly variable. This is where, in terms of, like you said, let’s test upfront. What does my hormone map look like? Am I more energized or more estrogenized? And then, what are my metabolites? Is it more toxic? Is it a 2-hydroxy, which is safe until I hit the menopause and they flip and become a threat on their own? Then the detox pathways are clear, though. So that entire map, understanding it like you do, is not a silo or a concern. It’s the full cascade from beginning to end. What do I do from beginning to end? Then my net result allows me to pick a path—a personalized path. I think you have this crazy algorithm running in your head because you’ve done it so many times that you see the person, you see the paperwork, you hear the symptoms, and you already compute and understand exactly where to go. That’s the brilliance of working with somebody like yourself, because you’ve had the experience, which is really key. 

Margaret Christensen, MD

Well, besides the genetics, I think one of the most critical aspects to understand if you’re interested in hormonal balance is to start with gut health. Two things: You start with adequate sleep—getting enough sleep, having good gut health, and making sure you poop every day because the vast majority of our hormones are metabolized in our gastrointestinal tract. So if you have a leaky gut or increased intestinal permeability, you’ve had a lot of gut issues. We’ve been on tons of antibiotics. You have a lot of dysbiosis, and you’re drinking a lot of alcohol. The gut and the liver are what process your hormones. If they can’t do it well and you end up recirculating toxic hormones, like you were mentioning, there are different metabolites of hormones. You can go down good or not-so-good pathways. Being mindful of those is helpful, but you don’t even need all the fancy testing. It’s really simple. You clean up your diet. You get rid of the sugar, and you get rid of the processed foods. You try to be organic as much as possible. Stop genetic modification. Learn about that. If you don’t know anything about that. I am on the board of responsibletechnology.org. They’re one of the leaders in helping to educate people about the threat of everything from genetic modification to the recent pandemic. We’re not going to talk about the details of that, but I’m going to talk about a genetically modified organism and a genetically modified solution. That wasn’t what it said it was to treat, which it didn’t treat or prevent. If we understand the roles of toxicants in genetics and a disrupted gut right there, you can learn how to balance your hormones on your own by sleeping enough and getting your gut in order.

Kashif Khan

At a baseline. Yes, for sure. That’s amazing advice. I think the in-between-the-lines hint that you dropped. What we have to look for is different from what our ancestors had to look for. The way I suppose it was, I even meant somebody five years ago. I’m not talking about grandma anymore. The reality of our food supply and certain technologies now being used in our meat supply. For example, it’s no secret that this technology, since 2018, has been used in pork. Pigs are being injected with a variable MRNA shot, which is the actual active portion of it and doesn’t even require any FDA clearance because it’s considered to be a custom portion of the base formula. It’s very important to re-educate yourself on what clean eating actually means beyond just pesticides and chemicals, etc. Yes, to all of that, obviously. But there’s more, and there will always be more. To constantly be learning and never think to know it all about the reality of how quickly things are changing today. You have to keep learning and learning and learning. Thankfully, with people like you, we have some place to go. So now, back to what you were dropping a hint at. What are they talking about? We talked about the hormone pathway. We talked about the dance. We kind of understand how the body works. We now know the implications: if you take this homeostatic, beautiful functionality away from yourself, what are the things that are disrupting that that we’re exposed to?

Margaret Christensen, MD

Again, I think genetically modified organisms are probably one of the most insidious and toxic things that we are being exposed to and that are triggering so much autoimmunity. For those who don’t understand what that is, a genetically modified organism, that’s basically 90% of our food supply. Now, we’ve taken a virus and spliced it to a piece of DNA from a bacteria, and then spliced that into a plant so the plant doesn’t die when you spray it with glyphosate, which is also called ramped-up, and other pesticides. So now you have a plant, such as corn, that is now growing because it has been genetically modified. So it’s completely new to nature’s DNA that the body has never seen before. It’s also covered in a pesticide, which is a known hormone disruptor, a known neural toxicant, and a known immune system disruptor. We’re consuming that, and it also acts like an antibiotic. So it’s killing off our good microbiome.

That’s probably one of the biggest challenges, and then we’re eating all these PHOOD foods. A lot of them, what I call food with PH, P. H. O. O. D., are pharmaceutical foods. It’s not real food. You have dyes and all kinds of preservatives, as well as all these pesticides and chemicals. They’re wrapped in plastic and heated in the microwave. There’s actually no nutritive value other than calories, and those chemicals in very tiny, tiny amounts can cause hormone disruption. So it’s one of the reasons that we’re seeing such an increase in fertility, autoimmunity, and all that. So the combination of GMOs, pesticides, and food additives in our food supply is huge. One of the things I say is to become part of a local food gardener, food co-op, or support your local or organic farmer. Go down to the farmer’s market and grow your own garden. We all need to understand what’s happened to our food supply, and I can get into that a little bit more.

But again, why is it important when we can eat organic? I mean, that has its own challenges. There are a lot of people trying to bend the rules there, but that’s another piece. Heavy metals are another big challenge, as is heavy metal exposure. So things like mercury and aluminum, and I won’t mention where the most common source of those ingredients comes from, because again, that’s one of the things that gets people censored if you start speaking out against the Sacrosanct Cow of what we’re loading our children up with multiple 77 doses of by the time they reach 18th theoretically, if you follow the CDC schedule. That is another problem, and there is also the water. We have heavy metals from the water supply and from the air pollution; that’s another piece. All the plastics that we’re being exposed to, they all have hormone-disrupting effects. Again, drinking things out of glass rather than plastic is helpful. I’ve already mentioned pesticides and then toxics.

All this is an area that I’m particularly very familiar with personally, and as well as in my practice, it’s one of the things that really started with. But it’s probably one of the most common environmental exposures that goes completely unrecognized and that has massive hormonal-disrupting effects. Again, at the level of neurotransmitters creating all that brain fog stuff and at the level of actual hormone production and metabolization in itself, there are toxic mold mycotoxins that actually mimic hormones, mimic estrogens, mimic testosterone, and mimic thyroid hormones. That’s a very common exposure that a lot of people have no clue about. It can lead to fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and a lot of the mystery illnesses that we see. Basically, we are surrounded by hormone disruptions. There’s no incentive for any of the industries involved, whether you’re big pharma, big food, big ag, big media, and the funding from big banking, to change any of that because they make massive amounts of profit. We have a sick care system, not a health care system. All of those factors are things that we are dealing with. That’s, like you said, the reality of today. The act today is totally different from five years ago. I thought I knew five years ago that everything was okay.

Kashif Khan

Yeah, no kidding. 

Margaret Christensen, MD

Yes,  there’s another layer here. 

Kashif Khan

Let’s wait to see what’s coming.

Margaret Christensen, MD

Yes.. Hold on to your boots.

Kashif Khan

In a couple of those areas, we should expand. But before we go there, I just wanted to ask you to break down for people that don’t know. We know that the word hormone drop should mean something bad, but what’s the actual mechanism like? What is that? The disruption—what’s actually happening?

Margaret Christensen, MD

Well. That’s a good question. There are a lot of things that are happening. First of all, again, we would just go back to the idea that hormones are messengers. So the hormones are being produced in one part of the body, and they’re sending a message to another part of the body to do that. They do that by triggering a receptor or flipping a switch. A receptor on the cell membrane to say, Hey, do something, make some thyroid hormone, or turn on some energy. That’s what tells you that thyroid hormone tells your mitochondria to make some energy. One of the ways that you can have hormone disruption is that you can have something that actually mimics a hormone itself, attaches to that receptor, and does things that it’s not supposed to be doing. That’s one way it does it; another way, like I already mentioned, is by disrupting the gut flora. So if you’ve been taking a whole lot of antibiotics in your life and you’re taking a lot of medications like nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, things like ibuprofen or Aleve, or pain medications, those poke holes in the stomach and they impact the microbiome, as do pesticides, as do all the things I just talked about. You can disrupt hormonal function by disrupting good gut flora and healthy function so that the hormones don’t work right or ones that have been metabolized or gotten rid of already are dumped into your intestines to be pooped out and end up getting reabsorbed. So now you have too much of a toxic form in the body that doesn’t work. So that’s another form of hormone disruption.

A third form would be impacting what we call the HPA axis, the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal. Now we call the HPATGG axis the hypothalamic, pituitary, adrenal, thyroid, and gut gonadal gonads. When we’re under a lot of stress and we’re sending a signal from the hypothalamus in our brain, the master regulatory center, down to our adrenal glands, that via the pituitary gland to say, Hey, make some, run or fight hormones, make some adrenaline, make some cortisol. Again, those are going to impact what hormones are being produced, what other hormones are being produced, and whether or not you feel anxious or like you need to go eat a pile of French fries and a whole chocolate cake. A lot of that is coming from your stress hormones. That is another form of hormonal disruption—the inflammation that you alluded to earlier. And when we trigger autoimmunity in our body, we’re triggering cells to start producing inflammatory chemicals against our own bodies. That’s stressful. That’s another way of disrupting hormones. So basically, we’re not allowing our body to do what it’s supposed to do because of inflammation. Again, pretending like it’s a hormone means that it’s not, mocking up our stress mechanism and HPA axis response, mocking up our guts and our livers, and not being able to get rid of toxins. So it happens on multiple levels.

Kashif Khan

Just listening to you, I know that earlier you mentioned how women don’t fare well when it comes to cardiovascular health compared to men. We find that, I think the statistic is that 66% of women will die on their first cardiovascular event with no previous warnings or symptoms. They don’t even know that they’re sick. And then, boom, it hits, and it’s hard to recover. It’s a fraction of that for men. Is this because that’s innate, or is it because the hormone disruption is so prolific? Women are just set up; they’re already at that threshold because that’s what they call the hormone. The plague that we have today is affecting women so much more. Or is it a combination?

Margaret Christensen, MD

Well, I think it’s multifactorial. Again, women are much more prone to autoimmune inflammation than men. Testosterone, to some extent, has a protective effect against that. We know that a lot of cardiovascular disease is really cancer or autoimmune inflammation inside the blood vessels. It really has very little to do with cholesterol, and cholesterol is a terrible marker for heart disease. My mother, who is almost 90, runs around with cholesterol in the 280s to 300s. She’s great, and she’s sharp as a tack. There are a lot of myths out there. I think the other thing to really understand is how tiny the amount is. When our body produces estrogens in what are called picagram amounts, that’s a homeopathic level that’s very little, teeny amounts of estrogen. So it doesn’t take a whole lot of any kind of hormone-disrupting chemical that’s acting as if it’s a hormone. And that’s what a lot of the pesticides and a lot of petrochemical products, along with muscle toxins, do—it doesn’t take very much to start skewing the whole thing. I hope that answers your question.

Kashif Khan

That’s a really important point where people don’t think about it like, Oh, I’m in this environment. Everybody’s in this environment. I’m not sure. But would you take a supplement? You’re taking a capsule this big to alter some pathways and make yourself feel better, but think about how little it takes to actually change your biochemistry. When you’re holding those grocery receipts or breathing in those pesticides or whatever you’re doing, it’s probably a lot more than what’s in that little supplement pill. Just imagine. It doesn’t take much, and you’re getting too much. It’s a combination of both. One other thought I had, just because I don’t know, was that you listed all these potential toxic burden threats, including EMF or Magnetic Fields. 

Margaret Christensen, MD

That’s a whole other battle ax.

Kashif Khan

Yes Oh, really? 

Margaret Christensen, MD

Oh yes. One of the things that 5G particularly does is disrupt what are called the calcium-bolted gated channels. That’s a very fancy term for what allows calcium, magnesium, and potassium in and out of our bodies, particularly the heart muscles, to keep them beating, and EMFs disrupt that and 5Gs in particular. It’s one of the reasons that we’re seeing all the side effects from it. It’s so interesting that, again, part of what happened in the last couple of years, while everybody was quietly hiding away and being shut down, was the rollout of 5G towers all over the United States. So that’s something else too that we’re dealing with, and I don’t want to get people down.

Kashif Khan

Well I mean.

Margaret Christensen, MD

There are solutions.

Kashif Khan

The great news is you have solutions, and people need to understand the landscape, like, Here’s how your body works. Here are the threats. You need to know that there’s a real threat out there. And now, guess what? Dr. Christensen heals people every day, right? Let’s get into the picture,  the silver lining is there, right?.

Margaret Christensen, MD

Yes. I’m a coach, and I’m the head coach. They’re healing themselves; their bodies are healing themselves. This is just basic functional medicine principles, which are that you take out what’s toxic and put in what’s missing. Whether toxic thoughts, toxic relationships, toxic foods, or mycotoxins, that was my case, too. Then you put in what’s missing: sleep, laughter, joy, play, methylated B vitamins, zinc, and vitamin D. We need both of those things. Our body has really powerful healing mechanisms. If we can tune in to those, that can be super helpful. So I think that’s an important piece to remember: that we do have capabilities to help heal ourselves, and it’s overwhelming right now. Here’s the reality: I don’t even talk about trauma or the role of trauma in hormone disruption. That’s a huge piece.One of the reasons, from a functional medicine standpoint, is that we want to go back and ask somebody questions about what happened and what happened to their ancestors—generational trauma. In my case, my father was in Auschwitz. He was a Polish Catholic picked up in the resistance movement because he was resisting the Nazis. That he has given me epigenetically—okay, we can talk about genetics here—lots of things. It’s made me a lot more sensitive to many things because of his level of stress hormones, which ended up impacting his sperm count and what happened. Then my mother’s levels of stress hormone, so all of that can be impacted. With technology such as the one you’re working with, you can get down to the nitty gritty of what’s going to be helpful for you. But there are just some basics there. There are just some basics that we can do to help our bodies heal themselves. As I mentioned earlier and it’s very true that list again.

Kashif Khan

Yes, with this concept of multigenerational passed-down trauma, people think of it as somewhat woo-woo, like, how do you pass on trauma? But the sort of science involved is very clear. You can’t change your genetics per se. You’re inheriting your genetic legacy. But the way those genes express, it’s a coping mechanism that you’re using. Your body doesn’t know that you weren’t born into the same environment. It thinks it’s protecting you. Like daddy and grand dad, they had this. So I’m going to arm you with this and the ability to cope with it. All of a sudden, here you are trying to practice medicine with armor that you don’t need. So that can be unwound. There are practices to break that down, and it heals multigenerationally. You make me think of this, where recently the CDC said that suicide rates, and not only rates but attempts—are skyrocketing in young women. They particularly called out young women of teen age, and they said that now one in three American teenage girls has considered at some point taking her life because she just can’t cope with it anymore. This was not a statistic that you would expect from the previous generation, and even now, it’s a bit of a surprise. So are we seeing this because of the toxic burden? Is it because of social media or something else? But is there something to be said about starting much earlier when it comes to dealing with your hormones?

Margaret Christensen, MD

Well, I think both. Women considering pregnancy and all that really need to learn this stuff very early. There are all kinds of protocols that we can use to help with detoxification and supporting optimal genetic expression. That can be done. But as far as a toxic burden, I mean, absolutely, so the EMFs and then just the social media itself, what has been done? There’s a lot that’s been learned about how to brainwash, and that’s a lot of what we’re dealing with here besides electromagnetics. It also has to do with how our brains are being trained, and what’s the best way to brainwash somebody? You isolate them.

You isolate them and feed them. Fear, fear, fear, fear, fear, fear. I think, for all those young women out there, this is a multi-generational issue. It’s not just the young women; it’s also some of the older ones. But that is a tragic statistic. But we know that there is hope and these are times of great chaos. To be able to find a center, to find community, to link up with one another, and to be able to speak truth to power. Because I think that’s another really big thing that’s going on is something called cognitive dissonance. I don’t know if you’ve heard that term before, but it’s again where we’re being told one thing, yet our experience is something very different. Our personal experience of what’s going on is very different from what we’re being told. And again, that often happens in households where abuse or alcoholism goes on: everybody, hush, hush, be quiet. Don’t confront the powers that be about what’s really happening because you’re going to get in trouble. That is a piece of what’s going on now. And one of the best things that you can do is learn how to turn this thing off. They are addictive. I mean, the science behind this is amazing. Anyway, we can use all of our technologies for good, for education, and for uplifting, but we can also be abused in terms of, again, the misinformation, disinformation, and silencing of the dissidents who are trying to speak the truth and get it out there.

Kashif Khan

Yes, and the break even is that. 

Margaret Christensen, MD

It’s off topic from that, but that’s part of the generalized anxiety feeling, just as this background low-level anxiety is, and if you want to just talk about girls and suicide, let’s just talk about all these mass shootings and all the boys that are picking up guns, and Dr. William Ray, God bless him. He was one of the very first pioneers in the whole field of environmental medicine. He was right here at the Dallas Environmental Health Center, which is still ongoing. He passed away a few years ago, but he predicted the violent level of violence that we’re seeing now with gun violence and things like mass shootings because of things like EMFs and what they do to the brain. There are ways, though, to rise above that and to vibrate above these levels of disinformation, of hopelessness, and of despair. To reach out to one another, we end with hope. I hope that’s what you guys are doing.

Kashif Khan

For sure, that’s the intention of putting people like yourself in our community together. It’s to understand that everybody feels the pain, regardless of what your perspective is, and that the cognitive dissonance has hit you. Yet we can still all see there’s a mismatch here and there. So this world is not what it used to be. Knowing that you can rise above this and that this is a health concern as much as you said, Hey, we went off onto the field here. No, this is part of your health journey. If you are going to deal with this, you can deal with everything else. You’re not going to feel great. This is a constant chronic stressor and anxiety inducer, which is not good for any part of your body. So let’s deal with it openly because it is part of your health journey.

Margaret Christensen, MD

Yes, and I can speak to mental health issues because two out of my four have very severe issues, beginning with autism spectrum disorder, and that’s one of the reasons I got into this work that I’m doing besides my own health journey and now, as adults, what we’re having to deal with. So I can absolutely speak to you that those statistics that you are naming are real and valid. Again, there are ways to get around it. I’d love to just talk about it, very briefly, some of the things that we can do to help ourselves.

Kashif Khan

Sure. In terms of, let’s take that, for example, because typically, when you use the word hormones and you’re talking to a female audience like this, we start talking about estrogens and all the fibromyalgia and all that. But we’re also talking about the brain, right? So what can we do to mitigate our mood and put today’s reality in context? Is it supplementation, or is it mindfulness? Is it unplugging, or is it all of these things?

Margaret Christensen, MD

All of the above, yes. Okay. Again, let me just go back to the first thing that I said: number one, sleep is to whatever you need to do to help with your sleep issues and to figure out and get adequate sleep, because that’s one of the things that cleanses our brains of toxins and allows ourselves to rest. We are being bombarded with so much data, and we’re trying to process so many things that our brains are just on overdrive. Anything that we can do to help with quality sleep is a whole summit in and of itself. But there are things that I’d like to do for that. Then again, the second thing is to improve your gut health. That starts with, again, diet. And then, absolutely, there are certain supplements and nutrients that can be very helpful in repairing a leaky gut. If we’re talking about neurotransmitters like serotonin, GABA, norepinephrine, adrenaline, and dopamine, there are a number of precursors that are helpful. But again, understanding that 90% of those are made in your gut, you have to keep your gut in good order. And then again, if you’re looking at genetics, so many of the people that we see here have all kinds of what are called genetic snips or changes in their methylation pathways or B vitamin pathways, just to make it very simple. Our need now for extra B vitamins to make and deal with the stress hormones is important for detoxification. They’re important for hormonal production and metabolism, and they’re important for neurotransmitter production. So you have to have adequate B vitamins. We need adequate zinc. We need adequate vitamin D; we need vitamin A.

We know, and those of us who are trying to speak out about it, that having adequate vitamin D levels is one of the things that prevents you from dying from the Big C, from the virus that’s rolling around. So yes, it’s a combination of those things. So adequate sleep, getting the gut in good health, and again, this is where I’m understanding that some of your genetics can be helpful in terms of targeting specific nutrients for you. But you can also just do some plain methylated B vitamins, adequate zinc, and DNC, and right there, that will probably help you. And then what do you do every day? What’s joyful, what’s playful, and what has purpose and meaning in your life? So even if you’ve got really crappy things going on and you’re under massive amounts of stress, are you connected to something larger than yourself? Fortunately, I have felt that very, very deep spiritual connection. I don’t care what you want to call it, what you want to label it, or whose bag you want to put it in. But being connected to something much larger than ourselves, understanding that we are spiritual beings, human beings, and human bodies, and tapping into that force, can be one of the most powerful healing mechanisms that you can have. And then being in community, talking with other people, and speaking the truth with others. Community is another incredibly important piece of good health, as are music, movement, and dance. Those are good things. But let’s just start with good sleep and pooping, and then try to do something that makes you laugh every day.

Kashif Khan

Amazing prescription. What were you saying about micronutrients? We see those every day in the clinical setting where things that are considered, their value have been taken away from them, like even calling vitamin D – vitamin D, when we know it’s a hormone. Why is it called that? Because if everybody had enough, you probably wouldn’t have the health care budget we have, right? From our understanding of the 20 to 23000 genes in your body, 2000 require the appropriate level of vitamin D to express properly. So your genes are functioning. 10% of your biochemistry is off. If you don’t have the right level. On the right level, it is different for different people. Based on how you convert D2 to D3, transport it and bind it, there are different genes that do all those jobs, right?

Margaret Christensen, MD

For all the hormones. 

Kashif Khan

For all of them. Exactly.

Margaret Christensen, MD

We’re all of them. Yes. How do you make it transportable? What does this receptor look like, and what are the micronutrients that are involved in its production? It’s really pretty ridiculous that we have to take bottles of supplements. I mean, as a human species, we didn’t, when we were cave people, we didn’t run out to the local health food store and get a bottle of whatever it was.

Kashif Khan

Yes, we were in the sun. We ate nutrient-dense food. We were not eating plastic with our food. 

Margaret Christensen, MD

Yes, There you go. 

Kashif Khan

A very different reality. Now there’s a whole other challenge where it’s understood: It’s not that the powers that be don’t know that this stuff is useful.

Margaret Christensen, MD

Yes, we know. 

Kashif Khan

I’ll give you an example. I’m in Toronto, Canada, and right now, there is a movement by Health Canada to say that doctors should no longer be able to recommend vitamins.

Margaret Christensen, MD

Wow. 

Kashif Khan

Including vitamin D and vitamin C. And why? Because they’re not evidence-based.

Margaret Christensen, MD

That’s cool. That is awesome. 

Kashif Khan

Yes, if you go to PubMed. There are, I think, 90 somewhat thousand publications about vitamin D. Then you look up the number one prescribed drug, Lipitor, and there’s, I think, ten or 11,000. So there are almost ten x the number of publications because of the impact. It’s actually 10 x reducing your cholesterol when you actually need it as a mitigating hormone as opposed to not having it. Just understand to anyone that’s listening or watching that there’s work you need to do on your own. There’s learning outside of school.

Margaret Christensen, MD

Yes. Do not trust. I wouldn’t trust anything that comes through mainstream websites for medical knowledge. I won’t name them, but yes. Because it’s all pharma, if you understand that big pharma funds 70% of advertising on mainstream media, 70%, and it’s even more of that when you look at the news. And it doesn’t matter if you’re watching MSNBC or you’re watching Fox News. It’s the same; the same forces, and the editorial content of what you are watching and reading is based on who’s advertising and who’s paying to be there. So learning how to have some discernment about where you’re getting information, listening to that still small voice within, listening to that intuitive knowing about, Does this sound right to me or not? Does this resonate with me? I think that’s really important. Since the audience is mostly women here, I mean, our intuitive knowing is so powerful. It’s so positive to dismiss that it’s the same, that it forces our animals to use their instincts, right? To do things. It’s our intuitive knowing, and paying attention to that is incredibly important. So anyway, I gather people are saying dance.

Kashif Khan

Yes, It’s funny.

Margaret Christensen, MD

Pray. Meditate.

Kashif Khan

Group praying, group meditation—there is a science on how that exponentially raises everybody, right? Again, as a Canadian, would I come into the U.S.? It’s funny you mentioned the pharma commercials. I always get this culture shock. There are three layers of culture shock I get every time I come, even though I’ve been coming for years. One is when I land at the airport and see the food that’s available. I’m like, That’s not food, right? Second, yeah, second. And I see the people and am like, How are you walking? If you go to any country in the world, it does not look like this. And the third thing is that I sit down, walk by a TV, and you see pharma commercials. The U.S. is only one of two countries in the world that allows pharma to advertise on TV. It’s now, like you said, the biggest marketer on TV. The same thing with lobbying: the biggest lobby. I think New Zealand is the other one. But it’s like a few million dollars versus the many billions that are spent in the U.S. This is a very American problem, unfortunately. For anyone that’s listening here, because there are some global listeners that won’t even know what we’re talking about; they’ve never seen a pharma commercial, right? But that speaks a little bit too, the agencies that are regulating and protecting and how they think. So that speaks to how much you need to be your own quarterback.

Margaret Christensen, MD

Amen. Yes, right. Because unfortunately, our government, your government either, or the governments around the world are not interested in protecting the health of their citizens. And that’s what they’re interested in—who can they get money from? And, to use my word, if you just look at the billions that our taxpayers spent on developing this latest COVID treatment for what’s been going on for the last three years, then Pfizer made $202 billion and they have zero liability. I think this is something people just need to wake up to and understand. This is not our grandmother’s hormone. We are seeing massive quantities of fertility issues. Again, early menopause, hormonally based cancers, etc. are things that we can do to shift and change. Part of it is just learning and educating yourself and seeing somebody, practitioners who have least educated themselves in health system thinking. I’m with the Institute for Functional Medicine, and they’re really the premier leader in terms of accrediting information that is being used to help, to actually create health rather than just treat disease.

Kashif Khan

Yes, for sure. I’m sure anyone listening was thinking, Well, how do I work with you? Do you actually see patients?

Margaret Christensen, MD

I’m at Carpathia Collaborative; it’s carpathiacollaborative dot com, spelled C. A. R. P. A. T. H. I. A. then the word collaborative and dot com. We have a team of practitioners here that have all been trained in this thinking and have been working with me for a long time. We are here to help and see people. I have a whole women’s health team as well as a men’s health and longevity team. We also do a lot of work in the area of things like long-haul COVID and chronic viral infections, mystery illnesses, and a lot of other things that you were plagued with, as well as myself and my family. And also, molddetoxdiet.com is another place to be able to find me and find a lot of good information. If you need to see a practitioner, it’s the Carpathia Collaborative.

Kashif Khan

In terms of what you just mentioned about the long haul, I mean, we know so much more now than we knew a few months ago. We do know it’s just mitochondrial disease, and we’re trying to support that. So what do you see now that’s really working that people need to know about? For a lot of people, this is a big gray area that they wish they knew more about.

Margaret Christensen, MD

Things that we do here: IV ozone with ultraviolet light—I mean, oxygen in light, how about that? What do you think about that? Oxygen and light to help heal something. Along with nutrients, things like methylene blue and antihistamines. We have whole protocols on that, and understanding that, a lot of it is reactivated. We’re seeing things like reactivated. Epstein-Barr virus, again, mitochondrial toxicants. Yes, the mitochondria have been stressed, so supporting that can be helpful, and that’s what we do.

Kashif Khan

And outside of the methylene blue, what are some things that people can just get kickstarted with at home that are easy?

Margaret Christensen, MD

Just like the things that I already said—an anti-inflammatory diet, vitamin D, and vitamin C—it can be helpful to take some antihistamine herbs, things like Quercetin. You can Google antihistamine herbs, and those would probably be just some simple things. Again, get some sleep and get your gut in order. Probiotics.

Kashif Khan

Okay. Yeah. Understood.

Margaret Christensen, MD

And be sure you don’t live with molds.

Kashif Khan

For sure. Before we end, I know this is a major problem. There isn’t a functional medicine, biohacking, or any sort of wellness conference that I go to where there isn’t somebody working on mold. And it seems to be this sort of endemic thing that isn’t being treated as such. How prevalent is it? Is it only in certain states, or does it apply nationwide?

Margaret Christensen, MD

Nationwide, 50% of houses and 60% of commercial buildings that haven’t had an issue with water damage. And that’s a whole other ball. You can access it through the Health Mold Summit.

Kashif Khan

50% of homes.

Margaret Christensen, MD

Have had water damage, yes. Not everybody gets sick. Again, that has to do with your toxic load, and your talk about getting a lot of it has to do with your genetics. Again, how many exposures have you had to toxic heavy metals over time in the form of the things that we can’t talk about, and all of those things build up in the body and shut down our detox mechanisms, making us more susceptible, whether it’s to the COVID virus or anything else? But toxic mold is probably one of the most common underlying environmental toxicants, and people have no clue that’s why they’re stuck.

Kashif Khan

That is the question mark: people don’t go there because one person in the home, like you said, is sick and everybody else is fine. We’ve seen that over and over again. There’s a family I can think of where the mother was diagnosed with Lyme disease because of how she felt. And the rest of the family was fine. When we looked at the genetics, what we saw was that the glutathione pathway had what are called copy number variations, and she was actually missing some of the key growth drivers. She didn’t even have them. Right. And when we started to pick away at their epigenetic inputs, like what he’d been eating and what he’d been exercising, we realized that just a renovation had ripped the kitchen apart and released all these mold spores that only made her sick. I mean, they were probably making everyone sick. She just had a symptomatic reaction, like, immediately because of her pathway. That’s just a keynote for everybody because you hear this often. Well, it’s just this person. It’s not our home; it’s not our environment, because they’re not you. We’re wired differently, right? So anyways.

Margaret Christensen, MD

That’s a whole other topic. I can do it. Now, I can wax eloquent on that for a long time.

Kashif Khan

Yes it is. 

Margaret Christensen, MD

Yes. That has and it has to do again just coming back to the same idea again with our hormones is that we have a kind of genetically sized toxic bucket of our ability to deal with things, whether that is infections, toxins, stressors, environmental toxicants, psychosocial issues, and stressors in our life, and that we have a spigot, we have several spigots, including ours that get rid of things that are in the bucket, and that would include our good gut function, our liver, working properly in us, peeing enough, shedding our skin, you know, draining our brains at night when we sleep. Those are the spigots. But if you start closing off the spigots because of toxicants and our genetic needs for nutrients that you’re not getting, and then you start filling up that bucket, then all of a sudden all these symptoms spill over. The conventional method is to put a lid on the bucket with medications or surgery, and nobody’s identifying what’s in the bucket. And how do we open the spigots? And that’s what we do from a functional medicine standpoint.

Kashif Khan

Beautiful. I feel like, just because of this conversation, we just created three more conversations that we need to have. We’ll see whether we might dedicate a day-two so we can get through this stuff. I wanted to thank you. This is a very awesome conversation. Exactly what we need to learn here. Thank you for sharing your knowledge. It is incredible, so thank you again for your time.

Margaret Christensen, MD

Yes. Carpathiacollaborative.com. The Carpathia was the ship that picked up the survivors of the Titanic. So we have the Titanic of Western medicine just treating the tip of the iceberg. We have the functional medicine ships coming along to help pick up the survivors and bring them back to health.

Kashif Khan

Wow. Beautiful. Well, I’ve got to let that settle in for a second. That was amazing. Well, thank you again for your time. This is awesome. Again, everybody, check out the website, and the clinical team is there to support you if you need it. Thank you.

Margaret Christensen, MD

You’re welcome.