Welcome to the VP Life Podcast, the show where we bring you actual

health advice from leading minds.

I'm your host, Rob.

My guest today is Dr. Jenny Goodman, a medical doctor at Ecological

Medicine practitioner who has made it her mission to educate the world

on the harmful effects that modern day toxicants have in our bodies.

Expect to learn how the detox systems in our body really work, why fluoride

is an issue for our health, and Jenny's top tips on how we can survive and

thrive in today's toxic landscape.

Now onto the conversation with Dr. Jenny Goodman.

Good morning, Dr. Goodman.

Thank you for joining us on the podcast today.

I say this often, but I know through my own experiences in working with

others that environmental toxins are often the reason why most

people actually struggle to heal.

So I'm excited to have this conversation with you.

Before we dive into today's podcast, uh, would you mind introducing yourself

for those in the audience who may be not so familiar with you and your work?

Hi.

Well, thank you very much, Rob.

Thank you for having me.

So, yes, I'm, um, a medical doctor qualified a very long time ago, 1982.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and I'd spent six years in medical school not learning of any of what I

thought I was going there to learn.

Um, I thought I was gonna learn how to heal the sick, why people got

sick in the first place, and how to prevent illness, and they don't

teach that stuff in medical school.

So, long story short, I had to find my own way through the

morass of mechanistic medicine.

To something that was truly holistic.

It took me an inordinate amount of time.

Um, and I was very lucky to eventually discover the British Society for

Ecological Medicine, which is essentially a bunch of wonderful doctors who,

like me, were very disillusioned with dishing out the anti-drugs, antibiotics,

antidepressants, anti-inflammatories, anti-epileptics, everything's anti, and

they were finding ways to get alongside the body as an ally, work with nature,

not against her, and heal people using nutrients and detoxification.

I know we're gonna talk about detoxification, but essentially they

were asking about causes and they were finding that those causes were to put it

at its simplest, the good stuff that's missing, that's nutrition and the bad

stuff that has no place in the human body, and that is environmental pollution.

That's been getting into our air, our water.

Our soil and therefore our food since the industrial revolution.

So by dealing with those issues head on, you can not only heal the sick,

but you can also keep people well.

Um, so I'm very lucky that I found ecological medicine.

I started practicing it myself in the year 2000.

That's 18 years after I qualified.

That was quite a long time in the wilderness, although I was using that

time teaching anatomy, physiology and so on to practitioners who were

training to do alternative medicine.

So I had a lot of contact with herbalist, homeopaths, osteopaths, naturopaths,

acupuncturists and so on, who are all doing wonderful work as well.

Yeah, I think when you start to look at it from that perspective and

you take an orthomolecular uh, approach to medicine, you really can start to

dig through a lot of what mainstream medicine does miss for the most part.

Dr. Woodman, I'd like to try something new today and ask you

a few rapid fire questions right off the bat, if that's okay.

Okay.

Uh, I, I would like to claim that the idea is my own, however, I lifted

it from, uh, Greg Ra, former podcast guest of ours, who also owns, hosts

his own show, um, which is very insightful called Reason and Wellbeing.

Um, I know that asking an academic to answer a question quickly is

no small matter, so don't worry if the answers do carry on a bit.

Well, that's all right.

But let me pause you there and say, I'm a clinician and a writer, but I

don't think of myself as an academic.

The whole point of my work is to make what's in the obscure scientific

journals accessible, easily accessible in plain English to the general public.

Uh, and I'm not part of a university, so I'm not sure that I'm an academic.

But I'll do my best anyway.

Go ahead.

Okay, perfect.

Thank you for that.

Okay, so start off with what's the one everyday product, uh, that people have

in their lives and homes that they should get rid of asap, in your opinion?

Oh, air fresheners.

Absolutely.

Because you are, you are spraying a mixture of petrochemical

plastics and goodness knows what toxins into the atmosphere it's

going in through your lungs.

It's probably also going in through your skin and it's giving

your kids respiratory problems.

It's certainly giving you migraines.

I had one patient with migraines who I cured by simply getting her

to stop using the air freshener.

Uh, ecological medicine is not usually that simple in clinical practice, but

I would also say if you are spraying air freshener, ask yourself why the air

in your house needs freshening in the first place, and you might wanna try.

Emptying the bins, opening the windows.

And if you still want to add a really nice smell, then get some

natural organic essential oils like essential oil of lavender,

geranium, orange flour, lemongrass.

There are hundreds of these wonderful smells, and these are watch perfume

used to be until the 19th century.

And you get a little ceramic oil burner, uh, and you put some water

on the top, a few drops of the oil in it underneath a tea light, but make

it a beeswax tea, light candle, so you're not burning petrochemicals.

That's a perfect start.

Thank you.

Okay, next one.

What's the most surprising source of toxins that most people don't think about?

Um, probably, okay, let me think about this.

It's not air pollution because we know about that.

Um, I think it's probably, again, in the home.

Having said that, most people don't think about the poison

that's coming out of their tap.

They think it's pure water.

And hopefully we'll go into that in more detail.

And most people think that, you know, if they're eating broccoli,

that's not poisoning them.

But it depends whether it was sprayed with glyphosate, whether it was sprayed

with synthetic pesticides and insecticides and so on, in which case, even the

best kind of food is poisoning you.

But I think people are getting the hang about that.

Now, I think it's mattresses, right?

It's many things in the home, but we don't tend to think

about what we're sleeping on.

And if we are sleeping on a synthetic mattress that's only a year or two

old, it is still outgassing the surprising number of toxic chemicals

that it's made of or impregnated with.

And one of those is fire retardants.

Now you have to have flame retardants in any synthetic.

Soft furnishing because synthetics, which are essentially petrochemicals like nylon

and polyester and so on, are flammable.

So by law you have to add an anti fire device, um, a flame retard, and these are

polybrominated by phenyls.

Now here the word bromine in polybrominated, it means lots

of bromine in these fennels.

And for the first year or two, your mattress and also your sofa

and synthetic carpets, curtains, cushions on are outgassing.

Those chemicals are coming out.

Now, please don't worry if said furnishings are more than a couple of

years old, they've stopped out gassing.

But if you are buying a new mattress, please try and get an organic one.

And in fact, this is so important that I've given the information about how to

find organic mattresses in both my books.

Uh, staying alive in toxic times, the first one, and getting healthy

in toxic times was the publisher's choice to make the titles so

confusingly similar, not mine.

Um, and that is Abba Cupp Organics in Wales, or the Natural Mat

down in Devon, but they have a showroom in Chisik in West London.

And it is so important to get an organic mattress.

'cause you know, your skin is on it all night long.

You're inhaling whatever's in it all night long.

And I have certainly had cases of people getting desperately

sick, even to the point of kidney failure from a new mattress.

But I have also had that same person have their partner sleeping next

to them be utterly unaffected and not even being able to smell it.

And this is because we have genetic differences, inherent

constitutional differences in our capacity to detox these things.

If you can't detox it, you'll smell it and it'll make you ill.

If you can detox it, you may get away with it for a number of years,

although probably not forever.

And those genetic differences in detox capacity would have made no

difference to our health whatsoever before the Industrial Revolution.

It's only now that we are surrounded by industrial poisonings that those

genetic differences become the difference between who gets sick and who doesn't.

But again, to make it crystal clear, it's not your genes that are

making you sick, it's environmental pollution and the nutritional

deficiencies that go along with them.

Yeah, no, I, again, I couldn't agree more.

I'm trying to veer away from the desire to start talking to you

about bromine and thyroid disorders.

Do you think that, uh, very quickly there's an issue there with, uh oh

yeah, there absolutely is an issue.

If you go back to school chemistry, the periodic table of the

elements, and think about group seven.

You've got fluorine, chlorine, bromine, and iodine.

Now, iodine is essential for health and in its, um, form where it's

gained an electron, it's iodide.

It's a hali rather than halogen.

That's essential for your thyroid.

With iodine is essential for the health of the breast and the prostate.

All the organs of the body need iodine and or iodide, but the body is not expecting.

Similarly looking, but toxic halogen.

So chlorine from your tap water displaces iodine impacts the thyroid,

bromine from your soft furnishings, displaces iodine impacts the

thyroid and all the other organs.

And of course, fluoride, which the Boris Johnson government resolved to add to

the tap water all over Britain just been added after a long fight that's

been lost in the northeast of England.

It's been in the tap water in the Republic of Ireland and Birmingham

and the West Midland since 1964.

Those are areas from which I see children with damaged brains and

damaged bones and damaged thyroid from the very high fluoride that

you can measure in their urine.

And guess what?

When you measure their iodine, it's vanishingly low, so low that with some of

these kids from Ireland and Birmingham, I've had the lab come back to me and

say, can you send another sample?

'cause we couldn't measure the iodine level, we couldn't find any.

And they think it's a error at their end and it isn't.

And you send the sample.

Again, high fluoride, no iodine, and um, we can come back to that topic

later, but I think in certain parts of the country it's a huge hazard.

But anywhere in the country, you've also got chlorine.

And the residues of pesticides, the residues of the drugs and hormones

that your neighbors are taking that get peed out into the water table.

Uh, heavy metals, the water companies don't remove any of these and they try to

remove some of them, but it's ineffective.

And so you're drinking all that if you've not installed a water filter.

And I think most people would be very surprised by that as well.

Yeah, I think what everyone misses it is that these chemicals bind to tissues,

they bind to receptors and then they start to cause this dysfunction of the cellular

and a hormonal level, which ends up, yeah.

Making us at a high level, just very unwell.

Um, we're going to go on tangents very quickly, so I'll

just bring us back to center.

Last, uh, rapid fire question.

Um, do you think saunas are effective for detox or are they overrated?

Well, they are very good if you do them in the correct way.

So here's the correct way, which I describe in some detail in my first book.

Um, but there as now I'll give credit to where we learned this from.

We all learned this from Dr. Sarah Myel, the correct way to do the saunas.

First of all, it does need to be a sauna, not a Turkish bath, right?

You don't want steam, you don't want humidity, you want dry heat.

May I, I was just gonna interrupt you quickly.

I, uh, I think.

What scares me most about Turkish bars or steam rooms is the fact that they

are to just, uh, carry on for, we were just talking about, um, full of mold.

They, well, not only full of mold, but they're also, uh, utilizing the very same

water that we're drinking that's just aerosolizing, those same chemicals, which

is one of the biggest, my biggest issues with them, especially in sort of your

public gyms and those, and those areas.

Um, and then the person, the person who spin in

before you was, was using synthetic perfumes,

and it's a whole issue.

But the thing about a dry sauna is firstly, you don't do it for too long.

No point.

Staying in there for half an hour once you start sweating five

or 10 minutes is all you need.

Why?

Because the toxins we are trying to get rid of by sauna, and it is valuable

because they're lipophilic, right?

Pesticides, plastics, plasticizer, chemicals.

All of these things that we're exposed to.

Now they are lipophilic, which means they dissolve in fat.

They're attracted to fat, they're not hydrophilic, you can't pee them out.

And although we've got loads of fabulous supplements and nutrient

combinations for detoxing, eg.

Heavy metals for petrochemicals like pesticides, we've got very few things you

can actually take that help get them out.

But saunas do.

Now what's happening is that the thin layer of fat under your skin, well,

it's not a thin layer in everybody's case, but the layer of fat under the

skin, it's really near the surface.

And after five or 10 minutes in the sauna, the toxins in there start

coming out along with the sweat.

But from an evolutionary point of view, the body evolved sweating to cool us down.

Not for detox and therefore the body doesn't know that you are detoxing.

So whatever comes out on the skin is instantly reabsorbed by the skin, right?

This is why you have to do the sauna correctly because you could cycle

from London to brighten 'em back and be sweating buckets and you won't

detox because you reabsorb the sweat and all the toxins in it immediately.

Therefore, the way to do the sauna correctly is to go in with a clean,

dry towel, and the minute you break a sweat, start toweling off, you towel

off the sweat as soon as it appears, and you keep doing that for 10 minutes.

That's all you need.

'cause after that, you just start losing the good minerals.

Drop that towel in the dirty laundry, have a shower, and do

the same again a few days later.

So it's little and often and it's drying off the sweat as it appears.

Um, don't do it for too long.

And that is absolutely key for it to be effective.

Otherwise, you may feel virtuous and you'll get dehydrated and

you won't detox, or you'll detox, but you'll reabsorb it instantly.

Yeah, that's, that's a good point 'cause I've always, uh, sort of followed

the mainstream sort of narrative there.

That being that if you are going to sauna, that you merely just need to shower sort

of as quickly as you can afterwards.

Uh, preferably with a, uh, a soap such as a Castile soap.

It's obviously low in, uh, pollutants just to sort of get that sweat off.

But you're saying that you do

all that, but you also keep telling it off while you are sweating.

Oh, that's an interesting thought.

Yeah, no, I never thought about it from that perspective as well.

It makes total sense.

Anyway.

Okay, perfect.

Well, let's move on.

Well, I just wanted to come back to something you said earlier,

Rob, because you talked about these substances binding to cell surfaces.

And that's incredibly important because in the case, particularly of

pesticides and heavy metals and plastics, they all act as estrogen mimics.

So the receptors on cell surfaces that they bind to are the estrogen receptors.

And all of us men and women alike have estrogen receptors

on all the cells of our bodies.

Estrogen's an incredibly important hormone, and you've got all these toxins

like pesticides, plastics, and oddly heavy metals have the same effect,

although you wouldn't expect them to.

Um, they all bind to estrogen receptors, so they all are endocrine disruptors as

well as being neurotoxic and implicated in our vast epidemic of neurodegenerative

diseases, as well as being carcinogenic and implicated in cancer.

They are endocrine disruptors.

They mess with our hormones by sitting on the estrogen receptor, which blocks

the real estrogen from sitting on it.

And creates estrogenic effects.

Breast cancer, possibly prostate cancer, ovarian cancer, endometrial cancer.

Those have other causes as well.

But this is an important contributory factor, um, which is why we've gotta stop

drinking water out of plastic bottles.

'cause you're drinking a hundred thousand microplastic particles when you do that,

especially if it's been in the warm.

And we've gotta stop wrapping food in Kling film, which is the softest

plastic, and therefore the one that gets into the food most, you know,

hard Tupperware type box in a fridge.

I'm much less concerned about.

Um, but yeah, plastic bottles and kling film are bad news.

Baking a

tinfoil.

Yeah.

Well, tinfoil is a problem in another respect because

it's actually aluminum foil.

And if you were to just rush, you know, wrap your sandwiches in it.

Or boil an egg in an aluminum saucepan, it's not a problem, but

acid will leach it out into the food.

So if you're cooking some fe fish or meat in the oven and you've

squeezed lemon juice on it, then you wrap it in aluminum foil, then

you are leaching out the aluminum.

Yes.

Similarly, if you cook rhubarb in an aluminum pot, you are

leaching out the aluminum.

Yeah, no, I just, I, I, I drink completely.

I chuckled earlier when you mentioned sort of, uh, plastic water bottles.

'cause we just had our discussion about sauna and every time I do

go into the local, into my local sauna at the local gym, you Yeah.

They're all drinking plastic water.

Yeah.

Just guys walking in the, with their plastic water bottles are my, yeah.

I, I just, I just feel my testosterone dropping, looking at them.

Absolutely.

And honestly, you know, this is where government action

could make such a difference.

You know, they more or less banned plastic bags if they banned plastic water bottles.

Yeah.

And put water fountains everywhere.

Okay.

We know the water would be crap quality, but it still would be

better than drinking plastic.

And people would learn to carry water bottles with them.

And even those ones that filter the water, you know, there should be water

fountains everywhere and the sale of water in plastic should be banned.

No, I, I couldn't agree more anyway.

You are the author of two very well received books, uh, staying

Alive in Toxic Times, A Seasonal Guide to Lifelong Health, which

was published in 2020, I believe.

And then more recent it was, yeah.

And then more recently, last year, getting Healthy in Toxic Times.

Mm-hmm.

Um, that's this one as, that's, yeah.

Can I tell,

can I tell your audience what my chosen title for the second book was?

I wanted to call it, of what got into you how pollution is damaging our

health and what we can do about it.

Yeah.

Why didn't that stick?

What was the, uh, the publishers?

Oh,

the head of the publishing company said she didn't like puns,

and it's a pun what's got into you.

Yeah.

Nevermind.

Yeah, they're a wonderful publishing company in every other respect.

I'm very happy to be with them.

Um, and so far I think people can tell one book from the other.

Gimme one second.

I'll just, um.

Show you the front cover of the first book

and and I wrote that in response to patients saying to me,

essentially after four or five consultations, and they were better.

Most people got better within four or five consultations.

It is just common sense actually.

People would say to me, why doesn't my GP know all this?

Why?

And can you please write it down?

Because everyone needs to know about this.

It isn't actually rocket science.

It's first year biochemistry applied to the hormones and

enzymes and nutrients in our body.

That's all it is.

That's why I wrote the first book, and it's mostly about eating and

living according to the seasons of the year, to be closer to nature, more

in touch with our natural rhythms.

Um.

And it does discuss hazards like mold, which is primarily a hazard

in the autumn, although it's also all year round, and how to deal with

that whole debate about sunshine.

And does the sun give you skin cancer?

Well, no.

We evolved under the sun for millions of years.

That's in the summer chapter.

And so on the spring chapter I discussed hay fever and the winter chapter, all

the nutrients that you need and how you need to live differently in winter and

summer, so you don't go down with millions of viral infections in the winter.

But the chapter that spot the most interest was the final

chapter, which I called tox detox.

You can't poison the planet without poisoning the people,

and that's the one that makes the links between our environmental

crisis and our health crisis.

I think everyone knows we have an environmental crisis.

Not everybody knows we have a health crisis.

Because what is familiar, what becomes familiar becomes normalized.

So everybody knows someone with cancer, but a hundred years ago,

nobody knew anyone with cancer.

So these diseases like cancer, diabetes, dementia, heart disease, autoimmunity,

neurodegenerative diseases like autism in kids, that's a neurodevelopmental

disorder, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, motor neuron disease, multiple sclerosis.

All of these have become hugely common and people just don't know

because they can't remember what life was like a hundred years ago.

None of us can, and we are repeatedly told it's because we have an aging population.

This is not the case.

It's not the case, and it's not the reason.

Um, there's an arithmetical error that's so important.

I have to mention it, that we are told, look, you go back to the mid 19th

century, the average age of death was 45.

Now it's about 85.

Well, the average age of death.

Back in Charles Dickens time was indeed 45, but that's

because the average

included the quarter of the population.

The 25% of people who died before the age of five, massive child mortality

because of appalling over crowding and terrible malnutrition and very, very

moldy, dangerous, crowded living spaces.

Complete lack of hygiene, you know, drinking water with cholera

in it, working down the mind.

If you take those kids outta the equation, their average age of death goes right

up to more or less what ours is now.

The difference, however, is that they lived until they died, and now

we tend to spend our last decade in this ghastly twilight of suffering

and disability warehoused in institutions, however caring they are.

Care home is an institution.

Um, because we become decrepit, so we are not actually living

longer, we are just living sicker.

And the point is that this health crisis, which people can't see is

inextricably linked to the environmental crisis that most of us can see.

If we walk around our local park and we see some of the trees are dying and we

know that the fish in the ocean are being choked by plastic, but we don't know that

it's giving us cancer, and we know that, you know, forest fires are destroying

the rainforest and that that's increasing the CO2, which is causing climate change,

we don't know that it's also causing lung cancer and Alzheimer's disease.

So because that was what garnered the most interest and was also what

I began to feel most passionate about, that's why the second book

is focused entirely on the planetary connections and why the subtitle is.

An ecological doctor's prescription for healing your body and the planet.

We cannot separate them.

And I wish the environmentalists, the environmental activists, knew that

they're fighting for human health as well.

And I wish the integrative and holistic physicians and practitioners knew that

they need to be environmentalists as well.

So I want to join these dots.

Yeah, no.

Well, number one, thank you for answering my question.

That was perfect.

Number two.

Um, yeah, no, I, I couldn't agree more.

And it is, it is just so insidious, this whole sort of, um, the,

this toxic environmental load sort of, sort of driving this

dysfunction at, at a health level.

And I think it's, it's because it's sort of s very slowly impacted society.

Um, I. A again, I'd sort of, I, I did sort of want to chuckle when you, uh,

sort of talked about environmentalists.

I often think, yeah, that they've got it the wrong way around

because ultimately I think the planet will probably be, be fine.

It's us, uh, human beings who are gonna finish themselves off, give

it, uh, I know 10, 20,000 years, whatever that figure may or may not be.

And the earth will regain its own homeostasis.

However, we will be long gone.

So, um, I'm not personally worried about the earth.

I'm worried about mankind or humankind, but I think that's, it's interesting,

isn't it?

There's a campaign to save the bees and save the badgers and say, save the beavers

and all these other, which is quite right.

I agree with all these, of course, but there isn't a campaign to save the

humans because we assume medicine will do that, especially the mh s God bless.

But all they can do is pick up the pieces.

They are not addressing the causes.

However, the good news is.

The good news is that if you understand all this and you know where the

pollution is coming from in your own environment and how it's getting into

you, through your lungs, through your mouth, through your skin, then there's

loads you can do about it loads.

And that's why I wrote the book, you know, you can protect yourself from

at least 90% of this pollution and we should talk about how you can do that.

Before we talk about actually detoxing.

Oh yeah, yeah.

No, I, I agree fully.

Um, just with regards to your book, uh, quickly, um, it's got a sort

of a very, sort of oriental feel to it in the sense that you've broken

down the chapters into earth, uh, water, air, fire, and then I think

indoor pollution is, is the last one.

Yeah.

Tax

one.

Um, yeah.

While that, yeah, while that last one doesn't quite fit in my analogy, I'm sort

of interested in thought process there.

So would you mind just break, uh, explaining why you, you

chose tho those chapter titles?

Yeah.

Um, it's a really interesting question because I wanted to

write this for a long time.

Um, but the information was overwhelming.

It overwhelmed me, and I was committed to presenting it in a way that wouldn't

be too overwhelming for the reader.

Okay.

So you're finding out about all this pollution and what it's doing to us.

And one way to cope with overwhelm is to categorize, okay, so how am

I gonna categorize, there's like a hundred thousand synthetic chemical

pollutants in our environment.

Now how am I gonna categorize them?

Obviously, I'm not gonna do it according to chemical type, um, because you'd need a

degree in chemistry to make sense of that.

And I sat with this for a full year, Rob, before I was able to start writing.

It was a year that I thought it was intellectual paralysis, but in fact,

I now know that the, the book was cooking under the surface because

the minute I broke through that, the writing just started to flow.

But the way I broke through it was as follows, that I was in a

cottage in July or August in s Snowdonia wanting to go hiking.

It was pouring with rain and after a week sitting there with a blank

piece of paper and a pen staring outta the window at the rain.

It suddenly came to me fully formed that the way to divide up this otherwise

unmanageable topic is according to the four elements, because earth,

water, air, and fire, as I say in the introduction to the book, are fundamental

categories of human experience.

I mean, their fundamental categories in physics like the three states of matter,

solid liquid, gas, and then energy, which of course is fire, but they're

also part of folklore, myth mysticism.

I think you said Oriental, but no, this is, this is Western Celtic tradition,

European and Native American tradition.

We all think in terms of the four elements.

In China, they have five elements, which is a different system.

Okay?

But even in India, I think they have the four elements.

And basically where do we encounter these toxins?

We encounter them in the earth.

The pesticides and the heavy metals from mining are in the earth.

Therefore, in our food, therefore in our bodies, we encounter them in the

water that's coming out of our tap.

We encounter them in the air that we are breathing.

And the fire chapter, I'm using fire in a semi metaphorical sense

because the pollution that we are encountering and that's damaging us is

physical as well as chemical, right?

So air, water, air, water and earth is chemical pollution, but

there is electromagnetic pollution as well, and nuclear pollution.

And this is about energy, not actually molecules of stuff.

Energy in the sense that your physics teacher meant it not in the way a Tai

chi teacher or homeopath might mean it, although ultimately they're the same.

I'm just trying to say this is science.

This is not wiffy mysticism.

But we've got an electromagnetic spectrum that we've evolved with

the middle bit of it, right?

The rainbow colored light, visible light ultraviolet and infrared from the sun.

That's what we've evolved with.

But since World War ii, we've also been exposed to much, much, much at

shorter wavelength, higher frequency, which is X-rays, gamma rays in nuclear

fallout, and the opposite extreme end of the electromagnetic spectrum,

which is very long wavelengths, but very high, uh, very low frequencies.

That's the electromagnetic radiation, which is coming out of your mobile

phone, your wifi router, and the mobile phone mask or cell phone

tower, as they call it in America.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and I discovered when writing chapter six of the new book, there's thousands

of published papers showing that this electromagnetic radiation that our kids

are now exposed to in school from wifi.

It is linked with neurodevelopmental disorders.

It's linked with brain tumors.

It's linked with the extreme restlessness we call A DHD.

And we are making these kids worse by putting them in school with wifi.

Uh, it's linked to cancers of all kind, unfortunately, including leukemia.

And that there's a solid body of research on this.

It's been known for many decades, and of course it's all getting more

intense with 5G on its way and so on.

And when I first started writing that chapter, actually as with the first

chapter about pesticides, I already knew this from my own clinical experience

and that of my colleagues, but I was worried will I be able to find

the academic papers to back it up?

I wanted half a dozen papers.

And actually what I found on all these topics was thousands of

published papers, proper Parker respectable peer reviewed journals.

And the problem was not, can I find the evidence, but which of the evidence

shall I put in the book as a reference?

Because.

It is over.

And what is mind blowing really is that all this information is

out there in the public domain.

Research has been done, the papers have been published, but nobody knows.

It's not just that the general public doesn't know, doctors don't know, doctors

don't know about the research that's been done showing what's actually happening,

that's making their patients ill.

Yeah.

No, again, I, I, I couldn't agree more on, it's something I'd like

to come back to in a minute.

Oh, actually we're on wifi.

We might as well talk.

Well, one non native EMS, we might as well talk about it, I suppose.

Um, yeah.

It's something near and dear to my heart and I've, I've definitely taken a, a

fairly deep dive into maybe the, the, the, the, the, the biochemistry there and

how these non-native EMS potentially sort of disrupt, uh, calcium gated channels.

Those all stated

calcium channels Yeah.

Channels.

Yep.

Yeah.

And all of that.

Um, do you think that.

Uh, on, on a list of thi on a priority based list of things, say one to 10, do

you think EMFs and non-native EMS and things like dirty electricity rarely are

as harmful as say something like fluoride, fluoride and drinking water or, yeah, I, I

think they're actually in my top three.

Okay.

So when people say, what are your three absolute key tips,

one is regulate your EMFs.

Now, it doesn't mean get rid of your mobile phone.

It means learn to use it safely.

And that's what the last part of chapter six is about.

In the new book is how you can use this technology in a

much, much safer way, right?

Instead of wifi, you can have ethernet cables, you can have

hardwired access to the in.

I'm talking to you now.

I have full broadband, full access to the internet with zero wifi.

It's actually not rocket science.

Again, you can get ethernet cables, you can get it set up for you if you are using

your mobile phone text rather than speak.

If you've got to speak, use speaker phone.

Do not carry it on your person when it's on.

Even putting it an inch or two away from your head vastly reduces

the danger of brain tumors.

Vastly.

The people who get the brain tumors are the people who've had the

mobile phone touching their ear.

And so there are loads of ways you can use the technology differently

to make it completely safe.

Um, so I would have, yeah, three top tips.

One is use your, your electromagnet, your electronic devices far more safely.

Second, filter your water.

'cause if you get a good wilt water filter, you are getting rid

of the chlorine, the fluoride, the pesticide residues, the drug residues,

the heavy metals, all in one go.

And thirdly, really, really crucial is to eat organic.

Because if you're not eating a hundred percent Soil Association,

certified organic food, whether it's vegetables, meat, eggs, whatever

you are eating, pesticides, and we need to say what the pesticides are.

They were developed as weapons of war for both the two world wars.

They are neurotoxic agents and therefore it's not surprising that they're

contributing hugely to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's,

MS motor, neuro disease, and so on.

Um, and when the Second World War ended, the companies still

wanted to sell their products.

So they literally repurposed them for killing insects, killing

fungi, filling, killing bugs.

Now, why are those pests a problem on the fields in the first place?

Primarily because of monocrop farming, right?

Chemical agriculture where you've got a vast field of only one crop.

It is like an invitation to whichever pest likes to eat that crop, to

eat it up, to reproduce wildly, to invite all their friends in

relations, then you need a pesticide.

But the way organic and regenerative farming is happening these days, which is

very, very exciting, and it's equivalent to integrative medicine actually, because

agriculture, like medicine, has been in the grip of the chemical industry and

many people are trying to get out of it.

Farm with nature, not against nature.

And if what they do is they have diversity, so they have animals roaming

the fields, fertilizing them naturally, they have flowers and vegetables and

lots of different crops growing together, which means you don't get many weeds.

So you don't need the herbicides and you don't get pests.

'cause pests always have a favorite plant.

And if their favorite plant is one among 20 growing in that little

plot, they're not gonna take over.

And these farmers never leave the earth bare.

So it doesn't get eroded by fertilizers.

You don't get.

The effects of drought and rainfall, you don't get floods.

I mean, it's good for the earth and it's good for us.

So if we're eating strictly organic food, we are supporting the farmers

who are eventually gonna make the pesticide companies redundant.

They'll have to take their bat home because if we all eat organic and farmers

are able to stop using these hideous chemicals will be eating healthily

and big pharma will go outta business.

Yeah, and I agree completely.

Do you think eating organic, uh, I'm just thinking the average consumer is

again, particularly high up on the list of things that people should prioritize.

Yep.

I think especially your

average day, eat organic, filter your water and vastly reduce and

moderate your use of the mobile phone.

Um, and I have had plenty of people sit in my consultation, say, look,

I can't afford to eat organic.

Yeah.

And then they say to me, oh, can we reschedule the next appointment?

'cause I'm gonna be on holiday in Barbados.

Fair enough.

Well,

priorities, that's a very nice

way to get your vitamin D, although it's not great for the planet.

But hey, uh, look, there is a real issue here, and that's what I list

at the end of chapter one of the new book, all the wonderful charitable

organizations that are working to make organic produce fresh, local, locally

grown, organic produce available to the poorest people in our societies.

Because ultimately, if you say, oh, organic is a middle class

privilege, then you are saying to paraphrase Murray Antoinette, let

the poor junk, let them eat junk.

And of course, what's given to food banks, tins and packets.

No.

Everyone has the right to access to decent food.

And as I say, there are plenty of organizations trying to make organically

farmed produce available to people who are struggling to eat at all.

And it is a scandal in our society that people are struggling to have

enough money to eat anything at all.

Ultimately chemical infested food and monocultural agriculture is, is not

affordable because we are all paying the price in an NHS waiting list

that's got 7 million people on it.

We've got something like 2 million people out of work because they're off sick

and they're eating processed junk food.

They're not eating anything organic or fresh or local.

And that's what needs to change.

And it takes government action at the highest level.

But there are only about 3 million people out of 70 million in

Britain who absolutely are too poor to afford to eat organic.

And what I'm saying to the other 67 million is vote with your wallet.

Right?

Prioritize it.

Do you know what proportion of our income we spend on food now?

It's about 8% and it used to be in the 1960s.

33%, one third.

So we totally need to reprioritize it and we need to think of eating organic and

filtering our water as health insurance.

You know, it's a bit expensive, but it's not as expensive

as actual health insurance.

And also it depends how much, sorry.

No, I was gonna say always being sick, to be honest,

that that's far more cost.

But being sick is incredibly

expensive.

If you have cancer, you can't work.

So what I would say is if you've been eating battery, farmed chicken, you know,

reared with antibiotics and hormones and immense cruelty three times a week,

cut that out and start eating a free range happy organic chicken once a week.

That's all you need.

You don't need loads of meat, then you're spending less money and you're

making yourself a whole lot healthier.

Yeah.

Uh, it's definitely sort of a, an an institutional, um.

Not argument but debate, isn't it?

Because I think ultimately that has to be, the society has

to be reeducated, don't they?

There's no point in sort of, uh, blaming the food companies because I

mean, if, if you believe in this sort of, this capitalist approach to, to

the world, which I, I suppose, which makes sense then fair enough, but okay.

Um, but ultimately we've somehow got to convince the government to sort of

start, uh, educating, well, I dunno if it's, it's on us, uh, as listeners

or how do you think about that?

Uh, that particular question?

Sorry, I'm, uh, sort of trying to Yeah.

The government won't do it.

The government won't do it because they get lots of nice

tax revenue from the food companies.

Um, if they really cared about the NHS, they would put vast taxes

on the junk food companies and make junk food really expensive.

And they would subsidize the organic farms.

And they would also subsidize local farmer's markets so that all the farmers

could sell their produce at the farm gate.

Special arrangements can be made for a huge city like London, which is

far away from any farms, although actually there are urban farms.

That's a whole nother exciting development.

But if you subsidize the organic farmers and stop, stop subsidizing the massive

agrichemical industrial farms that are mostly supplying wheat and oil seed

rate for the junk food industry, um, then your people will get healthier and

your NHS waiting list will get shorter.

I think it needs to be tackled at all levels.

Yes.

Grassroots education campaign, you know, but the mums that are passing the Turkey

twizzlerss through the bars of the school, the school railings, um, are not gonna

have the wherewithal to pay attention.

They need a decent place to live.

They need a decent income.

Um, before they can reasonably be expected to give their attention

to what, to feed their family within their very limited means.

And that's why some of it, some of it's education, but some of

it has gotta be political change.

And that's what I'm saying.

Those of us who can afford to vote with our wallets need to boycott the

junk food industry and the non-organic fruit and veg and meat as well.

And as, um, as William Lana of Green Fibers, an organic cotton clothing

company in Totnes said, what we buy will be produced and what we don't won't,

and boycotts are incredibly effective.

And if we boycott the poisonous stuff, we are making ourselves healthy.

And eventually those who are pedalling, the poisons will go outta business.

So I think it's from the top and from the bottom.

Yeah, no, it's definitely something that's important.

I. You've just mentioned cotton clothing, which is something that

I, I know you've spoken about before and I, I have a feeling it's in

your, it's in your book as well.

It's, it's in chapter three.

How important is, is clothing speci, uh, specifically sort of

not utilizing synthetic clothing.

Yeah.

Uh, he said wearing a synthetic hoodie, ironically enough.

Yeah.

But, um, so this

is a, this was a revelation to me because I've been

focused on, you know, what we eat, what we drink, what we inhale.

Um, but as I was writing this new book, I was invited to speak at Sustainable

Fashion Week, so that was September, 2022.

So I went into a bit of a panic, 'cause I know absolutely nothing about fashion

or clothing, but I did some research for that and discovered the huge amount of

pesticides that go into cotton clothing if it's not a hundred percent organic.

And the effects of synthetic clothing, which is made of fabrics

like polyester, nylon, rayon, and that those are petrochemicals.

They are essentially plastic.

Now, of course, I knew about the dangers of synthetic cosmetics, right?

Because I know the skin is the largest organ of the body.

It's a highly absorptive surface.

And if you are rubbing moisturizer into yourself, if

it's coconut oil, that's fine.

If it's one of the wonderful, completely organic products that are mentioned

on the Soil Association's health and beauty pages, then it's fine.

But if it's some nasty thing from the chemist or the supermarket,

you are rubbing plastic petrochemicals into your skin.

And just like the lipophilic chemicals can come out in the sauna, they will go in.

So I knew that we absorbed toxins through our skin.

You know, aluminum and parabens from underarm deodorants.

Um, you know, all, all these, all these nasty things that we put on

our skin, every single one of which has a safe herbal alternative, right?

You can get safe herbal alternatives to all of them.

And I describe how to make sure they really are organic in

chapter seven of the new book.

Okay?

But I hadn't really thought about clothing, which is touching our skin,

and particularly nightwear pajamas, whatever you're wearing at night,

like your bedding and your mattress is touching your skin for eight hours a day.

When I began to look into it, I discovered that, yeah, most,

most clothing now is synthetic.

So you're wearing plastic next to your skin.

Not only is that probably harmful to you, but every time you wash those

clothes, millions of plastic microfibers are released into the environment

and when they are finally recycled, I don't believe they ever are recycled.

They end up in rubbish dumps.

And those are some of the plastics that are going into the oceans and poisoning

the birds and the fish and what have you, and coming back to bite us in the end.

So that was really shocking.

So I thought, well, you know, natural fibers, cotton, 95% of

cotton is drenched in insecticide.

And what I learned in my conversations with Pesticide Action Network, wonderful,

wonderful organization, pan UK, do look them up, is not only is it probably

harmful for us, that's not their main concern, but the farmers in Africa and

India who grow this non-organic cotton, not only does it consume vast amounts of

water, whereas organic cotton isn't quite so thirsty, but those farmers get sick.

They get very sick from working with a pesticide infested cotton and

the, and those people who spray the insecticides get incredibly sick.

And this is now well documented.

And the children of the farmers and the sprayers.

Guess what?

Behavioral and neuropsychiatric disorders, because these are neurotoxins,

so what's left that we can wear?

And the answer is a hundred percent organic cotton.

And you have to be really careful and check the labels because yeah, you can

go to, uh, popular clothing manufacturer say, and it says made with organic

cotton with, right, it's a bit of a con.

It means there's some organic cotton in it, but made with

organic cotton is not enough.

It has to say a hundred percent organic cotton.

And there are several places you can get this fabric and these clothes now

including green fibers in to nest.

And you know what?

It's expensive.

So you don't need 20 t-shirts, you maybe need half a dozen and you can get lovely

non-toxic laundry liquid from green scent.

That's sense as in perfume, A-C-E-N-T-S Green Sense.

Who make fabulous laundry, liquid and even fabric condition, it's totally non-toxic

and your clothes will feel better on you and you make your half a dozen t-shirts,

which are expensive last, as opposed to having 20 pathetic ones that are damaging

you, but also damaging the environment.

Because if you use organic cotton or any other natural material like linen,

which is from a plant flags or hemp, which does grow in this country, and

cotton doesn't, so that's another thing for linen and hemp and even silk, right?

And even nettles, you can make fabric out of stinging nettles and it's really shiny

and silky and it doesn't sting, right?

So when those clothes reach the end of their life and are

disposed of, they are compostable.

They just go back into the earth.

So you are doing no harm to yourself and you are doing no harm to landfill.

So, yeah, I get very enthusiastic about natural clothing in, uh,

the middle of chapter three.

And the reason it's in chapter three, which is the water chapter, is because

this is to do what happened with what happens when you put them in the washing

machine as well as everything else.

Yeah.

No, I think it just comes down to a sense of priorities.

Uh, doesn't it?

At the end of the day, uh, we sort of somehow got to convince people

that their health should come above and before their desire to wear, uh,

our, our butcher it, 'cause I don't know any clothing brand names, but

Chanel is, is that a perfect brand?

Just don't mention any brand names.

We

get the idea.

But also, sorry, just to go back, the reason that the clothing issue is in

the water chapter is also because what goes around comes around and all those

plastic fibers from those thrown away synthetic clothes are coming back in

our taps unless we filter them out.

Yeah.

It is hard for people to prioritize this stuff and unfortunately what it

usually takes is getting ill, well, actually it takes two stage process.

It takes getting ill and then discovering that conventional medicine

can't really do anything for you.

No, the there are amazing, uh, there are amazing triage services and

as I'm sure you've, uh, discussed on many other podcasts, broken leg and

all of that, I'm going straight to a knee, but if I got type two diabetes,

I am not going to my local gp seeing as we're talking about we're in the

water chapter, we might as well go back to the discussion, uh, on water and,

and maybe tie that up, uh, for folks.

Um.

You mentioned fluoride earlier, and I think that's something that is what it is.

I don't think it is a contentious topic.

Yeah.

Um, and uh, obviously as you mentioned it, it's, it's derived from fluorine.

Um, and it was originally introduced, I think around about 60

years in the AGO in the UK and 64

in Birmingham and, and the Republic of Ireland, much later in other

parts of the uk, but a long time ago in America and nowhere in mainland Europe.

'cause they're not doffed.

Definitely not.

Uh, and I believe it was introduced predominantly with the idea

of improving a tooth quality.

Now I have a feeling, uh, that it does actually make up, uh, to teeth harder.

Mm-hmm.

But it oftentimes makes them more brittle as well.

Yep.

Which is sort of what people don't tell you.

Yeah.

Now, fluoride is also a, as you mentioned earlier, a a neurotoxin.

It's a mitochondrial toxin.

Mm-hmm.

Would you sort of mind running us through the fluoride story and

why is potentially so dangerous?

So, when something is incredibly controversial, you have to

follow the money if you want the clues.

So let's go back, let's rewind.

They're telling us that it's good for children's teeth and it certainly has an

effect on the teeth, and it has exactly the same effect on the bones with bones.

Also, it makes them harder, but more brittle.

So, you know, it's gonna make osteoporosis slightly worse because although

it makes the bones harder and more dense, it increases the fracture rate.

And I found studies, which I quote in chapter three that show that

particularly in postmenopausal women who are very liable to fracture of

the hip, which can be fatal and almost always disabling, um, that risk is

much greater if they live in an area where there's fluoride in the water.

And you also find an increased risk of osteosarcoma, which is a rare and

usually fatal primary tumor of the bone in young people, especially young men,

where there's fluoride in the water.

So it distorts the architecture of bone.

It lowers children's iq.

Again, there are, this is so astonishing.

There are studies going back to the 1930s showing that where

there's more fluoride in the water or the soil, there is a lower iq.

And we know that putting fluoride in the water or in the salt as they do in Mexico.

Um, affects children in the womb and it affects babies and

toddlers, and it lowers their iq.

And it scares me that we're for that and for other reasons.

Raising a generation of kids who are damaged, you know, their

brains are not as sharp as their great-grandfather's brains were.

So what is fluoride?

And the most important thing to say about it is it's not a nutrient.

It has no role in human metabolism.

No role whatsoever.

It's one of the toxic hagens that pushes out iodine or iodide.

Okay?

It damages the kidneys, it damages the ovaries.

Um, and obviously it damages the thyroid for reasons that we've already explained.

So, what's it doing in our water?

Well, they're saying it's for children's teeth, but you know, the best way to

conserve children's teeth is twofold.

One is keep them off the sugar, and number two is brush their teeth.

And if you look at the graphs of how dental decay has been decreasing since

the late 1960s across Europe and Britain and America, you find that the rate

of decline in tooth decay in kids goes down steadily and identically in the

countries where there's no fluoride in the water and the countries where

there is fluoride in the water, right, it has made no def difference to

the rate of decline in tooth decay.

And tooth decay is declining because dental hygiene is improving.

Now, you know, things may be going the other way because there are

no NHS dentists anymore and you know, there's an awful lot of

junk food and sweets being sold.

And maybe if you are a very distracted mom and you are living 10 floors up in a

tower block, and you're gonna give your kids something sweet to shut them up, and

you are gonna forget to brush their teeth.

So it may be going backwards, but fluoridation has made no.

Improvement to dental health on a population level, but it

has damaged bone and brain.

And again, there is a case history in chapter three, one of many that I could

have included of a child from Birmingham with incredibly damaged bone and brain

and very high levels of fluoride in the urine and vanishingly low levels of ide.

Now, can you treat this?

Yes, you can.

And what?

What we do is firstly plead with the parents to install a water

filter, a whole house water filter.

Yes, it costs money, but it means the child is no longer

drinking the toxic fluoride.

Second, you do all the general detox measures, you know, from

vitamin C to vegetable juicing, to sauna to everything else.

But third and most important, you give iodine.

You give the child some iodine drops to get the fluoride outta

the body because just like fluoride pushes out iodine, iodine pushes

back and it pushes out fluoride.

I'll tell you something else.

Iodine protects against it protects against radioactive iodine, which

is the first thing to be released when there's a disaster like churn

Bill or Fukushima, or wind scale, which is now called Celler Field.

And those nuclear power plants, even though it's meant to be a reprocessing

plant now, they are still legally allowed to release radioactive waste into the sea,

and therefore it blows back on the land.

It's in the air.

That's the subject of chapter five.

But in the first few days and weeks after any kind of nuclear disaster,

whether it's covered up or whether we read about it in the press, iodine

being topped up with good iodine, natural iodine in your thyroid

gland and other organs will mean the radioactive iodine can't get a foothold.

So iodine is hugely protective against radioactive iodine as well as against

fluoride, chlorine, and bromine.

Do you worry about excessive iodine intake and things like any

form of sort of thyroid toxicosis or excessive thyroid function?

And when you talk about iodine supplementation, yeah, it's,

it's, um, it's a complicated one, which is why I'll never answer

the question about what dose do you give, because it depends on the person.

And if you are doing iodine, you have to be, you have to be working

with an experienced practitioner.

If somebody's got hyperthyroidism, like thyroid, toxicosis, you have

to be extremely careful with iodine and not just give it willy-nilly.

But the first thing to do is measure the iodine.

And actually, even in some people with overactive thyroid, you find vanishingly

low levels of iodine and maybe a thyroid is, you know, trying to make more thyroid.

Precisely because it's trying to find the iodine.

We don't know this almost always with underactive thyroid iodine is

useful, but you see, this is where medicine has gone astray because.

70 years ago, if you went to the doctor with a goiter, right?

An enlarged thyroid.

And the classic symptoms of low thyroid is your pale, cold, puffy,

constipated, sluggish brain.

They wouldn't give you thyroid hormone.

They'd, first of all, give you some iodine.

Yeah.

And 99% of the time, that would enable your thyroid gland to

make its own thyroid hormone.

Right.

And we are seeing an absolute epidemic of low thyroid, and it's both

untreated, undiagnosed, and overtreated.

Right.

That's a whole nother complicated story.

And No, it is, and uh, it's something again near and dear to my heart, but

I think, uh, sort of to prove your point, the point of this conversation,

I think the, the reason that things like Id no longer work is because the,

the huge amount of contaminants that, that, that are in the thyroid and

either sort of endocrine or uh, uh, active, active tissues in the body.

And then you, you throw all these, uh, these medicines at it and you create

this sort of environment where there's this, this polypharmacy going on.

There's this huge amount of medications being used and what should have just

been a simple nutrient deficiency is now, and a body saturated with toxins.

Too many drugs.

That's all true.

That is all true.

But there's another factor that has complicated it, which was meant to help.

And that is testing, laboratory testing of thyroid hormones has caused immense

confusion because firstly, they've created a so-called normal range, but that's

just based on a population average.

With half the population being deficient and takes no account of the fact that

the amount of thyroxine I might need in my system is not the amount of

thyroxine you might need in your system.

So I've seen some people are only, well, when their thyroxine level is at the top

of the so-called normal range, and many people who have the symptoms of thyroid

deficiency when it's actually in the middle of the so-called normal range.

And this normal range issue is a problem with vitamin D as well.

You know, the NHS have a normal range that's way too low.

Most of us need higher levels than that, and it's a question of confusing

what's average in a fairly sick and sickening population with what's healthy?

Yeah.

Or what's natural.

You don't necessarily want to be in the middle of the range.

And of course with thyroxine, they're not even measuring T four now, still less T

three, which is actually the active form of the molecule they should be measuring.

They're just measuring thyroid stimulating hormone.

TSH.

And your pituitary may be under or overproducing that

for any number of reasons.

Um, so again, this is about money saving and they ought to

be testing far more thoroughly.

But overall you should be treating the person, not the test results.

And if all the symptoms and the clinical picture indicate underactive

thyroid, then that's what they need.

Although I would always start with natural glandular thyroid rather than

going straight for the synthetic version.

And even before that, check the ID level.

Yeah, because the natural glandulars have got a balance of T three and T four.

T four.

Yeah.

I mean there are people who've been on T four for decades and they keep going back

to their GP and saying, I'm still tired.

So the GP and those T three goes up?

Yeah.

And they end up with palpitations and sweats and all the symptoms of overactive

thyroid still exhausted because what they needed is a little bit of T three,

which isn't in the standard prescription.

No, it's, uh, it is an issue and something we should, we'll have

to have another discussion about.

It's something again that I'm, I'm quite passionate about, so, but yeah.

Um, let, let's go back to, I suppose, um, air and air pollution.

I'd love to sort of, I know we're starting to run off on time, so I would

love to sort of just have the more discussion and then maybe look at,

at, at some, at some detox physiology.

'cause I think that's where most people sort of miss out is on how

the body's actually supposed to get rid of these, uh, toxins that

we're sort of steadily hoarding.

So, yeah, the mold piece, uh, it's obviously an, uh, issue predominantly

that has to do with this idea of sick building syndrome that was sort of trapped

inside, uh, mold, so than we should be.

Nobody opens the windows, um, et cetera.

And that just leads to the accumulation of a large amount of,

of moisture developing in houses.

Um, would you sort of mind just elaborating on that story there and,

and why mold is just such an issue?

I, I talk about this at length in the first book in chapter

three, which is the autumn chapter.

Uh, we have an endemic problem of mold in this country because it's

damp, it's cold, and it's damp, and people keep their windows shut.

And when your windows are shut, and of course your house is nicely

insulated to conserve energy, there's no ventilation anymore.

We do three things, right?

We bath and shower, we exhale with breathing out water vapor, and we cook.

So of course there's loads of moisture inside the home and it goes up to where

the walls meet the ceiling, the cornices, and even if you can't see black mold, it's

there unless you basically try and mimic the climate of the, of the Mediterranean

of Southern Europe where it's hot and dry.

And the dry bit is crucial, right?

It's not hot in Switzerland upper a mountain, but it is fairly dry.

You have to have the windows open and you have to, I should be shot down in flames

for saying this, but if it's winter and you've got the windows open, you have to

have the heating on and your visitors will be scandalized and they will say, but the

heat's going out the window to which you reply, yes, but so are the mold spores

and so are the toxic flame retardants.

Outgassing from all the soft furnishings that I bought before I

knew about all this stuff, right?

So yeah, you've got to have air circulation.

Gotta be warm, it's gotta be dry.

And you've gotta open the windows, and if you have got mold, you

can clean it off with borax.

Now, borax is not, borax is not a synthetic fungicide is natural

material that's been used for ages.

It's incredibly cheap.

That's why it's really hard to find.

And I can tell you that, um, there's a chemist near Elephant and Castle

Baldwins chemist that still sells Borax.

It's ridiculously cheap.

You can use it to clean off the mold, but you can also coat it on those surfaces

to prevent the mold accumulating.

Other than that, if you can't move to Cyprus, you've just gotta keep

your house warm and the windows open all the time, especially at night.

The other thing is about bedding, right?

So we sweat at night, so what we need to do in the morning is pull the duvet right

back, open the bed so it can air, because otherwise you've got mold accumulating.

And guess what?

The house dust mite loves the mold.

Right They are, um, yeah, they go together.

Um, so the house dust might actually feeds on the mold or is it the other way around?

No, the house dust might feeds on the mold.

On the other hand, if you're allergic to house dust mite, you

don't want your bed to get dusty.

So the compromise is you open the duvet and let the bed air with the window open,

reasonably warm room for at least an hour.

And then an hour after you've got up, you go back and you put the duvet over and you

cover the whole thing with the bedspread.

'cause you don't want the dust getting in there.

But if you leave the bed covered up after you've been sleeping in

it, you will have both moles and house dust might accumulating.

Um, it's not a perfect climate.

That's the best we can do.

But there are other sources of air pollution that we've talked about,

like air fresheners, like those ghastly scented candles, um, and so on.

But 90% of our time, unfortunately, is lived indoors.

And so if you can get rid of the air pollution inside your home.

You are getting rid of 90% of that which you are exposed to.

Um, and that's, that's what I recommend in detail how to do it

in chapter seven of the new book.

Air Pollution from Car Fumes is a more difficult one, and I think it really can

only be addressed by government policies, um, by us getting out of our cars.

And we won't do that until we have decent public transport system.

What we need is what they have in Finland, which is a really good public

transport systems, affordable to everyone.

Clean, green, efficient, pleasant, spacious.

I mean, if you go by train in Finland, I'm reliably informed

there's one whole carriage, which is a crash for the kids to play in.

You know, it's an appealing option.

And you know, the fact is at the moment, if I want to go from London to Glasgow, I

will go by train, but it will be cheaper to fly, which is a complete scandal.

So again, government action has got to make the train cheaper than the plane.

And I know a lot of people in the health world don't agree with me on this, but I

think we do have to get out of our cars.

And I don't think electric vehicles are the answer either, because although

they're relatively non-polluting in the place where they are, what has

to be dug up out of the earth, um, to provide the rare earth minerals

that they need, you know what I mean?

That, you know, there are tribes being thrown off their land in Indonesia

to get at the nickel, and there are kids down the mines in Congo.

This is child slave labor.

In order to get the materials for the batteries, for us to put in our electric

vehicles and then feel virtuous, you know, it doesn't make any sense.

We need properly funded pleasant green, cheap public transport so that it

actually is convenient, more convenient and cheaper to use the Boston train

and tram than it is to use our cars.

Yeah, sadly.

I think it's a case of outta sight outta mind If you don't have to sort

of witness the, the ahor conditions that people are sort of have to go

through to actually provide us with these, uh, with the nickel for the

batteries, then it, it, it's easily sort of swept under the rug, isn't it?

It it, it becomes less of an issue.

Yeah.

Which is why we need more education and um, yeah.

In my chapter about air pollution, I referenced a wonderful organization called

Survival International for Tribal peoples, and they are fighting for the rights of

these beautiful, ancient tribal peoples in Indonesia have been living in the jungle

on their islands for tens of thousands of years, doing no harm to anyone acting

as natural stewards of the forest.

And their government is trying to throw them off to make way for nickel mining

so we can drive electric vehicles.

It's insane.

Yeah, as an everyday person, this, it can definitely seem overwhelming, I think.

However, I think, and this is where your book comes into it, um, if you just make

these sort of individual, uh, choices as a consumer, you are supporting the

system, be it directly or indirectly.

So I think that's important to realize and that you can actually, yeah,

you are making a huge difference.

You change your choices, but you also tell all your friends about why you

are doing so and spread the word.

Yeah.

Vote with your pounds and your dollars opposed

to, yeah, it, it's important

and we need to talk about detox and how it works in the body.

I think.

So I think that's definitely something, uh, that's, uh, quite relevant as I think,

well, as I know a lot of people's, it just provides an underpinning as to why

you should be doing this, doesn't it?

It provides you just with a, that little bit of extra sort of.

Understanding.

So yeah, if you could just run us through, um, the basic

detoxification systems of the body.

We don't need to go as in depth as Gluc ation and all of that obviously,

but uh, just how those systems work.

Okay.

So we detox through sweating.

We detox through breathing out.

Um, we detox through excretion through urine and feces, but most of all

it's the liver, which is our primary detoxification organ and the liver.

And to some extent, the small intestine produce enzymes.

An enzyme is a substance that changes one substance into another in the body.

It's a long, complex protein molecule, and its job essentially is to change

X into Y. Now the detox enzymes are evolved to change something

toxic into something non-toxic.

So first we need to rewind a moment and ask why the body would have

detox systems in the first place.

From an evolutionary perspective, why do we make detox enzymes?

Because we weren't encountering, you know, petrochemicals and plastics

and heavy metals and all that until a couple of hundred years ago.

The answer is that these systems are primarily evolved to detoxify

our own hormones and our own natural substances that we produce that

are not inherently toxic, but would be if they accumulated too much.

So the way the body works is if you need estrogen or cortisone or

testosterone, the body makes it for when it's needed or thyroid hormone.

And then when it's done its job, it has to be deconstructed back

down into its component molecules and those have to be excreted.

So that's what our detox systems have primarily evolved for, for

breaking down our own hormones.

And our own natural substances.

And also, you know, to cope with the occasional natural poison

from stinging nettles, poison ivy, a spider bite, snake venom,

scorpion poison, that kind of thing.

And by chance, some of those enzymes in some of the human population can also

deal with organophosphate insecticides and, and that sort of thing, but at

least in a third of us, they can't.

So how does it work?

There are two main phases.

Two detoxification in the liver.

Phase one is carried out by a group of enzymes called the P four 50 cytochrome.

And so cytochrome just means they look colored under the microscope

when they were first spotted.

Um, and their job is to carry out a simple biochemical reaction like

oxidation reduction or hydrolysis.

Which activates the substance.

It doesn't initially make it safer, it actually makes it more toxic.

But those toxic intermediary metabolites are only supposed to last

for a fraction of a millisecond in the body before phase two kicks in.

Now the phase two detox enzymes do something called conjugation.

That means they add or conjugate in a way means to marry, so

they join another molecule onto the activated toxic molecule.

And what they join on will be something that's water soluble.

So it could be sulfate, it could be glucuronide, um, it could be one of about

half a dozen water soluble molecules or groups that when added to the activated

toxic molecule, makes it water soluble.

And that means you can excrete it in the bile.

Through the feces or in the urine via the kidneys.

Okay?

Now the problem we've got is if phase one is doing its job well, but phase

two isn't, you are gonna get sick.

And I would say almost everyone I've seen with chronic fatigue syndrome or multiple

chemical sensitivity and many other illnesses, they've got an upregulated

phase one and a downregulated phase two.

So yes, they immediately convert any toxin into its ac, into its activated

version, but the phase two processes are not so good, and so they get very toxic.

Now the thing about these enzymes that we can do something about is this,

both phase one and especially phase two enzymes work with co-factors.

Now, we did learn this in medical school and we learned that the

co-factors for these detox enzymes.

Are vitamins, mostly the B vitamins, B2B three, B six, B nine, which is

folate, and B12, and the minerals, you know, zinc, copper, selenium,

magnesium, all of these minerals and vitamins are crucial cofactors,

without which the enzymes can't work.

But the way I was taught it at medical school was it was totally assumed that

those vitamins and minerals just are there and the enzymes can make use to them.

But the fact is we are mostly deficient in those crucial nutrients without

which the detox enzymes or phase two cannot do their job and keep us safe.

Now we have a vicious circle here.

We're nutritionally deficient because the use of synthetic fertilizers has

drained all the nutrients outta the soil, and therefore, out of the plants we're

eating, if we're not eating organic.

Um, and therefore we've got less nutrients.

But also we are exposed to all these environmental toxins and

alcohol and cigarettes and drugs like paracetamol, which all require

intensive detox from the liver enzymes.

Therefore, we're using up those nutrient cofactors more quickly

and not taking them insufficiently.

That's one of the many reasons why the government's recommended daily

amounts of vitamin and mineral intake are complete nonsense.

You know, they might be true if you were living 300 years ago on a little

local organic peasant farm and eating everything that you had picked the same

day and not exposed to any toxins at all.

Um, but the way we are living now, we need vastly more nutrients.

So even if you are genetically predisposed to be a poor detoxifier,

really good nutrition can make a big difference combined with knowing the

source of the toxins and avoiding them.

And that goes back to eating organic.

Filtering your water and being very careful with your

electromagnetic exposure.

So it is perfectly possible to live much more safely than we are doing

even in a polluted world, but we need to know how, and we need to support

our liver in every way possible.

That starts with supporting the gut microbiome.

So eating lots and lots of fresh vegetables.

Notice I said vegetables rather than fruit and vegetables.

Um, you know, a bit of fruit from time to time is fine, but not

fruit juice and not dried fruit, because that concentrates the sugar.

We need to look after our microbiome and we need to take probiotics

if it's not in good condition.

There are loads of herbs that support the liver, and really good

herbalists know about this, but the one that everyone knows about

is silly Marin or milk thistle.

Milk thistle is like a brilliant tonic for the liver.

You know, so vegetable juicing, organic vegetable juicing gives

you the antioxidants that are an essential part of detox.

Why?

Because that phase one releases lots of free radicals and they are

oxidizing agents, which are toxic.

And the way to deal with oxidizing agents is by having antioxidants in your system.

You can do that by eating a salad.

And if you are poorly and a salad is not enough, then you juice your

vegetables and drink your salad.

Um, and yeah, of course there are lots of nutritional supplements, but

basically raw vegetables is our best source of antioxidants, and that's why

organic vegetable juicing is crucial.

It's not actually doing the detoxifying, but it's preventing the natural detox

process from poisoning you with the oxidative products of that process.

And lastly, I said before that we are genetically different.

Some of us naturally have liver enzyme detox systems that work

brilliantly and some of us don't.

And what that means is that the kind of detox protocols, people like me,

are always going on about like saunas, like um, vegetable juicing, like Epsom

salts, bath, like colonic, hydrotherapy.

All of those things, while they're good for everyone, are crucial

for some people's actual survival.

So you can get genetic testing to see exactly what your detox

systems can and cannot do.

My favorite company for this is called Life Code gx, capital G,

small X run by brilliant nutritional therapist, Emma Beek, who knows

more biochemistry than I do.

I mean, she is brilliant and you get a really clear report with

this that you probably need a practitioner to interpret for you.

But again, they can recommend.

Practitioners.

Indeed, I recommend practitioners on my own website because I've retired from

the fray to concentrate on writing.

But the point is that if your genetic detox profile shows that you are okay

with this form of detox, but you're really not very good at enzyme such

and such doesn't work well, well, what co-factors does enzyme X require?

And if it requires, let's say B12 and folate, that means you need loads

more of that than the next person.

Not that you can transform your genetic propensity, but you can at

least enable your not so perfect detox enzyme to be the best it can,

to do the best that it's capable of.

And beyond that, it's avoiding the source of toxins.

You know, the two most extreme multiple chemical sensitivity people

I've had, one had to go live in the desert and one had to go living.

And live in the middle of a very remote forest because they had to be

away from all sources of pollution.

But the vast majority of people, by sorting out their nutrition

and avoiding the toxins, can do fine even in the middle of a city.

Yeah, and I think that's important to point out is that you'll always

have outliers and people who have very compromised immune systems.

Um, but for the most part, you rarely can get away with these, uh, issues by simply

just focusing on getting the basics right.

Uh, and by util and by.

Lowering the toxic burden and by improving your diet and just taking care

of yourself as nature intended you to.

Uh, and I think for most people, that then does away with the need

for a lot of these expensive tests, a lot of these confusing tests.

And when you sort of got that dialed in and, and if you, there are still

issues, then you can work with a practitioner to maybe fine tune some

of these, the finer points of your biology, uh, that may be dysfunctional.

And I think that's just something that's quite important to, to end off with, is

that it is, it's not a death sentence and it's, it is not as scary as it sounds.

It, it, you just need to follow a, a. A guy, which is where, again, your

book is just so well laid out and so supportive, uh, for the everyday person.

And no, it really is, it's, it's an amazing read, so I highly suggest that.

I think it's, mm-hmm.

Sorry, I, I just think a couple of things important to emphasize.

Yeah.

One is that it is very clear that the chronic degenerative illnesses that so

many people are suffering from today, are suffering from today are primarily

not genetic, because if they were genetic in origin, they would stay at the same

level through the changing generations.

And the very fact that they've increased exponentially over two or three

generations tells us that we are dealing with an environmental factor, not a

genetic factor, but it's the impact of those environmental factors, nutrition

and toxicity on our gene expression.

And just to clarify, one of the thing you mentioned about people

supporting their immune systems, that's absolutely important.

What we've been talking about though, is supporting the detox systems.

Which is not exactly the same, although it's crucial for the immune system because

toxins impact on the immune system.

But just to say, you know, our immune system's been doing a brilliant

job for billions of years, but it does need the tools to do the job.

And those tools for the immune cells directly are vitamin C, vitamin vitamin

D, vitamin, zinc, selenium, sunshine, fresh air, uh, love and happiness,

sunshine.

Yeah.

No, and, and the stress component cannot be, uh, overstated.

I think everybody just sort of looks at stress as the last thing to, to deal

with, where, in my opinion anyway, it should probably be one of the first, um,

the moment you have a stressed uh, body, you you're going to have overactivation

of that immune system constantly.

So yeah, it's,

I think that's true, but I worry about people getting

into a destructive loop of.

Feeling stressed about the fact that they can't eliminate their stress, you

know, and we can't eliminate our stress.

We can reduce it.

Um, we can do what we can, but we are living in a stress genic universe.

Yeah, no, I, I think,

and we shouldn't beat ourselves up about the fact that we

can't be totally relaxed all the time.

Oh

yeah, no, definitely.

And I mean, uh, I think that could very quickly get us into a conversation

about the cell danger response, which is another, uh, love of mine.

But, um, I, I, I, yeah.

Uh, it's, it's, I think it's making the best of a bad situation and, and just

working again within the means that you have to make the best decisions

that you can and then to sort of try and forget it as much as you can and

just sort of move forward as life.

I think that's right.

And what I say in the book is you don't need to make all the changes at once.

You know, everything you do will make a difference, you know, one change per week.

Oh yeah.

No, definitely.

It, it all adds up, doesn't it?

It does.

And it's just about the plugging those holes one at a time and Exactly.

Uh, and the bucket will slowly start to fill.

Exactly.

Dr. Goodman, you have been an absolute star.

Thank you so much.

Um, you've mentioned once or twice now that, uh, you, you are,

you've re uh, moved outta clinical practice to focus on writing.

Uh, what's next in the pipeline for you?

In terms in terms of books?

I am working on a third book, but I'm not going to say too much about

it at the moment because it's embryonic and an embryo is a delicate thing, uh,

it doesn't want to be talked about.

Fair

enough.

Okay.

Well, I wait for bated breath to, to have, uh, to receive it.

It'll be a couple of years.

It takes a long time to give birth to a book.

That's

all right.

I, uh, your books are definitely worth waiting for, so there's,

uh, there are no issues there.

Thank you,

RO uh, thank you so much.

It's a pleasure.

Where can people find you?

Oh, you mean the, the world of social media and all that?

Yes.

Where's the best place for people connect to connect

and all of that good stuff.

Okay.

So start with the website, because on the website are all for, I

think they're called social media handles.

So I am on, I'm still astonished about this myself, but I have got

someone helping me with the tech side 'cause I don't possess a smartphone.

I am on Instagram, LinkedIn, uh, Facebook, and a little bit on

Twitter, which is now called X.

Um, but all those, you can access all the social media through the

website, which is dr jenny goodman.com.

It's just dr jenny goodman.com.

And if you go to the resources section.

You'll see lots of podcasts that I've done.

This one hopefully will eventually be on there.

But you will also, um, see my list of colleagues, recommended

practitioners who do this same kind of medicine that I was doing.

Um, some of whom have sat in with me, many of whom have sat in with

me actually in my consultations.

Yeah.

And we, we'll be sure to, to link to, to all of those

links in the show notes as well.

Great.

And, uh, as well as the BSEM, uh, yeah, your, your colleagues, Dr. Hil, uh,

included are, are amazing physicians in their own rights and absolutely brilliant.

I mean,

I've learned everything I know from the British Society for

Ecological Medicine, and I would say, you just mentioned that you're very

interested in the cell danger response.

The person in the BSEM who is an absolute expert on that is Jillian Kraver.

Do you know Gillian Kraver?

No, not at all.

Um, okay.

So email me, Dr. Michael, Dr. Dr. Downing.

Yeah, yeah,

yeah.

She's, she's a colleague of mine and Sarah, my Hills and Damian Downings.

Okay,

perfect.

Um, Jillian with one L, Jillian Kraver, she's given some

brilliant lectures about the cell danger response, so you wanna interview her?

Definitely.

Well, Dr. Goodman, thank you so much for your time and, uh, we'll definitely

have to have you on again soon to talk about just everything else.

All right.

So that would be awesome.

The gaps you'll

find as you go through this, you'll find what

we didn't remember to talk about.

We'll talk about those things next time.

Perfect.

Thank you.

All right.

Lovely to talk with you, Rob.

Take care.