96- How Are Environmental Toxins Impacting Our Health with Tom Malterre

Bryan:00:15The air we breathe, the soil we touch, the water we drink and everything around us has significant importance in our health, but all of these essentials in life are slowly being polluted and in a lot of cases we can't even see the toxins that are starting to accumulate. The environments we are in regularly will cause the most changes to our health, whether it is good or bad for us. A good example is mold exposure. Mold and mycotoxins are usually invisible in the sense that the mold is hidden and the mycotoxins are in the air. However, constant exposure to these toxins can cause extreme illness or even death, as we just saw at the children's hospital in Seattle. And while environmental toxins may sound very gloomy, we have some actionable steps you can take in this episode to learn how to minimize exposure. Yeah, what's up everyone?

Bryan:01:12I'm Bryan Carroll and I'm here to help people who have an injury or illness that holds them back from enjoying the outdoors. And today I am joined by Tom Malterre who does a lot of education around environmental toxins. We'll be talking about microplastics, pesticides, chemicals, and products, how to improve your microbiome and so much more. So let's go chat with Tom Malterre. Tom Malterre is a certified functional medicine practitioner and an educator for the Institute of functional medicine. You hold both a bachelor's and master's degree in nutritional sciences from best here university and as a past medical affairs team member at thorn research, Tom has lectured across North America on various functional medicine and nutritional biochemistry topics and currently offers online educational programs at whole life, nutrition.net and foundationsFXmed.com. Tom is also a bestselling author of the elimination diet and has been in clinical practice in Bellingham, Washington for the last 15 years. Thanks for coming onto the show, Tom.

Tom:02:15Hey, it's a pleasure to be here. A fellow, Washingtonian, hiker and climber. It's a, it's great to share time with you about this important subject. For protecting the outside that we both so much love and cherish.

Bryan:02:31I love talking with other practitioners that make it a priority to get outside, which you definitely do. You get out to hike, climb, and we live in a beautiful place to make that happen. So as we get deeper into this conversation about environmental toxins, let's learn a little bit about your background and who you are.

Tom:02:49Yeah, sure. So you know, as a kid I was raised by a psychologist who had me always doing systems thinking, you know, who are you, how do you affect the environment around you know, what are you saying and doing and how does it affect you and everybody else? So I guess when my family was sick and we got introduced to another systems guy who is named dr John McDougall, he's a kind of a dietary guru in the vegetarian vegan space. And he said, look, everything that you put into your mouth as medicine, you guys don't need any sort of meds to fix yourself. You just need to change your diet and get some exercise. So my family was pretty sick at the time, you know, we're a little overweight. We weren't doing so well. My mom had joint and foot pain, back pain.

Tom:03:31My dad was severe set, my brother and I were heavier set. And we just changed our diet and started thinking about food as medicine. And sure enough, you know, we got better, we played more tennis. We were getting out in Hawaiian surfing and playing in the water and, and on land and, and all of a sudden life was good. So I just started thinking, wow, you know, how come more people don't know about this? So I start studying about how our environment changes our internal environment. So I started looking at diet. I started looking at, we're now what's called functional medicine. So all the signals that come into somebody's life and how it changes their health outcomes. And in the process, I ended up attending Bastar university, got a bachelor's of science, master's of science. Came out of there, worked for a supplement company called foreign research as part of the medical affairs team where I educated across the United States and Canada. Was associated with the Institute for functional medicine. The autism research Institute learned a ton about how the environment affects human cell function. And here we are today, you know, 15 years in clinical practice, thousands upon thousands of people. It helped through our books, programs and my clinical outcomes, you know, from our, our practice here. And, and I'm totally convinced now more than ever that you know, what we think, what we eat, what we drink, what we breathe becomes us. So that's where I got here. Okay.

Bryan:04:45Yeah. And this is a fascinating topic because we can have the best foods, but there's still all these toxins around us in our environments that can have huge impacts on our health. And so we're going to touch on a lot of different hot topics right now. We're going to talk about plastics, GMO pesticides air pollution. So you know, being in a world full of these toxins, how do we start to minimize our exposure because we don't necessarily have companies on our best side cause a lot of companies are trying to make money instead of trying to keep you healthy. So a good example of this is people using baby powder and as bestest was actually found to be in baby powder. So can you talk a little bit about some of these dangers that we don't even know of while using these products that might come out 10, 20 years later down the road that there was issues with those products?

Tom:05:44Yeah, let's back up. Let's just say that we're living in a capitalistic society where the currency that is found to be valuable, quote unquote in a, our current thinking is paper currency. It's gold, it's silver. It's something that can be exchanged for a tangible item that you can possess. Now that thinking of what is truly valuable to you is going to either bring us health or bring us from health. So the true currencies of life are not a dollar bill. You cannot breathe a dollar bill. You cannot drink a dollar bill. You can not eat a dollar bill. You can't place a dollar bill in your heart and give you the feelings of love and happiness and acceptance. It doesn't happen. It doesn't exist. It's not possible. So what you can do though is you can inhale clean mountain air and all of a sudden feel revitalized.

Tom:06:41You can drink clean mountain water and feel like you've just bloomed from being a sagging, a flower to being a vibrant flower. You can eat fresh mountain blueberries and wild game and whatever you can find, you know, that's it's vital foods and you can feel life come into your body. So in my mind, true currency is air, water, and food. And then of course, loving connection, right? Because without those things, we know human species die. I mean, literally try and, and try and hold your breath. You know, unless you're David Blaine or whatever, try and hold your breath for more than five minutes and see what happens, right? Try and go five days without drinking water or try and go five weeks without eating food. It's not going to work, right? Usually you have about three minutes without hair, three days without water and three weeks without food.

Tom:07:36And most people are in problematic States if not dead. So those are the things that really bring us life to imagine that an extra Hummer or you know, whatever your G wagon is going to give you, you know, life, happiness, health, it's impossible. It can't happen. So what we've done is we've turned over our logistics of running an entire country and an entire globe to multi-cam glomerate international corporations that now profit and they have shareholders and they have to meet certain quarterly numbers. And unless they do that, then they will crumble and they'll disintegrate and they won't survive. So what's happened now is we've turned our entire global focus to economic gain and the profits from chemicals are huge. They're massive. Whether you're building houses or you're fueling cars with oil or whatever you're doing the, the chemicals needed to do that are very expensive, very profit oriented.

Tom:08:51So you and I probably aren't conscious of the fact that the American of pediatrics was behind the scenes in 2010 looking at all the chemical data in the United States and they came up with a beautiful paper. It was a policy statement and it said, look, women, children of childbearing age, what in the world are we doing? We're exposing these people to a tremendous amount of chemicals. Look at this. There are 27 trillion pounds of chemicals being imported or produced in the United States every single year. No, that's 74 billion pounds of chemicals per day. That's 250 pounds per person per day of chemicals being imported or produced in United States and unfortunately when these things are being introduced, produced, put into mass production, there's not a lot of safety rules, regulations, policies to make sure these things don't harm us or children or animals or the air or the water. It just doesn't happen.

Tom:09:54We have these chemical companies that are given these 90 day windows to prove their own chemicals harmful. Otherwise they get approved. I mean it's, it's ridiculous how easy it is. Let, let me give you an example. 1976, we had something called the the TSEA. Okay. The toxic substance control act and this toxic substance control act was so weak in regulating chemicals and their potential harmful effects or scientifically proven harmful effects that when [inaudible] came in, you were talking about a specialist in baby powder. When a specialist came in to be regulated and it was proven that there were over 10,000 deaths per year associated with a specificity. The, the policy was so weak that the court cases couldn't even get it withdrawn from the marketplace, couldn't even get it tightly regulated. The chemical companies could still use it, whatever they wanted to. We couldn't regulate it enough.

Tom:10:50It took a separate act of Congress just to regulate a specificity. And now with our current policies in our current political state, with our current president, the regulations are becoming more and more lax all the time. There are certain herbicides that were deemed to be harmful to children's neurological development that are being now deregulated. Asbestos itself is on the table to be deregulated. I mean there's, there's a lot of different things that say, well you know what, by you restricting the sale of this, you restrict profit, you restrict monetary gain, and that's harmful to our economy. But what we're not thinking of is look, population growth is, you know, growing a at, you know, what, 3% per year, no, excuse me, 0.77% per year, 0.77% population growth chemicals are 3% per year. So we've got over three times the level of chemical use being increased versus population use.

Tom:11:56Meaning for every year that we're spewing out all these chemicals and quote unquote profiting from them, then you know, we're breathing more polluted air, we're drinking more polluted water, we're eating more polluted food and we're not going to have health. We can't have vitality. And unfortunately, what people aren't even considering is one of the most testing systems is the brain. So when you're inhaling air pollutants, for example, it goes up through the olfactory nerve outlets and you can actually get toxins to the mitochondria of the brain, which become very sensitive to these and they'll, it'll start changing your energy production in the brain and it will basically shut down your brain function to a sub optimal level. So we don't even know because we're not even as cognizant, conscious, aware, bright, intelligent as we used to be prior to this pollution. We don't even know what we're doing to ourselves because we can't even experience life to the optimal state that, that nature had intended. So this whole thing is a, is is kind of a a bizarre cycle we've thrown ourselves into. We want to experience life and really profit and be healthy and happy and we're killing ourselves by trying to profit monetarily.

Bryan:13:17There's a lot to unpack there. First off are most air pollutants small enough to pass directly into the blood brain barrier or does it have to be my my Newt levels in order to make that happen?

Tom:13:30Well see that's, that's where you start getting into particular matter sizes and whatnot. Yeah, so you can pass small particles if there's a leaky blood brain barrier and that can occur when there's a leaky gut barrier, interestingly enough. And it can occur with multiple other issues, nutrient deficiencies hormonal imbalances, toxic onslaughts from other areas other than actual air pollution. So yes, you can pass particles straight through the blood brain barrier. And if you're breathing in 10,000, 800 cubic feet per day, then what in the world, you're going to be exposed to a tremendous amount if there's lots of particles in the air. Now what I find interesting is that we're looking at this carbon-based issue. We're looking at this air pollution as a way of being greenhouse gases that cause climate change. What we're not considering is the sulfur dioxide that polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.

Tom:14:30There's the burp substances in the air, the plastic Burke substances like doxins. If you're honest, all these things that are in the air change our cellular function. So it's not just changing the climate, it's changing who you are. So to give you an example, I mean forest fires in California, right? I haven't heard anything in the news about how air pollution itself is changing moisture levels in forests. The research is solid. It basically shows the more air pollution you have, sulfur dioxide you have, the more the leaves of the plants inhale and exhale differently and they're not exhaling as much moisture. They're not retaining as at the right times to create rain and they're maintaining too much. And so they're there, or excuse me, they're excreting too much at the wrong time. And so they're drying out the plants. So the breathing apparatus, the stomata of the plant where it keeps in the CO2 and then exhales, you know, oxygen and then keeps in moisture and gives moisture out. When we need proper rain clouds, then whole function is shifting because of the chemicals in the air and it's leading to more droughts and more forest fires. So climate change is only part of the story when it comes to air pollution. There's a lot more to that story. [inaudible].

Bryan:15:56And then correct me if I'm wrong, but earlier you said, if I am a company and I have a product I'm trying to sell, I have 90 days to try to prove to you that my product is harmful. Is that correct?

Tom:16:10Yeah. You're supposed to be running safety trials and oftentimes those trials are sponsored by the actual companies who are launching the product and you leave it to public a response. So if there's a safety group that's been keeping track of your chemical development and they're concerned about it, they can try and submit data to prove your chemical harmful, but then it would cost them money to prove it harmful. So what's usually done is what they consider quote unquote due diligence. And I'll do these 90 days safety trials on rats. And what they'll find is they'll, they'll give the rat, you know, the chemical and they'll try and give an isolated component of the chemical compounds. So let's take Roundup for example. So you've seen all the trials in the news about Roundup and whatnot. Okay. So they say glyphosate is the active ingredient in Roundup.

Tom:16:57So we're going to taste the test, the toxicity of glyphosate nonsense. Glyphosate is a mixture along with 27 other co-formulation chemicals and actually literally hundreds more, but 27 primary other ones, and usually the glyphosate will be 30 40 up to 50 60% of the product. What else is in there? Well, what we're finding is if you look at the literature and the research on this, and now all the internal documents that are being disclosed in these lawsuits, there's a lot of other chemicals in there that have a lot more potential harm to human health than glyphosate. So the company got to choose the quote unquote active chemical to discern as the potential harmful compound and only perform safety studies on net. And then the rest of the co-formulation chemicals they put, they are proprietary in their ingredients, right? So what does that mean? But when we test some of those other substances, something called POV, for example, up to a thousand times more toxic than the glyphosate, but we don't have to do safety testing on that because it's quote unquote inert and proprietary.

Tom:18:06So there's a lot of little loopholes. There's a lot of ways of getting things approved onto the marketplace. The don't necessarily bode to human health in a huge way. So I would, I would I'd be really concerned as I am not, not to mention, here's one more other thing that I thought was fascinating. If you're going to compare chemical exposure to something and non chemical exposure, don't you want to do like a saline solution or some sort of control that's a true control. So like a person is going to take glyphosate for example, and a person is going to take water, right? So water versus glyphosate, well hopefully the glyphosate isn't contaminated with water but or the water not contaminated glyphosate. But it's, it's a control. It's true control chemical, no chemical. Well what we found once again in some of these papers is it the rats that are given this glyphosate are fed Roundup ready grain foods that are Laden with glyphosate. So there really is no control. So they say it's safe because the same amount of cancers occur in the same amount of weight, but there was no control. The rat chow is oftentimes very high. And a lot of agricultural chemicals. It's very poor, green quality Laden with chemicals. So the rats are toxic to begin with. So we don't really have true controls on the chemicals.

Bryan:19:34Yeah, that's super fascinating. So in a lot of different trials where they're using rats to experiment on, it's already contaminated from the very beginning,

Tom:19:43From the very beginning. No one's even looking at that.

Bryan:19:47Interesting. Yeah, that, that is fascinating and there's, there's probably a lot of people out there that are thinking, you know, I'm probably not that exposed to environmental toxins. You know, you might live away from big cities and whatnot. You might not be close to freeways, but there was a study a couple of years ago that they did testing on the fluids in umbilical cords in women and the babies were before even being born, already had around 270 chemicals that they could test for in the umbilical cord. Did you hear about that study?

Tom:20:24Yeah, there's actually multiple studies two cord blood studies, one in Canada and one in the U S as well. But yes, that's very well known. And the interesting piece is if you look at some of the animal based studies, the insect studies, you can find residues of these toxins in the Arctic circle. You can find these residues in, in the rainforests, in, in, you know, Ghana. I mean there's, there's, there's places everywhere that have these incredible levels of plastics and environmental pollutants that you would never guess that they are there, but they're in high enough concentrations that you're seeing the reproductive behaviors change in birds and ants and it's all over the globe. In fact, there's not a single place that you can test life on planet earth without finding endocrine disrupting chemical residues. It's, it doesn't exist anymore. So what we don't know is what life would be without them. What we do know is that disease risks are rising exponentially every single year. Now, let me, let me ask you a question. What's the one thing you could do for your health that would contribute to lung cancer, heart disease, elevated blood pressure, type two diabetes? What's the one thing you could do as a human right now? Start participating in it and you could increase your risk for all those diseases,

Bryan:21:45Probably smoking

Tom:21:46There it is smoking. So let's imagine that we're burning more things these days. We're producing more chemicals that have harmful effects on the environment. We were running all these fossil fuel based vehicles. What are we doing to the air? I can't talk like we're making burnt particulate matter in the air. So as we pollute the air more and more, it's the equivalent of more and more people smoking. So I literally have an app on my phone that's, it's called shit I smoke and I can see now in my neck of the woods, you know? All right, what's the equivalency of me going outside and playing outside with my kids or hiking or whatever of me. How many cigarettes am I smoking today? Oh, it's only 1.2 cigarettes. That's great. You know, on bad days it's seven to nine cigarettes a day. Right? So we're actually correlating the air pollution to how much damage it's doing to our system. Very much like we were smoking. Is vaping the same way? I don't know enough about the differences between vaping and smoking to, to speak to that. I mean, I don't know about filtration versus non filtration. I don't, I don't know. I wish I did.

Bryan:22:56So right now there's a big undertaking going on where there's a company's going out and trying to clean up large sections of the ocean that are just filled with garbage and plastic bottles and all sorts of stuff. And there's a lot more pictures coming out showing that process. And I actually just saw a video a couple of days ago. One of the very large ships that they have doing this cleanup has first started to pull stuff out of the the ocean. So you had mentioned microplastics, which is a lot smaller than a water bottle, but it all starts from let's say, a water bottle in the ocean. So can we start talking a little bit about microplastics, what microplastics can do to the body and how they start breaking down in the ocean or the environment?

Tom:23:50Yeah, sure. So in essence, what we're concerned about is that plastics have a or additives to the plastics have a structure that's very similar to human hormones. In fact, you know, BPA originally, a lot of people don't know in 18, 90, one was brought in by Diane and then this company started using it as a synthetic estrogen. So it was used to put into animal feed to fatten up animals. And then after the 19 hundreds, it was actually used in, in humans. They had some, some early trials trying to, to use it as a hormone replacement. And then it got replaced by another chemical that turned out to be very harmful, but it was put on the side, it's put on the shelf. You know, there was a bunch of stockpile. This BPA that was sitting around it got repurposed when we found out that you could use it to add to plastics, you can soften up the plastics of PVC, whatnot.

Tom:24:41And you know, you could, you could do all sorts of fun things with the BPA. Well, this is a hormone substance and hormones act on the Pico gram level is a teeny, teeny, tiny amount in yourselves to actually change the entire gene expression of yourself. Right? Hormones released from a distant tissue travels sooner. The tissues changes DNA expression. That's the definition of hormone. So you've got this substance that can change your gene expression that's floating around. Now in the environment, if you have a large piece of it, you can't get it into yourselves. If you break it down into multiple different small pieces, you can get those more into yourselves. They're sticky, they stick in your fat, they stay around in your body for a period of time and they change your hormonal expression. So that's a problem. We don't want people getting more fat.

Tom:25:32We don't want them having more diabetes, obesity issues, you know, that's not, that's something we want. So how do we then lower that exposure? That would be the wise thing. Well, I don't know if you've seen the news, but our president just promoted plastic production. He wants now a lot of our fossil fuels to be made into more plastics. He wants more plastics on the planet because it's very profitable. So now we're producing more plastics and we can have these things that the bond is not tight usually on, on BPA, for example. And it can separate from the plastic quite readily, constantly in our environment. So we're, we're going to be getting it in our air or water or food or soil. We're going to be getting all over the place. Microplastics is one way you can get that, that's in that article that you heard me speak about was on, on teabags.

Tom:26:19You know, they're now making plastic tea bags and if you heat up that plastic tea bag, you know, and you can get thousands of times exposure to the plastic you normally would in your daily basis just by drinking tea. And the microplastics can give you an idea of how small they are. You know, like human hair for example, is about 75,000 nanometers. And these nano-plastics are about 100 nanometers. So that's a considerably smaller than the human hair by, you know, factors of multiple hundreds. So this is teeny, teeny, teeny, teeny, teeny, teeny amounts. If you're going through the ocean and you're trying to you know, scoop this up, there's no way you could scoop it up with any net. There's no way you could do it at all. These microplastics are coming off of our clothing when they're made out of nylon and other plastic derivatives.

Tom:27:10These, these plastics are, are, are everywhere. It's great that people are going and cleaning up the plastic bottles and they're cleaning up the waste in the ocean. And if you ever do any Marine biology, you know, research and environmental toxicology and Marine animals, you'll see that all turtles and seabirds and whales and you know, I mean, gosh, you'll see these whales getting cut open and autopsy and they'll have plastic sheets of plastic bags and all sorts of stuff in their bellies. Killer whales, same thing, a sea bird, same thing. So yeah, it's great that that's getting cleaned up. But the true solution is don't use the plastics because they will get out into the environment and they will degrade over time and they'll become microplastics. And just think about this, come on, not all plastics float. So plastics that may be on the surface of the ocean might be a a teen teen fraction of what's on the bottom of the ocean.

Tom:28:03And what we're finding is when animals die, they sink to the bottom of the ocean. But the fats from those animals will float up and sometimes they'll float up and fats stick to plastics and plaques is sick, the fats, so they'll float up with the plastics that are on the bottom of the ocean and we end up with this sea surface level of highly, highly concentrated plastic residues and other chemical residues that are live what's called lipophilic or love fat. There'll be 100,000 times that of those found elsewhere in the ocean. So the seat micro seeds surface layer is, is 100,000 times more concentrated in these plastics and other chemicals. So yeah, you can filter stuff out, but you're not going to get a lot of what's already there. Okay.

Bryan:28:47This is probably a lot bigger than the scope of what we'll be talking about. But in an effort to try and clean up all those microplastics that are at the bottom of the ocean, can you inject a fat layer at the bottom in a secluded area and have it bind to the plastics and raise it up and then go through and clean all that up?

Tom:29:09Technically you could, I don't know how you would get the plastic to separate, but I'm sure that technology could be discovered. Sure. Yeah. I think the, the question is do we want to start mopping up the floor or do we want to stop keeping the faucet on? Right. So we probably should turn off the faucet and do that as well. So if we're going to be mopping up the floor, it's probably a good idea not to you know, continue going on. So let me give you an example. You know, our, our current economy promotes a sale of plastics and plastics are incredibly profitable industry. I ran across a merchant article promoting plastics as a, as an investment opportunity in 2012 and it basically said, you know there was an additional 745 million, 840,000 pounds of BPA that was produced additionally in the year 2012.

Tom:30:05So normally that the annual total at that time was 12.1 billion pounds of BPA that's produced every year, right? Pounds, Pico grams or what we have hormonal effects on pounds is what we're selling. So we're blanketing the entire planet earth in plastic. So what you'll hear if people are aware is that, you know, there is a quote unquote like a plastic Armageddon is what people will say and it's a massive concern. So what we need to be conscious of then is where's that plastic coming from? Am I consuming things out of plastic water bottles? Am I making plastic cookware? Am I using Tupperware? Is you know, my laptop cover that I just bought silicone or is it plastic? What, what is it? You know, what's going on is a wood. So like we need to be conscious of what we're consuming first and foremost. Like we banned plastic bags in the city of Bellingham for example. We can't use plastic bags at a grocery store. They don't let us do it. So I think that's great. Right? So what can we do? What can you do today to reduce the plastics that are being put into this? You know, so turn off the faucet then let's clean up the plastics at the same time.

Bryan:31:15Yeah, I'm thinking about other products that are out there that we probably don't think about. The plastics such as cars, cars are highly made out of plastic nowadays and I'm sure what the heating and the exposure to the sun and rain waters and whatnot, you're probably leeching off chemicals down into the water that's then making its way into the ocean that way as well.

Tom:31:36You know, it's fascinating, right? I mean this is all petroleum-based. Okay. So a plastics come from the oil refinery industry in petroleum. You don't think about all the things that are derived from petroleum and as a massive resource. I mean we use, this is how we run our economy. This it seems like, but you know, Fluor wax, perfumes petroleum jelly, antiseptics shoes, footballs lipstick, toilet seats, roofing materials, you know, rubber cement candles with paraffin wax. These are all petroleum based products, right? And the list goes on for four days. I mean, we basically have this stuff everywhere we look. And so we're going to be getting some of it into our skin when we touch some of these things into our air when we're surrounding these things and they get hot, you know, or, or burnt. So yeah, they're, they're, they're all over the place.

Bryan:32:34So if you are in ingesting food that's coming from a plastic container, or if you're drinking water that's coming in from a plastic container, and then you get these microplastics into your system and then they're entering into your cells and can cause a disruption to your hormones, what can we do to start moving away from all this plastic or environmental toxins in our lives? Like you mentioned, get away from the plastics, but what are some actionable steps that we can take to start making that actually happen?

Tom:33:07I love it. And there's some really nice research on this. You know, I've, I've interviewed some people who've done research on this and it's fascinating. One of the things I really liked was the fresh food diet study, so that when was basically looking at how people can reduce their exposure to BPA and phthalates. And it was basically just eating three days of fresh foods and that, that group out of both the sound spring Institute in Massachusetts and then out of the breast cancer fund and in, in Los Angeles on, they were also in New York and British Columbia. There's a bunch of teams working on that, but it was it was basically saying, look, up to 60% of your exposure is going to come through your food. So whether it's your food or your water, you know, whatever you're drinking or eating.

Tom:33:52So why don't you just reduce the amount of foods that you're buying and plastic storing and plastic heating in plastic. So do a stainless steel water bottle. Do stainless steel lunch containers. No plastic containers or plastic lids. No. You know, don't do any saran wrap or plastic wrap. No canned foods. Of course you have the BP lining of the can. No nonstick cookware. Do your milk and orange juice from glass and use only a French press to make coffee. Now people don't, don't know. But I'm, I'm a, you know, my friend does this little espresso machine. He puts these little plastic things into espresso machine to get the flavoring and stuff out. And I'm like, what in the world? That's heated water in plastic and no. W if you just did those things right, watched what your food was touching before you ate it, you can reduce your exposure to plastics by 60%.

Tom:34:40So that's fantastic, right? Definitely look at that water bottle. Definitely look at whatever you're cooking in microwaving and plastics is nuts. Especially if you have something that's, you know, acidic, then it'll migrate. I mean, the reality is it doesn't take much to have these plastics break down and have a, you ingest it. And the other key piece that I would say is, is, is receipts thermal paper. So receipts have this thin layer of BPA on the top of them and then you heat it up and the BPA mixers with the dye, which gives you that an ink marking on the receipt, but the receipts actually have thousands of times higher BPA than you're normally gonna find anywhere else. So one of the most harmful things that I'm hearing about in the endocrine, a world of toxicity is they're, they're seeing some young individuals coming in with terrible plastic toxicity problems who are taking receipt paper that has this dye in it and all this BPA in it, in their ruling their joints in it.

Tom:35:42And then they're smoking their joints. And apparently the dye will crackle on the, you know, it looks really fun and it's perfectly smooth. And so, you know, the kids aren't even thinking that they're giving themselves, you know, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of times higher level of these chemicals than they would if they used a standard rolling paper. So you know, you know, in Washington state it's legal now Colorado legal now, I mean, more people need to be aware, receipts are not something to mess with. Now you never want to put them in your mouth. You want to touch them as less, as, as least as possible. And then whenever you do touch them, you can increase the absorption of the plastics through your skin by having any sort of hand sanitizer or lotion on prior to touching the receipt. So you can literally have someone grab a receipt after they put on a hand sanitizer and then a few hours later you can inject into their arm and draw their blood out and you can see the BPA coming up their blood.

Tom:36:38Okay, so you absorb the BPA through your skin. So don't think that like, you know, it's out there. It's not part of me, it's not my business. This is all our business. Right? We have to think who are we? What are we? We're humans and what are humans while we're animals and we're on a planet. And what is the planet? Planet is this finite life system of air, water, and soil in which we grow food in which we eat. So that's the essence of life right there. The essence of life is not what you're going to buy at a shopping mall. The essence of life is not what are you going to drive? Where are you going to live? What sport are you gonna play and what clothes you're going to wear when you're playing that sport. That's not life. That's social media hype, that's internet hype. That's whatever life is you breathing, eating and drinking. Do you want to have a good life? Think about those things.

Bryan:37:41Do you think making these changes to get away from plastics, petroleum products trying to reduce the air pollution that's going out there, do you think we will be able to sustain that type of living for the amount of population that we currently have?

Bryan:38:00Okay.

Tom:38:01Okay. Let me rephrase the question then. You're saying at our current rate of population growth, can we keep life on this planet sustainable for awhile? Is that what you're saying? Yeah. Yeah. No, probably not. If we want it to be realistic. And this isn't a doomsday thing, this is just, you know, someone who read scientific literature for decades at a time. At the rate we're going right now, if we continue with our population growth, we will out of resources in space mean it's just, it's just a matter of time. The quality of life while we're here can be drastically changed. If we had conscious conception, meaning people only had kids when they could support those kids in a healthy fashion, then we would probably do voluntary, a restriction of the amount of kids that we chose. Voluntary, not requirement from a government or anything.

Tom:39:02We just kind of look and say, wait, I'm concerned about our air quality, our water quality and our food quality. Maybe I'll think twice about having a big family. No, you know, hypocrite, right here. Before I was conscious about all these things. I have five kids. So, you know, I'm really concerned about my kids' kids now. So I'm like, Whoa, you know, what am I going to do? You know, this is, these are things that we need to be conscious of it and I teach best what I most need to learn. I, I'll, I'll admit to that, but if I just look at this and you asked me that question, I have to answer honestly and honestly, I will say it's a big concern. We can't keep with this population growth. We can't keep up with this unconscious consumption of products that are damaging life.

Tom:39:44If we do that, then we will suffer. It's just like saying, Hey, can I walk into my room every day and throw more laundry on the floor and consider that, you know, two days from now I'm not going to have a big pile in two months from now. I can't even walk in my room anymore. Right. So it's, it's the same kind of thing. We're just throwing stuff on the ground and walking away. We're throwing stuff on the ground and walking away. We can't throw it. We have to start picking up the laundry and do our laundry. You know, it's just, and hopefully with, you know, nontoxic soap.

Tom:40:16So how can we get these microplastics and these toxins out of our bodies? So number one reduce exposure as we talked about, right? So eating a fresh fruit type diet is great. The number two is going to be then the transformation. So transforming these molecules into substances that can actually get out of our bodies. So that means eating healthy diets, you eat lots of vegetables. The precipitous vegetables. I did a Ted talk on this, a really good about converting toxins into shapes, sizes that can be excluded from the human body, and once they'd been transformed by eating broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, brussel sprouts you know, good soluble fiber and green beans, for example, or squashes or root vegetables. Then you can get some of these things out of the body with proper dedication, sweat. So your excretion process. So you want to make sure that you're not constipated.

Tom:41:12You want to make sure their bowels are moving. You want to make sure that you're urinating freely, so you're drinking plenty of fluids and you want to make sure that you had your nutrient status tested by your healthcare practitioner. Now, this is ridiculous how healthcare in the United States doesn't have nutrient status. Test it. I mean, they look at B12 and the serum, which is awful. They look at magnesium, which is awful. I mean, you've got to do some sort of urinalysis, plasma amino acids, fatty acids. You've got to do some sort of analysis to see what your nutrient status is because my gosh, you need these nutrients to run your machinery, your detoxification, your digestion, your mitochondrial function. If you're short on nutrients, you can't do your job very well. And what's happening with detoxification is anytime we grab onto a toxin and excrete it, we use gludethyon.

Tom:41:58We use glycine, we use Torian, we use, you know, all these different things, the methyl groups. And when we do that, we excrete them from the body. They come out in our sweat, they come out in our urine, they come out in our fecal matter. So all day long, every day we're detoxing. We're throwing away nutrients in our, our wastes. So it's super important that we look at our nutrient status. So I would definitely say, all right, eat plenty of cruciferous vegetables. Get your nutrient levels tested and replace missing nutrients. Make sure you're eating clean, clean, healthy, wonderful foods that feed your microbiome. Your microbiome can bind to toxins and get them out. In fact, it's estimated that 50% of detoxification occurs in the microbiome itself before the chemicals even touch you, whether it's on your skin or your nasal passage and your bowels. You know, you have to have beneficial bugs.

Tom:42:46So if you're eating junk food, if you're eating acidic foods, if you're eating really nasty or I should say acid forming foods like refined carbohydrates and lots of sugars you're not going to be feeding a beneficial microbiome. That's a lot of root vegetables. It's a lot of, you know, legumes that are, that you've if they're dried, you've soaked and, and cooked properly, you know, the, you want to feed with resistant starches. So you've got your plantings, you've got your, your scorches, you've got your, your potatoes. You want to make sure that you're, you're thinking all the time, you know, what would I've eaten a hundred years ago? What would I have fed my microbiome if I didn't have convenient foods? And then all of a sudden, boom, the entire system starts jumping online. So microbiome feeding exercise actually happens to be fantastic about healing and sealing both the gut barrier and the blood brain barrier.

Tom:43:41It seems to protect the brain from, from damage, from chemicals eating lots of polyphenol compounds like blueberries. Pomegranates seems to protect brain function. I've seen studies where you actually introduce a toxic chemical to a brain cell. You'll feed that brain cell in a Petri dish, you know, blueberry compounds and all of a sudden the chemical has no toxic effect on the brain cells. So you can wash your brain and beneficial what we call phyto or plant based chemicals all the time by eating healthy foods. That's one way. And then the other thing I would say is just trying to calm down your stress levels. Because it appears that we detoxify and excrete toxins at a much higher rate when we're calm. And I know I've not done a very good job about calming people's nerves after this podcast here. But yeah, just breathing and trusting and just saying, you know what?

Tom:44:34It's all gonna happen exactly how it needs to happen. It's all good. I'm going to breathe when I eat. I'm going to sit down with my friends and family. I'm going to tell them how much I love him. I'm going to eat a bunch of good food and that will actually help with detox. Well, if people listening to this live in a place that has marijuana legalized and that they can go and smoke some of that without using their receipt paper, if they need to reduce their stress. So that can be a good favorite nutrient status test that you like. I'm a huge fan of the ion 40 from Genova. Yeah, it used to be Metametrix, but I've learned from Richard Lord, he's the kind of the founder of that panel and Andy Brawley. So the, the two guys that used to run that Metametrix panel Richard's a genius bio chemist.

Tom:45:21And I've, I've had the pleasure of learning from him over the years and so I've, it's taken, it takes me a while. It took me a couple of years to really grasp what those tests were all about. But now I teach doctors about how to interpret those tests. So I like their ion 40, and I like their neutral evil from Genova as well. The two new Genova nutrient evaluation testing those are phenomenal. We get to see the amino acids, we get to see the fatty acids, we get to see a little glimpse of heavy metals. We get to see minerals, we get to see the organic acids of, you know, mitochondrial function, neural transmitter formation kidney function. I mean, it's phenomenal, phenomenal. In fact, I kind of insist my clients get those tests now because I really want to see what's going on. And when I find out some of those nuances between that microbiome testing and gene testing, we can solve, you know, lifelong issues.

Tom:46:09It's pretty fantastic. Or I can't say we solve them, we can identify a weak spots in their health journey and we can modify those and give them progress like they've never had before. Do you have any final thoughts that you want to make sure that we touch on before we wrap up? Oh man. I just want people to be really conscious of the currency issue. You know, if we're seeking something outside of ourself instead of giving value to ourself, we'll always be in deficit. So if we're thinking about purifying our air, breathing clean air for ourselves, eating clean foods, drinking clean liquids, having clean thoughts and being nice, loving human beings to ourselves and others, then health just happens. So, you know that's something I'm going to seek to do until the day I die. And I'm just, I'm hoping other people join me and they, they wake up to the fact that these are the things that will bring us health, not not money.

Tom:47:11And my final question for you is, do you have a morning routine? And if so, what is it? Oh, I've been doing this gratitude journal and I just, I love you know, because he know, come on, you saw the sunset last night. I mean, there's so much to be grateful for. And I had, you know, special with my kids and, and eating wonderful herbs and, you know, had some amazing Rosemary. I mean, there's so many things that you can just stop and be grateful for and see that there's genius everywhere. There's just genius everywhere. And when you recognize that and you participate in that, I mean, come on, we're, we're here, we're thinking, we're breeding, we're come eyes. It's amazing, right? It's like a princess bride, right? When a, all of a sudden, you know, he's, he's, he was dead and then all the, he moves his head, right? He's like, that doesn't make you happy. Right? Like, come on. What? There's so much to be happy about, right? I mean, we can be happy every single second of the day. And when we're in a state of happiness and appreciation and gratitude and awe, then I think we're, we're more humble and we treat ourselves and the planet butter.

Bryan:48:16Awesome. Well people can find [email protected] also at TomMalterre.com which is M, a,L , T, E, R, R, E and all of that will be in the show notes at summitforwellness.com/96. So if people want to go there to find the links to your sites, then it will be there. Thank you so much Tom, for coming on. I appreciate having this conversation. It's a conversation we need to be talking about a lot more and I'm hoping that more and more people will start to become more conscious of the products that they're using and what it can potentially do to their health. So thank you.

Tom:48:51Oh, absolutely. My pleasure. I appreciate being on and gosh wishing you the best.

Bryan:48:56I hope that you were able to learn some actionable steps you can take to reduce exposure to microplastics and other environmental concerns. I know that some of the topics that are discussed on this podcast can seem super overwhelming. So just try to take small steps to make changes and you will be much more successful making small changes instead of trying to change everything at once. And to learn more about Tom, go to Tom [inaudible] dot com which the site should be live here real soon. And you can also find him@wholelifenutritiondotnetandyoucangetalloftheselinksattheshownotesatsummitforwellness.com slash [inaudible] 96 and if you are wanting to test to see if environmental toxins have been impacting your health and reach out to us and we can help, all you have to do is schedule a free call with us. And you can do [email protected] slash ready and the year is closing fast, which means a lot of people will be jumping on the new year's resolution bandwagon. So next week's episode will be with Mandy green talking about metabolic approaches to weight loss. So let's go learn a little bit about Mandy. I am here with Mandy green. Hey Mandy, what is one unique thing about you that most people don't know?

Mandi:50:07Okay, well don't tell anybody this, but I'm pretty much an open book. So when I was thinking about this, I thought, I'm just going to tell him, you know, the thing is, the truth is for the past like 15 years, when I drive my kids to school, I'm still in my pajamas. So I'm in the carpool dropoff line every morning in my pajamas and it's not coffee in my giant mug. It's my warm lemon water. And the only time that's bad is this one time that I got pulled over cause I was driving too fast in the unschool zone, you know? And that was, I had to explain that a little bit. But so that's one thing people don't know about me.

Bryan:50:42Well that's one thing I really love about podcasting is I can totally be in my pajamas and no one would ever know.

Mandi:50:50Now I've got a good visual.

Bryan:50:53Well, we'd be learning about in our interview together.

Mandi:50:56Well, we're going to talk about a metabolic approach to weight loss. So basically what that means is how your hormones and your mindset can be balanced. And when they are, it makes losing weight, like totally easy, sustainable and it's even fun.

Bryan:51:14And what are your favorite foods or nutrients that you think everyone should get more of in their diet?

Mandi:51:19Well, I'm a huge fan of the greens and the veggies like spinach, mixed greens, those are like the transporters of all the other foods in my life. So it's kinda like when in doubt just throw a handful of spinach in there, fresh, fresh spinach.

Bryan:51:34And what are your top three health tips for anyone who wants to improve their overall wellness?

Mandi:51:40You've probably heard these before but I'm going to just go ahead and say it again. But drink more water, get more sleep and bring awareness to your daily thoughts and feelings. Cause it's the thoughts and the feelings that are creating your belief system and that it's motivating every single choice, every decision that you're making. It's the thoughts and the choices that are creating your results. And ultimately we can take back our own health when we learn how to regulate and manage our mind.

Bryan:52:07If you're gearing up for the new year, then make sure to listen to next week's episode and until then, keep climbing to the peak of your health.