Enzyme Therapy and Cancer – Getting To The Root Cause of Cancer – Dr. Linda Isaacs | Podcast #383
In this video, Dr. Justin and Dr. Linda discuss an educational and informative discussion about enzyme therapy and its relationship to cancer. In addition, she highlights her close connection to the late Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez, a former doctor in New York City and a follower of Dr. William Donald Kelly’s work.
The podcast covers various essential topics related to cancer and alternative therapies. Dr. Isaacs delves into metabolic types and how different individuals may require other treatment approaches. She also touches upon the impact of processed sugar, processed foods, pesticides, and xenoestrogens on cancer growth. Dr. Isaacs emphasizes the need to treat cancer holistically and believes that these environmental elements might substantially impact the development of cancer.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
04:08 – Views on Carbs and Fats Leading to Cancer
08:32 – Type of Enzymes for Cancer Treatment
14:02 – Potential Root Causes for Cancer
19:51 – When to check if it is a Gut Problem
22:52 – Preventing the Side Effects of Chemotherapy
33:11 – Chemotherapy Standard Care and Managing Side Effects
39:15 – Antioxidants Support
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani, excited for today’s podcast. I have Dr. Linda Isaacs here, really excited to chat with her today. She’s from Austin as well, and we’re going to be diving into the topic of cancer and enzyme therapy. Dr. Linda, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: I’m doing good! Thank you so much for inviting me. I’m really glad to be here.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent! Very nice to have you! So, I know your background is you specialize in cancer, natural cancer therapies. I know you can be connected for, I think, at least 10 or 20 years with Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez, the former late Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez, in the New York City area. I know he passed, what 2017? It’s been that long ago?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: 2015 actually.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: ‘15? It was a heart issue wasn’t it?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Well, we don’t really know what happened, but he’s, he did a full day’s, day of work and then went home and passed away suddenly.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh my gosh!
Dr. Linda Isaacs: But it’s not really clear what exactly happened. But yes, he and I worked together for many years. In fact, I met him when I was in medical school when I was a third-year medical student. I was assigned to an internal medicine team for my clinical rotation and he was the intern. And he was actually engaged in doing research at the same time. Just goes to show how devoted he was because most people aren’t trying to do research when they’re medical intern.
But he was looking into the work of William Donald Kelly our predecessor, with this type of treatment.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wasn’t he a dentist as well, Kelly?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Yeah, Dr. Kelly was a dentist, an orthodontist by training and he had kind of an academic interest in nutrition. In other words, he thought about it, read about it, didn’t do it, until he himself got sick. And then, he put together a treatment protocol for himself and when he got better people started coming to him, to not to get their teeth straightened but to get their cancer straightened out.
And so he wound up, in effect, turning into an alternative cancer practitioner and then Nick went, and went through his files and found a lot of amazing cases told me about it that’s how I wound up getting into this line of work.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow and then were you working with Dr. Gonzalez’s last day?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: I’m sorry?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You said he was working that day and then he went home and he passed away. Were you able to work with him that last day he was there too?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: I was not physically in the office that day because I had just moved into a new apartment but the last communication I had with him was actually him congratulating me about an article that I got published and you know it, I obviously treasured that email. But it was totally sudden you know, he was at work that day, yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow yeah, the first, I think, at first I came across Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez, was in a Gary Knoll documentary in the in the early 2000s. He was talking about enzyme therapy there and I think he was also interviewed in Suzanne Summer’s book Knockout, which was really interesting and that’s where kind of the enzyme therapies were really brought to my forefront.
Also, I think he was connected, I think Dr William Kelly may have gotten him into the metabolic-typing diet and he was doing a lot of metabolic typing on patients as well. Does that ring a bell?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Oh, absolutely! That’s a big part of the work that we do as well. I still use that general concept, so yes. Dr. Kelly had, you know, through clinical observation, noticed that not all of his patients needed the same thing, and that’s something that I continue to use as well.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so with metabolic typing, you kind of have your slow oxidizer, your mix, and your fast oxidizer, right? Essentially, a protein-type in between, kind of like, zone-type and like more of a carb-type, right?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: That’s correct, I tend to use more about autonomic physiology and oxidizing concept, but yes, that’s the general idea that different people need different things, absolutely.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Do you find more of the cancer patients tend to be more like protein types, where there are, maybe too much carbohydrate, maybe the glucose is converting and maybe as a fuel source for cancer? Do you see that more in today’s society? Not enough protein and good fats?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Well, I certainly think fats, you know, good fats are important for a lot of people. You know, there’s been this whole craze for the last 30 to 40 years of using all kinds of junk fats, which is not good for anybody. But most types of cancers actually go more on the vegetarian side, and the carcinomas, which would fit into, you know, breast cancer, colon cancer, pancreatic, prostate, the major cancers.
The ones that we feel are more carnivorous are the blood disorders like Leukemia, Lymphoma, Myeloma those types. Those are the ones that I’m more likely to put on a meat diet.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, interesting, because you see a lot of the pet scans, right? The visual imagery where you’re giving radioactive glucose, so it seems like, even conventional medicine kind of has an idea that, “Hey, we’re going to give this radioactive solution and we’re going to see where it goes.” And so, if you were to look at the big foods today, I mean do you feel like processed sugar is an issue? Do you feel like pesticides and a lot of the GMO in the foods are also driving cancer growth? What other aspects in the food do you think are factors?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Well, I certainly think that processed sugar and processed foods in general are not good for anybody. And pesticides, you all of those xenoestrogens as they’re called, the molecules in the environment that function like estrogens, all of those things are not at all good for us. I think they can cause one type of problem in one person in a different type of problem in another, but they’re not good for anybody.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, if I have someone like, on a diet, they’re eating like let’s say some grass-fed meat and they’re eating some good healthy fat within the meat, maybe coconut oil, things like that, good health and they’re avoiding the excess omega-6. How important is that little bit of extra carbohydrate for some like, could they do some squash or sweet potato? Or for some cancers, is that even too much and could set them over the edge? How strict do you have to be with some of these recommendations if their overall diet is really clean?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Well, see the the issue for me is that, I don’t think that sugar or natural sugars are going to be, or natural starches, are going to be the make a root issue for cancer. You know, again, it just sort of depends on how metabolically unhealthy somebody is but I personally believe that the real root issue is a lack of pancreatic enzymes and so that’s where I give people a lot of enzymes.
You know I have people that are alive and well and doing great years out who were eating natural sugars and natural carbs and drinking carrot juice and you know all of the things that somebody that’s a real advocate of the ketogenic diet would say is not a good idea. And so, it’s just not really my focus. I don’t put anybody on a diet that’s restrictive. It starts to get really difficult to know what what to eat, especially if you’re talking about somebody that shouldn’t be on a lot of protein. Well then, if they’re not going to eat protein and they’re not going to eat carbs, well then, what are they going to eat?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, that’s, in fact right.
Dr. Linda Isaacs: A buttered avocado? You know, I just don’t see
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right! Exactly!
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Not feasible.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I remember an interview that Dr. Gonzalez did, I think it was in 2010, with Dr. Mercola, and it was right after the passing of Steve Jobs. And I remember vaguely he was making the connection because I think Jobs was a known fruititarian. He was in the in the 80s, it was very culty at Apple where like, “If you weren’t a fruititarian, you weren’t accepted!”, right?
And so, he was kind of making the connection of, “Hey, the beta cells of the pancreas are really important for making insulin”, but I think is it the out, no? I think, it’s the, that’s also could wear down potentially the exocrine function of the pancreas, making enzymes as well. Any connection with the excess insulin from the carbs could impact negatively the exocrine pancreatic enzyme output?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: I don’t know, maybe, it’s not something I’ve really thought about. I suppose that could be possible. You know, I do believe that something happens for some people that they’re not making enough of the pancreatic enzymes whether that’s just getting older or whether that’s, you know, some of the like a byproduct of all the metabolic consequences that come with being overweight and Insulin resistant. Not really sure, it’s a good question.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay, let’s dive into some of the enzymes. So, I mean, obviously, there’s different kinds that are out there. We have, you know, your proteolytic, your amylase, your carbohydrate base, your lipase. Obviously, there’s some that are enteric coated, you have like your lumbrokinase, your sera peptidase. What type of enzymes do you like, and what levels?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: The enzymes that I use with cancer patients are actually just bottom line freeze-dried pancreas in a capsule. They’re not and there is a little bit of an activation process that’s done but there’s some debate as to whether the truly active thing with cancer is the proteolytic, that means, protein dissolving, proteolytic enzymes or whether it’s actually the precursor form for those proteolytic enzymes.
Because when the enzymes are sitting there in the pancreas, they’re actually what are called pro-enzymes they’re not quite active because if they were active they would chew up the pancreas and that’s no good. That’s actually very bad if that happens. And so, they come as this packaged form, a precursor form, but there are some scientific studies that would suggest that that’s actually what’s active against cancer and not the truly activated enzymes. So, by just using freeze-dried pancreas, we’re getting quite a lot of the enzymes that are available actually in the precursor form, that’s what we did.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Interesting, so you do like a pancreatic, like a proto morphogen type of thing? Like a glandular extract?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: No, it’s just freeze-dried meat in effect. It’s with everything intact, fat and everything. You know, there’s some reasons to believe that the fat may actually stabilize the enzymes. Those proto morphogens, I must admit, I’m not completely familiar with exactly how they’re processed, but I believe that it’s a salt precipitate, which means that they mince up the organ and then they mix it into a salt solution and then see what settles out.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s it.
Dr. Linda Isaacs: …removed some of the fats, yeah. This, what we’re using is a lot simpler, and it’s, you know, everything in the organ is, in effect, in the glandular.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s great, so you’re getting like a full ancestral type of support, and is there a certain supplement company do you like for the glandular, specifically? I know Dr Gonzalez, I think has mentioned Standard Process, there’s other ones out there.
Dr. Linda Isaacs: The product that I use, the closest thing that’s commercially available is made by Allergy Research Group, which also sells under the label Nutricology. And it’s called Pancreas, so that’s, there’s a small company that only sells to my patients that I mainly use by the Allergy Research Group product is available commercially.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s great and then what kind of doses are you using? Are you spreading it throughout the day and does it matter if it’s empty stomach when you dose it specifically?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Yeah, well, I mean to some extent I don’t really like to get into a lot of details because I don’t think it would be very responsible of me to encourage people to try to treat themselves with something as serious as cancer. You know, and also, the doses vary depending on the person, depending on the type of cancer, but it’s very important that it be away from food. These are digestive enzymes and the goal with what I’m trying to do is give them to people to get into their system and work systemically, not just to thoroughly digest whatever they had for lunch.
So, I do recommend a few enzymes with meals, and for that matter, I recommend that for anybody. But for patients that are fighting a cancer, or have a strong family history, you know, whatever the concern might be. That would be when you would take them away from food.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it and so obviously, you’re going to be working with the patient, you’re going to be looking at their overall health, how aggressive the cancer is, maybe there’s some objective and subjective markers you’re looking at. So then, you’re going to work with that patient and then dial it in specifically for their needs. Is that correct?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: That’s right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Do you ever plug in, like you hear these other enzymes are out in the markets. I use them, you know, for blood flow or even you can see them, you use for like breaking down fibroid tissue things, like that, like Serapeptidase or Lumbrokinase or Nattokinase. Do you have any opinion on those or any therapeutic rationale to use those in your practice?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Well, I use a few plant-based enzymes as a digestive aid. So, for example, the Standard Process product “Multizyme”, I use some of that as just as a digestive aid. And, there’s some reason to believe that amylase, specifically, one of the other enzymes that breaks down starches and that’s in a lot of both plant-based enzymes, a word in the pancreatic enzymes for that matter.
But there’s reason to believe that a little extra of that can help with some of the waste materials that can form as the enzymes do their thing. So, I use some enzymes for that otherwise it would be more about specific circumstances. So, you just mentioned some of the things that, some of those other enzymes are good for, and I might well, use them for that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it, yeah. When you work up a patient, how do you like, when you look at there’s obviously a lot of potential root causes for cancer, right? There’s different therapies that you’re adding in I mean, I talk to patients, they’re like, “Well, when’s there going to be a cure for cancer?” And my general take is, well there’s a lot of different potential causes.
You could have low vitamin D, you can have insulin resistance, you can have exposure to different toxins in the environment, chemicals Plastics, pesticides, beyond hormonal compounds that are driving. There’s a lot of different root causes. So, when you’re looking at a patient, you one, do you obscribe to that similar belief? And then, two, are you working patients up and looking at all of the potential root causes and trying to address those while you’re doing these other therapies at the same time? How do you frame that out? How do you assess that ?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Well, that’s an interesting question. I think, you know, on the one hand I could certainly say that, you know, as you mentioned, there’s a lot of different things that can contribute to somebody developing a cancer. On the other hand, on a practical level, I find that, you know, whether somebody’s cancer developed, primarily because of toxic exposures, or whether it didn’t, I’m still going to be focusing a lot on detoxification because, for one thing, we live in a polluted world, for another, the process of getting rid of the cancer, you know, you got to think, “Where does it go?”
You know, it’s, in other words, you kill it, but you’ve still got to get rid of the pieces. Something’s got to be removed. And so, they’re all going to need to address detoxification no matter whether, the cause of their cancer or, per se, was toxins or not. And the same thing would go for vitamin D, you know? Even if vitamin D deficiency wasn’t the fundamental cause, they still need to have their vitamin D optimized. So, in a way, some of the “Why” questions, from my point, of view kind of come out in the wash, in the sense that, I’m going to be doing or trying to address the same considerations whether that was the bottom line issue or not.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right, that makes sense. Makes sense. And so, when you’re working with a patient, you’re working them up, are there any specific lab markers that you’d like to look at? I mean, are you running, imagine you’re probably running vitamin D, you can tell me, are you looking at things like C-reactive protein? Are you looking at fasting insulin? Do you run any like cancer-antigen markers? Like, what are your favorite kind of go-to’s to kind of get a assess the playing field, so to speak?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Right. Yeah, I may, well, wind up expanding that at some point but you know, to a large extent we learned what we did. Dr. Gonzalez and I, from Dr. William Donald Kelly. And a lot of the tests were not available in his area. And for that matter, you know, I started doing this work in the early 90s and a lot of these tests were only barely becoming into existence at that point. So, I’ve really learned to do a lot just with my clinical impression of situations.
And a lot of the standard markers, or the markers that you just mentioned, can actually be very confusing. For example, C-reactive protein, that might go up before it goes down. Why? Because, breaking up cancer is an inflammatory situation. The white cells and the macrophages and things that chew up and get rid of stuff require inflammation to do their thing. So, just like, it would be, I would think counterproductive if somebody had pneumonia to completely try to squelch their inflammation because that inflammation is fighting the pathogen that’s causing the problem.
So, I don’t necessarily want to squelch inflammation altogether. And so, it makes me a little wary because, you know, people kind of have this mindset, “Oh! Inflammation! That’s bad!”, “Inflammation causes cancer.” Well, and chronic inflammation can cause cancer but to get rid of it, you may need an inflammatory process for a while. So, it’s complicated, bottom line.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, your body has to, basically, start to break down these cancer cells and that can be a little bit inflammatory. Just like exercising can be a little bit inflammatory. But it’s enough where your body can be on top of it. And you’re keeping your detoxification pathways open to be able to process all that as well.
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Exactly, right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And typically, your body does apoptosis, right? That’s like programmed cell death. Like, if you look at the average person, what do you think the big barrier to the body starting to not be able to keep track of this apoptosis and not be able to continue to monitor cells so they don’t overgrow? What’s the first thing that goes wrong?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Gosh, I don’t know. I think I might be able to win a Nobel Prize if I answered that one. But I, you know, again, our, the underlying theme in our work is pancreatic enzymes. You know, a shortage of the proteolytic enzymes, and you know, bear in mind that in the regular medical literature, the idea that proteolytic enzymes did more than digest food, is relatively new.
We’re just talking about, you know, the last 15, 20 years that there’s been more and more research about what proteolytic enzymes do systemically, as opposed to just like digesting food. So yeah, I, there’s an 80-page article about proteases that I referenced into something I recently wrote up about pancreatic enzymes, and you know, among the things that’s talked about is the immune system, and you know, some of the autophagy and etc.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Interesting! And where does the microbiome plug-in? Because obviously, we have to have good digestion. Now you mentioned, protease for breaking down cancer and then protease for just being able to break down protein and fat. Where does looking at the microbiome and seeing, you know, “Hey, I have an infection I may have some bacterial overgrowth. I may have some bugs that can be creating some stress with me absorbing my nutrition. Maybe I have some bugs and some food allergens kind of creating some gut permeability, some leaky gut. Maybe that’s stressing out my immune system.” Where does looking at the gut kind of come in here?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Well again, if somebody is short on pancreatic enzymes then they’re digestion, you know, whether they’re having symptoms or not, their digestion is going to be a bit of a mess. Simply because, you know, if you think about it what’s more important to the body on an immediate sense, certain cancer surveillance or digestion? Digestion, of course. That’s the thing you need to do first. And so, if somebody isn’t making enough enzymes to keep cancer cells under control, then they’re surely not making enough for digestion. So that can that can lead to various microbiome issues that, I think, can certainly play a role, sure.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, what else do you think is important? The average person that comes into you? The average listener right now? Okay, so we have these enzymes, we’re going to use these. This is going to be a very important palliative kind of root cause tool to get these, get that cancer low down, what do you think the next big thing? Is it working on the drainage and the detoxification? What’s the next big step here?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Well, I typically, will address multiple things at once. My patients frequently look like they’ve been run over by a truck by the time I finish my recommendations, although I do try to warn them before we start, you know, “This is going to be a lot.” And the things that I have them address, first of all, they are taking a lot of enzymes, they’re also taking other supplements that just help give the body what it needs for repair and then, they need to clean up their diet for sure.
You know, you can’t keep eating the way that got you into trouble. In order to get out of trouble, you’ve really got to clean it up. And then, there’s also detoxification, that’s a huge part of it because if people faithfully take all of their enzymes but don’t do the detoxification, and they’ll wind up feeling like they’ve got the flu. So the detox part is extremely important.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And where does conventional therapy come in? I mean, obviously the big concern with conventional therapy is, number one, you don’t really get to the root cause, and two, yeah you can knock down the cancer load but then you’ve beaten up the immune system, so then now, this cancer can grow back because your immune system isn’t able to keep the cancer cells in check.
So, when is the conventional modality for cancer good and acceptable and then how do you work with that if someone’s doing cancer? Do you say “No, we got to do this. Do your programs first this second.” What’s the order of operations and how do you prevent the side effects of chemo from devastating the immune system in general?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Yeah, okay, well before I take on a case, I ask people to send in some information about their situation and I do that partly because there are some situations where orthodox therapy is the way to go, or the way to go initially. And so, I will let people know that. I myself do not work with people that are getting chemotherapy at the same time, and there’s plenty of other practitioners that do that kind of work but I, that’s not what I choose to do.
You know, I think that in situations where surgery is possible and makes sense, in other words, the cancer hasn’t spread elsewhere, I would argue that people should go ahead and do it. So that’s, you know, one consideration. And there are times that people will send me information about a cancer.
You know, like just the other day, I got an application from somebody with a particular type of lymphoma, and that type of lymphoma, chemotherapy actually works for. So, you know, it would be irresponsible of me to tell him to do something else when chemotherapy can actually work now. I also, you know, I wind up seeing people that got the chemo and then come to me afterwards, to kind of get get their system working better. You know, I’m certainly open to doing that but I I don’t see people that are simultaneously getting chemo.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct. I think it’s the big three, it’s the lymphoma, leukemia, and testicular cancer. I think those are the big ones that chemo and conventional care tend to work well with, right?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Yeah, there’s a few others but that’s, those are the big ones
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Do you remember the other ones?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Oh gosh
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s off top of your head
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Yeah, I’m totally blanking out on that one. I know there are a few but I don’t remember.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I’ll ask you the opposite. Are there any cancers out of the gate, that chemo just does not do well with, or conventional care doesn’t do well with?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Yeah, pancreatic cancer is probably the biggest one, and that’s been the thorn in the side of the medical community for many, many years. You know, there’s a few people that can be cured by surgery, but even when the surgeon walks out and says, “I got it all.” 75% of them will recur within five years.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow, yeah. And aren’t there, how many types of pancreatic cancer are there? And isn’t there one more than another that’s more serious, or are they all equally the same?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Yeah, the pancreas is almost like two organs in one. You’ve got the cells that make enzymes and when you develop a cancer in those cells, that’s the nasty type of pancreatic cancer. The other type, it develops in the beta cells, are called and that’s a group of cells that mainly make hormones like insulin or glucagon or gastrin. You know, there’s a different enzymes at those cell us make. And those cancers, when when a cancer develops there, it is typically slower growing, and so it’s not as immediate, a threat to life.
Although the ones that make hormones, if the hormone is causing trouble, well, that can get can be pretty touchy. But Steve Jobs, for example, he had the neuroendocrine, that’s another word for that. He had the slower growing type, as opposed to the exocrine pancreas, that’s the ones for the end, will make the enzymes, and that’s the truly nasty one.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it, exactly. So the exocrine one, is the one from the insulin side?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: No, exocrine is the one that makes the enzymes that digest food.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Enzymes, got it. Exocrine is the enzymes and the beta cell one, that’s the insulin one, correct?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Yeah, yeah
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay, got it.
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Yeah, kind of confusing because there’s many different words to describe the same thing. So, you know, exocrine is talking about enzyme secretes and endocrine is another word for the beta cells that secrete hormones into the blood.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it, and then if you have a pancreatic adenocarcinoma, is that going to be a exocrine one?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Strictly speaking, adenocarcinoma is the label you would apply to either type
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, okay.
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Yeah, but most of the time if somebody says pancreatic adenocarcinoma, that’s usually referring to the exocrine, the nasty one. There’s other labels, I know this is confusing, but you know, it’s just the way it is. Adenocarcinoma is actually a label that can be applied to some types of lung cancer, to stomach cancer, to colon cancer, to breast cancer.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it.
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, in other words, we have this adenocarcinoma is kind of the umbrella, and then we have the exocrine, which is more the enzyme side, that’s the nasty one, and then we have the endocrine, which is the insulin part. and that’s the lesser one. And you said Jobs had the lesser one.
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Yeah. He had the lesser one. Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay, good okay. I try to boil everything down and make it as simple as possible. I want to be able to tell it to my five-year-old son, we can get it, good.
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Well, I hope your five-year-old son is not interested, you know?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, right right, no, I get it. Okay, so that’s cool, so we have these different types, and then, so what are the types of chemo that just, or types of cancer that just are not helpful at all? So we hit the pancreas, what else? Are there any brain parts, I think the medulloblastoma is another one. Any other takes on other types of cancer besides just the pancreas?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Well, there’s a there’s a number of other situations where chemotherapy may be helpful for a short period of time, but it’s not going to fix, you know, not going to be a permanent solution. So, just about any of the metastatic cancers, meaning that it’s spread outside the original location, you know, chemotherapy may shrink tumors, it might prolong life, but it’s not going to be a cure.
And this, you know, is where people, you know, the terminology that’s frequently used in oncology, can be very confusing like for instance, people will hear a response you know the chemotherapy will give a response, and you know, 75 percent of patients, and they think, “Oh great! That means cure!” It doesn’t mean cure. it means tumor shrinkage. You know, so you have to kind of ask what words mean if you really want to know what orthodox therapy can do for you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very good, and so obviously, if someone has cancer it’s always good to put someone like you, in their corner no matter what, whether they’re going to go the conventional route or the natural route or both. If someone’s going to their oncologist, I find a lot of conventional oncologists, they’re totally clueless when it comes to nutrition.
Like it’s just unbelievable, why the patients with brain cancer, they’ve asked their oncologist, “What kind of, you know, diet nutrition I should be on?” They said, “Diet has nothing to do with the cancer.” And I’m just like, “Wow!” You know, Harvard-trained physicians, it’s unbelievable. If someone’s going to see their oncologist, what are the top two or three questions that they should ask to see if they’re a good fit? Or just to run by their oncologist?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Okay, well, I mean, first of all, I think the oncology world is starting to change a little bit. There have been a few studies recently where, it was shown that diet and exercise did make a difference, and so, I think that bit by bit, the oncologists will start to, at least, not be quite so dismissive, or say things like “Diet doesn’t matter.” So I’m hoping that will be the case.
I personally think it’s kind of a waste of time, though, to try to talk to an oncologist about diet because most of them really don’t know that much. You know, in terms of talking to an oncologist about the treatments they’re offering, some of the things you have to think about, you know, is listen to the way they explain things.
So, for instance, you know, this “X treatment” is going to reduce your risk by, you know, and they’ll say some big number, and you say, “Okay, if 100 people like me came in and got this treatment, how many of them would it help?” You know, you have to ask questions in questions like that because, for instance, supposing that you had, you know, a five out of ten people like you were going to have a recurrence, and the chemotherapy could reduce it to two and a half, well that sounds pretty good.
But what if a thousand people were going to have a recur, I mean, there was out of a thousand people, two of them were going to have a recurrence, and the treatment could reduce it to one in a thousand. That’s still a fifty percent reduction. Do you see what I’m saying? You have to you know because, unfortunately, the statistics are expressed in whatever way makes them sound the best.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Essentially, they’re gonna create a fog over relative risk versus absolute risk. Relative is the percentage, two out of a thousand to one out of a thousand, “Oh, it’s a 50% reduction!” But in the end, you know, is it really, you know, I get it. I understand it. Yeah, the relative versus the absolute. Also too, how they kind of, do a little pivoting when it comes to cures, right?
Because usually, a cure is talked about within a five-year time frame. If you had a cancer and you survived five years, they kind of lump you into a cure rate, yet you could die in year six and technically, you’re cured from that cancer. Maybe this is a new thing. So there’s also some fog around that too.
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Yeah there can definitely be some fog around things so you just have to ask questions.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And also too, it seems like the wheels have changed when it comes to chemotherapy. It takes a while once you have a standard of care, it’s hard to get a new standard of care above that and then, you have to look at the side effects. I mean, the standard care for pancreatic cancer as you know, it tends to be really powerful chemo that has terrible side effects. I mean, can you talk about like the standard of care treatment on the chemo side and what that looks like from a side effects standpoint?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Well, your typical side effects of any chemotherapy or things like fatigue and nausea and, you know, the potential for infections, neuropathies. A lot of these different things can happen certainly, yes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and then the nausea and all that is just terrible from a quality of life standpoint. I mean, I think it’s really important anyone that if you know anyone that has pancreatic cancer or has themselves it’s really important whether you go conventional or not, you want someone like Dr Linda in your quarter, that’s powerful.
You talked about detoxification. So, that’s kind of a big buzzword, right? Because there’s a lot of things that help enhance detoxification. When you say that, is that including water, sauna therapy? I know, you have the Gerson Institute that will do coffee enemas. There’s also things like glutathione and vitamin C and herbs like milk thistle. Which one do you kind of plug into your corner, or you like?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: The day-to-day detoxification routine that I recommend for everybody is coffee enemas. And that’s something Dr. Kelly used. It turns out, you know, coffee enemas go back in the literature for easily 150 years. The oldest reference I think I found for them was in a book, that was Google books, it has a lot of really old medical textbooks, so it’s a great place to look around, and I found something from the 1850s or 1860s, it actually described coffee enemas as if it was something everybody knew about.
You know, so they’ve obviously been around for a long, long time. They were used for poisoning or, you know, people that were really sick with infections, they would use it. They were also routinely used in post-operative care. And it’s one of those things that kind of got lost in the shuffle as pharmaceuticals came into wide use.
But you know, I think they’re very effective. Most of my patients absolutely love them. Nobody believes that when they first hear it. I didn’t believe it myself. But most of the patients love them. They feel better with them, and they are rapidly sold on the benefits.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, the mechanism essentially, you’re getting, you know, lukewarm or, I should say, room temperature or, I should say, body temperature type of coffee, right in regards to the temperature you’re using, do you use the Gerson, I think, is it a medium dark roast or medium roast for the type of coffee?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Yeah, I don’t think it makes all that much difference what the roast you use.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Organic, though, right?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Yeah, it should be organic. And yeah, so it’s a coffee solution. It’s weaker than your typical drinking coffee. There’s a lot of different variants on how strong to make it out there, but you know, it’s introduced into the rectum, held for 10 minutes, I tell people, and expelled. And like I said, most of the patients really come to love it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Now, what’s the mechanism? I’ve seen that it’s going to go up, to the gallbladder, and to the liver, and it’s going to increase glutathiones, that this is 600% – 800%, I’ve seen that. I’ve seen this also an expelling of toxins from the liver and gallbladder back into the coffee, so then when you go and jump on the toilet afterward, you’re going to release a lot of toxins plus stimulate the liver to make more glutathione. Are those the big mechanisms or is there more?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Well, unfortunately, I can’t claim that this has been thoroughly researched. The coffee enemas definitely moved bile from the liver and gallbladder. And there was actually some folks in Korea that did an experiment, to document this. They were looking to, they were they had patients that were getting what’s called “capsule endoscopy” which is where you swallow a little camera and what would happen is that, people would swallow this little capsule and that would stimulate bile flow and then the bile would be in the area where the camera was and so you couldn’t see anything because it was all clogged, clouded up.
So what they had people do was to do a coffee enema right before they swallowed the capsule and there was no bile to be released so they in effect showed that the coffee enemas stimulate bile flow. I wrote a whole article a couple of years ago about coffee enemas and it turns out that whole thing about glutathione, I traced back you know, this to the source that comment about the explosion of glutathione.
And it’s unfortunately, I don’t think it’s a valid. It doesn’t mean the coffee enemas, they might be working that way, but the thing, the paper that’s quoted as proof for that, doesn’t prove that. So I don’t throw around the concept that it’s stimulating glutathione but I can tell you, it’s making people feel better.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So you feel like, the bile is, kind of like, wringing that sponge out, getting all that bile in there and there’s probably some kind of toxins in the bile that you’re able to pull out?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Right, that’s what I think. Bile is where the liver gets rid of waste material so it makes sense and you know, I on a practical level, it’s not that easy to prove it though because nobody really wants to be doing laboratory tests on stool, to see if there’s toxins in there, they just you know, it’s not good. So, it’s not that easy to figure out how to prove it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right, that makes sense but clinically there’s data there. I mean, from your practice of empirical data that you see patients getting better, feeling better, that’s excellent. And then, we talked about glutathione within the coffee enema, right? That’s kind of a controversial aspect of it but are you working on increasing patience glutathione? Are you giving amino acids to make it? Do you give extra exogenous antioxidant support or give the amino acids to make it? Where does that plug in or does it?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Well, I use like an acetylcysteine, alkylic acid. I definitely think those are helpful, and that’s one of the standard things that I give people.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very cool. Now, if you talk to like conventional oncologists, I see this a lot, where they’re afraid to give antioxidants during killing therapy or during chemotherapy? It’s just as they, the chemo is going to create a level of oxidative stress that will go after the cancer and if you’re giving antioxidants that it may neutralize the ability of the chemo to kill cancer. And that was kind of a thing that people were told to not be on supplements. Maybe eat a super healthy antioxidant-rich diet of leafy green vegetables, whatever. Where do you sit on that? Is that kind of old thinking? Or are they thinking these nutrients would still be helpful? Or should you still avoid a lot of these antioxidants if you’re going that conventional route?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: What I’d say there is that, I don’t do this kind of work myself. I’m not treating people that are simultaneously getting chemotherapy, so that question would be better directed towards somebody that is doing that. I’ve read conflicting information on that and so I don’t really have an opinion on that one.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, see, some of the studies I’ve seen, it seems to be like survey data and they look at like patient outcomes like after the fact, which you know, that’s probably not the best. They probably should put people in a medical lab and monitor it as they go. So yeah, I kind of feel the same. And so, when you see patients, do you prefer to see them after chemo?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Yes, if somebody’s in the middle of chemo I prefer that they’ve finished that before I would consider taking them on, yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent, excellent. We’re going to put your links here to get a hold of Dr. Linda, doctorlindai.com, doctorlindai.com, we’ll put your coordinates down below. Anywhere else, potential patients or listeners could find out more about you?
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Well, that’s really the best place is my website and I would also encourage them to sign up for my email list and what they’ll get if they do that is a little introductory series and then just a little email once every couple of weeks. I won’t drown them in information but I try to you know, break it up so it’s a little more manageable. There’s a lot of information on my website, so I’d say that’s the place to start. so that’s d-r-l-i-n-d-a-i.com.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We’ll put the link down below if anyone’s driving they can go check it out. I’m gonna subscribe right now. All right, look at that. So outside of that, anything else you want to leave the listeners with so? I think we hit a lot of like conceptions, myths, you know, how to approach this naturally root cause. Any other questions that I didn’t ask that would be powerful to review briefly.
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Well, I think you did a great job of covering all the bases, really. So I can’t think of anything to add.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well I really appreciate you doc, taking Dr. Gonzalez’s torch and keeping it going for decades to come. it’s great that patients have natural options out there that have an integrative approach using the enzymes, diet, all the different tools so I love it. I think it’s great. I’m going to definitely use you as a resource for a lot of patients that I see that have cancer or need additional support above and beyond. So thank you for doing what you do. I appreciate it Dr. Linda.
Dr. Linda Isaacs: Okay, well thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Awesome. Thank you. Take care.
References:
Coffee Enemas: A Narrative Review
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bY6AvGT4cNVvBx1CypSee-PD4m9Jo462/view?usp=sharing
Audio Podcast:
Natural Strategies to Detoxify Glyphosate or Round Up | Podcast #345
Several studies demonstrate that exposure to glyphosate to humans (and mammals) can cause serious chronic health problems. Also, exposure to glyphosate usually manifests slowly over time and results in apparent dysfunctions in biological systems.
According to Dr. J and Evan, several recent studies claim that glyphosate accumulates in the bones, intestine, spleen, liver, muscle, and kidney. And because glyphosate is so prevalent, it will be essential to incorporate foods into your diet that help your body detoxify. It may entail making lifestyle choices that you can and are willing to do daily for the long term.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
1:43: Roundups
6:04: What does glyphosate do?
10:37: The benefits of organic foods, air filters, and water filters
15:17: Glutathione and Collagen
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are Live! It’s Dr. J here in the house with Evan Brand. Today we’re gonna be chatting about natural strategies to help detoxify round ups or glyphosate. Really excited to be chatting with Evan today. Evan, how are you doing today man?
Evan Brand: Doing really well! This is a super important topic.You sea many many lawsuit around the country happen and bayer who bought monsato. They’re really trying to get out of it. I’ve seen several, I’m no law expert but I’ve seen several stories how basically they’re trying to just, throw one lump sum out there for all the cases, as there are thousand and thousand of cases coming at them, because of different cancers like non-hodgkin’s lymphoma that people are claiming that has been linked to their glyphosate exposure. Whether it was like the school grounds worker who was a famous story or other people. They’re really coming at them hard and they’re really really trying to weasel this way out of it and then I saw news just uh, last week actually, that glyphosate is actually going to be phased. I don’t know if you saw this but it said it’s going to be phased out by 2023. So I sent this new article over to Stephanie Synep who I’ve interviewed several times about glyphosate, and she goes “yeah, I saw this. They’re probably just going to come out with another slightly different molecule that’s just as toxic”. So she didn’t think it was that exciting news.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Interesting! Yeah, I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s kind of like a lot of the medication they have many me’s for it right. Something they can re-patent, um, almost the same molecular structure so they know it’s going to work based on the previous medication or compound but they don’t really have to do too much RND on it because, it’s so close to where it was. So yeah, I get that maybe, probably, the same toxicity profile too. So that makes sense, hopefully that’s not going to be the case but either way, we have a lot of toxins in our environment and roundup’s just one that we have a lot of other pesticides, herbicides, or genocides that are out there. Obviously, a lot of potential chemicals in the water, air, and so roundup or we can kind of put roundup of pesticides – all in the same category, I think that’s pretty fair . So you know first thing is, try to mitigate the use of them on your property, I mean, I use a little bit of pesticides in a spot treating, man. Are we trying to avoid anything blanketed or anything just, you know, blanketed across the board, and you know, we don’t really play out in the grass that much, I mean so if your kids are rolling around out in the grass definitely pay extra money and have those weeds picked up by hand. I think that’s a better way to do it but every now and then, there may be a necessity to spot treat stuff but do your best to avoid that especially if your kids are playing near glass like that, or just have a grass in your yard that you know, this is the play area this where the kids go. We put a nice little rock pit in our backyard just because we know that the rock pit’s going to be perfect right? Put some like, soft help you know, small pebbles in there, um, that are you, um, still fun to play in and they have a digger pit and all that so just try to do your best if you have kids that are young that are playing; mitigate any playing on areas that have any pesticides at all; try to mitigate the use of them, 100 percent and try to have safe, safe spaces in your yard that, you know are perfectly clean.
Evan Brand: There is an alternative to roundup. I’m trying to figure out what it was the moms across America did and article on it-I’m trying to fin it here-it was like a non-toxic weed control. I don’t care about weeds; my grass looks cool and it’s got clover. We’ve got many other different species of plants besides just grass. I mean, I think it’s a myth and it’s dumb you have all these neighborhoods where they think you got to have the grass looking perfect, and grass is just like another version of monoculture. It’s like if you go and walk through my yard, you’re going to see so many different types of plants so I just don’t care. I think people have been brainwashed by the mainstream industry. Even our neighbor we’ve seen you know just out in flip-flops, spraying the glyphosate on their weeds. It’s like who said dandelions are bad? Like, that’s the first food for bee so for me, I’d rather see the field full of dandelions. I guess it’s personal preference but I kind of like it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. It just depends. You know, the biggest problem with weeds in relationship to grass as they grow like, three times the speed, so if you haven’t cut your lawn for a week your grass in this long and your weeds are this long, right? So you missed the nice homogeneous, kind of, clean lawn. I’m a big long guy, I like a nice, clean, homogeneous lawn so I’ll walk out there, you know, halfway through the week if I see any weeds popping up; it’s easy because they grow twice the speed, it’s grass, and I’ll just go and take five minutes, and I’ll just pull my hand. You know, I’m like I like a really nice pretty front lawn. So I’ll go there spend 5-10 minutes a week walking around, pulling by hand, just to mitigate the chemical usage but. First thing is, decrease the chemical usage, decrease the chemical dependency out of the gates. I guess that’s the easiest first step.
Evan Brand: So here’s one. So it’s called, there’s one called Dr. Kirchner natural grass and weed killer. I’m gonna to try to look it up, see what the ingredients. There’s another one, another competitor to it called, Green Gobler. And that’s a 20% vinegar weeding grass killer. And this thing’s got crazy high reviews of it. This Dr. Kirchner k-I-r-c-h-n-e-r natural weed killer . This is just, so it’s four percent sodium chloride, interesting. And they say this ocean water-based product is made for non-selective control of broad-leaf weeds and wheat grasses results in hours. So there you go, I mean it sounds like they’re just using like, concentrated ocean water, they’ve got thousands of five-star reviews on people, people on Amazon are posting their reviews of them in their garden after spraying this stuff and it literally kills it all. This lady said here that it’s magical and safe. So there you go!
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So we’ll have to put some links down below. So you have what, so what are those two products? Those ones that was an apple cider vinegar-based, what else?
Evan Brand: Yeah, and then you got this other one that’s salt water, it’s literally like, four percent ocean water concentrate, and then you have another one called, Natural Armor which is a 30 percent vinegar concentrate.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay.
Evan Brand: My wife even saw one at Target recently. She saw like an organic herbicide. I had a picture of it, I don’t know if I could find it on my phone or not but, she sent me a picture the other day. She said there’s no excuse for people using glyphosate; I said I know, I know, and then she sent me that picture-let me see if I can find it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Good. That’s good. I mean glyphosate, what is does is, it it basically is a chelator, it pulls away all the minerals from the soil, and so it decreases the minerals getting up into the plant which then kill it. And so, if you’re using it even worse on food you’re eating, It’s it’s way worse. Because now you’re destroying the quality of the topsoil, you’re destroying the minerals in that soil, and we know that soil requires minerals so that plant can, um, let’s just say express it you know, express it’s full nutritional potential if you will. So if we have nutritionally deficient soil, like manganese for instance, you know, vegetables are going to have less vitamin C in it, right? So we know the minerals have a major role and they and the quality of that soil, plays a major role in the kind of nutrientsthat plants will produce. So you’re gonna have less nutrition in soil where there’s a bunch of roundup that’s chelated out a lot of those minerals.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I was gonna say, let’s hit on the mechanism . So that’s definitely a big important one, and then the other one that you and I test for in the gut is, we’re seeing the glyphosates damaging the beneficial bacteria in the gut. And this is happening at even PBB – parts per billion levels. So once you kill off the beneficial bacteria in the gut, now you see the overgrowth of clostridium, and there’s a famous chart-I know you’ve seen it before and hopefully others have seen it. But you could just look it up, type in glyphosate autism chart, and you can see the correlation where glyphosate skyrockets along with autism rates, and I’ve seen many many autistic children and we test their glyphosate levels and they’re always high. So, this is not saying causation, but this is in correlation; and William Shaw, Bill Shaw-he’s a guy at great plains lab that we, that we use for these toxic chemical tests. You know, he wrote a great paper on this. He had a paper published about the mechanism . Essentially, it was like an order of operations. It was the glyphosate, as you mentioned, will cause nutrient deficiencies but then damages good bacteria. Bad bacteria like clostridium overgrowth. Now you’ve got these organic acids that go high which mess up an enzyme that breaks down dopamine, now you’ve got excessive dopamine, now you’ve got brain toxicity and the you damage the mitochondria. So it’s a long, a long route there but, this is directly damaging mitochondria which is certainly linked to chronic fatigue and other issues so, when we’re looking at someone’s picture of health, and we see they’ve got a major overload of pesticides, and they’re fatigued, we’re not gonna say, “Hey! This is you number one smoking gun of fatigue” but, it’s certainly a big peace of the puzzle; and I can tell you personally but also clinically when we use nutrients which we’ll get into to detox these pesticides-we see that energy levels go up; and you mentioned exposure, so also, you got to consider where you live too. So even if you’re having Joe Bob next door spray, that might not be as big of a deal as more agricultural areas which is you know, partially where I am which I don’t like. There’s a corn and soybean around here. This is just part of the country where I, where this happens and there’s papers on even one mile of pesticide drift. So the question is…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Far more worried about you because, just the load, you know, if you look at the, just the load coming through.
Evan Brand: Oh, yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh, and your area is just got to be, you know, orders of magnitude. 10, 100x more than just a general uh, you know, residential person that’s just trying to knock down weeds a little bit.
Evan Brand: Totally. Which, which we’re aware of. We’re working on it and we’ve got, we’ve got an exit, so we’re working on it but, yeah. Luckily, we’ve been doing a lot of things. Are you ready to talk about some of the solutions? Obviously, avoidance, external exposure, trying to stay away from it, watching out for like, playgrounds. You know, a lot of playgrounds, they’re too lazy to pull the weeds so they’re just going to spray it so you’ll see often signs at playgrounds like, “watch out!”, and you can tell that they’ve sprayed on the mulch where the kids are playing, and then you may say, “Well, oh! We’ll just go to a rubber playground”, where you have all those chopped up tires but, those are really toxic too. We mentioned those rubber chemicals on the chemical profile for children too. I had a child, a young child actually, was a client who was diagnosed with a rare type of cancer, and we looked at the levels of 1-3 butadiene and maybe some other chemicals; and these are all from synthetic rubber, and this kid was like a stup, a superstar soccer player. He was playing indoors, like 24/7. This kid was these fake rubber mats and his levels were like a hundred x higher than 95th percentile and that was a known carcinogen so we can’t say the rubber caused it but, man, it was certainly a big smoking gun in this case.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: What’s the chemical name?
Evan Brand: It’s so, it’s 1-3 butadiene. It’s on the great plains chemical report. It just says using the production. Yeah, just as used in the production of synthetic rubber.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. So it’s definitely possible, right? So, I mean, out of the gates, the first thing is, we look at our food. Right? First this is make sure you food’s organic because you’re going to have major exposure if you’re taking things in, internally. Right? Things on the outside of the world like yeah, if you’re touching it, right? That’s going to be a problem so one try not to use it at your property or if you do you know, like you know, we try to use it more like glyphosate but kind of more natural version in the front yard spot treated. But in the backyard or in the play any area where we know that kids actually play. Like that’s just going to be off-limits. We try to make sure it’s super clean and good there; and then number two is um, you know, air is going to move all this stuff around. So even if you know you yard’s clean, your neighbors may not be clean. So you got to make sure air filtration in your home is dialed in so you can mitigate it potentially being in the home and breathing it in constantly. So air filters in the home, water filer because there’s also the worry about it getting off into the water table, and if we have a well or anything else, very concerning so you want to make sure good quality water filtration and then like I mentioned earlier-organic food and try to mitigate it’s usage around your property, or try to choose natural sources.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I’m glad you mentioned the water too because that’s important. Believe it or not, even glyphosate’s being found in rain water which is crazy. It’s literally raining down glyohosate because it’s evaporating from various farms and agricultural than it’s moving through the wind currents and then getting rained down on people, and you may say, “Oh well, that’s got to be such a trace amount it doesn’t matter. Well that’s the thing, we’re finding that these, these compounds are active against the beneficial bacteria in your gut at these per billion levels. So you really can’t brush it off. People will try to brush it off but, it’s the small levels, and it’s the synergistic effects, right? So you’ve got a little bot of that and then you’ve got it from your diet. Plus you’ve got it from your water supply, plus you’re getting rained on in your organic garden. This adds up overtime and you and I see bacterial overgrowth everyday, all day; and we know that this is certainly linked to the disruption of the gut-these chemicals. So it’s too important to ignore the air filters is a tough one. I asked Stephanie Synep about that I said, “Hey! What is the actual size of glyphosate? I can’t find it. I’m trying to figure out because you’ll see air purifiers talk about a one micron or a three micron filtration, and she said “Oh, no. There’s no way you’ll be able to filter it. It’s too small so that’s what she said bit, I can’t find anything about the size of it. I’ve asked a couple of companies about is and they say, “Oh, yeah. NO problem. Our air filter will take care of it”, and another company said, “Oh, yeah. Our air filter should destroy the molecule” but, I don’t know how you would yest that. You’d have to like, I don’t know; Have somebody spray a bottle of glyphosate into a room and then run the purifier and see what happens but, it’s removed so many other things that it’s a non-negotiable us, and I know you do the same like, air purifier…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. It’s moving a lot. I mean, you know, we like the Austin Air just because they have the 30 pounds of activated charcoal and zeolite, and those binders, you know, would have a positive effects, binding up these things and so it’s definitely going to decrease the load for sure. If it’s blowing through a hepa filter and also through the 30 pounds of zeolite and activated charcoal. It’s going to have mitigating effects. It’s going to be better off, you know, on when it’s out than, than before, right? So I think it’s still a good thing to have to what degree, um, I don’t know but, in general, it’s good to have, of course the water is a big one. So I try to have all my water that I drink personally-reverse osmosis, so we have a whole house filter that’s carbon-based that filter a lot, and then I have a under the counter filter where I drink my water, and like you know, make smoothies from, or make my coffee from, or use for cooking like that’s all RO. And so we have a little mineral support supplement that will add minerals back in. Because the biggest problem with RO water is the depletion of minerals but, um, I’d rather always have the water cleaner and then add minerals back. It’s always easier to add minerals back than take toxins out.
Evan Brand: Right. Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Always easier.
Evan Brand: For sure, for sure. I mean, yeah…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So like, Oh my God! The minerals In the water. There’s no minerals. Like yeah, but there’s no toxins are way less, so now I’m okay with way less toxins and just being able to add a good trace mineral support back into the water.
Evan Brand: Yep! Yeah, and people…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And you can do like, a redmond. You can do like a redmon’s real salt, you could trace mineral support with some extra potassium and magnesium-all that’s fine.
Evan Brand: I’ll do some of the sea water too. Like some of the sea water like, quinton and there’s a couple other professional brands we use of sea water, that stuff. I tell you, I was kind of skeptical. I’m like how is adding like, basically salt water going to help me bit, it sure did. I mean, it definitely is like a thirst quencher. So it’s pretty remarkable the difference.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, yourself, your cells need uh, they run on a sodium-potassium pump. There’s this gradient of minerals on wither side of the cell. I think it’s what sodium, sodium is on the outside, potassium’s in. It does a little switcheroo. Sodium goes in, potassium goes out, and you need that gradient to happen for the cells to communicate properly. So it you’re low in sodium or potassium, that sodium potassium pump is not going to work optimally.
Evan Brand: you can feel it. I’m telling you. It’s, it’s significant. All right. Let’s hit on some of like, the detox strategies if you’re ready. I think the easy one…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So the first thing is all the lifestyle stuff. That’s foundationthat we stack up. So easiest thing out of the gate is going to be glutathione. So glutathione, whether it’s s acetyl, lyposomal, reduce, whether we do, whether we’re making it with all the precursors like, NAC, ALA, glycine, collagen, right? All these things are going to be really important to help make your master antioxidant out of the gates-that’s probably the big one first.
Evan Brand: Yeah, glycine’s huge, and there’s actually some papers just on glycine by itself in isolation helping with glyphosate which is awesome. So I actually take glycine before bed. It really helps sleep too. So that’s another cool benefit but…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, you can mix collagen, peptides, like I use my TrueCollagen with a little bit of magnesium powder before bed. That knocks it right out and glycine’s helpful with other toxins like strippers like xylene and things like that. It will, it will detoxify xylene-thses kind of chemicals too. So glycine is excellent, and then of course um, you know, roundup’s very destructive on the gut and so if you’re doing glycine, it’s very helpful to kind of heal the enterocytes and repair those too.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I would say probiotics are somewhere on the list now. I don’t know in terms of priority and the mechanism is the same as it is for mycotoxins. There’s some cool research coming out about probiotics actually being able to convert toxins into less toxic forms, and then that makes them more water-soluble, and able to excreted from the body. So there’s some cool mechanism involved with probiotics and of course, if you’re working with a practitioner like us, we’re going to coach you through when and how, and what we’re going to use. But that another cool piece of the puzzle. I’d say my next one is going to be micronized chlorella. There’s a couple professional that we use of it, and this is better than the broken cell wall chlorella because, it’s smaller molecules, and then that’s going to allow better transfer across the blood-brain barrier to get some of these heavy metals out. So we’ll actually use some products that are basically designed for heavy metals but, we’ll use them off-label for like mold and chemical detox.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and so like I have a heavy meal clear product that has some of the, some of the chlorella in there. It also has some of the sodium alginate, and then also some of the modified citrus pectin. These are really good binders that will help with metals and they’ll also help with uh, pesticides too which are great, and then, um, some of the research you’re talking about probiotics actually converting some of the mole toxins and also, they also have an effect binding them too. It’s that what you’re saying too?
Evan Brand: Yeah. I know it’s a conversion. I don’t know if it’s actually binding but, there’s a lot of like great planes they’re doing a lot of work on like promoting the idea of probiotics being like the universal mold detoxifier now – even better higher rated that charcoal for example, which is crazy.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s why we always talk about dealing with the gut and working on the gut before we push any crazy detox because we know, the gut’s so important. It’s like a lot of these functional medicine principles are like you know, they’ve tried and true but, if you look at the science, like you find more little nitty-gritty within the science of what’s happening, why that is the case like we just kind of know clinically, you get better results doing it so we kind of go that way, and then we just see more data kind of just supporting that hypothesis.
Evan Brand: It’s cool. Yeah, it’s fun because you and I have been basically using the methods we use for years, and then new stuff comes out that’s like, “Oh, cool!” Well, we were doing that already; now we know that it was actually doing other things that we needed it to do for. It’s like get rid of toxins. So that’s, so that’s awesome. How about sauna too? I mean, sweating has been proven to help excrete so many things. I’ll tell you, you know, I had a lady that was in her 70s. We ran a chemical profile test on her. This lady’s test was so clean, I was almost in disbelief because I’ve seen 5, 6 year-old children that are just off the charts with chemicals, and then we have this lady in her 70’s who you think just lived through all sort of different eras of toxicity. Man, I tell you, her chemical tests were as clean as a whistle. I said, “What are you doing?’, and she was in a sauna three to four times a week for half an hour. I said “Wow!”, I said, ”You are living proof that the sauna works and that sweating is an incredible detox pathway.”
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I see a lot of women, too. Like “Oh, man! I’m pregnant.Like, what’s the best way to detoxify when I’m pregnant?” I’m like, well number one, we don’t want to really push any detoxification. The only thing I may gently recommend is maybe a little bit of a, kind of a natural fiber, eating organic, drinking lots of water, and maybe a little bit of an infrared sauna. But you have to shower right afterwards just because you don’t want to move toxins to the skin, and then have them reabsorb back in. So you want to make sure you use a good 10 sulfur soap, break up that film of toxin on your skin so it flushes off your skin. So would you agree that you know, potentially doing a little bit of sauna therapy as long as you’re not depleting yourself, dehydrated, is probably a safe, probably one of the more safer, gentle ways to detoxify if you are pregnant?
Evan Brand: I guess it depends on temperature. Like I’m not going to put a lady in like, a hundred and eighty, like a hot rock one.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Evan Brand: I think an Infrared one…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It can be infrared were it’s lower temperature.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I think if you’re probably at like a 125 degrees or something. That’s somewhat natural that you could experience on the planet. I think would be no problem; the chlorella should be no problem, too. You know, we’ve actually…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Stays in the gut. It stays in the gut. You’re probably okay, I mean, chlorella, some kind of a gentle, more food-based binder is probably okay. I mean, if you’re gonna do some kind of a sauna and you’re pregnant, one, make sure you’re hydrated, make sure you have minerals. Start with like, three or four, or five minutes, and just kind of add like a minute of two every time so you don’t overdue. I always rather know you go at a lower level where you’re confident- you can handle it, and gently nudge it up, and just make sure you shower right afterwards. It’s probably the only detoxification means that I would really push outside of a gentle binder. Uh, that’s food-based for my pregnant females. Back on that, would you agree?
Evan Brand: I would say, I, I don’t see a problem with charcoal and chlorella during pregnancy because, you have to kind of weigh the pros and the cons, right? And we know that for example, these toxins go through the placenta. We know they go through breast milk, so here you are, willingly letting this toxins go through the unborn baby, when you could simply use a gentle binder to try to mitigate some of that or even detox; that there’s actually been crazy stuff being done behind the scenes. I won’t go into too much details because I don’t think it’s published yet but, showing that these micronized chlorella molecules can literally detox the baby before the baby’s even born. So you can actually have a baby come out cleaner than it would’ve been, chemical wise, by being detoxed throughout the pregnancy by the transfer of the chlorella from mom to baby; and then of course, once the baby’s born, through the breast milk, also there is some transfer of chlorella. So there’s some crazy, crazy stuff coming out on that but, too soon to say exactly.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very cool. I like that. So, yeah. We have our binders, we like the binders, and again, talk to your, your OB if you’re a person that wants to look into that. When you’re pregnant, just be careful. I always recommend do all this stuff before but, if you waited and you have issues, and you got to do it now, talk to your OB, talk to your functional medicine doc before you ever do that. We typically don’t push any hard detoxification when uh, patients are pregnant just because we’re mobilizing a lot of toxins unless, we do it very very gentle-way like we mentioned before. Uh, outside of that, I would say we talked about all the big binders of water filtration. We’ll put some links down below with some of the RO and whole house activated charcoal, carbon-based filters that I personally use and Evan uses. We’ll put some recommended links that you guys have that. That’s going to be really important. I’d say air, water, organic food-those are going to be big, and then we can set them in on top of that. So uh, in my line I use heavy metal clear, my detox aminos that have calcium gluconate, and all the sulfur aminos, and reduced glutathione. Evan has some similar glutathione, and sulfur, and mineral-based products that are mineral, that are like our binders, like fulvic minerals or things that help bind up some of this things, too. So we’ll put some links down below if you want some recommended products that we personally use, and we’re kind of gave you some of the big mechanism, right? One’s binding, right? You’re binding some of it up, and the other one is you’re working on enhancing your own detoxification pathways, so they can excrete them. And then of course, low-hanging fruit, right? The solution to pollution dilution. You take any toxins, you hydrate well enough, good clean water and minerals, the more you hydrate that mineral, that toxin becomes less potent, the more it’s diluted. So that’s, it’s low hanging fruit. It’s easy to forget but, solution to pollution is dilution.
Evan Brand: Cheers! Yeah, and this is real stuff. I mean, we’ve seen many, many, I mean, hundreds of this point; before and after case studies of measuring these chemicals. It’s absolutely remarkable what can be done. So if you’re just like, “Oh, toxins are bad.”, and that’s all you get from this podcast, no. Remember that goes deeper than this. We’re talking the way you perform in terms of your mitochondreal function, your energy levels, the health of your gut. Whether you have bacterial overgrowth which then leads to bloating, and burping, and gas, and issues with your joints and potential autoimmune issues because now you’ve got chlostridium overgrowth. So if you hear this, all you think is” toxins are bad, I need to detox.”, no. Remember, this goes into every body system. This goes into adrenals, mitochondria, liver, gallbladder; I mean, the whole system is involved so don’t just blow this thing off. I still see people-I won’t name her but, there was a lady I knew from my, my town. Now she’s super big and she’s got a supplement company that’s like all these vitamin shop stores and everywhere, and she did a Q&A, and I mean this lady is a multi-millionaire, and people asked her, “Do you eat organic?”, and she said “No. I think it’s a waste of time.” It’s like you’re just, you’re just, uh, what’s the word? Not dumb, that’s the rude word. Uh…
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Ignorant.
Evan Brand: Ignorant. She’s ignorant. Yeah, that’s the word. She doesn’t know what that means. Like how important that truly is and how that’s changing everything from her offspring, and the health of her babies to her own health. So to people out there, if you’ve got the means to do it, which hopefully everyone can, I can see people have that brand new iphones but then they say they don’t have the extra dollar to buy the organic strawberries. You got to make thins thing a priority or you’ll see a brand new Mercedes SUV in the McDonald’s parking lot, like you’ve got to make organic a priority.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Absolutely. So you git to make it a priority. It’s shift that for sure, and again, people’s say organic’s a fad. Well, again, before 1950, everything was organic, right? That’s where the pesticide kind of fertilizer industry came kind of post-World War II, and so, everything was organic before that point. And again, like first thing I recommend in the order of priorities is, make sure your meat are organic and pasture fed first, okay that’s the first order of, um, let’s just say investment. The second thing is, eat from the clean 15-these are pesticides that have, these are foods that have a pesticide load; and then, avoid the dirty dozen. That’s kind of environmental working group thing. So we’ll put a link for the clean and the dirty dozen; and then from there, you can start getting organic vegetables that are frozen; that’s cheaper. And then of course, start to buy them, you know, more fresh and organic across the board but, that’s kind of the progression. So just try to at least start with the meats because the meats hold the most toxins, and so fats are in the toxins. So you want to start with meats first, and then you can work on going to clean 15, avoid dirty dozen, frozen organic, and then full fresh on organic. That’s kind of the algorithm there. Anything you want to say about that Evan?
Evan Brand: Yeah, local too. I mean, if you can get local beef too, where it hadn’t traveled thousands of miles from Brazil, and they didn’t cut down the rain forest to get that grass fed beef, then I would totally do that. I get my meat from 15 minutes down the road. It’s just hundreds, and hundreds of acres of beautiful chemical-free pastures. So I feel really good about it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s great! I love it. Well, very good. So out of the gates here also, one last thing, if you don’t have good gallbladder function, or good digestion, right? You’re constipated, you’re not pooping everyday, you’re having a hard time digesting food, not breaking fat down or protein adequately, your stools are floating, excessive skid marks streaks-those kind of things that means you’re not breaking down fat, you’re not breaking down protein adequately, you’re not moving toxins through your bowels adequately, you’re gonna be reabsorbing that, you’re gonna, you’re not gonna have good gallbladder flow to push that out in the stool. So you’re potentially reabsorbing or not eliminating toxins via your digestive tract. And so if we have digestive issues, we got to have some stool testing, we got to fix whatever is going on from a microbial imbalance or gut infection in the intestines. That’s really important. Got to work on live, gallbladder, and making sure enzymes and acids are adequate to break everything down.
Evan Brand: Yep! Good call. And if you need help, you want to get some of this testing done, investigate your gut, look into your chemical toxicity, you can reach out to Dr. J or myself. This website is justinhealth.com if you need to reach out, it worked worldwide (facetime, phone, skype) any way you need to connect there. So justinhealth.com, and for me Evan, it’s evanbrand.com. We look forward to helping you. Also reach out. We offer intro calls too! You can chat with us and figure out exactly what’s going on, symptom wise, we’ll see if you’re good fit for care, and look forward to helping you out.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. We’re here for you all, guys. Awesome! And if you enjoyed it, thumbs up, comments down below, and um, we’re here! Justinhealth.com, evanbrand.com, and write us a review too! We appreciate it.
References:
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/natural-strategies-to-detoxify-glyphosate-or-round-up-podcast-345
Recommended products:
Natural Armor Weed and Grass Killer All-Natural Concentrated Formula
The Top Binders to Help Detox From Mycotoxins and Mold | Podcast #337
Different binders have affinities for various toxins based on the net charge and other molecular bonds. One commonly used binder is Chlorella – a living organism that has evolved to bind only to toxic metals, not essential minerals. Because of this, it can be used long-term with no risk of nutritional deficiency over time; Charcoal – a broad-spectrum binder that will bind a little bit of everything. It means it will bind toxins, as well as vitamins and minerals. So it is suitable for acute situations, not long-term; Humic and Fulvic Acids are made of decomposed plant matter, essentially dirt. They have been shown to detox glyphosate.
The binder that suits someone can also differ significantly based on the specific load of toxin. What works well for someone can also change during different phases of treatment, especially when the root cause is identified and fixed.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
1:29 How to Eliminate Molds in Our Body
7:36 Probiotics
11:05 Mycotoxins
17:06 SIBO, Candida on Mycotoxins
22:55 Better Bowels
25:58 Different Binders
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We are live. It’s Dr. J here in the house with Evan Brand really excited about today’s topic. We’ve been talking about binders a little bit here recently. And we’re going to be going into the top binders to help and improve mold toxicity and help kind of help your body get rid of mold in a safe, meaningful way. Evan, how you doing today, man?
Evan Brand: Hey, doing well, always excited to dive in with you here. Let’s just drop the bomb right out of the gate here. Mold is epidemic. I mean, you saw several podcasts you and I’ve done together on mold, I got exposed my levels of ochratoxin were off the chart, I had a ton of symptoms. We took the family and lived in a hotel temporarily to escape until we could find a new plan, I had to get rid of a lot of clothes that were contaminated. I even tried doing some special laundry detergent we use and couldn’t save some of my clothes. So I know firsthand that this can be a huge problem for people. And it can be frightening because conventional doctors, which we hear this all the time during consultation, they just don’t really have a clue about this. And if you go to the emergency room with dizziness and shortness of breath and blood pressure issues and hives and skin reactions and food sensitivities and all these other what made to some people be crazy symptoms, you’re just going to get like an anti anxiety medication and you get sent home. And that’s where people start to question their sanity. So I hope that we can provide some sanity today and then also provide some actions, you know, action strategies of how to get this crap out.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. So the first off is how do we eliminate mold from our body anyway, so we have a couple of reasonable means that detoxification, the big ones that we’re pushing are going to be the bile slash tool, because your liver and your gallbladder make bile, your gallbladder stores that and concentrates it and then we excrete that one to help break down fat, then some of that is going to be captured in the store and eliminated the the store. Some is going to be out the urine, right and a lot of Mold Testing, if we’re testing someone, we’re going to be testing via mold in their urine. So we’re actually using urine as a way to assess mold excretion and mold levels. So the guts, stool and urine slash kidneys are going to be the biggest ways. We have some other ancillary ways we may be pushing and provoking such as using sauna or infrared therapy, which we’re using the skin and the sweat to kind of excrete some of these things. Obviously, if you’re a pregnant Mom, you may even be using breast milk. That’s why it’s important to to really get yourself healthy. So we’re limiting the baby’s exposure to mold via breast milk. So those are kind of some of the big ways and means the body is going to eliminate mold. Now, first thing out of the gate, I’m not a huge fan of jumping on and going after mold right away. Unless we have some type of acute exposure, where we know we’re in an environment where mold is present where we can visually see it. We have very abnormal high amounts of mold via testing. We know there was a major flood or some area and we weren’t able to remediate it. So typically, I don’t love to go after it right away partly because healthy gut function is going to be one of the major ways that we detoxify from mold. So we know just based on the literature, that gallbladder function, good bowel motility, and good stool motility helps us eliminate a lot of mold. We know that because we’re contracting our gallbladder, we’re eliminating a lot of mold via bile synthesis and injection and then having healthy BM so just by having your gut on track, we’re going to be eliminating lots of mold. And if we look at the different types of mold that we can kill it and pull out of our body, probiotics have effects on detoxifying nearly all mold toxins. Probiotics, according to literature, help us detoxify aflatoxin, gliotoxin stir riego matto system as your Alan own and the Atan B and citrinin. These are all different mold toxins, mycotoxins most of them are going to be eliminated with probiotics. Now what does that mean? That means out of the gate if you have healthy The best way to detoxify mold is having good healthy gut function and good healthy bacterial balance balance. So if we have SIBO bacterial overgrowth, gut infections that are throwing off healthy bacteria balance in our gut, that’s going to be one of the major ways that we can kill ate mold is having good healthy bacteria balance and also having good healthy biliary function and good healthy motility. So if we don’t have enzyme acid, bile salt production, are probably going to be slower motility. If we don’t have good bacteria balance with healthy good levels of bacteria too bad we’re probably not going to be able to kill it more efficiently as well. So probiotics are like I think the home run key later that most people don’t think of right we think of like clays and charcoal and and medications like coolest army but we forget about the probiotics and how good healthy gut function plays such a big role.
Evan Brand: Yeah, this is crazy because you know when I first got exposed You and I were Actively researching and looking into the literature on this and it kind of felt a little overwhelming because it’s like, well, crap. Now we got to work all these other things into the protocol. But now with the more and more research coming out on these specific strains, like you mentioned probiotics, but we’ll also talk about something that we sell in market as a probiotic, but technically is a beneficial yeast saccharomyces. This has been shown to bind to aflatoxin, also okra toxin and zero genome, and glio toxin. So this is amazing because you and I’ve been using saccharomyces for years. And now all of a sudden, here we are, we didn’t even really know this. We’ve been detoxing mold the whole time as a side effect of doing these Gup protocols with people. It’s really beautiful.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. And this is why I tell people, if you go after the foundational systems in functional medicine, and not necessarily worry about all the symptoms downstream, you’re going to hit and help so many other areas of the body. And it’s kind of like bowling, right? If you just focus on hitting that first pin square, you’re going to knock down a lot of other pins in the second row, right? Same kind of thing with functional medicine. If you hit the foundational pins, right, good digestion, good solid anti inflammatory diet, good motility, good anti inflammatory support, reasonably healthy, balanced adrenal, thyroid, female or male hormones that plays such a major role on immune function. detoxification, elimination plays such a huge role, and you can miss the crazy nuanced mole protocol, and still help people get better. Now, there’s people that are going to still need additional mold support outside of this right. And of course, the more genetically prone You are right, there are certain people that have this kind of Ginny’s certain genetic markers that make them more mold sensitive, okay. And then, of course, the levels of mold being in a mold environment longer living in that basement that’s moldy without the dehumidifier and the sub pump, living in that damaged home, living in that flood damaged environment, these things, the leaky roof, chronically, it can definitely accumulate in your system. And even someone that’s not that genetically sensitive. If those mold levels increase above and beyond for so long, you may eventually become sensitive. So we have to look at the environment and look at the levels and make sure we’re trying to fix that environment first, but it’s over the top, we got to really get that environment fixed. And that’s why it’s nice to be able to do Mold Testing that looks at your home first. And so we have some testing that we use various labs that use play testing, that can be very helpful, we’re going to put links down below for the specific test that we use. So if you guys want to do some deeper testing, feel free, click the link down below. Any comments on that?
Evan Brand: Yeah, I just wanted to hit back on the probiotics, one of the mechanisms because I think this is pretty cool. And once again, this is just makes me feel better about the gut work we’ve been doing with people so many times, because like I said, we’ve been fixing things with mold, not even truly knowing it. So one of the mechanisms of some of these beneficial bacteria is that it actually up regulates glutathione s transferase. So here we are coming in now we’ll supplement glutathione, but you’re actually increasing Bluetooth ion just by taking some of these beneficial strain. So that is just absolutely amazing. And it’s funny because we focus so much on the binders in the conversation of detox, you hear so much talk about charcoal and sauna and all these more intense therapies. But in reality, that’s kind of the icing on the cake. It sounds like now for me, I still do take binders, I still do charcoals and clays and all of that. And I think it’s totally beneficial. And if I take a hit if I go to a moldy building and take a hit the binders do help me reset. But I’m going to start working in just some high dose probiotics and see and I’ll report back and see what if I take a big hit and instead of a binder, or maybe I do both, maybe I hit binder and probiotic and see if I get greater relief. That’s gonna be an interesting experiment.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally. Now, if you’re out there, and you’re like man, probiotics make me feel worse. Or if you have kind of like headaches or mood issues or more cognitive issues, or you just have more digestive issues, there’s a good chance that you have cebo dysbiosis, bacterial overgrowth, maybe other types of gut issues. And those are going to have to be looked at because if you have those types of imbalances, odds are, there’s a skew in the ratio of bad bacteria to good bacteria in the gut. And if we know there’s more bad and less good that’s naturally present, then it’s going to be harder to have good healthy mold detoxification because we know how important those good beneficial bacteria are. So keep that in the back of your head. If you are someone that’s like man, Dr. J never really talked about how all these mold toxins are super, you know, they get killed out by probiotics. You know, bifidobacteria lactobacillus saccharomyces, I can’t take them What do I do? Well, you got to look deeper. You got to reach out to a good functional medicine practitioner and really work on getting your gut dialed in. Work on the six R’s before we touch probiotics, right? Remove the bad foods replace the enzymes acid bile support, support the repairing of the gut lining and the hormones then work on removing the despotic bacteria and the infections. The fifth are is to repopulate re inoculate good bacteria, pre and probiotics. That comes fifth. Not first. Most people want to put that in first. So we guess you got to do things in the right order, then of course, the sixth art is to retest.
Evan Brand: Yeah, let’s talk about pooping too, because you’re mentioning all these steps with the gut. If people are coming straight into detox you mentioned you’d like to come at it right away. Part of the reason is because if people are constipated, you can’t really start binding these toxins binding sounds really attractive. It sounds like Oh, you’ve grabbed on to the toxin. But really, this is not a super tight bond call the styrene is a very tight bond. It’s very strong, but that’s a prescription binder. And there are a couple of papers on mitochondrial damage happening. So I’m not a huge fan of color storming out of the gate for people if they already have chronic fatigue. Now, I’m not a pharmacist, I’m not a medical doctor. So if your doctor says cola star means the best Fine, go for it. But for me when I took cola star mean, I do think it irritated my gut quite a bit. So I was kind of fixing one thing and then irritating another I was pulling the mycotoxins out. But then my gut became more irritated and I had more sensitivities to certain foods. So looking back, what I’ve done it again, I don’t know, I may have just lean more on some of the natural binders that would have just took longer, I was just desperate to get better.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% and so I know with colas diarmaid people that are listening, the research shows this is going to be more helpful to the mycotoxins that are produced by the Aspergillus and Penicillium molds. And a lot of times, if I haven’t great evidence, you would know maybe a little more than me is the specific mold aren’t necessarily the big immunological issue. It’s more of the mycotoxins produced by the mold. Is that correct?
Evan Brand: Well, the bigger problem with the mold itself is just when you’re colonized, so a lot of people will do on the Oh, you’ll see that they’re not colonized, but they just have the mycotoxins. So the way I say it is, you kind of have three situations. Step one, you could be a mold factory. Step two, you could be a mold reservoir, or technically, you could be both you could be a reservoir and a factory at the same time. That’s when the actual mold is the problem. And then that’s where the antifungals come in, in addition to the binders.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So you’re saying, so you’re saying the Aspergillus Penicillium mold can be produced by your internal microbiome because of different fungal overgrowth in your body?
Evan Brand: Totally, yeah, if you’ve been exposed long enough, or a big enough amount of it, or your immune system is weakened by other things, whether it’s like you mentioned gut infections or lime or co infections. If something’s weakened do enough in that colony can take place, then you’re in bigger trouble and just using the binders won’t get you better, because you haven’t turned off the water hose. Essentially, you’re still so even if you’re in a desert island situation, you’re still colonized. So you’re generating mycotoxins internally, and binders are just going to open the drain, they’re not going to stop the water pouring in the bucket.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it. So that’s where addressing the gut stuff really makes a big difference, wiping out using specific herbs to kind of clean down the fungal overgrowth and bacterial overgrowth and make more of a difference. Of course, with molds, probably more on the fungal side, correct?
Evan Brand: Yeah. And that’s the cool thing about what you and I do is we use a lot of herbs that are broad spectrum, right? So it’s fun, because we may come in and see this colonization problem, but we’re also going to come in and simultaneously be working on the bacterial overgrowth and the parasites and maybe h pylori is in the mix too. And worms and, and gut inflammation. So I would say rarely Are you just going to come in and just do the antifungals. We’re probably going to see many more things going on. By the time you get to a fungal overgrowth. Like if you see on an oat test, you’ll see the Aspergillus growing by the time you get to that point, there’s probably also Candida, there’s probably also some SIBO stuff, there’s potentially also parasite infections to sort of find just the colonization so far, and all the testing I’ve looked at, it’s pretty rare. You’re usually going to have three, four or five infections at the same time.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, totally. That makes a lot of sense. I would just say out of the gates, think of the mold as like the seeds and think of the, the fruits that’s that’s bared by the seeds is like the mycotoxins and essentially, you’re saying you could have a whole bunch of seeds down there. And not necessarily a lot of fruit being buried from those seeds or you can just have a lot of the the fruit and the vegetables right. Those are the mycotoxins. I mean, I have a lot of the seeds there. Is that correct?
Evan Brand: Yeah, that’s a good way to look at it. Yeah. I mean, I think of mycotoxins. I just call them mold farts because you could go in a building and you could be exposed to okra toxin. in it. Let’s say your child goes to a moldy school or a moldy daycare your child can be exposed to the Penicillium and the Aspergillus but it might not get colonized your child might just come home and it only has the mold fart inside of them. AKA the okratoxin the Michael-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And you can eliminate that and you can detoxify it. Some people they may just be genetically sensitive and they have a harder time eliminating that that mold far out of their system. Is that correct?
Evan Brand: Yeah, exactly. And so people they kind of question us like, Well, why is this such a big deal? moulds everywhere, blah, blah, blah. So just I just want to say just two things on that real quick. Number one is the buildings are much tighter than they used to be. So we don’t have that natural leakage. I mean, you think of like an old 1800s farmhouse, you’ll feel the draught coming in and they use plaster and other building materials. They didn’t use paperback drywall like we use today. So the building materials have changed and the the homes are much tighter. So I mean, you could have an old house in Kentucky. From the 1800s built of plaster, and it might have not been moldy or if it was built of concrete or something, but now you’ve got lumber and then you’ve got paperback drywall, you’ve got high humidity, you’ve got the moisture. People used to do clotheslines, my grandmother would hang her clothes. I remember as a kid, she had the big clothesline, now, you have a dryer in the home, you’ve got moisture coming from that you’ve got your washing machine, you’ve got your dishwasher. Now where that thing is off gassing humidity, you’ve got showers and bathrooms, and we just build this moist on envelope which is a home. So that’s why you and I we have whole house dehumidifiers in our house. So that’s really one important strategy. If you’re like, Okay, yeah, I’m gonna do the binders. Now what? Well, you’ve got to make sure your environment is an oasis. So it’s the air purifiers. It’s the dehumidifiers. It’s the mold treatments that we do inside the home that really are the icing on the cake, or maybe not even the icing. It’s the foundation if you’re getting exposed. You’re wasting your time with these protocols.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, it’s very interesting too I saw, there was, I think, built in the 1800s. And one of the things they use for insulation in the home was a horsehair. So you had horsehair mixed with plaster all in the walls. And that was what they use for insulation. I wonder if I would imagine hair probably wouldn’t mold too much. But it was really interesting. And they couldn’t even get Wi Fi in the home because the horsehair was so insulating from Wi Fi technology it couldn’t even pass through it met crazy.
Evan Brand: Wow. Well, I know a lot of the camper vans you know people are taking vans and converting them into like travel things for the road. They’re putting wool insulation in there because the wool can get moist and wet and it won’t mold versus if you’re doing like a standard like cellulose or other type of insulation that will create mold. So yeah, I mean, nature is smart nature’s got it figured out.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And that’s probably why some of those homes that had the hair in it, you know, imagine the horsehair is probably very similar in regards to the lack of molding capacity.
Evan Brand: Yeah, there’s it’s not organic, right. I mean, some could argue well, that’s here that’s natural, but it’s not an organic material like paper like mold wants to eat paper fungus wants to eat paper that’s just part of it’s the natural biological process. But here’s [inaudible] interested in eating that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we talked about mold or fungus kind of colonizing. We have SIBO bacteria or Candida which is a common fungus species. All of these produce their own toxins, right. mycotoxins are produced from Candida as well. And these can create whether it’s acid aldehyde, causing a drunk feeling or making you feel drowsy and brain foggy and tired or affecting the mitochondria, or whether it’s endotoxin Produced by H. pylori or some kind of a bacterial overgrowth, whether it’s citrobacter, prep, Prevotella, Pseudomonas, right. All these different types of bacteria, these things can affect obviously gut permeability. And when we affect permeability, we automatically have a negative effect on our immune system because the more permeable our gut is the more undigested foods the more these mycotoxins or endotoxins get in our bloodstream. They can make their way up to our brains and cross between the astrocytes which are the blood brain barrier, immune markers, immune cells, and once they’re in their brain, they can create immune reactions. And they can activate our micro glial cells. And these can create brain fog issues, mood issues, maybe sleep issues, and of course, people have mold, one of the most common symptoms, is this, like this equilibrium brain fog type of scenario. Is that one of the symptoms you notice the most frequently, Evan?
Evan Brand: Totally, yeah, it’s not fine, but I’m slowly recovering. And my old test did show I had Candida and my diets clean. So I’m basically animal base, plus some nuts and some berries here and there. And so people immediately think, oh, Candida, yeah, but I’m paleo or I’m AIP or whatever. There’s no way I can have Candida. And you made a great point that Candida will actually produce mycotoxins specifically one called glio toxin and we can test for that via urine. Aspergillus mold also makes it so if you see super high gliotoxin and you’re super spacey, we know that that could be from a water damage building, but it also could be from Candida. Yeah, if you look on Dr. shoemakers website, surviving mold, or Neil Nathan’s book, toxic, those are great resources to look for symptoms, we put it on our intake form. Now that’s how we justify testing is we just have those symptoms on there, and we just have people check it off on the forum. And anytime we see more than three symptoms checked off in the last six months, we just immediately say okay, we need to run for urinary mycotoxins and I will tell you pretty much 9.9 out of 10 times, if they check, check, check and then we test the mycotoxins are there. And then that gives people the confidence that we’re doing the appropriate binders and the appropriate protocol to address it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and for me, a lot of times out of the gates when I see a lot of these cognitive issues, I just wait and see and look at how much of the foundational things we’re going to do to improve it. So a lot of times just getting the diet cleaned up, getting digestion cleaned up, making sure we’re eliminating, making sure the environments pretty decent, right? There’s nothing over in the environment. A lot of times if we start to see movement on that people are improving. I don’t even jump into the mold stuff out of the gates. I only jump into it if there’s a stronger history, or things aren’t moving in the right direction. Some of these foundational things.
Evan Brand: Yeah, you and I are a little different in that just because now people like seeking me out because they already know they’ve been exposed. Like, oh, Evan, I heard your story. It’s like, Oh, great. Now I got all these like moldy people coming out of the woodwork to come get. Yeah. So they already know, you know what I mean? Yeah. So it’s definitely complicated things.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, exactly. And if you’re getting more people that are having these issues, and already know it, and already have done the foundational things that it makes sense to just kind of go into that next initial step, for sure.
Evan Brand: I say it’s not really but but I didn’t finish the thought on it, which was we were talking about pooping. And we got into the SIBO and the SIFO and the infections. And, and one thing we were talking about as the the idea of binding being really attractive, because it sounds like it’s just going to grab on to the toxin. And it’s just like perfectly in a straight jacket, essentially. But that’s not actually how it works. And you can actually get worse using binders. And I did that one day. And in particular, I’ve had many days like this, but one where I took like eight capsules of charcoal, because I was just ramping up slowly to see how I felt when I got up to eight. Oh, my God, I was way worse. And the reason is, the binder is a weak magnet, I think is the best way to look at it. And so the mycotoxin is attached to it. But it can still detach on its journey through your intestinal tract and reabsorb into the bloodstream, especially if you have gut irritation or leaky gut. So this goes back into what you’re hitting on, which is you really got to do the gut work, get the gut somewhat optimized first, or maybe simultaneously optimize the gut. Because if you’ve got all these binders moving stuff through, but your gut super leaky, or the second problem is you’re constipated, you’re not pooping, you’re going to reabsorb a lot of this stuff and get worse. So if you’ve taken binders, and you feel worse, those are two reasons why.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. I mean, if you go, I think you can get these you see them at like the Science Museum and your kid. It’s like a plate of iron filings. And then you put a magnet on top, and you can see the the iron filings kind of trailing the magnet. And obviously, like, the faster you go, you’re going to see more of the iron filings kind of like falling off the tail end right kind of getting left behind, right? If you put that magnet in there and like you just really go slow through the the iron filings, or you keep a larger percent of those iron filings. So I kind of look at that is if we start using binders, the less we use, the less fall off, we’re going to have as well. Well, one, the less you’re going to mobilize, right and the less you mobilize the last fall off as a percentage, right and as a absolute amount. So if we’re going to start with binders, we’re going to start with a very, very small amount to mitigate the follow up percentage, that is just going to happen because Gavin said there’s a weak bond there and so you can break some of that off. And of course, a lot of these binders could cause you to have slower motility. So if you’re already on the fence with your guts, and you start doing any binders at all and you notice your motility starts to slow down, got to be careful, we gotta start either waiting, fixing the gut, maybe adding some natural motility support. We just have to be very careful binders causing slow motility is going to be a recipe to cause more mold die off issues.
Evan Brand: Yeah, for me, luckily, you know, I never had a problem pooping. My poops are always great even and I never got constipated. That’s like the biggest complaint of it. No, I was fine. So for me, I was lucky. But many people they do get stopped up. So we will come in and use like magnesium can work great like magnesium hydroxide or citrate will use higher dose vitamin C. What else do you like to use to move the bowels?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, we can use natural pro kinetics, whether it’s ginger, five HTP, a lot of times neurotransmitter five HTP issues can cause problems, because that really helps with the gut as well. We can look at things like carnitine we can look a lot of different bitters that can be helpful. Not having enough acid or enzyme levels can easily cause lower motility. Obviously, a lot of sympathetic nervous system stress over adrenal stimulation, can’t activate more of the sympathetic nervous system that can slow down peristalsis and cause a lot of problems. They actually need more parasympathetic nervous system stimulation. So all those things can can push us in that wrong direction.
Evan Brand: Yeah, this is fun stuff. I mean, this is like one of the smoking guns. I mean, it certainly was for me, and I hope people are encouraged by this, you can get better with this. It takes time, timeline wise, two to three years is what I would say for most people with a major toxin load. I’ve seen it done in a year or so. But if you ask some of the medical Doc’s that are treating mold, they’ll say three to five year timeline, I just want to make that clear, because some people get frustrated, they’ll say, hey, um, you know, six weeks into a protocol. And you know, here’s my results. It’s like, man, six weeks is just a drop in the bucket. So if you’ve been exposed to mold as a kid, or your mother had placental transfer, or you were breastfed, and that was transferred, or you grew up in a moldy house or had childhood exposure, you had exposure in your college dorm, then you had exposure in your office and your home. I mean, if you’re talking 50 67 year old person reversing mold issues in two to three years, that’s very fast. So I just want people to have realistic expectations with this.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep, obviously depends upon how long you’ve been accumulating these things for sure. I mean, if it’s colonized, because if you’re colonized-
Evan Brand: -too, you got to knock that out too. Because let’s say you got exposed 20 years ago, but now you’re colonized so you’re just generating internal mycotoxins That is also something I think is going to definitely increase your timeline.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And your best way to look at that. It’s going to be like an organic acid test where you’re looking at some of those Aspergillus those type of mold. Those mold critters, is that correct?
Evan Brand: Yeah, there’s like four or five markers on page one. I know you like to use Genova. Right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I use that test as well for some of these, you know, more more potential people, or for looking at a lot more oxalates and things like that. That’s a nice test to look at that.
Evan Brand: Yeah. So that one’s good. And then the Great Plains is good too. I mean, the page one on it’s awesome because they also have a marker for I think it’s try carbolic. I’d have to look back but they do have a marker now for Fusarium, which is cool because sometimes you’ll see some people colonized for Fusarium, which is another mole but not Aspergillus. A lot of times it’s both though if they’re colonized, that means they were so weak or had so much exposure. Usually you’ll see the Aspergillus and Fusarium you can see all mode molds growing. Maybe the technology gets better in the next few years. But for now, you can at least test the most common mold we see which is Aspergillus.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. 100%. So let’s kind of go into all the different binders. Right, we talked about costar I mean that’s a medication that’s going to help more of the okra toxin, right, the Aspergillus Penicillium molds. Charcoal is a common one. And like it, charcoal is very prone to constipation. It’s also let’s say, if you had tend to be more sensitive in the colon area, whether it’s hemorrhoids or fissures, it can be a little bit rough on people’s colons on the way out. So I find if you tend to be more prone for hemorrhoids, that can be a problem. So keep an eye on charcoal. It’s a good one. It’s the cheap one. It’s nice, you know, that’s coconut shells, right? That’s where they’re getting a lot of the good charcoal from. And again, we like charcoal for primarily removing a couple of different types of moles, right, the big mole that we’re going to see with charcoal, it’s gonna affect the trachoma scenes, right? It’s going to have some effect on okra toxin as well. Those are going to be some of the big ones out of the gate with charcoal, Caesar anything else that charcoal tends to be very helpful with Yeah, okra and the trifle at the scenes. Anything else there?
Evan Brand: It may help us in pesticide herbicide stuff too, right? I mean, we know charcoal is a pretty good broad spectrum, but it’s not perfect in isolation. That’s why you and I like to use blends a lot because we see people go Yep, benefits of charcoal and then they just totally ignore the others.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. So it’s nice to have some broad spectrum there. Obviously, we have things like clays as well, which are really nice, tend to be a little bit more gentle coming out the colon. Again, very helpful for gliotoxin ochratoxin zearalenone. There’s a couple different mold toxins that you’re gonna see more on the beneficial side. In regards to clays also, it’s going to be very helpful if aflatoxin as well, f one and F was in a what be what you see more with the peanuts, right?
Evan Brand: Yeah, totally more food base, the area known to be zero and unknown is going to come from Fusarium that really cattle, right? Yeah, so the cattle, they they’ll test high because they’re eating like messed up corn, corn, nasty.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I’ve even heard Dave Asprey talking about putting zero unknown in the cow’s ears, they’ll put it in their ears, and it causes them to accumulate more fat. Now, we know that mold toxins have a negative effect on thyroid. So I wonder if it’s just lowering the thyroid enough where they’re just becoming more fat accumulators versus burners. So that’s an interesting concept.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Well, Sierra Leone is super super estrogenic, too. So maybe it’s just making them out of high estrogen and then that creates the body fat.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I know Dave talked about that many years ago, but which is really interesting, but putting it in the cow’s ear, like a pellet. That’s crazy.
Evan Brand: It’s bizarre. Well, I can confirm that the clays work amazing. First year alone, we had a woman who had a lot of estrogen dominant symptoms. So we got to run the zeolite spray Actually, we just tried to go isolation and see how it worked. Man, it worked like a charm. We got the retest back in the zero linoone was gone and a lot of her estrogen dominance symptoms went away. So that was freakin amazing.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s great. Next we have gluco monin and different fibers. So fibers are going to be really helpful whether it’s like a modified citrus pectin. gluco monans. Also, another type of fiber that we use is a premier probiotic, it can be helpful, but that’s going to be helpful against aflatoxin ochratoxin psoralen own modified citrus pectin is also shown to be great at biting up heavy metals lead different things like that. okra toxin like I already mentioned, those are some of the big ones out of the gate. Anything else you want to comment there?
Evan Brand: Yeah, before we forget to mention it. Calcium D glue grade is also really helpful. We do talk about that in regards to estrogen you and I’ve done a podcast on like bacterial overgrowth, and we’ve talked about how high beta glucuronic days will basically cause you to recirculate hormones and toxins. So, we will come in and use calcium D glucose as part of a mole detox protocol, but it does help with other things too.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep, I like that. Very cool. Next, chlorella chlorella is very good, really high in certain vitamins A C and E good source of fiber, helps with heavy metals as well been shown to be very helpful at mobilizing, really mobilizing a binding up to any mercury. It’s in your gut. So if you’re dumping a whole bunch of mercury via your gallbladder, from your liver into your intestines, it does help bind that up which is really Really good, very helpful at binding up different types of mold as well. The ones are going to be the aflatoxin. That’s the one you’re going to see more in food products, peanuts, right, that okra toxin, which is a common one that you’re going to see. So it’d be more like, like water damage in the home for okra, right?
Evan Brand: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, Aspergillus makes that so and then also, you mentioned that mobilization. So a lot of times we’ll use combos, so we’ll use like a chlorella and cilantro cuz cilantro will help mobilize. And that’s the cool thing is, you may create what’s called a mycotoxin detox protocol. But in reality, you’re working on heavy metals, you’re working on pesticides and herbicides. So it’s really fun because you’re killing so many birds with the same stones when it comes to these binders. So chlorella is amazing. And we like to use micronized versions of it. So we can put links and show you what we want. And what we would want you to use, obviously, at this point, may be good to consult the practitioner, you know, we’re happy to help or if you have another practitioner guiding you through this, who’s done this before, it’s helpful because you do want to be able to approach these things in a smart way and you want to know what to do if you do get a reaction because like I said, I screwed myself up many times, the best way to learn is experience in the trenches, and I’m in the trenches on my own mold recovery. And I tell you, too much chlorella sounds like Oh, just some chlorella. Whoa, right. That’s powerful.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep, exactly. Next one humic acid, right, we see humic acid or different fulvic minerals. A lot of different companies are recommending these and pushing these now which are helpful, right? Click acid fulvic minerals, they’re very helpful because they are anti inflammatory, which is really good. I think they tend to not push constipation as much right? You can kind of take them they’re not going to slow down your motility as much. Have you had that experience?
Evan Brand: Yeah, you and I’ve used that one, the toxic bind, when that one with the fulvic acid is not as much clay are anything that one tends to move the bowels pretty good. It may even have a bow moving effect to it in reality.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. And it doesn’t, I don’t think it binds up as much on the nutrient side, a lot of these binders, you definitely want to take more away from food, because they can bind up a lot of the supplements or nutrition in the food where the humic acids not going to be as competing for nutrients as well.
Evan Brand: Yeah, good call. I have seen that out where there’ll be discussion like, Hey, you can take it with or without food. I still think empty stomach is better, though, especially first thing in the morning or even at night, because you’re fasted and when you’re fasting that’s been proven to excrete more mycotoxin. So if you wake up first thing in the morning, you’ve been fasting for 12 14 hours. To me, that’s a great time to take a binder
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally. And if you’re binding things up, and there’s something there and you’re binding up a nutrient where you could be binding up a mold toxin, well, you’re kind of just you’re losing kind of your bang for your buck on these binders. So you want it to have the greatest ability to bind to as much of the toxic debris that’s present on other nutritive substances. So we got to keep an eye on that. And the next we talked about probiotics we already hit that right that’s going to have a major effect on binding with many different models, whether it’s aflatoxin gliotoxin, Stratego. matto syston the tri coat the scenes, the psoralen own, the annotated bee and then the Citron and these are different mold toxins that we already hit on in the beginning I’m just gonna re summarize that again for y’all but probiotics tend to have the best bang for your buck that’s why working on fixing your gut even if you don’t have mold issues is gonna make you more prone to mold toxicity in the future having good motility. good healthy gut bacteria balance good digestion really is the foundation for healthy mold detoxification excretion.
Evan Brand: That’s amazing, isn’t it? Because you and I’ve gone and and I totally appreciate you being on board with me to go down some of these mold rabbit holes together ever since you and I became educated on this and Oh, totally, we kind of went in some, I don’t want to say tangents. But we’ve dove into Glutathione and [inaudible] and cell membranes and all these other things. But now here we are, again, circling right back to the foundation of just improving the gut function. And that’s just amazing.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely, I totally agree. So anyone listening if you guys enjoy this or you want to dive kind of a little bit deeper down the rabbit hole of mobile detoxification and or of course dealing with the gut because that’s a major foundation for it. Feel free click down below we’re going to have links to Evan’s site EvanBrand.com where you can reach out to Evan, also my site, JustinHealth.com where you can reach out to myself Dr. J, we’re here to help you worldwide via Skype, FaceTime, all the different video mediums as well as phone, we’re excited to work with you all we have colleagues as well that we work with to help kind of get people in the right direction. Outside of that, anything else you want to highlight?
Evan Brand: Now that’s it, we’ll put some links below. So you can check out some of the products we do have some professional probiotics that we use clinically that we give to our clients. So these are things that you can access to just as a listener of the show, and that’ll support the show. But more importantly, it’ll help you to get this stuff out of your body. So take care and if you have questions, concerns, please reach out we’re here for you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Thanks. So I will put our links below for the products and labs and supplements that we like and use the most at our practice. Thanks guys. Have a phenomenal day. Take care y’all.
Evan Brand: Take care. Bye
References:
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/the-top-binders-to-help-detox-from-mycotoxins-and-mold-podcast-337
Recommended products:
Genova Organix® Comprehensive Profile
Genova Organix® Dysbiosis Profile
Glyphosate and Chemical Detox | Podcast #334
Most people don’t realize that glyphosate is not just found in farm fields and on GMO crops but is lurking in your next-door neighbor’s garage and your neighborhood park, on the local golf course, or in your kid’s playground. You can find glyphosate on nearly 100 non-GMO food crops, including vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds, and cereals like wheat and oats. You can find it in wine, beer, ice cream, and pretty much everything else. Also, you wouldn’t imagine in a whole host of ingredients, such as corn starch, beet and cane sugar, and even honey!
Glyphosate interrupts the body’s ability to turn natural sulfites from food into sulfates that the body needs to detox and stay healthy. High sulfate levels heal the gut while supporting the absorption of many vital nutrients. Sulfates assist in clear brain fog and improve memory through increased blood flow.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this podcast, we cover:
1:27 Glyphosate (what it is, how it works)
8:42 Clean Water, Osmosis Water Filter
17:12 Powerful Antioxidants
23:23 Water Plunge, Saunas
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s Dr. J here in the house with Evan, Evan, how we doing today, my friend? Really excited to chat with you.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Likewise, and this is a big topic. So Huh, you got hundreds of millions of pounds of glyphosate being sprayed on our beautiful Mother Earth every year. It’s terrible, how much is being sprayed. If you look at the stats, they just go up and up and up and up and up. And we have GMO corn and soybean accounting for the major places that people are being sprayed. So if you’re simply just cutting out, yep, those foods from your diet, and you’re eating animals that don’t feed on the soybean and corn, you’ve already done a great job. But but that’s not enough, because I recently spoke with Stephanie senath, who’s been educating and researching about glyphosate. And she’s talked about which you and I’ve known for a long time, but it’s good to hear somebody else validate the research is, it’s in the water supply, it’s in the food, it’s in the air, it’s everywhere. So you really have to put in a detox protocol on going to be able to deal with this because even parts per billion levels of glyphosate act as an antibiotic and will kill beneficial bacteria in the gut. And you and I, we don’t necessarily call ourselves gi specialist, but we are when it comes to naturally approaching gut infections and restoring gut integrity and gut health. And part of that is getting the glyphosate out of the system. So we can truly allow our beneficial bacteria to thrive. So that’s kind of the setting the stage of where we’re where we’re going today.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. So glyphosate is essentially roundup. Right? It’s essentially Roundup, it’s a pesticide. And so essentially how it works, it’s a mineral key later. So what it does is it basically thrips away or, or kind of as a magnet of all the key lay of all the minerals away from the plant. And so essentially by robbing the plan of all those minerals that essentially kills it is that the major mechanism and how that works.
Evan Brand: Yeah, it inhibits the photosynthesis, I don’t know the full chemistry behind it. But yeah, basically it starves the plant to death, and then the the byproduct, the byproduct or the the process of doing that, you’re robbing and basically cleaving off these amino acids. And that’s the problem. And that’s why it’s going to end up in joints and everywhere else in the body. Because the body’s trying to basically absorb the minerals, if you will, but by accident, it’s absorbing the glyphosate. So it’s number one thing is you got to go organic to get away from it. But the problem is, if you’re not filtering your water, if you’re not filtering your air, you’re probably still getting exposure there. Or if you eat out at restaurants, which even I and you and I, we try to do the best we can if we eat out, but we may get exposed to trace amounts there. And kids too. I mean, you send the kid with a school lunch, that’s organic, but if you don’t, they’re probably getting exposed to it there. And this stuff accumulates over time. And as Stephanie was talking about with me, the individual parts meaning like a little bit of glyphosate here, it’s a problem. But when you mix it with the dicamba and the 24D and all these other chemicals and the xylene and the gasoline additive chemicals and the plastics and the Falaise in the BPA and the other endocrine disruptors, that’s when you really get into trouble. So it’s important to hyper focus on one chemical like this, but I want people to just know, it’s the sum that really creates the problem. And you and I measure for this on the urine. So if people listening like, Well, what do I do? How do I investigate this problem, you simply do a urine urine sample. And we can measure this. And the fun part is when we get people on a detox protocol, and we retest, you can see the levels go down. And a lot of cases, we get the levels to nd non detected non detectable limits, that is the most exciting part. So I want to inspire hope with this too some of the stats are really depressing on it. But there is hope that you can get this stuff out of your body.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. And so the mechanism how it works is it’s a key later pulls that away, and also affects the protein synthesis of the plants. There’s a pathway there, it’s called the shikimic. It’s kind of a funny name, the shikimic pathway that affects you know, essentially the the protein synthesis of these plants. So it disrupts that it does it by disrupting protein synthesis. And it does it by collating away a lot of these important minerals. And I think that’s part of the reason why a lot of foods that are grown in Roundup, or glyphosate is used on them, I think you’re gonna also see a decrease in nutrient levels. Part of the means why is because it’s creating a lot of those minerals away from the plants. And the plants don’t have adequate minerals in the soil. And others there’s data on it like when there’s less manganese in the soil, the vitamin C production in that plant is less for instance. So we do know there’s a disruption, there’s a correlation with low minerals in the soil can have a major impact on the nutrient production by that plan as well. And so there’s a nutrient issue on one side, and then there’s also a toxicity issue. And we can go deeper into that. Any questions on that?
Evan Brand: So the the big, the big problem with people is, here’s one of the mechanisms and people can check out the podcast. I mean, we don’t have to get into the the advanced chemistry. I mean, some of the stuff even goes over my head. But basically, one of the big problems is glyphosate is pretending to be glycine. And that’s what she talked about. Basically, it’s your body-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: it’s just an amino acid.
Evan Brand: Right? So it’s looking for glycine, but then it sucks up glyphosate in place of it, right? That’s where you get into trouble.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, you kind of similar to what may happen in your body with iodine, and fluoride, for instance, or bromine, right, it’ll it’ll suck up your thyroid will suck up a lot of those nutrients which can impact its function because it’s not the primary nutrient it’s looking for.
Evan Brand: And then here’s what it says advocates claim that glyphosate is not harmful to humans, as the shikimate pathway does not occur in humans. But the truth is, glyphosate enters our gut and primarily targets the good bacteria, and then that’s when you get the bacterial overgrowth. So that’s kind of what the industry will will counteract on let’s say, well, humans don’t have chicken meat pathways. That’s why it’s not dangerous. But the mechanism is that it’s killing the good bacteria in the gut. And it’s really an antibiotic that, you know, disguised as an herbicide. And so that’s the problem.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I think the big thing that if you look at some of the studies on the topic, where they look at glyphosates impact on the gut lining and the brush border, in the small intestine, the brush borders, what secretes a lot of enzymes and aids in digestion. And if you just look at the thinning out of the gut lining in the small intestine, and you look at the increase in gut permeability that can happen from that. All of those type of mechanisms are part of what’s driving a lot of autoimmunity. So when you have increased gut permeability, weaken gut lining, you have a imbalance in the healthy bacteria in the guts all of those tilts your immune system in the direction of autoimmunity, it tilts your immune system in the direction of lack of nutrient absorption, which then affects the immune system as well. So all of these things compound right gut in bad gut bacteria and balanced dysbiosis. Right, more bad bacteria than good gut permeability, increased autoimmunity, increased food allergens, less nutrient density, obviously, you’re eating plants that have a lot of Roundup, there may be less nutrients in those plants, right. So all of those things just kind of spiral out of control. And, and typically, if you’re consuming the big foods that are going to have the highest residue, they’re going to be a lot of your grains, right grains, and soy and corn and wheat and all those things. So if you’re eating a lot of those foods, that’s a lot of processed food anyway.
Evan Brand: Yeah. And that’s why you and I talked about, a lot of people feel so much better on like grain free or more paleo template, because not only are they getting rid of the allergenic foods, but they’re getting rid of the chemicals too, because everything is so heavily sprayed. Now one of Stephanie’s arguments, which was interesting was that the people are having so much gluten sensitivity is because of the glyphosate. And so she told me she actually eats organic wheat, and she feels totally fine. And I said, Well, what about gluten and zonulin? And all that? And she goes, I don’t know if that’s the full story because I feel fine. But feeling fine. I don’t know. I’d like to see like a stool test, right? And look at gut inflammation and all that and try to confirm because and look at gluten antibodies, because I still even if it’s organic You and I are still not going to recommend people going into the grains.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. And then also the other element of this whole thing is what about glyphosate, when it’s heated up? What if you have glyphosate residue on certain foods, and then you’re cooking, you’re heating those foods up? What does that do to it? Because I know, there’s some data out there showing that a lot of these pesticides become more toxic when they’re heated. So that’s another area another avenue of discussion, probably not a lot of data on it, but definitely a lot of theoretical, what well, you know, what if that does make it worse, and so that’s definitely a concern. So, you know, out of the gates, I think the big thing people can control is going to be water and runoff. So everyone should have at least a reverse osmosis water filter to filter a lot of the roundup glyphosate out of that, so you’re not getting exposed via water. And then number two is do your best to eat organic or if you’re on a budget, try to do at least clean 15 these are going to be the foods that are going to have a relative peel over it right avocado, banana, those kind of things that will decrease the amount of residue because as a peel, and they just going to have less of the glyphosate anyway, and so try to do at least clean the clean 15 and then avoid the Dirty Dozen if you will, but try to go organic free range as much as you possibly can. Because it’s not just the nutrient density that’s important with organic it’s the decrease in toxic load. There’s both you win twice you you win with nutrient density, and you decrease toxic load. I think it was um, I had Joel Salatin on my podcast last year. And he talked about his eggs that are pasture fed, and he sent a bunch of conventional eggs to the grocery store. And to a lab Actually, I’m sorry, to a lab. So conventional eggs he bought at the grocery store to his own pasture eggs in his backyard, his farm, right. And he compared the nutrient levels of it. And so he just compared one nutrient full eight. And he found that his eggs had 19 times more full light than the conventional x 19 times. So if you look at it, it’s like wow, I’m getting 19 times a day. An important nutrient. And maybe the eggs cost twice as much. What’s kind of a pretty good deal? That’s a pretty good ROI on your investment there.
Evan Brand: It is. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, I need to interview him. He’s awesome. And I love his books and love seeing the farming videos. A lot of people I know he has like students, though, they’ll do all the work for him. He’s got an amazing setup, because he pays like zero labor costs, because everybody wants to learn. So he’s got all these people like harvesting his chickens for him.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, it’s a pretty sweet gig. So yeah, it’s really interesting. I think it’s good for everyone to understand that to know about it to be on top of that, and to look at your food differently, right? You got to look at it like, Alright, I’m decreasing the toxic load. So that’s one important big vector. And then I’m increasing the nutrient density side. And if you look at it like that, I think you go into the grocery store and you make different food choices. I think it was Michael Pollan talked about this in his book Omnivore’s Dilemma, as a society today, we allocate way less of our income towards food, I think it’s today, it’s like 9% of our income goes towards food. As a society, I think about I think it was 50 to 100 years ago, it was twice that was 18%. And so people prioritize food a lot more. From an income standpoint, you know, they’re willing to put more of their money where it counts. And today, that’s not the case. And so I just think it’s really important that people really look at allocating their money towards food, because that’s the foundation of everything, especially once you get sick, you’re going to really wish you did.
Evan Brand: Well, let’s take it a step further to so you got the glyphosate in or out of the picture in your diet. And now, not only are you getting, as you mentioned, potentially 19 times more folate and who knows a lot more B vitamins and other nutrients. But now you’re also getting all these different amino acids, which are going to fuel your neurotransmitters. So you’re going to be happier, yep, you’re going to be able to tolerate stress better, you’re going to be less depressed, you’re possibly going to have better sleep, you’re going to feel better, you’re going to have more energy, so you’re going to perform better at work, you’re going to be a better parent, because you have enough nutrients to stabilize your blood sugar. So you’re not hangry. So I love how you kind of illustrated that you’re not just getting less toxin, more nutrition, you’re really getting a whole better human. And that’s going to extrapolate that out to your friends, your family, your boss, your spouse, everything gets better. So it’s tough when you see people that like even the other day we drove past a Popeye’s chicken. And that’s probably like the lowest quality fast food you could get. Maybe there’s something worse McDonald’s or something. But we’ll see like a brand new Range Rover, you know, $100,000 vehicle, and they’re in the drive thru parking lot getting like a $2 lunch, but they’ve got $100,000 car, it’s like, you got to just focus on the good good stuff. I’d rather drive. You know, like I did for years, a 1990. When I had my 1992 Honda Accord, I was still buying the pastured bison, grass fed beef, steaks, all organic vegetables, you know, even though I had a $4,000 car, I probably spent 4000 a year on high quality groceries.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, exactly. So it’s a lot of it is an education thing, getting people to reprioritize kind of where they’re at and it gets number one out of the gates. And then two is just really educating people on the benefits, right? It’s like it’s all about value. So the big thing today that we’re kind of hammering on is the glyphosate component, how that affects your gut lining how that affects dysbiosis, how that affects nutrient absorption, how that affects your immune system, because 80% of your immune systems in the golf and the malt in the stomach and the small intestine. So all these play a major role. And we know that autoimmune conditions are on the rise right there massive amount of increased, not all immune conditions, 150 least different conditions that are out there now. And we know gut permeability plays a major role. We know gluten, we know Roundup, we know gut bacterial imbalance plays a major role. So if we know the mechanisms, then we can work on creating an execution plan to help believe that.
Evan Brand: Yeah, there are several charts online, you could just look this up yourself. You could type in autism, glyphosate, and you can see some of the correlation not necessarily causation. But definitely the correlation charts, where you’ll see the autism rates skyrocket exponentially, along with the exponential use of glyphosate. And, you know, Stephanie’s talked about this many times. Dr. Kurt Waller, he’s hit on this. He’s done many great presentations on autism, and has some courses all about that one of the integral pieces of his protocols I know is detox. So let’s talk about that. What do you actually do? You and I have many, many before and after on ourselves personally, but also clinical case studies where I’ve seen literally 1000s of percent off the chart, I mean levels so high that the lab can even give you a range for it. And we’ve been able to take those people and significantly reduce it, especially in children. I’ve seen kids that are four or five, six years old, off the charts with two four D glyphosate and many other of the organophosphate pesticides and holy crap, it’s scary when you first look at it. You look at the symptoms, you look at the gut, you look at the skin, you look at the behavioral problems, but man within six months to a year I’m confident most people listening could clear out 90 plus percent of their chemical load.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, 100% I think it’s, it’s super important to be empowered like that. So, so you hit a couple of the big mechanisms there. So I think one of the first things people have to look at is when there’s stress, there’s going to be indigestion, right, there’s going to be some level of bloating or gas, we’re just not breaking a lot of the nutrients down. And we have to look at what are the nutrients, we need to run a lot of these pathways, you kind of hit some right there. But we need amino acids, we need a lot of sulfur, we need a lot of the sulfur rich cruciferous vegetables, we need a lot of B vitamins, we need a lot of antioxidants. So for eating nutrient poor food, we’re not going to get those we also need a lot of good high quality sulfur based amino acids. And when you know from our healthy pasture fed eggs and animal products, and if we’re not eating those things and breaking them down optimally, then we’re gonna have problems, we’re not gonna be able to get the amino acids to make our powerful glutathione to help with our B vitamins, and our methylation and acetylation glucuronidation are phase one cytochrome p 450. Or phase two cytochrome p 450. oxide pathways that require on the phase one B vitamins and antioxidants, phase two, all the sulfur amino acids to run those pathways.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and the glyphosate messes up that P 450 cytochrome p 450 pathway too, so that was another mechanism that gets screwed up. And even if you have the nutrients and to fuel that pathway, if you’ve got a big Roadblock, there are you mentioned the glucuronidation pathway. That’s another issue. We’ve done podcast on this but the the spark notes the long story short for people listening is when you have bacterial overgrowth in your gut, which could be traced back to glyphosate exposure, damaging your good bacteria, therefore allowing the dysbiosis to happen. That then messes up this enzyme, which is the beta glucuronidation enzyme which we test for via stool now your re circulating hormones and recirculating toxin. So, like, you know, Justin and I will do protocols where we may throw in something like calcium D glue gray to inhibit that enzyme, but we have to work backwards and fixing the gut. So all this could be traced back to your glyphosate exposure sounds get reference. Sounds crazy to think like, wow, me eating conventionally sprayed toxic strawberries lead to my depression and my anxiety, but there’s the link of how it can all go down.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct. So we talked about a lot of the key nutrients, right, we talked about the gluten, and we talked about the antioxidants. Also, if we have a lot of inflammation happening in the brain, what do we do? So of course, we have powerful antioxidants like glutathione we have, which is it’s twofold, right? Because it also helps with the pathways of elimination, but it’s also a powerful antioxidant. So it deals with a lot of the oxidative stress that happens from these toxins. We also have things like vitamin D, we have things like curcumin, curcumin, like compounds, or is bare trawl gingko bacopa things that have anti inflammatory cognitive enhancement benefits. Because a lot of times what we have is we have this immune response that’s over reactive that’s stimulated in the brain, we have our immune cells called microglial cells in the brain that are overstimulated. And so a lot of times, we have to attenuate that and get that kind of calm down and relax because it’s in this positive feedback loop is once it starts getting ramped up and ramped up and ramped up and ramped up, it’s kind of at this arching level of it’s just it’s continuing to increase, increase, increase. And if we can calm that down what’s powerful antioxidant compounds, while we also stop adding fuel to the fire with a lot of these toxins and pesticides, that’s going to help us a lot.
Evan Brand: Yeah, absolutely. And the big heavy lifters, we won’t say the names because who knows in the future, our ideas and thoughts may change. So we’ll be putting some links in the show notes on your app to where you can view these products. But let’s break down some of the nutrients at least in the products in case we come out with our own or we come out with better versions in the future something the biggest heavy lift or I would say is definitely going to be chlorella. And specifically, as opposed to the conventionally sold mass marketed what’s called broken cell wall chlorella, which is decent, we like to use one that’s called a micronized chlorella, which is extremely small molecules of chlorella, that is able to get across the blood brain barrier. That’s the magic sauce that most chlorella products fall short. And I literally have 100 case studies where I could show you a before and after of getting children and adults on these products. And we’ve been able to massively reduce the levels at a woman in Canada just last week, she was off the chart with nearly every chemical gasoline xylene validates pesticides, herbicides, two, four D glyphosate, the whole nine yards. And within six months to a year of doing some of this stuff. Her levels are now non detected in a lot of categories. She’s not fully out of the woods, if we could get her in a sauna, which is another way to help with glyphosate. I think she would speed it up but just the chemical detox alone using nutrients massive success.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I love that. I love it. Yeah, like you mentioned binders we have different chlorella we have different maybe activated charcoal or bentonite clay compounds we have a kind of our own formulated products that we love. We’ll put the links down below, we have a lot of the glue defi on or solidify on sulfur amino acid precursor building blocks, those are really powerful. We have a lot of liver tonifying and supporting herbs to help the liver and gallbladder whether it’s milk thistle or, or, or dandelion or phosphatidylcholine. We have a lot of those nutrients that we’ve kind of formulated up. And I think that outside of that would be we get some of the B vitamins, the binders we hit some of the tonifying herbs. cloudify owns sulfur amino acid, I think we hit all the major ones out of the gates, I would just say there’s some different lipidsoma curcumin, and resveratrol and anti inflammatory compounds that the we’re looking at that really have great clinical benefits. Also binders on the activated charcoal a zeolite, citrus pectin side. So we’ll put some of our links to products that we’re personally using with ourselves, patients and family and clinically every day. And we’re kind of looking at the results that we’re getting and trying to always adjust it. So it’s the best. We’ll put those down below. Anything else Evan, you want to add today?
Evan Brand: Yeah, so the MCP, the modified citrus, pectin, that’s something we can use, we’ll often use that in a blend, and then fulvic and humic acids, those tend to do really, really good too. I don’t like those in isolation. So a lot of people have really jumped on kind of the fulvic acid train, I think it’s smart. I think they’re great. But I’ve seen, you know, before and after test results, and I haven’t been super impressed in isolation. So we might use those foam fulvic and humic acids quite a bit. But it’s going to be in a blend, it’s not going to be by itself. We’re gonna have the chlorella, maybe the cilantro. As you mentioned, milk, this whole other liver support, maybe lymphatic support thrown in there to infrared, sauna, rebounding, anything you can do to sweat hot baths, Epsom salt, where you can boost that sulfur pathway, fixing the gut getting the gut infections address, so you can get that glucuronidation pathway working better, doing the testing on your stool to see where your gut is, if your systems even working properly, to do the detox, and then obviously doing the before and after chemical testing. And I will tell you, there’s not a single non toxic human on the planet unless they’ve done a really great job with chemical detox. But just coming in your average person coming into us with complaints doing the testing, you’re going to have chemical levels off the chart, I only had one guy who came to me over hundreds and hundreds of chemical profiles who didn’t have much of anything. And this was a guy who was doing a sauna for almost an hour, five times a week. And I was like, Whoa, you’re proof that Asana excretes a lot. So everyone else they were pretty much off the chart.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And I had a patient just recently to did a sauna session. And this person had eye level of mercury. And the kind of one of the biggest things I preach is you have a good sulphur soap, that’s going to decrease that lipid barrier and get a quick shower right afterwards. So you can get all the chemicals and stuff off your skin that are fat soluble metals and such toxins, make sure you do that as soon as possible. This person waited think 10 to 15 minutes. And during that timeframe that next day, they had a major herxheimer or issue. And my concern is if you don’t get those toxins off your skin fast, there’s a great chance you’re going to reabsorb them, and then you’re going to reabsorb met a very high level. And that can create a lot of herxheimer. So you got to be very careful. If you’re using an infrared sauna, you won’t want to flush those toxins off your skin fast and make sure you’re really hydrating well, and you may even want to go into that sauna session with binders and solidify them before and during just in case you reabsorb some of those toxins.
Evan Brand: Yeah, that’s great advice. And that’s why a lot of people recommend like a cold like water plunge or a cold shower afterwards. So you can really just seal up get those goosebumps get your pores sealed up to where everything is off. I know for me, it was crazy, because I was kind of skeptical. I thought is that really are you really reabsorbing stuff. So I did kind of a warm shower. It was soap and then I did a cold shower. And who knows maybe it was all the benefits of cold in general. But I tell you I feel so much better with a cold shower after the sauna. as brutal as it is to put that thing all the way on cold, especially in the winter. It’s cold, but man, I feel like a million bucks after that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, no, I think that’s that’s smart. So I urge patients if you’re going to do an infrared sauna, which I think is powerful, just kind of start with five or 10 minutes, do a quick shower afterwards have a good soap ready that can kind of cut that lipid by layer. Because remember, a lot of these toxins are going to be they’re going to be fat based. They’re going to be what fat soluble toxins. So it’s like imagine cleaning a pan that you just had bacon in right? With just water. You need that emulsifying dawn soap or whatever organic soap to kind of cut that friction off the pan and allow that grease to kind of come off you right? If you don’t, you’ll feel that greasiness afterwards. Well, it’s the same thing with these fat soluble toxins. You really want to use that soap emulsify what’s on your skin so it’s flushed off so you don’t reabsorb it later.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and you made a good point. I’ll just take a step further on the hydration piece and the mineral balance piece. If you’ve got adrenal issues, mineral imbalances, electrolyte problems, you know, thyroid issues, sleep issues, you’re chronically sleep deprived, you know, you’re just kind of a weak constitution. You got to be careful and go slow and steady with the sauna. If you get woozy, you get lightheaded, if you do pass out or you feel like you’re gonna pass out your heart’s racing uncontrollably, you’re getting heart palpitations, you’re gonna know you’re mobilizing too much. So when your body’s saying stop, stop, don’t push through. I made the mistake of pushing through one time. It took me like two to three days to recover. So don’t don’t do that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. 100% Well, I like it. Guys. If you enjoyed today’s podcast, please feel free put it down in the comments. Let us know what you liked about it. Let us know your own experiences dealing with chemical detoxification. And a lot of the pesticides and chemicals we chatted about today, we’ll put links down to our favorite products, detoxification, support water filters, things that are going to decrease toxin load in your body and things that are going to help your body expel toxins better. And it guys if you enjoy today’s podcast, feel free head over to EvanBrand.com or JustinHealth.com. We are available worldwide to help you all out if you need that extra functional medicine, nutrition support. We are here as well. Anything else?
Evan Brand: No, that’s it, you covered it all. And thanks for listening.
References:
Audio Podcast:
https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/glyphosate-and-chemical-detox-podcast-334
Recommended products:
What are the Natural Anti-Inflammatory Agents for Pain Relief
In general, we have our COX pathways. Now, Arachidonic acid can feed those pathways. A lot of excess, junky, refined Omega-6 from animal products can definitely feed those pathways. That sets the table like gas in the kitchen where a little spark can take it off.
Where to find anti-inflammatory agents:
- Natural herbs like ginger can help with COX-1.
- Fish oil is excellent for COX-2 at high doses. If you do high doses of fish oil, you can increase what’s called lipid peroxidation because fish oil is a polyunsaturated fatty acid. It’s more unstable. It’s got more double bonds in it. Omega-3 means three double bonds. The more double bonds that are they are, the more unstable the fatty acid is to heat things like that and the more, let’s say it can be oxidized. So, having extra vitamin C or extra vitamin D on board when you’re taking extra fish oil just to make sure you don’t have oxidation is great, and we already talked about things like systemic enzymes.
- There is also curcumin but liposomal curcumin is better due to the absorption or something with black pepper in it helps with absorption, too.
- Frankincense or Boswellia.
- White willow bark which is kind of how aspirin is naturally made though aspirin works more on COX-1. So, aspirin can be your other natural source and you can do white willow bark which is the natural form of aspirin.
- There are things like Tylenol but Tylenol works more on the central nervous system perception. So, it decreases the nervous systems’ perception of pain. Note: We have to be careful of Tylenol as it can actually chronically reduce glutathione. So, if you’re taking Tylenol longer-term, you definitely want to take it with NAC and/or some glutathione, just to be on the safe side.
- At the extreme example, we have opiates which block pain receptors in the brain, the opiate perception of the brain. It’s not the best thing because you’re just decreasing perception of pain. Obviously, the opiates are way more addictive.
- We can block some of these natural pain perceptions with CBD oil. So, CBD is another great way to reduce the perception of pain.
In general, we want you to try to do more of the herbals and more of the natural stuff out of the gates because that really, really, really can help reduce inflammation.
If you have osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, sports injury, or you’re just trying to heal maybe postoperation, these things may be something to implement and then obviously work in all the other root causes, too. You are not just what you eat. You are what you digest from what you eat.
So, if you’re doing all these good nutrients, but you’ve got some type of malabsorption issue in the gut, you’ve got ridges on your fingernails, you’ve got thinning hair or falling out here, you may need to look deeper at the gut and try to find some of these more root cause issues that led you to that amount of inflammation or slow recovery in the first place.
Collagen Diet: Collagen-Rich Foods for Healthy Joints, and Skin
We know collagen is going to help with the joints because we know half of your bones are protein. We need good building blocks for our cartilaginous tissue and ligamentous tissue. Frankly, most people get most of their protein from muscle meats. That’s a problem because they’re not getting the knuckles, the bones, and the cartilage, as we would from old-fashioned soups. So, if you’re doing a lot of soups and bone broth soups, that’s great. If not, we really want to add extra collagen.
I do 20 g of collagen in my coffee every morning. I think it’s amazing. I do my true collagen with some MCT oil and grass-fed butter. I love it. I think it’s excellent for skin, hair, nails, and just for overall prevention of bone loss and cartilage loss. We know the wear and tear that most people experience in their joints throughout the year, especially if they do a lot of long-distance cardio. You really need more building blocks to help prevent and mitigate the wear and tear, so you don’t have knee and joint replacements later in life. Collagen can really help decrease some of that wear and tear.
How do you take collagen?
I like adding collagen in my coffee in the morning because it has a nice little kind of creamer-like effect. It gives that little bit of frothiness which is wonderful. I also do it before bed. Sometimes I’ll do a little bit of collagen (glycine), magnesium, and vitamin C because vitamin C is a really important building block for making collagen. I find magnesium has some very good calming effects as well where there are plugs in the GABA or it’s just a natural beta-blocker as well. It can calm the heart and bring the heart rate down a little bit. I think magnesium does work on some of those GABA pathways as well and, of course, magnesium helps with blood sugar. You’ll get deeper sleep and better REM sleep when you have good magnesium. So, I love combining collagen and magnesium at night.
Where can you get collagen from?
You can get collagen from food via bone broth. Chicken skin is super rich in glycine, roughly 3.3 g for 3-1/2 oz. If you make chicken soup, throw the whole chicken in there. Get a rotisserie chicken from Whole Foods and or get the fattier cuts of the chicken at least with the bone and the skin, so that way you get the best of both worlds if you’re going to do it from a whole food source. Regarding seafood, wild salmon is going to be the best source of glycine.
Natural Herbs and Foods to Help Fight Stress
When you’re stressed, what are the important things? Blood sugar stability is really important because most people get on a roller coaster when they get stressed, meaning they’re overly gravitating towards alcohol and towards refined sugar. Their blood sugar goes up and then it crashes down, and then it creates more nervous system stimulation via adrenaline, epinephrine, and cortisol being stimulated to bring the blood sugar back up.
So, I find just keeping it really simple and really easy with your meals. You may be more nauseous when you’re overly stressed because stress hormone does cause you to feel nauseous. So, this is where you may want to do a soup or a simple smoothie, something really easy where there’s not a lot of digestion but you’re still getting some proteins and fat in there, whether it’s some collagen and some coconut milk or just sipping on some bone broth. Something like that’s going to have some good fat and good protein, and it won’t be hard to digest. So, if you feel nauseous, just still know you should probably be eating but just try to make it something very easy on your tummy.
Then think what are some of the nutrients your nervous system is going to need when you’re more stressed. So, the low hanging fruit, B vitamins. B complex is going to be very essential. Magnesium is going to be excellent. GABA and L-theanine are good things that are going to help you relax and wind down. Valerian root or passionflower, which are all connected to GABA and that inhibitory neurotransmitter that helps you just relax a little bit. It kind of puts the clutching gear and disengages the gearbox, so you can downshift so to speak.
I always go to nutrients first and then I go to my favorite adaptogenic herbs second. So, Ashwagandha is one of my favorites. Rhodiola is excellent and there’s holy basil, which are my favorite very relaxing and tonifying herbs.
If you want to learn more about herbs for stress relief, click this link to schedule a chat with me!
Vitamin D Benefits You Should Know
Vitamin D has a couple of different benefits. Let’s go over some of the benefits. We’ve talked about the natural antibiotic that’s being produced by vitamin D, which is called cathelicidin, a kind of antibacterial enzyme. It is super helpful at being able to knock down bacteria. It also has antiviral mechanisms, as well as antimicrobial peptides and antiviral mechanisms.
Part of that is it stimulates and it can modulate the Th1 immune response in the Th1 immune system where you’re making a lot of your natural killer cells and your helper cells. Good helper cells can also help your antigen-presenting cell and it can help make antibodies more efficiently. So, you’re also going to have a better Th2 immune response. You’re going to make antibodies to whatever that infection is. Those tend to come a little bit later in the game, but good signaling to make your antibodies is super helpful as well.
There is a couple of other studies here that are talking about different things. We have a reduction in our MMP-9 concentrations. We have a reduction in bradykinin storms and reduction in our cytokine storm. So, basically we have a lot of inflammatory molecules that get produced such as bradykinin, cytokines, interleukins MMP-9. These are inflammatory types of chemical messengers. Vitamin D can help modulate that and prevent that from being overproduced. The more we overproduce those, the more our immune system responds. So, we can create more cytokine storm issues because our immune system will be on this positive feedback loop, responding and creating more issues with the cytokines. When there are less cytokines, there’s less chance of a cytokine storm, which is basically our immune system responding.
Imagine a fight between two people where one person yells out first and the other person yells back. Then they’re pushing, shoving, and hitting and the violence escalates. That’s what happens with the cytokine storm with your immune system and all the different cytokines and immune chemical signal. So, we can keep that modulated a bit which is very helpful. Vitamin D plays a really important role in that.
Recommendation
Get vitamin D supplementation from Thanksgiving to spring. At least, make that investment. If you want to come off the rest of the year, as long as you’re getting some sunlight, it’s fine. At least do that vitamin D supplementation to give you a good bump and the fat-soluble nutrients you’ll get over those four or five months will hang around months afterward because it takes a while for that vitamin D level to build up.
If you want to learn more about Vitamin D, click this link where you can schedule a chat with me!
Nutrients to Help Make Serotonin to Help Improve Mood and Sleep
In today’s blog, I am going to share with you the natural ways to boost your serotonin levels and other alternatives. Let’s talk about nutrients to help support serotonin levels.
Serotonin is a really important neurotransmitter. Its building block comes from protein and amino acids, particularly 5-HTP (5-hydroxytryptophan) but serotonin has a lot of important roles in regards to mood, well-being, sleep, stress reduction, and happiness. So, all these things play a major major role in helping you feel good. If we have inadequate serotonin levels, that’s going to create a whole bunch of things. Once you start having sleep issues, mood issues, or stress issues then stress starts to hitch a little more. You don’t quite sleep as well. You don’t adapt to or deal with stress, not quite as resilient as well, and then a lot of times you’re just not going to heal and recover well either because serotonin is a precursor to melatonin. Melatonin helps you sleep and it’s also a very powerful antioxidant. So, a lot of good benefits there.
Serotonin is made from tryptophan and/or 5-HTP which is 5-hydroxytryptophan. Now, I personally like using 5-HTP better because there is an enzyme that’s kind of a governor on tryptophan converting downstream into serotonin. The 5-HTP bypasses that enzyme, so you can therapeutically bump up serotonin a little bit better with 5-HTP. So, we use 5-HTP and B6 that can really significantly improve serotonin levels. Anywhere between 100 to 600 mg per day can be very helpful. There are important cofactors that will also add. B6 is an essential B vitamin that helps with the synthesis. You may also want to throw in B12 or methylcobalamin, ideally methylated because these neurotransmitters need to be methylated. B12 makes a huge difference.
In the podcast, we talk about a study where they used antidepressants, not that I’m a huge fan of those, but they found that an antidepressant plus a methylated B12 improves depression symptoms by 20%. So, we know B12 and that methylation process is very important for your neurotransmitters. Also, we can throw folate in there because folate works a lot like brother and sister with B12. So, B6, B12, and folate (or B9 for short for folate) are really important. Those are your key methyl groups in regards to your B vitamins. They have a lot to do with methylation.
Of course, vitamin C can be very important because the adrenals play a major role in serotonin and stress. In that sympathetic fight or flight nervous system response, the adrenals play a big role in making cortisol and/or adrenaline to help manage or deal with or adapt to that response. So, for chronically firing our adrenals, whether it’s cortisol and/or adrenaline, and we start have HPA access issues meaning brain-adrenal communication feedback issues, that can make it hard for us to kind of calm down from stress and/or even ramp up to deal with stress. So, it’s kind of like it being really cold out, you put your heater on and you can’t quite mount the heater or mount enough of a response to create heat and warm your house up or vice versa if it’s cold. You need to be able to adapt and modulate to our environment. So, we need healthy adrenal function. A lot of times, I’ll add in things like various adaptogens like Rhodiola, Ginseng, Ashwagandha, and Eleuthero. These are great adaptogenic herbs to help us modulate and deal with stress better.
And then, of course, a good healthy diet is essential because inflammatory foods, food allergens, processed junk, grains, and refined foods are going to stress out our body. The problem with refined processed foods like grains and sugar is they can, in the short run, increase our serotonin and allow us to feel good. So, people say, “Oh, I’m an emotional eater.” What are you doing? You are essentially trying to artificially boost your brain chemicals up with junk food. It’s like whipping a tired horse to perform better. It’s like trying to drink coffee at midnight to get work done. It’s going to just throw off your sleep and you’re going to be tired the next day.
So, of course, there are always what I call constructive vehicles versus destructive vehicles. Destructive vehicles provide a short-term gain and long-term destruction if they are habitual. Constructive vehicles are not quite as an impactful short-term gain but long-term restoration, long-term healing, and long-term performance enhancement. So, that’s good digestion, eating protein, balanced blood sugar, and we can utilize amino acids like 5-HTP, B6, folate, B12, vitamin C, and adaptogenic herbs. These are very helpful in modulating our stress response. They also modulate how we perceive stress. The more you can perceive stress better, you don’t mount as much of a cortisol or adrenaline response because your perception of it is much better.
Things like magnesium can also be very helpful as magnesium kinda plays into GABA. GABA has a major role in the inhibitory neurotransmitter. It’s the downshift or it helps hit the brake, so things like GABA by itself and things like L-theanine are excellent. Adaptogenic herbs like passionflower or Valerian can be very calming. Even things like Kava or CBD could also have a very calming effect. So, there’s a couple of different things that we can throw in there.
When I’m working with the patients, I’m always saying to myself, “What’s the root cause?” Let’s set the foundation and make sure the root cause is supported. Let’s make sure able to break down and digest and absorb all the nutrients and make sure there are no underlying bottlenecks in regards to low enzyme, low acid, and gut infections. Let’s make sure we’re managing our lifestyle stressors and we’re doing our best to sleep good. Food is good, food quality is good, and hydration is good. I make sure those foundations are solid and then we can kind of get in there with other supplements and nutrients to help support those pathways.
If we wanted testing for neurotransmitters, I’ll do things like organic acid-based tests. Then we’ll look at a lot of the metabolites for these neurotransmitters, whether it’s serotonin where we will use 5-hydroxyindoleacetate (5HIAA) or we will use Vanilmandelate which is a marker for adrenaline or Homovanillate which is a marker for dopamine. Again, dopamine is a precursor to adrenaline, so it’s phenylalanine, tyrosine, dopamine, L-dopa, and then it can go down to epinephrine/norepinephrine or adrenaline/noradrenaline. It’s the same thing. So, these are catecholamines and they can convert a lot of these upstream neurotransmitters down. There’s some overlap in dopamine and serotonin symptoms. A lot of people that think they have serotonin problems may actually have a dopamine problem. So, it’s good to get tested as well. It’s good to look at the symptoms, make sure the foundation is set, and then you can dive in deeper to look at a lot of these nutrients.
Now, in my supplement line, we use things like Brain Replete which has an excellent 10:1 ratio of tyrosine or dopamine to serotonin. That’s a good combo product. It has all the precursor nutrients, too. Also, I use a product called Serotonin Replete which is excellent with 5-HTP with B6. I have a product called Dopa Replete which is just a tyrosine product that is nice for lower dopamine issues and for higher dopamine, there is a product called Dopa Replete Plus and that helps bump up dopamine more. It has got Macuna pruriens in there plus a couple of other compounds that are very helpful. It has L-dopa, tyrosine, EGCG, and of course, B6.
The Top 5 Reasons Why Your Estrogen Levels are High – Men & Women!
Let’s talk about the top 5 reasons why your estrogen levels are high. We’re going to break them down today.
WHAT ARE ESTROGENS?
First, let’s look at the 3 major kinds of estrogens: E1 or estrone, E2 or estradiol, and E3 or estriol. In a woman’s regular cycle, it’s usually estradiol we’re talking about. When you start shifting to more menopausal and the ovary stops working, you start getting more estriol. The adrenals help in kick in a lot of DHEA and you make more estriol. Estradiol is more of the growth factor type of estrogen and estriol is a weaker estrogen.
WHERE CAN WE FIND ESTROGENS?
- PLASTICS. You’ll get it when the plastic is warm like in a microwave or out of a plastic water bottle especially if it’s in the car and the sun is hitting it or it’s outside. That’s why you want a good stainless steel or glass water bottle if you’re going to go outside or leaving it in the sun. The microwave heat and the radiation is going to cause a big release of plastic chemicals there, the xenoestrogens. One of the big ones are the phthalates but also BPA. There are other types of BPAs that are new which are supposedly safe but there are still estrogen-like compounds there as well. These plastics can affect women and men as well. Men are actually going to be more affected by them because men aren’t used to having estrogen in their environment and getting a whole bunch is going to be a problem.
- PESTICIDES. These tend to have an estrogenic quality to them and if you’re eating foods that are not organic, you’re definitely going to be getting organochlorines and various pesticides in your environment.
- PHYTOESTROGENS. These are found in soy. For example, I had a vegan-vegetarian patient. We ran a Dutch sex hormone panel on her and her estradiol was through the roof and really high. Phytoestrogens can be a big one, so soy may be a problem. With vegan-vegetarian, there’s a lot of phony protein consumption like fake meat kind of stuff such as the Beyond burger where there are a lot of soy and estrogen-like compounds in there. There are also hormones in meat. You have to make sure you get antibiotic-free, hormone-free, and ideally organic and pasture-fed or if you’re on the Whole Foods scale, step 4 or step 5 is ideal. Step 2 is at least pretty good. Organic means no pesticides, no hormones, and also the food they’re eating has no pesticides or hormones, too.
- HIGH LEVELS OF INSULIN. Too much carbs drive high levels of insulin because insulin responds to a high level of blood sugar. The blood sugars in your bloodstream go up and your pancreas comes in. The beta cells make a bunch of insulin to bring it down and bring it into the cellar and converted to fat. So, high levels of insulin upregulate an enzyme in men called aromatase that converts testosterone, the male hormones, to estrogen which becomes a problem. Now, in women, a similar thing happens but it’s the exact opposite or the big switch. Their estrogen is converted to testosterone. So, women can actually get more androgen-like issues which results in weight gain, acne, hair growth, and sometimes you can see some libido enhancements on that. So, that’s the difference between men and women.
- POOR GUT HEALTH. In the gut, we make healthy good bacteria in our gut that help us absorb a lot of nutrients. A good healthy gut function helps us break down protein for good HDL levels and good enzyme levels. We need these to break down protein into amino acids which are really important for helping us to detoxify. So, detoxification helps us to excrete estrogens that we’re getting exposed to in our environments such as the pesticides, plastic, or something that you don’t even know you’re getting exposed to. Good healthy detoxification will help your body eliminate that, so that’s a good backup plan.Also, if we have a lot of dysbiosis, SIBO and bacterial overgrowth, we can make a lot of what’s called beta-glucuronidase. This is an enzyme that’s made by bad bacteria and it makes it harder to detoxify estrogen. The beta-glucuronidase takes conjugated estrogens and binds it to a protein that helps us excrete it out the body. It takes that protein and it pulls it apart. It takes the handcuffs off that protein, so that allows that estrogen that’s been deconjugated to go back into the body in the general circulation. So, if we have gut issues, that could be a major concern.
HOW DO WE ADDRESS THE PROBLEM?
We need things like cysteine, glycine, glutamine, sulfur amino acids, and things that help us methylate like B12, B6, and folate. So, these nutrients we have to get them in our diet via a good diet. We need to be able to break down and absorb those nutrients, so we need good digestion to get those things in there.
So, in general, we’ve got to make sure we have a good gut bacteria balance. Even fungal overgrowth can cause problems and H. pylori that can lower stomach acid and make it harder to break down nutrition on one side and then it can create this bacterial overgrowth enzyme that makes it hard to detoxify estrogen. These are really important components. If you have any issues with estrogen, you’ve got to look there.
Now, we may want to do things to help detoxify like make lifestyle changes, food changes, pesticide changes, make the changes in regards to plastics, and make in in regards to your diet, your glycemic load, and your gut. That’s a good first step to get to the bottom. There are also different things we may do to help upregulate detoxification to help get that estrogen. It may be activated charcoal or various soluble fibers. It could be things like bentonite clay. We could use things like DIM or Calcium D-Glucarate or glutathione, sulfur amino acids, and vitamin C. They’re all helpful in different situations. We would recommend them based on what’s happening but at least make the diet and lifestyle changes out of the gates.